The Romance of a Plain Man Part 52

"Comfort Sally, Miss Mitty, and it will do me more good than chicken jelly."

For a minute she sat looking at me kindly in silence. Then, as little Benjamin was brought, she took him upon her lap, and remarked that he was a beautiful baby, and that she already discerned in him the look of her Uncle Theodoric Fairfax.

"I should like you to come to my house as soon as you are able to move,"

she said presently, as she rose to go, and paused for a minute to bend over and kiss little Benjamin. "You will be more comfortable there, though the air is, perhaps, fresher over here."

I thanked her with tears in my eyes, and a resolve in my mind that at least Sally and the baby should accept the offer.

"There is a basket of old port in the sitting-room; I thought it might help to strengthen you," were her last words as she pa.s.sed out, with Sally clinging to her arm, and the c.r.a.pe veil she still wore for Miss Matoaca rustling as she moved.

"Po' Miss Mitty has done breck so I 'ouldn't hev knowed her f'om de daid," observed Aunt Euphronasia, when the front door had closed and the sound of rapidly rolling wheels had pa.s.sed down the street.

All night Sally and I talked of her, she resisting and I entreating that she should go to her old home for the rest of the summer.

"How can I leave you, Ben? How can you possibly do without me?"

"Don't bother about me. I'll manage to sc.r.a.pe along, somehow. There are two things that are killing me, Sally--the fact of owing money that I can't pay, and the thought of your toiling like a slave over my comfort."

"I'll go, then, if you will come with me."

"You know I can't come with you. She only asked me, you must realise, out of pity."

"Well, I shan't go a step without you," she said decisively at last, "for I don't see how on earth you would live through the summer if I did."

"I don't see either," I admitted honestly, looking at her, as she stood in the frame of the long window, the ruffles of her muslin dressing-gown blowing gently in the breeze which had sprung up in the garden. Beyond her there was a pale dimness, and the fresh, moist smell of the dew on the gra.s.s.

What she had said was the truth. How could I have lived through the summer if she had left me? Since the night after my failure, when we had come, for the first time, face to face with each other, I had leaned on her with all the weight of my crippled strength; and this weight, instead of crushing her to the earth, appeared to add vigour and buoyancy to her slender figure. Long afterwards, when my knowledge of her had come at last, not through love, but through bitterness, I wondered why I had not understood on that night, while I lay there watching her pale outline framed by the window. Love, not meat and drink, was her nourishment, and without love, though I were to surround her with all the fruits of the earth, she would still be famished. That she was strong, I had already learned. What I was still to discover was that this strength lay less in character than in emotion. Her very endurance--her power of sustained sympathy, of sacrifice--had its birth in some strangely idealised quality of pa.s.sion--as though even suffering or duty was enkindled by this warm, clear flame that burned always within her.

As the light broke, we were awakened, after a few hours' restless sleep, by a sharp ring at the bell; and when she had slipped into her wrapper and answered it, she came back very slowly, holding an open note in her hands.

"Oh, poor Aunt Mitty, poor Aunt Mitty. She died all alone in her house last night, and the servants found her this morning."

"Well, the last thing she did was a kindness," I said gently.

"I'm glad of that, glad she came to see me, but, Ben, I can't help believing that it killed her. She had Aunt Matoaca's heart trouble, and the strain was too much." Then, as I held out my arms, she clung to me, weeping. "Never leave me alone, Ben--whatever happens, never, never leave me alone!"

A few days later, when Miss Mitty's will was opened, it was found that she had left to Sally her little savings of the last few years, which amounted to ten thousand dollars. The house, with her income, pa.s.sed from her to the hospital endowed by Edmond Bland in a fit of rage with his youngest daughter; and the old lady's canary and the cheque, which fluttered some weeks later from the lawyer's letter, were the only possessions of hers that reached her niece.

"She left the miniature of me painted when I was a child to George,"

said Sally, with the cheque in her hand; "George was very good to her at the end. Did you ever notice my miniature, framed in pearls, that she wore sometimes, in place of grandmama's, at her throat?"

I had not noticed it, and the fact that I had never seen it, and was perfectly unaware whether or not it resembled Sally, seemed in some curious way to increase, rather than to diminish, the jealous pain at my heart. Why should George have been given this trifle, which was a.s.sociated with Sally, and which I had never seen?

She leaned forward and the cheque fluttered into my plate.

"Take the money, Ben, and do what you think best with it," she added.

"It belongs to you. Wouldn't you rather keep it in bank as a nest-egg?"

"No, take it. I had everything of yours as long as you had anything."

"Then it goes into bank for you all the same," I replied, as I slipped the paper into my pocket.

An hour later, as I pa.s.sed in the car down the long hill, I told myself that I would place the money to Sally's account, in order that she might draw on it until I had made good the strain of my illness. My first intention had been to go into the bank on my way to the office; but glancing at my watch as I left the car, I found that it was already after nine o'clock, and so returning the cheque to my pocket, I crossed the street, where I found the devil of temptation awaiting me in the person of Sam Brackett.

"I say, Ben, if you had a little cash, here's an opportunity to make your fortune rise," he remarked; "I've just given George a tip and he's going in."

"You'd better keep out of it, Ben," said George, wheeling round suddenly after he had nodded and turned away. "It's copper, and you know if there's a thing on earth that can begin to monkey when you don't expect it to, it's the copper trade."

"Bonanza copper mining stock is selling at zero again," commented Sam imperturbably, "and if it doesn't go up like a shot, then I'm a deader."

Whether his future was to be that of a deader or not concerned me little; but while I stood there on the crowded pavement, with my eyes on the sky, I had a sudden sensation, as if the burden of debt--which was the burden, not of thought, but of metal--had been removed from my shoulders. My first fortune had been made in copper,--why not repeat it?

That one minute's sense of release, of freedom, had gone like wine to my head. I saw stretching away from me the dull years I must spend in chains, but I saw, also, in the blessed vision which Sam Brackett had called up, the single means of escape.

"What does the General think of it, George?" I enquired.

"He's putting in money, I believe, moderately as usual," replied George, with a worried look on his face; "but I tell you frankly, Ben, whether it's a good thing or not, if that's Miss Mitty's legacy, you oughtn't to speculate with it. Sally might need it."

"Sally needs a thousand times more," I returned, not without irritation, "and I shall get it for her in the way I can." Then I held out my hand.

"You're a first-rate chap, George," I added, "but just think what it would mean to Sally if I could get out of debt at a jump."

"I dare say," he responded, "but I'm not sure that putting your last ten thousand dollars in the Bonanza copper mining stock is a rational way of doing it."

"Such things aren't done in a rational way. The secret of successful speculating is to be willing to dare everything for something. Sam's got faith in the Bonanza, and he knows a hundred times as much about it as you or I."

"If it doesn't rise," said Sam emphatically, "then I'm a deader."

I still saw the dull years stretching ahead, and I still felt the tangible weight on my shoulders of the two hundred thousand dollars I owed. The old prostrate instinct of the speculator, which is but the gambler's instinct in better clothes, lifted its head within me.

"Well, it won't do any harm to go into Townley's and find out about it,"

I said, moving in the direction of the broker's office next door.

CHAPTER x.x.x

IN WHICH SALLY PLANS

My first sensation after putting Sally's ten thousand dollars into copper mining stock was one of immense relief, almost of exhilaration, as if I already heard in my fancy the clanking of the loosened chains as they dropped from me. I recalled, one by one, the incidents of my earliest "risky" and yet fortunate venture, when, following the General's advice, I had gone in boldly, and after a short period of breathless fluctuation, had "realised," as he had said, "a nice little fortune for a first hatching." And because this seemed to me the single means of recovery, because I had so often before in my life been guided by some infallible instinct to seize the last chance that in the outcome had proved to be the right way, I felt now that reliance upon fortune, that a.s.surance of the thing hoped for, which was as much a portion of experience as it was a quality of temperament.

At home, when I reached there late in the afternoon, I found Sally just stepping out of the General's buggy, while the great man, sacrificing gallantry to the claims of gout, sat, under his old-fashioned linen dust robe, holding the slackened reins over the grey horse.

"We've got a beautiful plan, Ben, the General and I," remarked Sally, when he had driven away, and we were entering the house; "but it's a secret, and you're not to know of it until it is ready to be divulged."