Part 30 (1/2)

”He's alive now, but doctor don't know how long he'll last. There he comes now. I must go and git his horse.”

The doctor, who seemed nervous,--he was a young local pract.i.tioner,--asked to speak with Miss Sallie's hero apart.

”Did Mrs. Bogardus say anything when she first saw that man? Did you notice what she said?--how she took it?”

The hero, who was also a gentleman, looked at the doctor coolly.

”It was not a nice thing,” he said. ”I saw just as little as I could.”

”You don't understand me,” said the doctor. ”I want to know if Mrs.

Bogardus appeared to you to have made any discovery--received any shock not to be accounted for by--by what you both saw?”

”I shouldn't attempt to answer such a question,” said the youngster bluntly. ”I never saw Mrs. Bogardus in my life before to-day.”

The doctor colored. ”Mrs. Bogardus has given me a telegram to send, and I don't know whether to send it or not. It's going to make a whole lot of talk. I am not much acquainted with Mrs. Bogardus myself, except by hearsay. That's partly what surprises me. It looks a little reckless to send out such a message as that, by the first hand that comes along.

Hadn't we better give her time to think it over?” He opened the telegram for the other to read. ”The man himself can't speak. But he just pants for breath every time she comes near him: he tries to hide his face. He acts like a criminal afraid of being caught.”

”He didn't look that way to me--what was left of him. Not in the least like a criminal.”

”Well, no; that's a fact, too. Now they've got him laid out clean and neat, he looks as if he might have been a very decent sort of man. But _that_, you know--that's incredible. If she knows him, why doesn't he know her? Why won't he own her? He's afraid of her. His eyes are ready to burst out of his head whenever she comes near him.”

”Did Mrs. Bogardus write that telegram herself?”

”She did.”

”And what did she tell you to do with it?”

”Send it to her son.”

”Then why don't you send it?”

This was the disputed message: ”Come. Your father has been found. Bring Doctor Gainsworth.”

In the local man's opinion, the writer of that dispatch was Doctor Gainsworth's true patient. What could induce a woman in Mrs. Bogardus's position to give such hasty publicity to this shocking disclosure, allowing it were true? The more he dwelt on it the less he liked the responsibility he was taking. He discussed it openly; and, with the best intentions, this much-impressed young man gave out his own counter-theory of the case, hoping to forestall whatever mischief might have been done. He put himself in the place of Mr. Paul Bogardus, whom he liked extremely, and tried to imagine that young gentleman's state of mind when he should look upon this new-found parent, and learn the manner of his resurrection.

This was the explanation he boldly set forth in behalf of those most nearly concerned. [He was getting up his diagnosis for an interesting half hour with the great doctor who had been called in consultation.]

The shock of that awful discovery in the locked chamber, he attested, had put Mrs. Bogardus temporarily beside herself. Outwardly composed, her nerves were ripped and torn by the terrible sight that met her eyes. She was the prey of an hallucination founded on memories of former suffering, which had worn a channel for every fresh fear to seek. There was something truly n.o.ble and loyal and pathetic in the nature of her possession. It threw a softened light upon her past. How must she have brooded, all these years, for that one thought to have ploughed so deep!

It was quite commonly known in the neighborhood that she had come back from the West years ago without her husband, yet with no proof of his death. But who could have believed she would cling for half a lifetime to this forlorn expectancy, depicting her own loss in every sad hulk of humanity cast upon her prosperous sh.o.r.es!

Every one believed she was deceiving herself, but great honor was hers among the neighbors for the plain truth and courage of her astonis.h.i.+ng avowal. They had thought her proud, exclusive, hard in the security of wealth. Here she stood by a pauper's bed in the name of simple constancy, stripping herself of all earthly surplusage, exposing her deepest wound, proclaiming the bond--herself its only witness--between her and this speechless wreck, drifting out on the tide of death. She had but to let him go. It was the wild word she had spoken in the name of truth and deathless love that fired the imagination of that slow countryside. It was the touch beyond nature that appeals to the higher sense of a community, and there is no community without a soul.

The straight demands of justice are frequently hard to meet, but its ironies are crus.h.i.+ng. Mrs. Bogardus had fallen back on the line of a mother's duty since that moment of personal accountability. She read the unspoken reverence in the eyes of all around her, but she put in no disclaimer. Her past was not her own. She could not sin alone. Only those who have been honest are privileged under all conditions to remain so.

On his arrival with the doctor, Paul endeavored first to see his mother alone. For some reason she would not have it so. She took the unspeakable situation as it came. He was shown into the room where she sat, and by her orders Doctor Gainsworth was with him.

She rose quietly and came to meet them. Placing her hand in her son's arm, and looking towards the bed, she said:--

”Doctor--my husband.”