Vistas of New York Part 16

"That's what we wanted to know," replied my cla.s.smate, "so we telegraphed to our local manager, and he gave us an explanation right off the reel. The manager has a sister who is the widow of a California millionaire, and she has been in Denver for the winter, and she has met our friend; and for all she is a good ten years older than he is, she has been fascinated by him--you know what a handsome fellow he is--and she's going to marry him next week, and take him to Egypt for his health."

"He's going to marry the California widow?" I asked, in astonishment.

"Why, he's enga--" Then I suddenly held my peace.

"He's going to marry the California widow," was the answer,--"or she's going to marry him; it's all the same, I suppose."

Two days later I had a letter from Denver confirming this report. He wrote that he was to be married in ten days to a most estimable lady, and that they were to leave his mother in New York as they pa.s.sed through. Fortunately he had been able to make arrangements whereby his mother would be able to live hereafter where she pleased, and in comfort. He invited me to come out to Colorado for the wedding, but hardly hoped to persuade me, he said, knowing how pressing my engagements were. But as their steamer sailed on Sat.u.r.day week they would be at a New York hotel on the Friday night, and he counted on seeing me then.

I went to see him then, and I was shocked by his appearance. He was thin, and his chest was hollower than ever. There were dark lines below his liquid eyes, brighter then than I had ever seen them before. There were two blazing spots on his high cheek-bones. He coughed oftener than I had ever known him, and the spasms were longer and more violent. His hand was feverishly hot. His manner, too, was restless. To my surprise, he seemed to try to avoid being alone with me. He introduced me to his wife, a dignified, matronly woman with a full figure and a cheerful smile. She had a most motherly manner of looking after him and of antic.i.p.ating his wants; twice she jumped up to close a door which had been left open behind him. He accepted her devotion as a matter of course, apparently. Once, when she was telling me of their projects--how they were going direct to Egypt to remain till late in the spring, and then to return to Paris for the summer, with a possible run over to London before the season was over--he interrupted her to say that it mattered little where he went or what he did--one place was as good as another.

When I rose to go he came with me out into the hotel corridor, despite his wife's suggestion that there was sure to be a draught there.

He thrust into my hand a note-book. "There," he said, "take that; it's a journal I started to keep, and never did. Of course you can read it if you like. In the pocket you will find a check. I want you to get some things for me after I've gone; I've written down everything. You will do that for me, I know."

I promised to carry out his instructions to the letter.

"Then that's all right," he answered.

At that moment his wife came to the door of their parlor. "I know it must be chilly out in the hall there," she said.

"Oh, I'm coming," he responded.

Then he grasped my fingers firmly in his hot hand. "Good-by, old man,"

he whispered. "You remember how I used to think the frog that played the trombone was trying to execute a Heine-Schubert song? Well, perhaps it is--I don't know; but what I do know is that it has played a wedding march, after all. And now good-by. G.o.d bless you! Go and see my mother as often as you can."

He gave my hand a hearty shake, and went back into the parlor, and his wife shut the door after him.

I had intended to go down to the boat and see him off the next morning, but at breakfast I received a letter from his wife saying that he had pa.s.sed a very restless night, and that she thought it would excite him still more if I saw him again, and begging me, therefore, not to come to the steamer if such had been my intention. And so it was that he sailed away and I never saw him again.

In the note-book I found a check for five hundred dollars, and a list of the things he wished me to get and to pay for. They were for his mother mostly, but one was a seal-ring for myself. And there was with the check a jeweler's bill, "To articles sent as directed," which I was also requested to pay.

The note-book itself I guarded with care. It was a pocket-journal, and my friend had tried to make it a record of his life for the preceding year. There were entries of letters received and sent, of money earned and spent, of acquaintances made, of business appointments, of dinner engagements, and of visits to the doctor. Evidently his health had been failing fast, and he had been struggling hard to keep the knowledge not only from his mother, but even from himself. While he had set down these outward facts of his life, he had also used the note-book as the record of his inward feelings. To an extent that he little understood, that journal, with its fragmentary entries and its stray thoughts, told the story of his spiritual experience.

Many of the entries were personal, but many were not; they were merely condensations of the thought of the moment as it pa.s.sed through his mind. Here are two specimens:

"We judge others by the facts of life--by what we hear them say and see them do. We judge ourselves rather by our own feelings--by what we intend and desire and hope to do some day in the future. Thus a poor man may glow with inward satisfaction at the thought of the hospital he is going to build when he gets rich. And a wealthy man can at least pride himself on the fort.i.tude with which he would, if need be, bear the deprivations of poverty."

"To pardon is the best and the bitterest vengeance."

Toward the end of the year the business entries became fewer and fewer, as though he had tired of keeping the record of his doings. But the later pages were far fuller than the earlier of his reflections--sometimes a true thought happily expressed, sometimes, more often than not perhaps, a mere verbal ant.i.thesis, such as have furnished forth many an aphorism long before my friend was born. And these later sentiments had a tinge of bitterness lacking in the earlier.

"There are few houses," he wrote, in October, apparently, "where happiness is a permanent boarder; generally it is but a transient guest; and sometimes, indeed, it is only a tramp that knocks at the side door and is refused admittance."

"Many a man forgets his evil deeds so swiftly that he is honestly surprised when any one else recalls them."

Except the directions to me for the expenditure of the five hundred dollars, the last two entries in the book were written on Christmas morning. One of these was the pa.s.sage which smote me most when I first read it, for it struck me as sadness itself when written by a young man not yet twenty-five:

"If we had nothing else to wish, we should at least wish to die."

At the time I did not seize the full significance of the other pa.s.sage, longer than this, and far sadder when its meaning was finally grasped.

"The love our parents gave us we do not pay back, nor a t.i.the of it, even. We may bestow it to our children, but we never render it again to our father and our mother. And what can equal the love of a woman for the son she has borne? No peak is as lofty, and no ocean is as wide; it is fathomless, boundless, immeasurable; it is poured without stint, unceasing and unfailing. And how do we men meet it? We do not even make a pretense of repaying it, most of us. Now and again there may be a son here and there who does what he can for his mother, little as it is, and much as he may despise himself for doing it: and why not? Are there not seven swords in the heart of the Mater Dolorosa? And what sort of a son is he who would add another?"

Although I had already begun to guess at the secret of my friend's conduct, a mystery to all others, it was the first of these two final entries in his note-book which came flashing back into my memory one evening toward the end of March, ten weeks or so after he had bidden me good-by and had gone away to Egypt. I was seated in my library, smoking, when there came a ring at the door, and a telegram was handed to me. I laid my cigar down on the brownish-yellow sh.e.l.l, at the crinkled edge of which the green frog was sitting, reaching out his broken arms for the trombone whereon he had played in happier days. I saw that the despatch had come by the cable under the ocean, and I wondered who on the other side of the Atlantic had news for me that would not keep till a letter could reach me.

I tore open the envelope. The message was dated Alexandria, Egypt, and it was signed by my friend's widow. He had died that morning, and I was asked to break the news to his mother.

(1893)

[Ill.u.s.tration: On an Errand of Mercy]

The ambulance clanged along, now under the elevated railroad, and now wrenching itself outside to get ahead of a cable-car.

With his little bag in his hand, the young doctor sat wondering whether he would know just what to do when the time came. This was his first day of duty as ambulance surgeon, and now he was going to his first call. It was three in the afternoon of an August day, when the hot spell had lasted a week already, and yet the young physician was chill with apprehension as he took stock of himself, and as he had a realizing sense of his own inexperience.

The bullet-headed Irishman who was driving the ambulance as skilfully as became the former owner of a night-hawk cab glanced back at the doctor and sized up the situation.

"There's no knowin' what it is we'll find when we get there," he began.

"There's times when it's no aisy job the doctor has. Say you give the man ether, now, or whatever it is you make him sniff, and maybe he's dead when he comes out of it. Where are you then?"

The young man decided instantly that if anything of that sort should happen to him that afternoon, he would go back to Georgia at once and try for a place in the country store.

"But nothing ever fazed Dr. Chandler," the driver went on. "It's Dr.

Chandler's place you're takin' now, ye know that?"

It seemed to the surgeon that the Irishman was making ready to patronize him, or at least to insinuate the new-comer's inferiority to his predecessor, whereupon his sense of humor came to his rescue, and a smile relieved the tension of his nerves as he declared that Dr.

Chandler was an honor to his profession.

"He is that!" the driver returned, emphatically, as with a dextrous jerk he swung the ambulance just in front of a cable-car, to the sputtering disgust of the gripman. "An' it's many a dangerous case we've had to handle together, him and me."

"I don't doubt that you were of great a.s.sistance," the young Southerner suggested.

"Many's the time he's tould me he never knew what he'd ha' done without me," the Irishman responded. "There was that night, now--the night when the big sailor come off the Roosian ship up in the North River there, an' he got full, an' he fell down the steps of a barber shop, an' he bruck his leg into three paces, so he did; an' that made him mad, the pain of it, an' he was just wild when the ambulance come. Oh, it was a lovely jag he had on him, that Roosian--a lovely jag! An' it was a daisy sc.r.a.p we had wid him!"

"What did he do?" asked the surgeon.

"What didn't he do?" the driver replied, laughing at the memory of the scene. "He tried to do the doctor--Dr. Chandler it was, as I tould you.

He'd a big knife--it's mortial long knives, too, them Roosians carry--an' he was so full he thought it was Dr. Chandler that was hurtin' him, and he med offer to put his knife in him, when, begorra, I kicked it out of his hand."

"I have often heard Dr. Chandler speak of you," said the doctor, with an involuntary smile, as he recalled several of the good stories that his predecessor had told him of the driver's peculiarities.

"An' why w'u'dn't he?" the Irishman replied. "It's more nor wanst I had to help him out of trouble. An' never a worrd we had in all the months he drove out wid me. But it 'll be some aisy little job we'll have now, I'm thinkin'--a sun-stroke, maybe, or a kid that's got knocked down by a scorcher, or a thrifle of that kind; you'll be able to attend to that yourself aisy enough, no doubt."

To this the young Southerner made no response, for his mind was busy in going over the antidotes for various poisons. Then he aroused himself and shook his shoulders, and laughed at his own preoccupation.