that he could not straightway recover his mental balance. The appalling
shadow which the doctor's presence had for the moment thrown across him
had left Lynde benumbed and chilled despite the reassuring sunshine of
the doctor's words. By degrees, however, Lynde warmed to life again;
his gloom slipped off and was lost in the restless tides of life which
surged about him. It was the hour when Paris sits at small green tables
in front of the cafes and sips its absinthe or cassis; when the
boulevards are thronged, and the rich equipages come and go. There was
not a cloud in the tender blue sky against which the reddish obelisk of
Luxor looked like a column of jet; the fountains were playing in the
Place de la Concorde, and in the Tuileries gardens beyond the breeze
dreamily stirred the foliage which hid from Lynde's view the gray
facade of the gutted palace, still standing there, calcined and cracked
by the fires of the Commune. Presently all this began to distract him,
and when he returned to the hotel he was in a humor that would have
been comparatively tranquil if so many tedious miles had not stretched
between Paris and Chamouni.
He found Mr. Denham and Dr. Pendegrast delaying dinner for him. After
dinner, seeing no prospect of renewing conversation in private with the
doctor, Lynde killed the time by writing a voluminous letter to
Flemming, whose name he had stumbled on in the passenger-list of a
steamer advertised to sail two days later from Liverpool.
As Lynde took his seat in the railroad carriage that night he had a
feeling that several centuries had elapsed since daybreak. Every moment
was a month to him until he could get back to Chamouni. The thought
that Ruth might be dangerously ill scarcely presented itself among his
reflections. She was free, he loved her, and there was no reason why he
should not try to win her, however strongly the Denhams might be
opposed to him. His mind was perfectly easy on that score; they had no
right to wreck the girl's future in their shallow fear. His two
travelling companions shortly dropped asleep, but Lynde did not close
his eyes during those ten weary hours to Macon. Thence to Geneva was
five hours more of impatience. At Geneva the party halted no longer
than was necessary to refresh themselves at a buffet near the station
and hire a conveyance to Chamouni, which they reached two or three
hours after sunset. The town still lay, as Lynde had left it, in the
portentous shadow of the mountain, with the sullen rain dropping from
the black sky.
Lynde drew an alarming augury from the circumstance that Mrs. Denham
did not come down to greet them. It dawned upon him then for the first
time with any distinctness that Ruth might be fatally ill. Mr. Denham,
accompanied by Dr. Pendegrast, hastened to his wife's apartments, and
Lynde stationed himself at the head of a staircase in the hall, where
he waited nearly an hour in intolerable suspense before the doctor
reappeared.
"What is it, Doctor?"
"Pneumonia. No," he added, divining Lynde's unspoken thought even
before it had fairly shaped itself in his brain, "it is not the other
business."
"You are hiding the truth from me," said Lynde, with a pang. "She is
dead!"
"No, but she is very low. The disease is approaching a crisis; a change
must take place by to-morrow. Frankly, I dread that change. I am hiding
nothing from you."
"Is there no hope? You do not mean that!"
"I am afraid I do. Perhaps it is because she is so dear to me that I
always anticipate the worst when she is concerned. The other physician
is more sanguine; but then he does not love Ruth as I do."
"You might have saved her!"
"Everything has been done that could be done. He is a person of
remarkable skill, this Paris physician. I could have advised no change
in his treatment of the case if I had been on the spot at first. That
is a great deal for one physician to say of another. You had better go
and get some rest," added Dr. Pendegrast in a changed voice, struck by
the young man's ghastly look. "Your two night-journeys have used you
up."
Lynde went mechanically to his room and threw himself upon the bed
without undressing. He had no inclination to sleep, but his fatigue,
bodily and mental, overcame him unawares as he lay listening to the
wind which swept through the mountain-gorges, and rose and fell
monotonously with a sound like the rote of the sea. It was a vision of
the sea that filled his unrestful slumber: Ruth was dead, she had died
in his arms, and he was standing woe-begone, like a ghost, on the deck
of a homeward bound ship, with the gray, illimitable waste of waters
stretching around him.
It appeared to Lynde to be in the middle of the night, though it was in
fact on the edge of daybreak, that he was awakened by some one knocking
softly at his door. He lighted a match, and by its momentary flicker
saw Mr. Denham standing on the threshold.
"Ruth wishes to see you," he said indistinctly and with an indecisive
air. "As nearly as we can gather, that is what she wants. Come quickly!"
Without waiting for a reply Mr. Denham turned and passed through the
hall. Lynde followed in silence. He was less surprised than agitated by
the summons; it was of a piece with the dream from which he had been
roused.
There were candles burning on the mantel-piece of the chamber, and the
dawn was whitening the window-panes. In that weird, blended light the
face of the sick girl shone like a fading star. Lynde was conscious of
no other presence, though Mrs. Denham and Dr. Pendegrast with a third
person were standing near the chimney-place. Ruth raised her eyes and
smiled upon Lynde as he came in; then her lids closed and did not open
again, but the smile stayed in a dim way on her features, and a flush
almost too faint to be perceived crept into her cheeks. Lynde stooped
by the bed and took one of Ruth's hands. She turned her head slightly
on the pillow, and after a moment her lips moved as if she were making
an effort to speak. Lynde remained immobile, fearing to draw breath
lest a word should escape his ear. But she did not speak. As he stood
there listening in the breathless stillness, the flame of the candles
burned fainter and fainter in the increasing daylight; a bird twittered
somewhere aloft; then the sunshine streamed through the windows, and
outside all the heights were touched with sudden gold.
[Illustration: But she did not speak]
Dr. Pendegrast approached Lynde and rested one finger on his arm. "You
had better go now," the doctor whispered hastily. "I will come to you
by and by."
Lynde was sitting on the side of the bed in his own room in the broad
daylight. He had been sitting motionless in one posture for an
hour--perhaps two hours, he could not tell how long--when Dr.
Pendegrast opened the door without pausing to knock. Lynde felt the
cold creeping about his heart.
"Doctor," he said desperately, "don't tell me!"
"Mr. Lynde," said Dr. Pendegrast, walking up to the bedside and
speaking very slowly, as if he were doubtful of his own words and found
it difficult to articulate them, "a change has taken place, but it is a
change for the better. I believe that Ruth will live."
"She will live!"
"We thought she was sinking; she thought so herself, the poor child.
You were worth a thousand doctors to her, that's my belief. Mrs. Denham
was afraid to tell her you had gone to Paris to fetch us, thinking it
would excite her. Ruth imagined that her aunt had offended you, and
thought you had gone not to return."
"Ah!"
"That troubled her, in the state she was in--troubled her mightily. She
has been able to take a few spoonfuls of nourishment," the doctor went
on irrelevantly; "her pulse is improved; if she has no drawback she
will get well."
Lynde looked around him bewilderedly for a moment; then he covered his
face with his hands. "I thought she was dying!" he said under his
breath.
That day and the next the girl's life hung by a thread; then the peril
passed, and her recovery became merely a question of careful nursing.
The days which immediately followed this certainty were the happiest
Lynde had ever experienced. Perhaps it was because his chamber was
directly over Ruth's that he sat there in the window-seat, reading from
morning until night. It was as near to her as he was permitted to
approach. He saw little of Mr. Denham and still less of Mrs. Denham
during that week; but the doctor spent an hour or two every evening
with Lynde, and did not find it tiresome to talk of nothing but his
patient. The details of her convalescence were listened to with an
interest that would have won Dr. Pendegrast if he had not already been
very well disposed towards the young fellow, several of whose New York
friends, as it transpired, were old acquaintances of the doctor's--Dr.
Dillon and his family, and the Delaneys. The conversation between Lynde
and Dr. Pendegrast at the Hotel Meurice had been hurried and
disjointed, and in that respect unsatisfactory; but the minute history
of Ruth's previous case, which the doctor related to Lynde in the
course of those long summer nights, set his mind completely at rest.
"I could never have given her up, anyway," said Lynde to himself. "I
have loved her for three years, though I didn't know it. That was my
wife's slipper after all," he added, thinking of the time when it used
to seem to be sitting up for him at night, on his writing-table at
Rivermouth, and how often it threw a gloom over him with its tragic
suggestion. "My wife's slipper!" He repeated the phrase softly to
himself. There was nothing tragic in it now.
By and by the hours began to drag with him. The invalid could not get
well fast enough to keep pace with his impatience. The day she was able
for the first time to sit up a while, in an armchair wheeled by the
bedside, was a fete day to the four Americans in the Couronne hotel. If
Lynde did not exhaust his entire inheritance in cut flowers on this
occasion, it was because Dr. Pendegrast objected to them in any
profusion in a sick-chamber.
"When am I to see her?" asked Lynde that evening, as the doctor dropped
into the room to make his usual report.
"Let me think. To-day is Tuesday--perhaps we shall let you see her by
Friday or Saturday."
"Good heavens! why don't you put it off thirty or forty years?"
"I haven't the time," returned Dr. Pendegrast, laughing. "Seriously,
she will not be strong enough until then to bear the least excitement.
I am not going to run any risks with Ruth, I can tell you. You are very
impatient, of course. I will give you a soothing draught."
"What is it?"
"A piece of information."
"I'll take it!"
"And a piece of advice."
"I'll take that, too; you can't frighten me."
"It is a betrayal of confidence on my part," said the doctor slowly,
and with an air of reconsidering his offer.
"No matter."
"Well, then, Ruth's asking for you, the other night, rather amazed
Denham when he came to think it over quietly, and Mrs. Denham judged it
best to inform him of the conversation which took place between you and
her the morning you set out for Paris. Denham was still more amazed.
She had attempted to cure him of one astonishment by giving him
another. Similia similibus curantur did not work that time. Then the
two came to me for consultation, and I told them I thought Ruth's case
required a doctor of divinity rather than a doctor of medicine."
"Did you say that!"
"Certainly I did. I strongly advised an operation, and designated the
English church here as a proper place in which to have it performed.
Moreover, as a change of air would be beneficial as soon as might be
afterwards, I suggested for the invalid a short trip to Geneva--with
not too much company. My dear fellow, you need not thank me; I am
looking exclusively to Ruth's happiness--yours can come in
incidentally, if it wants to. Mrs. Denham is YOUR ally."
"Is she, indeed? I thought differently. And Ruth"--
"Ruth," interposed the doctor, with a twinkle in his eyes, "Ruth is the
good little girl in the primer who doesn't speak until she's spoken to."
"By Jove, she doesn't speak even then! I have tried her twice: once she
evaded me, and once she refused to listen."
"The results of her false education," said the doctor sententiously.
Lynde laughed.
"To what view of the question does Mr. Denham incline?" he asked.
"Denham is not as unreasonable as he used to be; but he is somewhat
stunned by the unexpectedness of the thing."
"That's the information; and now for the advice, Doctor."
"I advise you to speak with Denham the first chance you get. You will
have an opportunity this evening. I took the liberty of asking him to
come up here and smoke a cigar with us as soon as he finishes his
coffee."
Lynde nodded his head approvingly, and the doctor went on--
"I shall leave you together after a while, and then you must manage it.
At present he is in no state to deny Ruth anything; he would give her a
lover just as he would buy her a pair of ear-rings. His joy over her
escape from death--it was a fearfully narrow escape, let me tell
you--has left him powerless. Moreover, her illness, in which there has
not been a symptom of the old trouble, has reassured him on a most
painful point. In short, everything is remarkably smooth for you. I
think that's Denham's step now in the hall," added Dr. Pendegrast
hurriedly. "You can say what you please to him of Ruth; but mind you,
my dear boy, not a word at this juncture about the Queen of
Sheba--she's dethroned, you know!"
XI
FROM CHAMOUNI TO GENEVA
One morning in September, a month after all this, three persons, a lady
and two gentlemen, stood on the upper step of the Couronne hotel,
waving farewell with their handkerchiefs to a carriage which had just
started from the door and was gayly taking the road to St.
Gervais-les-Bains, on the way to Geneva.
A cool purple light stretched along the valley and reached up the
mountain side to where the eternal snows begin. The crown of Mont
Blanc, muffled in its scarf of cloud, was invisible. The old monarch
was in that disdainful mood which sometimes lasts him for months
together. From those perilous heights came down a breath that chilled
the air and tempered the sunshine falling upon Chamouni, now silent and
deserted, for the season was well-nigh over. With the birds, their
brothers, the summer tourists had flown southward at the rustling of
the first autumnal leaf. Here and there a guide leaned idly against a
post in front of one of the empty hotels. There was no other indication
of life in the main street save the little group we have mentioned
watching the departing carriage.
This carriage, a maroon body set upon red and black wheels, was drawn
by four white horses and driven by the marquis. The doctor had
prescribed white horses, and he took great credit to himself that
morning as he stood on the hotel steps beside Mr. and Mrs. Denham, who
followed the retreating vehicle rather thoughtfully with their eyes
until it turned a corner of the narrow street and was lost to them.
As the horses slackened their speed at an ascending piece of ground
outside the town, Lynde took Ruth's hand. The color of health had
reasserted itself in her cheeks, but her eyes had not lost a certain
depth of lustre which they had learned during her illness. The happy
light in them illumined her face as she turned towards him.
"I don't believe a word of it!" cried Lynde. "It is just a dream, a
cheating page out of a fairy-book. These horses are simply four white
mice transformed. An hour ago, perhaps, this carriage was a pumpkin
lying on the hearth of the hotel kitchen. The coachman is a good fairy
in thin disguise of overcoat and false mustache. I am doubtful of even
you. The whole thing is a delusion. It won't last, it can't last!
Presently the wicked gnome that must needs dwell in a stalactite cavern
somewhere hereabouts will start up and break the enchantment."
"It will never be broken so long as you love me," said Ruth softly. She
smiled at Lynde's fancy, though his words had by no means badly
expressed her own sense of doubt in respect to the reality of it all.
Here the driver leaned forward, skilfully touching the ear of the
off-leader with the tip of his lash, and the carriage rolled away in
the blue September weather. And here our story ends--at the very point,
if we understand it, where life began for those two.
MY COUSIN THE COLONEL
I
Mrs. Wesley frequently embarrasses me by remarking in the presence of
other persons--our intimate friends, of course--"Wesley, you are not
brilliant, but you are good."
From Mrs. Wesley's outlook, which is that of a very high ideal, there
is nothing uncomplimentary in the remark, nothing so intended, but I
must confess that I have sometimes felt as if I were paying a rather
large price for character. Yet when I reflect on my cousin the colonel,
and my own action in the matter, I am ready with gratitude to accept
Mrs. Wesley's estimate of me, for if I am not good, I am not anything.
Perhaps it is an instance of my lack of brilliancy that I am willing to
relate certain facts which strongly tend to substantiate this. My
purpose, however, is not to prove either my goodness or my dulness, but
to leave some record, even if slight and imperfect, of my only
relative. When a family is reduced like ours to a single relative, it
is well to make the most of him. One should celebrate him annually, as
it were.
One morning in the latter part of May, a few weeks after the close of
the war of the rebellion, as I was hurrying down Sixth Avenue in
pursuit of a heedless horse-car, I ran against a young person whose
shabbiness of aspect was all that impressed itself upon me in the
instant of collision. At a second glance I saw that this person was
clad in the uniform of a Confederate soldier--an officer's uniform
originally, for there were signs that certain insignia of rank had been
removed from the cuffs and collar of the threadbare coat. He wore a
wide-brimmed felt hat of a military fashion, decorated with a tarnished
gilt cord, the two ends of which, terminating in acorns, hung down over
his nose. His butternut trousers were tucked into the tops of a pair of
high cavalry boots, of such primitive workmanship as to suggest the
possibility that the wearer had made them himself. In fact, his whole
appearance had an impromptu air about it. The young man eyed me
gloomily for half a minute; then a light came into his countenance.
"Wesley--Tom Wesley!" he exclaimed. "Dear old boy!"
To be sure I was Thomas Wesley, and, under conceivable circumstances,
dear old boy; but who on earth was he?
"You don't know me?" he said, laying a hand on each of my shoulders,
and leaning back as he contemplated me with a large smile in
anticipatory enjoyment of my surprise and pleasure when I should come
to know him. "I am George W. Flagg, and long may I wave!"
My cousin Flagg! It was no wonder that I did not recognize him.
When the Flagg family, consisting of father and son, removed to the
South, George was ten years old and I was thirteen. It was twenty years
since he and I had passed a few weeks together on grandfather Wesley's
farm in New Jersey. Our intimacy began and ended there, for it had not
ripened into letters; perhaps because we were too young when we parted.
Later I had had a hundred intermittent impulses to write to him, but
did not. Meanwhile separation and silence had clothed him in my mind
with something of the mistiness of a half-remembered dream. Yet the
instant Washington Flagg mentioned his name the boyish features began
rapidly to define themselves behind the maturer mask, until he stood
before me in the crude form in which my memory had slyly embalmed him.
Now my sense of kinship is particularly strong, for reasons which I
shall presently touch upon, and I straightway grasped my cousin's hand
with a warmth that would have seemed exaggerated to a bystander, if
there had been a bystander; but it was early in the day, and the avenue
had not yet awakened to life. As this bitter world goes, a sleek,
prosperous, well-dressed man does not usually throw much heartiness
into his manner when he is accosted on the street by so unpromising and
dismal an object as my cousin Washington Flagg was that morning. Not at
all in the way of sounding the trumpet of my own geniality, but simply
as the statement of a fact, I will say that I threw a great deal of
heartiness into my greeting. This man to me meant Family.
I stood curiously alone in the world. My father died before I was born,
and my mother shortly afterwards. I had neither brother nor sister.
Indeed, I never had any near relatives except a grandfather until my
sons came along. Mrs. Wesley, when I married her, was not merely an
only child, but an orphan. Fate denied me even a mother-in-law. I had
one uncle and one cousin. The former I do not remember ever to have
seen, and my association with the latter, as has been stated, was of a
most limited order. Perhaps I should have had less sentiment about
family ties if I had had more of them. As it was, Washington Flagg
occupied the position of sole kinsman, always excepting the little
Wesleys, and I was as glad to see him that May morning in his poverty
as if he had come to me loaded with the title-deeds of those vast
estates which our ancestors (I wonder that I was allowed any ancestors:
why wasn't I created at once out of some stray scrap of protoplasm?)
were supposed to have held in the colonial period. As I gazed upon
Washington Flagg I thrilled with the sense that I was gazing upon the
materialization in a concrete form of all the ghostly brothers and
sisters and nephews and nieces which I had never had.
"Dear old boy!" I exclaimed, in my turn, holding on to his hand as if I
were afraid that I was going to lose him again for another twenty
years. "Bless my stars! where did you come from?"
"From Dixie's Land," he said, with a laugh. "'Way down in Dixie."
In a few words, and with a picturesqueness of phrase in which I noted a
rich Southern flavor, he explained the phenomenon of his presence in
New York. After Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court-House, my cousin
had managed to reach Washington, where he was fortunate enough to get a
free pass to Baltimore. He had nearly starved to death in making his
way out of Virginia. To quote his words, "The wind that is supposed to
be tempered expressly for shorn lambs was not blowing very heavily
about that time." At Baltimore he fell in with a former Mobile
acquaintance, from whom he borrowed a sum sufficient to pay the fare to
New York--a humiliating necessity, as my cousin remarked, for a man who
had been a colonel in Stonewall Jackson's brigade. Flagg had reached
the city before daybreak, and had wandered for hours along the
water-front, waiting for some place to open, in order that he might
look up my address in the Directory, if I were still in the land of the
living. He had had what he described as an antediluvian sandwich the
previous day at two o'clock, since which banquet no food had passed his
lips.
"And I'll be hanged," he said, "if the first shop that took down its
shutters wasn't a restaurant, with a cursed rib of roast beef, flanked
with celery, and a ham in curl-papers staring at me through the
window-pane. A little tin sign, with 'Meals at All Hours' painted on
it--what did they want to go and do that for?--knocked the breath clean
out of me. I gave one look, and ploughed up the street, for if I had
stayed fifteen seconds longer in front of that plate-glass, I reckon I
would have burst it in. Well, I put distance between me and temptation,
and by and by I came to a newspaper office, where I cornered a
Directory. I was on the way to your house when we collided; and now,
Tom Wesley, for heaven's sake introduce me to something to eat. There
is no false pride about me; I'd shake hands with a bone."
The moisture was ready to gather in my eyes, and for a second or two I
was unable to manage my voice. Here was my only kinsman on the verge of
collapse--one miserable sandwich, like a thin plank, between him and
destruction. My own plenteous though hasty morning meal turned into
reproachful lead within me.
"Dear old boy!" I cried again. "Come along! I can see that you are
nearly famished."
"I've a right smart appetite, Thomas, there's no mistake about that. If
appetite were assets, I could invite a whole regiment to rations."
I had thrust my hand under his arm, and was dragging him towards a
small oyster shop, whose red balloon in a side street had caught my
eye, when I suddenly remembered that it was imperative on me to be at
the office at eight o'clock that morning, in order to prepare certain
papers wanted by the president of the board, previous to a meeting of
the directors. (I was at that time under-secretary of the Savonarola
Fire Insurance Company.) The recollection of the business which had
caused me to be on foot at this unusual hour brought me to a dead halt.
I dropped my cousin's arm, and stood looking at him helplessly. It
seemed so inhospitable, not to say cold-blooded, to send him off to get
his breakfast alone. Flagg misinterpreted my embarrassment.