The house surgeon had returned a trifle graver. They might see him now, but they must be warned that he wandered at times a little; and, if he might suggest, if it was anything of family importance, they had better make the most of their time and his lucid intervals. Perhaps if they were old friends--VERY old friends--he would recognize them. He was wandering much in the past--always in the past.
They found him in the end of the ward, but so carefully protected and part.i.tioned off by screens that the s.p.a.ce around his cot had all the privacy and security of an apartment. He was very much changed; they would scarcely have known him, but for the delicately curved aquiline profile and the long white moustache--now so faint and etherealized as to seem a mere spirit wing that rested on his pillow. To their surprise he opened his eyes with a smile of perfect recognition, and, with thin fingers beyond the coverlid, beckoned to them to approach.
Yet there was still a shadow of his old reserve in his reception of Paul, and, although one hand interlocked the fingers of Yerba--who had at first rushed impulsively forward and fallen on her knees beside the bed--and the other softly placed itself upon her head, his eyes were fixed upon the young man"s with the ceremoniousness due to a stranger.
"I am glad to see, sir," he began in a slow, broken, but perfectly audible voice, "that now you are--satisfied with the right--of this young lady--to bear the name of--Arguello--and her relationship--sir--to one of the oldest"--
"But, my dear old friend," broke out Paul, earnestly, "I NEVER cared for that--I beg you to believe"--
"He never--never--cared for it--dear, dear colonel," sobbed Yerba, pa.s.sionately: "it was all my fault--he thought only of me--you wrong him!"
"I think otherwise," said the colonel, with grim and relentless deliberation. "I have a vivid--impression--sir--of an--interview I had with you--at the St. Charles--where you said"-- He was silent for a moment, and then in a quite different voice called faintly--
"George!"
Paul and Yerba glanced quickly at each other.
"George, set out some refreshment for the Honorable Paul Hathaway. The best, sir--you understand.... A good n.i.g.g.e.r, sir--a good boy; and he never leaves me, sir. Only, by gad! sir, he will starve himself and his family to be with me. I brought him with me to California away back in the fall of "forty-nine. Those were the early days, sir--the early days."
His head had fallen back quite easily on the pillow now; but a slight film seemed to be closing over his dark eyes, like the inner lid of an eagle when it gazes upon the sun.
"They were the old days, sir--the days of Men--when a man"s WORD was enough for anything, and his trigger-finger settled any doubt. When the Trust that he took from Man, Woman, or Child was never broken. When the tide, sir, that swept through the Golden Gate came up as far as Montgomery Street."
He did not speak again. But they who stood beside him knew that the tide had once more come up to Montgomery Street, and was carrying Harry Pendleton away with it.