'Sweetheart?'
'Yes, Alonzo?'
'Please don't sing that any more this week—try something modern.'
The agile step that goes with a happy heart was heard on the stairs, and the Reverend, smiling diabolically, sought sudden refuge behind the heavy folds of the velvet window-curtains. Alonzo entered and flew to the telephone. Said he:
'Rosannah, dear, shall we sing something together?'
'Something modern?' asked she, with sarcastic bitterness.
'Yes, if you prefer.'
'Sing it yourself, if you like!'
This snappishness amazed and wounded the young man. He said:
'Rosannah, that was not like you.'
'I suppose it becomes me as much as your very polite speech became you, Mr. Fitz Clarence.'
'Mister Fitz Clarence! Rosannah, there was nothing impolite about my speech.'
'Oh, indeed! Of course, then, I misunderstood you, and I most humbly beg your pardon, ha-ha-ha! No doubt you said, 'Don't sing it any more to-day.''
'Sing what any more to-day?'
'The song you mentioned, of course, How very obtuse we are, all of a sudden!'
'I never mentioned any song.'
'Oh, you didn't?'
'No, I didn't!'
'I am compelled to remark that you did.'
'And I am obliged to reiterate that I didn't.'
'A second rudeness! That is sufficient, sir. I will never forgive you. All is over between us.'
Then came a muffled sound of crying. Alonzo hastened to say:
'Oh, Rosannah, unsay those words! There is some dreadful mystery here, some hideous mistake. I am utterly earnest and sincere when I say I never said anything about any song. I would not hurt you for the whole world.... Rosannah, dear speak to me, won't you?'
There was a pause; then Alonzo heard the girl's sobbings retreating, and knew she had gone from the telephone. He rose with a heavy sigh, and hastened from the room, saying to himself, 'I will ransack the charity missions and the haunts of the poor for my mother. She will persuade her that I never meant to wound her.'
A minute later the Reverend was crouching over the telephone like a cat that knoweth the ways of the prey. He had not very many minutes to wait. A soft, repentant voice, tremulous with tears, said:
'Alonzo, dear, I have been wrong. You could not have said so cruel a thing. It must have been some one who imitated your voice in malice or in jest.'
The Reverend coldly answered, in Alonzo's tones:
'You have said all was over between us. So let it be. I spurn your proffered repentance, and despise it!'
Then he departed, radiant with fiendish triumph, to return no more with his imaginary telephonic invention forever.
Four hours afterward Alonzo arrived with his mother from her favorite haunts of poverty and vice. They summoned the San Francisco household; but there was no reply. They waited, and continued to wait, upon the voiceless telephone.
At length, when it was sunset in San Francisco, and three hours and a half after dark in Eastport, an answer to the oft-repeated cry of 'Rosannah!'
But, alas, it was Aunt Susan's voice that spake. She said:
'I have been out all day; just got in. I will go and find her.'
The watchers waited two minutes—five minutes—ten minutes. Then came these fatal words, in a frightened tone:
'She is gone, and her baggage with her. To visit another friend, she told the servants. But I found this note on the table in her room. Listen: 'I am gone; seek not to trace me out; my heart is broken; you will never see me more. Tell him I shall always think of him when I sing my poor 'Sweet By-and-by,' but never of the unkind words he said about it.' That is her note. Alonzo, Alonzo, what does it mean? What has happened?'
But Alonzo sat white and cold as the dead. His mother threw back the velvet curtains and opened a window. The cold air refreshed the sufferer, and he told his aunt his dismal story. Meantime his mother was inspecting a card which had disclosed itself upon the floor when she cast the curtains back. It read, 'Mr. Sidney Algernon Burley, San Francisco.'
'The miscreant!' shouted Alonzo, and rushed forth to seek the false Reverend and destroy him; for the card explained everything, since in the course of the lovers' mutual confessions they had told each other all about all the sweethearts they had ever had, and thrown no end of mud at their failings and foibles for lovers always do that. It has a fascination that ranks next after billing and cooing.
IV
During the next two months many things happened. It had early transpired that Rosannah, poor suffering orphan, had neither returned to her grandmother in Portland, Oregon, nor sent any word to her save a duplicate of the woeful note she had left in the mansion on Telegraph Hill. Whosoever was sheltering her—if she was still alive—had been persuaded not to betray her whereabouts, without doubt; for all efforts to find trace of her had failed.
Did Alonzo give her up? Not he. He said to himself, 'She will sing that sweet song when she is sad; I shall find her.' So he took his carpet-sack and a portable telephone, and shook the snow of his native city from his arctics, and went forth into the world. He wandered far and wide and in many states. Time and again, strangers were astounded to see a wasted, pale, and woe-worn man laboriously climb a telegraph-pole in wintry and lonely places, perch sadly there an hour, with his ear at a little box, then come sighing down, and wander wearily away. Sometimes they shot at him, as peasants do at aeronauts, thinking him mad and dangerous. Thus his clothes were much shredded by bullets and his person grievously lacerated. But he bore it all patiently.
In the beginning of his pilgrimage he used often to say, 'Ah, if I could but hear the 'Sweet By-and-by'!' But toward the end of it he used to shed tears of anguish and say, 'Ah, if I could but hear something else!'
Thus a month and three weeks drifted by, and at last some humane people seized him and confined him in a private mad-house in New York. He made no moan, for his strength was all gone, and with it all heart and all hope. The superintendent, in pity, gave up his own comfortable parlor and bedchamber to him and nursed him with affectionate devotion.
At the end of a week the patient was able to leave his bed for the first time. He was lying, comfortably pillowed, on a sofa, listening to the plaintive Miserere of the bleak March winds and the muffled sound of tramping feet in the street below for it was about six in the evening, and New York was going home from work. He had a bright fire and the added cheer of a couple of student-lamps. So it was warm and snug within, though bleak and raw without; it was light and bright within, though outside it was as dark and dreary as if the world had been lit with Hartford gas. Alonzo smiled feebly to think how his loving vagaries had made him a maniac in the eyes of the world, and was proceeding to pursue his line of thought further, when a faint, sweet strain, the very ghost of sound, so remote and attenuated it seemed, struck upon his ear. His pulses stood still; he listened with parted lips and bated breath. The song flowed on—he waiting, listening, rising slowly and unconsciously from his recumbent position. At last he exclaimed:
'It is! it is she! Oh, the divine hated notes!'
He dragged himself eagerly to the corner whence the sounds proceeded, tore aside a curtain, and discovered a telephone. He bent over, and as the last note died away he burst forthwith the exclamation:
'Oh, thank Heaven, found at last! Speak to me, Rosannah, dearest! The cruel mystery has been unraveled; it was the villain Burley who mimicked my voice and wounded you with insolent speech!'
