The Desert and the Sown Part 30

"He's alive now, but doctor don't know how long he'll last. There he comes now. I must go and git his horse."

The doctor, who seemed nervous,--he was a young local pract.i.tioner,--asked to speak with Miss Sallie's hero apart.

"Did Mrs. Bogardus say anything when she first saw that man? Did you notice what she said?--how she took it?"

The hero, who was also a gentleman, looked at the doctor coolly.

"It was not a nice thing," he said. "I saw just as little as I could."

"You don't understand me," said the doctor. "I want to know if Mrs.

Bogardus appeared to you to have made any discovery--received any shock not to be accounted for by--by what you both saw?"

"I shouldn't attempt to answer such a question," said the youngster bluntly. "I never saw Mrs. Bogardus in my life before to-day."

The doctor colored. "Mrs. Bogardus has given me a telegram to send, and I don't know whether to send it or not. It's going to make a whole lot of talk. I am not much acquainted with Mrs. Bogardus myself, except by hearsay. That's partly what surprises me. It looks a little reckless to send out such a message as that, by the first hand that comes along.

Hadn't we better give her time to think it over?" He opened the telegram for the other to read. "The man himself can't speak. But he just pants for breath every time she comes near him: he tries to hide his face. He acts like a criminal afraid of being caught."

"He didn't look that way to me--what was left of him. Not in the least like a criminal."

"Well, no; that's a fact, too. Now they've got him laid out clean and neat, he looks as if he might have been a very decent sort of man. But _that_, you know--that's incredible. If she knows him, why doesn't he know her? Why won't he own her? He's afraid of her. His eyes are ready to burst out of his head whenever she comes near him."

"Did Mrs. Bogardus write that telegram herself?"

"She did."

"And what did she tell you to do with it?"

"Send it to her son."

"Then why don't you send it?"

This was the disputed message: "Come. Your father has been found. Bring Doctor Gainsworth."

In the local man's opinion, the writer of that dispatch was Doctor Gainsworth's true patient. What could induce a woman in Mrs. Bogardus's position to give such hasty publicity to this shocking disclosure, allowing it were true? The more he dwelt on it the less he liked the responsibility he was taking. He discussed it openly; and, with the best intentions, this much-impressed young man gave out his own counter-theory of the case, hoping to forestall whatever mischief might have been done. He put himself in the place of Mr. Paul Bogardus, whom he liked extremely, and tried to imagine that young gentleman's state of mind when he should look upon this new-found parent, and learn the manner of his resurrection.

This was the explanation he boldly set forth in behalf of those most nearly concerned. [He was getting up his diagnosis for an interesting half hour with the great doctor who had been called in consultation.]

The shock of that awful discovery in the locked chamber, he attested, had put Mrs. Bogardus temporarily beside herself. Outwardly composed, her nerves were ripped and torn by the terrible sight that met her eyes. She was the prey of an hallucination founded on memories of former suffering, which had worn a channel for every fresh fear to seek. There was something truly n.o.ble and loyal and pathetic in the nature of her possession. It threw a softened light upon her past. How must she have brooded, all these years, for that one thought to have ploughed so deep!

It was quite commonly known in the neighborhood that she had come back from the West years ago without her husband, yet with no proof of his death. But who could have believed she would cling for half a lifetime to this forlorn expectancy, depicting her own loss in every sad hulk of humanity cast upon her prosperous sh.o.r.es!

Every one believed she was deceiving herself, but great honor was hers among the neighbors for the plain truth and courage of her astonishing avowal. They had thought her proud, exclusive, hard in the security of wealth. Here she stood by a pauper's bed in the name of simple constancy, stripping herself of all earthly surplusage, exposing her deepest wound, proclaiming the bond--herself its only witness--between her and this speechless wreck, drifting out on the tide of death. She had but to let him go. It was the wild word she had spoken in the name of truth and deathless love that fired the imagination of that slow countryside. It was the touch beyond nature that appeals to the higher sense of a community, and there is no community without a soul.

The straight demands of justice are frequently hard to meet, but its ironies are crushing. Mrs. Bogardus had fallen back on the line of a mother's duty since that moment of personal accountability. She read the unspoken reverence in the eyes of all around her, but she put in no disclaimer. Her past was not her own. She could not sin alone. Only those who have been honest are privileged under all conditions to remain so.

On his arrival with the doctor, Paul endeavored first to see his mother alone. For some reason she would not have it so. She took the unspeakable situation as it came. He was shown into the room where she sat, and by her orders Doctor Gainsworth was with him.

She rose quietly and came to meet them. Placing her hand in her son's arm, and looking towards the bed, she said:--

"Doctor--my husband."

"Madam!" said Doctor Gainsworth. He had been Mrs. Bogardus's family physician for many years.

"My husband," she repeated.

The doctor appeared to accept the statement. As the three approached the bed Mrs. Bogardus leaned heavily upon her son. Paul released his arm and placed it firmly around her. He felt her shudder. "Mother," he said to her with an indescribable accent that tore her heart.

The doctor began his examination. He addressed his patient as "Mr.

Bogardus."

"Mistake," said a low, husky voice from the bed. "This ain't the man."

Doctor Gainsworth pursued his investigations. "What is your name?" he asked the patient suddenly.

The hunted eyes turned with ghastly appeal upon the faces around him.

"Paul, speak to him! Own your father," Mrs. Bogardus whispered pa.s.sionately.

"It is for him to speak now," said Paul. "When he is well, Doctor," he added aloud, "he will know his own name."

"This man will never be well," the doctor answered. "If there is anything to prove, for or against the ident.i.ty you claim for him, it will have to be done within a very few days."

Doctor Gainsworth rose and held out his hand. He was a man of delicate perceptions. His respect at that moment for Mrs. Bogardus, though founded on blindest conjecture, was an emotion which the mask of his professional manner could barely conceal. "As a friend, Mrs. Bogardus, I hope you will command me--but you need no doctor here."

"As a friend I ask you to believe me," she said. "This man _is_ my husband. He came back here because this was his home. I cannot tell you any more, but this we expect you and every one who knows"--

The dissenting voice from the bed closed her a.s.sertion with a hoa.r.s.e "No! Not the man."

"Good-by, Mrs. Bogardus," said the doctor. "Don't trouble to explain.

You and I have lived too long and seen too much of life not to recognize its fatalities: the mysterious trend in the actions of men and women that cannot be comprised in--in the locking of a door."

"It is of little consequence--what was done, compared to what was not done." This was all the room for truth she could give herself to turn in. The doctor did not try to understand her: yet she had s.n.a.t.c.hed a little comfort from merely uttering the words.

Paul and the doctor dined together, Mrs. Bogardus excusing herself.

"There seems to be an impression here," said the doctor, examining the initials on his fish-fork, "that your mother is indulging an overstrained fancy in this melancholy resemblance she has traced.

It does not appear to have made much headway as a fact, which rather surprises me in a country neighborhood. Possibly your doctor here, who seems a very good fellow, has wished to spare the family any unnecessary explanations. If you'll let me advise you, Paul, I would leave it as it is,--open to conjecture. But, in whatever shape this impression may reach you from outside, I hope you won't let it disturb you in the least, so far as it describes your mother's condition. She is one of the few well-balanced women I have had the honor to know."

Paul did not take advantage of the doctor's period. He went on.

"Not that I do know her. Possibly you may not yourself feel that you altogether understand your mother? She has had many demands upon her powers of adaptation. I should imagine her not one who would adapt herself easily, yet, once she had recognized a necessity of that sort, I believe she would fit herself to its conditions with an exacting thoroughness which in time would become almost, one might say, a second, an external self. The 'lendings' we must all of us wear."

"There will be no explanations," said Paul, not coldly, but helplessly.

"Much the best way," said the doctor relieved, and glad to be done with a difficult undertaking. "If we are ever understood in this world, it is not through our own explanations, but in spite of them. My daughters hope to see a good deal of your charming wife this winter. I hear great pleasure expressed at your coming back to town."

"Thank you, Doctor. She will be up this evening. We shall stay here with my mother for a time. It will be her desire to carry out this--recognition--to the end. We must honor her wishes in the matter."

The talk then fell upon the patient's condition. The doctor left certain directions and took shelter in professional plat.i.tudes, but his eyes rested with candid kindness upon the young man, and his farewell hand-clasp was a second prolonged.