Part 15 (2/2)

It was on Christmas eve that year that he brought me the frog that played the trombone. Ever since the first Christmas of our friends.h.i.+p we had made each other little presents.

”This is hardly worth giving,” he said, as he placed the china sh.e.l.l on the corner of my desk, where it stands to this day. ”But it is quaint and it caught my fancy. Besides, I've a notion that it is the tune of one of Heine's lyrics set by Schubert that the fellow is trying to play.

And then I've a certain satisfaction in thinking that I shall be represented here by a performer of marvelous force of lung, since you seem to think my lungs are weak.”

A severe cough seized him then, but, when he had recovered his breath, he laughed lightly, and said: ”That's the worst one I've had this week.

However, when the spring warms me up again I shall be all right once more. It wasn't on me that the spring poet wrote the epitaph:

'It was a cough That carried him off; It was a coffin They carried him off in.'”

”You ought to go away for a month at least,” I urged. ”Take a run down South and fill your lungs with the balsam of the pines.”

”That's what my mother wants me to do,” he admitted; ”and I've half promised to do it. If I go to Florida for January, can you go with me?”

I knew how needful it was for him to escape from the bleakness of our New York winter, so I made a hasty mental review of my engagements.

”Yes,” I said, ”I will go with you.”

He held out his hand and clasped mine firmly. ”We'll have a good time,”

he responded, ”just we two. But you must promise not to object if I insist on talking about her all the time.”

[Ill.u.s.tration: ”I WENT TO SEE THE WOMAN MY FRIEND LOVED”]

As it turned out, I was able to keep all my engagements, for we never went away together. Before the new year came there was a change in my friend's fortunes. The man who had pretended to invest for them the proceeds of his father's life-insurance policy absconded, leaving nothing behind but debts. For the support of his mother and himself my friend had only his own small salary. A vacation, however necessary, became impossible, and the marriage, which had been fixed for the spring, was postponed indefinitely. He offered to release the girl, but she refused.

Through a cla.s.smate of ours I was able to get my friend a place in the law department of the Denver office of a great insurance company. In the elevated air of Colorado he might regain his strength, and in a new city like Denver he might find a way to mend his fortunes. His mother went with him, of course, and it was beautiful to see her devotion to him. I saw them off.

”She bore the parting very bravely,” he said to me. ”She is braver than I am, and better in every way. I wish I were more worthy of her. You will go and see her, won't you? There's a good fellow and a good friend.

Go and see her now and then, and write and tell me all about her--how she looks and what she says.”

I promised, of course, and about once a month I went to see the woman my friend loved. He wrote me every fortnight, but it was often from her that I got the latest news. His health was improving; his cough had gone; Denver agreed with him, and he liked it. He was working hard, and he saw the prospect of advancement close before him. Within two years he hoped to take a month off, and return to New York and marry her, and bear his bride back to Colorado with him.

When I returned to town the next October I expected to find two or three letters from my friend awaiting me. I found only one, a brief note, telling me that he had been too busy to write the month before, and that he was now too tired with overwork to be able to do more than say how glad he was that I was back again in America, adding that a friend at hand might be farther away than one who was on the other side of the Atlantic. The letter seemed to me not a little constrained in manner. I did not understand it; and with the hope of getting some light by which to interpret its strangeness, I went to call on her. She refused to see me, pleading a headache.

It was a month before I had a reply to my answer to his note, and the reply was as short as the note, and quite as constrained. He told me that he was well enough himself, but that his mother's health worried him, since Denver did not agree with her, and she was pining to be back in New York. He added a postscript, in which he told me that he had dined a few nights before with the local manager of the insurance company, and that he had met the manager's sister, a wealthy widow from California, a most attractive woman, indeed. With needless emphasis he declared that he liked a woman of the world old enough to talk sensibly.

Another month pa.s.sed before I heard from him again, and Christmas had gone and the new year had almost come. The contents of this letter, written on Christmas eve, when the frog that played the trombone had been sitting on the corner of my desk for just a year, was as startling as its manner was strange. He told me that his engagement was broken off irrevocably.

If my own affairs had permitted it, I should have taken the first train to Denver to discover what had happened. As it was I went again to call on the landlady's daughter. But she refused to see me again. Word was brought me that she was engaged, and begged to be excused.

About a fortnight later I chanced to meet on a street corner the cla.s.smate who had got my friend the Denver appointment. I asked if there was any news.

”Isn't there!” was the response. ”I should think there was, and lots of it! You know our friend in Denver? Well, we have a telegram this morning: his health is shaky, and so he has resigned his position.”

”Resigned his position!” I echoed. ”What does that mean?”

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