“See here,” said Sister Soulsby, alertly, “I half believe that a good cuffing is what you really stand in need of. Now you stop all this nonsense, and lie quiet and keep still! Do you hear me?”
The jocose sternness which she assumed, in words and manner, seemed to soothe him. He almost smiled up at her in a melancholy way, and sighed profoundly.
“I’ve told you my religion before,” she went on with gentleness. “The sheep and the goats are to be separated on Judgment Day, but not a minute sooner. In other words, as long as human life lasts, good, bad, and indifferent are all braided up together in every man’s nature, and every woman’s too. You weren’t altogether good a year ago, any more than you’re altogether bad now. You were some of both then; you’re some of both now. If you’ve been making an extra sort of fool of yourself lately, why, now that you recognize it, the only thing to do is to slow steam, pull up, and back engine in the other direction. In that way you’ll find things will even themselves up. It’s a seesaw with all of us, Theron Ware—sometimes up; sometimes down. But nobody is rotten clear to the core.”
He closed his eyes, and lay in silence for a time.
“This is what day of the week?” he asked, at last.
“Friday, the nineteenth.”
“Wednesday—that would be the seventeenth. That was the day ordained for my slaughter. On that morning, I was the happiest man in the world. No king could have been so proud and confident as I was. A wonderful romance had come to me. The most beautiful young woman in the world, the most talented too, was waiting for me. An express train was carrying me to her, and it couldn’t go fast enough to keep up with my eagerness. She was very rich, and she loved me, and we were to live in eternal summer, wherever we liked, on a big, beautiful yacht. No one else had such a life before him as that. It seemed almost too good for me, but I thought I had grown and developed so much that perhaps I would be worthy of it. Oh, how happy I was! I tell you this because—because you are not like the others. You will understand.”
“Yes, I understand,” she said patiently. “Well—you were being so happy.”
“That was in the morning—Wednesday the seventeenth—early in the morning. There was a little girl in the car, playing with some buttons, and when I tried to make friends with her, she looked at me, and she saw, right at a glance, that I was a fool. ‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,’ you know. She was the first to find it out. It began like that, early in the morning. But then after that everybody knew it. They had only to look at me and they said: ‘Why, this is a fool—like a little nasty boy; we won’t let him into our houses; we find him a bore.’ That is what they said.”
“Did she say it?” Sister Soulsby permitted herself to ask.
For answer Theron bit his lips, and drew his chin under the fur, and pushed his scowling face into the pillow. The spasmodic, sob-like gasps began to shake him again. She laid a compassionate hand upon his hot brow.
“That is why I made my way here to you,” he groaned piteously. “I knew you would sympathize; I could tell it all to you. And it was so awful, to die there alone in the strange city—I couldn’t do it—with nobody near me who liked me, or thought well of me. Alice would hate me. There was no one but you. I wanted to be with you—at the last.”
His quavering voice broke off in a gust of weeping, and his face frankly surrendered itself to the distortions of a crying child’s countenance, wide-mouthed and tragically grotesque in its abandonment of control.
Sister Soulsby, as her husband’s boots were heard descending the stairs, rose, and drew the robe up to half cover his agonized visage. She patted the sufferer softly on the head, and then went to the stair-door.
“I think he’ll go to sleep now,” she said, lifting her voice to the newcomer, and with a backward nod toward the couch. “Come out into the kitchen while I get breakfast, or into the sitting-room, or somewhere, so as not to disturb him. He’s promised me to lie perfectly quiet, and try to sleep.”
When they had passed together out of the room, she turned. “Soulsby,” she said with half-playful asperity, “I’m disappointed in you. For a man who’s knocked about as much as you have, I must say you’ve picked up an astonishingly small outfit of gumption. That poor creature in there is no more drunk than I am. He’s been drinking—yes, drinking like a fish; but it wasn’t able to make him drunk. He’s past being drunk; he’s grief-crazy. It’s a case of ‘woman.’ Some girl has made a fool of him, and decoyed him up in a balloon, and let him drop. He’s been hurt bad, too.”
“We have all been hurt in our day and generation,” responded Brother Soulsby, genially. “Don’t you worry; he’ll sleep that off too. It takes longer than drink, and it doesn’t begin to be so pleasant, but it can be slept off. Take my word for it, he’ll be a different man by noon.”
When noon came, however, Brother Soulsby was on his way to summon one of the village doctors. Toward nightfall, he went out again to telegraph for Alice.
XXXII
Spring fell early upon the pleasant southern slopes of the Susquehanna country. The snow went off as by magic. The trees budded and leaved before their time. The birds came and set up their chorus in
