Tales from Bohemia Part 22

"Yes," he answered, softly, a tender look coming into his eyes. "She is my wife. She was thirteen when I married her. Suddenly placed without means of subsistence, knowing nothing of the world, she came to me. I could see no other way. We are very happy together."

The pretty narrative of the rhymer put each of us in a delectable mood.

The notes of a harp and violins came from the lower deck in the form of a seductive Italian melody. White sails dotted the far-reaching sea.

XIX. -- A MAN WHO WAS NO GOOD

Hearken to the tale of how fortune fell to the widow of Busted Blake.

The outcome has shown that "Busted" was not radically bad. But he was wretchedly weak of will to reject an opportunity of having another drink with the boys--or with the girls--or with anybody or with n.o.body.

In the days of his ascendancy, when he was a young and newly married architect, he was a buyer of drinks for others. Waiters in cafes vied with each other in showing readiness to take his orders. He was rated a jolly good fellow then. No one would have supposed it destined that some fine night a leering barroom wit should reply to his whispered application for a small loan by pouring a half-gla.s.s of whiskey upon his head and saying:

"I hereby christen thee 'Busted.'"

The t.i.tle stuck. Blake, through continued impecuniosity, lost all shame of it in time; lost, too, his self-respect and his wife. Mrs. Blake, a gentle and pretty little brunette, had wedded him against the will of her parents. She had trusted, for his safety, to the allurements of his future, which everybody said was bright, and to his love for her.

The years of tearful nights, the pleadings, the reproaches, the seesaw of hope and despair, need not here be dwelt upon. They would make an old story, and some of the details might be shocking to the young person.

They reached a culmination one day when she said to him:

"You love drink better than you love me. I have done with you."

She was a woman and took a woman's view of the case.

When he came back to their rooms that night, she was not there. Then he knew how much he loved her and how much he had underestimated his love.

She did not go to her parents. There was a very musty proverb that she knew would meet her on the threshold. "You made your bed, now lie on it." Her father was a man of no originality, hence he would have put it in that way.

She got employment in a photograph gallery, where she made herself useful by being ornamental, sitting behind a desk in the anteroom.

I know not what duties devolve upon the woman who occupies that post in the average photographer's service; whatever they are she performed them. But within a very short time after she had left the "bed and board" of Busted Blake, she had to ask for a vacation. She spent it in a hospital and Busted became a father. She resumed her chair behind the photographer's desk in due time, found a boarding-house where infants were not tabooed, and managed to subsist, and to care for her child--a girl.

Somebody lived in that boarding-house who knew Busted Blake, and it was through inquiries resulting from, this somebody's jocularly calling him "papa" one night in a saloon that Busted was made aware of his accession to the paternal relation.

When the poor wretch heard the news, he made a prodigious effort to keep his face composed. But the muscles would not be resisted. He burst out crying, and he laid his head upon his arm upon a beer-flooded table and wept copiously, causing a sudden hush to fall upon the crowd of topers and a group to gather around his table and stare at him,--some mystified, some grinning, none understanding.

The next day he made a herculean effort to pull himself together. He obtained a position as draughtsman from one who had known him in his respectable period, and he went tremblingly and sheepishly to call upon his wife and child.

The consequence of his visit was a reunion, which endured for two whole weeks. At the end of that time she cast him off in utter scorn.

How he lived for the next two years can be only known to those who are familiar through experience with the existence of people who ask other people on the street for a few cents toward a night's lodging. By those who knew him he was said to be "no good to himself or any one else." He acquired the raggedness, the impudence, the phraseology of the vagabond cla.s.s. He would hang on the edge of a party of men drinking together in front of a bar, on the slim chance of being "counted in" when the question went round, "What'll you have?" He was perpetually being impelled out of saloons at foot-race speed by the officials whose function it is, in barrooms, to subst.i.tute an objectionable person's room for his company.

One winter Sunday morning he slept late on a bench in a public square.

Awakened by an officer, he arose to go. Hazy in head and stiff at joints, he slightly staggered. He heard behind him the cooing laugh of a child. He looked around. It was himself that had awakened the infant's mirth--or that strange something which precedes the dawn of a sense of humour in children. The smiling babe was in a child's carriage which a plainly dressed woman was pushing. He looked at the woman. It was his wife and the pretty child was his own.

He walked rapidly from the place, and on the same day he decided to leave the city. He had herded with vagrants of the touring cla.s.s. The methods of free transportation by means of freight-trains and free living, by means of beggary and small thievery in country towns, were no secret to him. He walked to the suburbs, and at nightfall he scrambled up the side of a coal-car in a train slowly moving westward.

What hunger he suffered, what cold he endured, what bread he begged, what police station cells he pa.s.sed nights in, what human sc.u.m he a.s.sociated with, what thirst he quenched, and with what incredibly bad whiskey, are particulars not for this un.o.bjectionable narrative, for do they not belong to low life? And who nowadays can tolerate low life in print unless it be redeemed by a rustic environment and a laboured exposition of clodhopper English and primitive expletives? Low life outside of a dialect story and a dreary village? Never!

Mrs. Blake and the child lived in a fair degree of comfort upon the mother's wages, but often the mother shuddered at thought of what might happen should she ever lose her position at the photographer's.

Consumption had its hold on Busted Blake when he arrived in the mining-town called Get-there City, in Kansas, one evening. Get-there City had not gotten there beyond a single straggling street of shanties.

But it had acquired a saloon, although liquor-selling had already been forbidden in Kansas.

Busted Blake, with ten cents in his clothes, entered the saloon and asked in an asthmatic voice for as much whiskey as that sum was good for.

While awaiting a response, his eyes turned toward the only other persons in the saloon,--three burly, bearded miners of the conventional big-hatted, big-booted, and big-voiced type. Above their heads and against the wall was this sign, lettered roughly with charcoal, under a crudely drawn death's head:

"Five thousand dollars will be paid by the undersigned to the widow of the sneaking hound that informs on this saloon. This is no meer bluf. P.

GIBBS."

Blake, after a brief coughing fit, looked up at the man behind the bar,--a great thick-necked fellow with a mien of authority, and yet with a certain bluff honesty expressed about his eyes and lips. This man, whose air of proprietorship convinced Blake that he could be none other than P. Gibbs, had first looked sneeringly at the ten cents, but had shown some small sign of pity on hearing the ominous cough of the attenuated vagrant. He set forth a bottle and gla.s.s.

"Help yerself," said P. Gibbs. While Blake was doing so, Mr. Gibbs went on:

"Bad cough o' yourn. Y' mightn't guess it, but that same cough runs in my fam'ly. It took off a brother, but it skipped me."

Here was a bond of sympathy between the big, law-defying saloon-keeper and the frail toper from the East. Busted Blake drained his gla.s.s and presently coughed again. P. Gibbs again set forth the bottle, and this time he drank with Blake. Before long, by dint of repeated fits of coughing on the part of Blake, the sympathy of P. Gibbs was so worked upon that he invited the three miners in the saloon to join him and the stranger.

Blake slept in a corner of the saloon that night. He left the next morning, a curious expression of resolution on his face.

During the next three weeks he was now and then alluded to in P. Gibbs's saloon as the "coughing stranger."

In the middle of the third week, at nine o'clock in the evening, when the lamps in P. Gibbs's saloon were exerting their smallest degree of dimness and the bar was doing a good business, the door opened and in staggered Busted Blake. His staggering on this occasion was manifestly not due to drink. His face had the hideous concavities of a starved man and the uncertainty of his gait was the token of a mortal feebleness.

His emaciation was painful to behold. His eyes glowed like huge gems.

The crowd of miners looked at him with surprise as he entered.

"The coughing stranger!" cried one.

"The coffin stranger, you mean," said another.

Busted Blake lurched over to the bar. His eyes met those of P. Gibbs on the other side, and the latter reached for a whiskey-bottle.

Blake fumbled in his pocket and brought forth a piece of soiled paper, which he laid on the bar under the glance of P. Gibbs.

"Keep that!" said Blake, in a husky voice, whose service he compelled with much effort. "And keep your word, too! That's where you'll find her."

P. Gibbs picked up the paper.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"That woman's name there. It's the name of my widow; the address, too, of a photograph man who will tell you where she is. Get the money to her quick, before the governor and the troops comes down on you to close you up. And don't let her know how it comes about. Pick a man to take it to her,--let him pay his expenses out of it,--a man you can trust, and make him tell her I made it somehow, mining or something, so she'll take it.

You know."

P. Gibbs, who had listened with increasing amazement, opened wide his eyes and drew his revolver. He spoke in a strangely low, repressed voice: