Everything was all right. There was only one thought which thrilled him: his impression that she had come to the hospital to see him was not a delusion; she had really been there--as a humane, Christian person, he said to himself. One day he told Meredith of his vision, and Tom explained that it was no conjuration of fever.
"But I thought she"d gone abroad," said Harkless, staring.
"They had planned to," answered his friend. "They gave it up for some reason. Uncle Henry decided that he wasn"t strong enough for the trip, or something."
"Then--is she--is she here?"
"No; Helen is never here in summer. When she came back from Plattville, she went north, somewhere, to join people she had promised, I think."
Meredith had as yet no inkling or suspicion that his adopted cousin had returned to Plattville. What he told Harkless was what his aunt had told him, and he accepted it as the truth.
Mrs. Sherwood (for she was both Mr. and Mrs. Sherwood) had always considered Fisbee an enigmatic rascal, and she regarded Helen"s defection to him in the light of a family scandal to be hushed up, as well as a scalding pain to be borne. Some day the unkind girl-errant would "return to her wisdom and her duty"; meanwhile, the less known about it the better.
Meredith talked very little to Harkless of his cousin, beyond lightly commenting on the pleasure and oddity of their meeting, and telling him of her friendly anxiety about his recovery; he said she had perfect confidence from the first that he would recover. Harkless had said a word or two in his delirium and a word or two out of it, and these, with once a sudden brow of suffering, and a difference Meredith felt in Helen"s manner when they stood together by the sick man"s bedside, had given the young man a strong impression, partly intuitive, that in spite of the short time the two had known each other, something had happened between them at Plattville, and he ventured a guess which was not far from the truth. Altogether, the thing was fairly plain--a sad lover is not so hard to read--and Meredith was sorry, for they were the two people he liked best on earth.
The young man carried his gay presence daily to the hospital, where Harkless now lay in a pleasant room of his own, and he tried to keep his friend cheery, which was an easy matter on the surface, for the journalist turned ever a mask of jokes upon him; but it was not hard for one who liked him as Meredith did to see through to the melancholy underneath. After his one reference to Helen, John was entirely silent of her, and Meredith came to feel that both would be embarra.s.sed if occasion should rise and even her name again be mentioned between them.
He did not speak of his family connection with Mr. Fisbee to the invalid, for, although the connection was distant, the old man was, in a way, the family skeleton, and Meredith had a strong sense of the decency of reserve in such a matter. There was one thing Fisbee"s shame had made the old man unable not to suppress when he told Parker his story; the wraith of a torrid palate had pursued him from his youth, and the days of drink and despair from which Harkless had saved him were not the first in his life. Meredith wondered as much as did Harkless where Fisbee had picked up the journalistic "young relative" who signed his extremely business-like missives in such a thundering hand. It was evident that the old man was grateful to his patron, but it did not occur to Meredith that Fisbee"s daughter might have an even stronger sense of grat.i.tude, one so strong that she could give all her young strength to work for the man who had been good to her father.
There came a day in August when Meredith took the convalescent from the hospital in a victoria, and installed him in his own home. Harkless"s clothes hung on his big frame limply; however, there was a drift of light in his eyes as they drove slowly through the pretty streets of Rouen. The bandages and splints and drugs and swathings were all gone now, and his sole task was to gather strength. The thin face was sallow no longer; it was the color of evening shadows; indeed he lay among the cushions seemingly no more than a gaunt shadow of the late afternoon, looking old and gray and weary. They rolled along abusing each other, John sometimes gratefully threatening his friend with violence.
The victoria pa.s.sed a stone house with wide lawns and an inhospitable air of wealth and importunate rank; over the sward two peac.o.c.ks swung, ambulating like caravals in a green sea; and one expected a fine lady to come smiling and glittering from the door. Oddly enough, though he had never seen the place before, it struck Harkless with a sense of familiarity. "Who lives there?" he asked abruptly.
"Who lives there? On the left? Why that--that is the Sherwood place,"
Meredith answered, in a tone which sounded as if he were not quite sure of it, but inclined to think his information correct. Harkless relapsed into silence.
Meredith"s home was a few blocks further up the same street; a capacious house in the Western fashion of the Seventies. In front, on the lawn, there was a fountain with a leaping play of water; maples and shrubbery were everywhere; and here and there stood a stiff sentinel of Lombardy poplar. It was all cool and incongruous and comfortable; and, on the porch, sheltered from publicity by a mult.i.tude of palms and flowering plants, a white-jacketed negro appeared with a n.o.ble smile and a more important tray, whereon tinkled bedewed gla.s.ses and a crystal pitcher, against whose sides the ice clinked sweetly. There was a complement of straws.
When they had helped him to an easy chair on the porch, Harkless whistled luxuriously. "Ah, my bachelor!" he exclaimed, as he selected a straw.
""Who would fardels bear?"" rejoined Mr. Meredith. Then came to the other a recollection of an auburn-haired ball player on whom the third strike had once been called while his eyes wandered tenderly to the grandstand, where the prettiest girl of that commencement week was sitting.
"Have you forgot the "Indian Princess"?" he asked.
"You"re a dull old person," Tom laughed. "Haven"t you discovered that "tis they who forget us? And why shouldn"t they? Do _we_ remember well?--anybody except just us two, I mean, of course."
"I"ve a notion we do, sometimes."
The other set his gla.s.s on the tray, and lit his cigarette. "Yes; when we"re unsuccessful. Then I think we do."
"That may be true."
"Of course it is. If a lady wishes to make an impression on me that is worth making, let her let me make none on her."
"You think it is always our vanity?"
"a.n.a.lyze it as your revered Thomas does and you shall reach the same conclusion. Let a girl reject you and--" Meredith broke off, cursing himself inwardly, and, rising, cried gaily: "What profiteth it a man if he gain the whole wisdom in regard to women and loseth not his own heart? And neither of us is lacking a heart--though it may be; one can"t tell, one"s self; one has to find out about that from some girl. At least, I"m rather sure of mine; it"s difficult to give a tobacco-heart away; it"s drugged on the market. I"m going to bring out the dogs; I"m spending the summer at home just to give them daily exercise."
This explanation of his continued presence in Rouen struck John as quite as plausible as Meredith"s more seriously alleged reasons for not joining his mother and sister, at Winter Harbor. (He possessed a mother, and, as he explained, he had also sisters to satiety, in point of numbers.) Harkless knew that Tom had stayed to look after him; and he thought there never was so poor a peg as himself whereon to hang the warm mantle of such a friendship. He knew that other mantles of affection and kindliness hung on that self-same peg, for he had been moved by the letters and visits from Carlow people, and he had heard the story of their descent upon the hospital, and of the march on the Cross-Roads. Many a good fellow, too, had come to see him during his better days--from Judge Briscoe, openly tender and solicitous, to the embarra.s.sed William Todd, who fiddled at his hat and explained that, being as he was in town on business (a palpable fiction) he thought he"d look in to see if "they was any word would wish to be sent down to our city." The good will the sick man had from every one touched him, and made him feel unworthy, and he could see nothing he had done to deserve it. Mr. Meredith could (and would not--openly, at least) have explained to him that it made not a great deal of difference what he did; it was what people thought he was.
His host helped him upstairs after dinner, and showed him the room prepared for his occupancy. Harkless sank, sighing with weakness, into a deep chair, and Meredith went to a window-seat and stretched himself out for a smoke and chat.
"Doesn"t it beat your time," he said, cheerily, "to think of what"s become of all the old boys? They turn up so differently from what we expected, when they turn up at all. We sized them up all right so far as character goes, I fancy, but we couldn"t size up the chances of life. Take poor old Pickle Haines: who"d have dreamed Pickle would shoot himself over a bankruptcy? I dare say that wasn"t all of it--might have been cherchez la femme, don"t you think? What do you make of Pickle"s case, John?"
There was no answer. Harkless"s chair was directly in front of the mantel-piece, and upon the carved wooden shelf, amongst tobacco-jars and little curios, cotillion favors and the like, there were scattered a number of photographs. One of these was that of a girl who looked straight out at you from a filigree frame; there was hardly a corner of the room where you could have stood without her clear, serious eyes seeming to rest upon yours.
"Cherchez la femme?" repeated Tom, puffing unconsciously. "Pickle was a good fellow, but he had the deuce of an eye for a girl. Do you remember--" He stopped short, and saw the man and the photograph looking at each other. Too late, he unhappily remembered that he had meant, and forgotten, to take that photograph out of the room before he brought Harkless in. Now he would have to leave it; and Helen Sherwood was not the sort of girl, even in a flat presentment, to be continually thrown in the face of a man who had lost her. And it always went hard, Tom reflected, with men who stretched vain hands to Helen, only to lose her.
But there was one, he thought, whose outstretched hands might not prove so vain. Why couldn"t she have cared for John Harkless? Deuce take the girl, did she want to marry an emperor? He looked at Harkless, and pitied him with an almost tearful compa.s.sion. A feverish color dwelt in the convalescent"s cheek; the apathy that had dulled his eyes was there no longer; instead, they burned with a steady fire. The image returned his unwavering gaze with inscrutable kindness.
"You heard that Pickle shot himself, didn"t you?" Meredith asked. There was no answer; John did not hear him.
"Do you know that poor Jeny Haines killed himself, last March?" Tom said sharply.
There was only silence in the room. Meredith got up and rattled some tongs in the empty fireplace, but the other did not move or notice him in any way.
Meredith set the tongs down, and went quietly out of the room, leaving his friend to that mysterious interview.
When he came back, after a remorseful cigarette in the yard, Harkless was still sitting, motionless, looking up at the photograph above the mantel-piece.
They drove abroad every day, at first in the victoria, and, as Harkless"s strength began to come back, in a knock-about cart of Tom"s, a light trail of blue smoke floating back wherever the two friends pa.s.sed. And though the country editor grew stronger in the pleasant, open city, Meredith felt that his apathy and listlessness only deepened, and he suspected that, in Harkless"s own room, where the photograph reigned, the languor departed for the time, making way for a destructive fire. Judge Briscoe, paying a second visit to Rouen, told Tom, in an aside, that their friend did not seem to be the same man. He was altered and aged beyond belief, the old gentleman whispered sadly.
Meredith decided that his guest needed enlivening--something to take him out of himself; he must be stirred up to rub against people once more.
And therefore, one night he made a little company for him: two or three apparently betrothed very young couples, for whom it was rather dull, after they had looked their fill of Harkless (it appeared that every one was curious to see him); and three or four married young couples, for whom the entertainment seemed rather diverting in an absent-minded way (they had the air of remembering that they had forgotten the baby); and three or four bachelors, who seemed contented in any place where they were allowed to smoke; and one widower, whose manner indicated that any occasion whatever was gay enough for him; and four or five young women, who (Meredith explained to John) were of their host"s age, and had been "left over" out of the set he grew up with; and for these the modest party took on a hilarious and chipper character. "It is these girls that have let the men go by because they didn"t see any good enough; they"re the jolly souls!" the one widower remarked, confidentially. "They"ve been at it a long while, and they know how, and they"re light-hearted as robins. They have more fun than people who have responsibilities."
All of these lively demoiselles fluttered about Harkless with commiserative pleasantries, and, in spite of his protestations, made him recline in the biggest and deepest chair on the porch, where they surfeited him with kindness and grouped about him with extra cushions and tenderness for a man who had been injured. No one mentioned the fact that he had been hurt; it was not spoken of, though they wished mightily he would tell them the story they had read luridly in the public prints.
They were very good to him. One of them, in particular, a handsome, dark, kind-eyed girl, const.i.tuted herself at once his cicerone in Rouen gossip and his waiting-maid. She sat by him, and saw that his needs (and his not-needs, too) were supplied and oversupplied; she could not let him move, and antic.i.p.ated his least wish, though he was now amply able to help himself; and she fanned him as if he were a dying consumptive.
They sat on Meredith"s big porch in the late twilight and ate a substantial refection, and when this was finished, a buzz of nonsense rose from all quarters, except the remote corners where the youthful affianced ones had defensively stationed themselves behind a rampart of plants. They, having eaten, had naught to do, and were only waiting a decent hour for departure. Laughing voices pa.s.sed up and down the street, and mingled with the rhythmic plashing of Meredith"s fountain, and, beyond the shrubberies and fence, one caught glimpses of the light dresses of women moving to and fro, and of people sitting bareheaded on neighboring lawns to enjoy the twilight. Now and then would pa.s.s, with pipe and dog, the beflanneled figure of an undergraduate, home for vacation, or a trio of youths in knickerbockers, or a band of young girls, or both trio and band together; and from a cross street, near by, came the calls and laughter of romping children and the pulsating whirr of a lawn-mower: This sound Harkless remarked as a ceaseless accompaniment to life in Rouen; even in the middle of the night there was always some unfortunate, cutting gra.s.s.
When the daylight was all gone, and the stars had crept out, strolling negroes patrolled the sidewalks, thrumming mandolins and guitars, and others came and went, singing, making the night Venetian. The untrained, joyous voices, chording eerily in their sweet, racial minors, came on the air, sometimes from far away. But there swung out a chorus from fresh, Aryan throats, in the house south of Meredith"s:
"Where, oh where, are the grave old Seniors?
Safe, now, in the wide, wide world!"
"Doesn"t that thrill you, boy?" said Meredith, joining the group about Harkless"s chair. "Those fellows are Soph.o.m.ores, cla.s.s of heaven knows what. _Aren"t_ you feeling a fossil. Father Abraham?"
A banjo chattered on the lawn to the north, and soon a mixed chorus of girls and boys sang from there:
"O, "Arriet, I"m waiting, waiting alone out "ere."
Then a piano across the street sounded the dearthful harmonies of Chopin"s Funeral March.
"You may take your choice," remarked Meredith, flicking a spark over the rail in the ash of his cigar, "Chopping or Chevalier."
"Chopin, my friend," said the lady who had attached herself to Harkless. She tapped Tom"s shoulder with her fan and smiled, graciously corrective.
"Thank you, Miss Hinsdale," he answered, gratefully. "And as I, perhaps, had better say, since otherwise there might be a pause and I am the host, we have a wide selection. In addition to what is provided at present, I predict that within the next ten minutes a talented girl who lives two doors south will favor us with the Pilgrims" Chorus, piano arrangement, break down in the middle, and drift, into "Rastus on Parade," while a double quartette of middle-aged colored gentlemen under our Jim will make choral offering in our own back yard."