Part 7
Reaching home, John found that his wife had been prematurely but safely delivered of a lusty son. The messenger sent to his office had missed him, and at the time of the appearance in the car, he declares that he was not consciously even thinking of his wife's condition at all.
When he had time to collect his thoughts after this second visitation, Vantine came firmly to the resolution that if he were ever favored with a third sight of the "Great Mogul," he would at least endeavor to discover whether the phantom were appreciable by the sense of touch. He read much about "astral appearances," and a good many more things of the sort, of which my own knowledge is too limited to permit my writing at all. He formed a hundred theories, and he began to get somewhat confused, to use his own expression, in regard to his identity. He was half convinced that by some mis-working of the law of re-incarnation, the spirit of some Eastern potentate had been put into his body.
"Or," said he, with a whimsicality which was evidently deeply tinctured with a serious feeling, "that I had got into somebody's else body. If I had known any possible way of stopping the thing, it wouldn't have been so bad; but to have the 'Great Mogul' pop up like a jack-in-a-box, without any warning, was taking me at a disadvantage that I think decidedly unfair."
Not to lengthen unnecessarily a simple story, the speculations and investigations of Vantine may be passed over, and the narrative confined to the bare facts.
It was when John's boy was about two months old that the embassy which had greeted John upon his wedding morning, or one closely resembling it, put in an appearance in honor of the child's birth. The child and its mother were taking their first drive, and Vantine came home to luncheon rather earlier than usual, to find them out. He went into the library, but had scarcely closed the door behind him, when the whole gorgeous company of his wedding morning were before him, and so real did they seem to him that John entirely forgot his intention of grasping the "Great Mogul" by the arm, to convince himself of the reality of that personage. The company overflowed with congratulations, rather florid to my friend's occidentally trained taste, but doubtless poetical in the extreme from an oriental point of view. Vantine was afterward amused and a little surprised to remember how much as a matter of course he took the adulation offered him, and the ease with which he played the rôle of "Great Master."
But suddenly he became so thoroughly amazed that all power of speech or motion seemed to forsake him. In the arms of the "Great Mogul" he perceived his baby boy, or an image that seemed to be the child, and to the babe the brilliant company were kneeling and swearing fealty. The whole ceremony occupied about half an hour, at the end of which time Vantine found himself once more alone, and upon going downstairs he met his wife and the nurse with the baby returning from their drive.
"He's slept like a dormouse," Mrs. Vantine said, in answer to her husband's inquiry. "I tried to rouse him once, but he wouldn't wake. I was half frightened, but he seems all right now."
As they entered the parlor the maid came to inquire if Mr. Vantine had brought company to luncheon, as she had heard voices in the library,--a circumstance which proved that the sound of the voices of his ghostly visitors was audible to other ears than his own.
John vainly wished that the baby, healthy, awake and cooing now, could tell whether dreams or strange experiences had troubled its sleep while its father had seen its image; but that is a point upon which he has never received enlightenment.
It was one winter night when the baby was six months old that the "Great Mogul" presented himself again. My friend had been taking a bath, and was dressing for bed when the figure of his visions appeared, and with every mark of terror and consternation prostrated itself at his feet.
"Great Master," it gasped in the usual formula, "pardon your slave's intrusion. The enemy are upon us. They--"
With this sentence still unfinished, the vision faded away in an instant, as if some unforeseen catastrophe in whatever region it came from had suddenly recalled the eidolon, or projected presence, or whatever the thing might be.
More confounded and disturbed than ever, my friend retired to bed, but he was too much excited to sleep. He had much the feeling that one fancies a prince to have over whose heritage distant armies are contending, while he in forced inaction awaits the result. No clue had been given which enabled him to reach a solution of the mystery that involved him, and nothing further transpired during the night to render matters any plainer.
On the following afternoon he was obliged to start for Boston on business. As he was elbowing his way through the crowd in the Grand Central station, he heard at his ear the well known voice of the "Great Mogul," speaking as usual in the unknown tongue which Vantine understood, yet the identity of which he had never established. There was no visible appearance this time, and the voice, although distinctly audible, seemed to come from a great distance.
"Great Master," the voice said, "they are beheading me. All is lost."
* * * * *
"It would be some comfort," John Vantine said, rather irritably, when he confided this strange story to me, "to know what was lost. It would have been uncommonly civil of the 'Great Mogul' to be a little more definite in his information. If the poor fellow lost his head in my service I am profoundly grateful, of course; but precious little good does it do me. Do you think the Psychical Society would undertake the job of discovering in what part of the universe I am rightfully dubbed the Great Master and that young rascal in the nursery is a prince! Unless they can do something, I'm afraid I shall be a half-starved New York lawyer to the end of the chapter."
To which I had nothing satisfactory to answer.
Interlude Fourth.
THE RADIATOR.
THE RADIATOR.
A STUDY IN THE MODERN STYLE OF COLLOQUIAL FICTION.
[_Scene, the chamber of Mr. and Mrs. Ellston, in an apartment hotel. Time, three A. M. The silence of the night is unbroken, save by the regular breathing of the sleepers, until suddenly, from the steam radiator, bursts a sound like the discharge of a battery of forty-pound guns._]
_Mrs. E._ (_springing up in bed_) Oh! eh? what is that?
[_Her husband moves uneasily in his sleep, but does not reply. The noise of the sledge-hammer score of the "Anvil Chorus" rings out from the radiator._]
_Mrs. E._ George! George! Something is going to happen! Do wake up, or we shall be murdered in our sleep!
_Mr. E._ (_with mingled ferocity and amusement_) There is small danger of anybody's being murdered in his sleep, my dear, where you are. It's only that confounded radiator; it's always making some sort of an infernal tumult. It can't do any harm.
_Mrs. E._ But it will wake baby.
_Mr. E._ Well, if it does, the nurse can get him to sleep again, I suppose.
[_From the room adjoining is heard a clattering din, as if all the kettles and pans in the house were being thrown violently across the floor._]
_Mrs. E._ There! The nursery radiator has begun. I must go and get baby.
_Mr. E._ Let baby alone. If the youngster will sleep, for heaven's sake let him. The steam-pipes make noise enough for this time of night, one would think, without your taking the trouble to wake baby.
_Mrs. E._ (_with volumes of reproach in her tone_) Your own little baby! You never loved him as his mother does.
[_The disturbances now assume the likeness to a thoroughly inebriated drum corps practising upon sheet-iron air-tight stoves._]
_Mr. E._ Of all unendurable rackets--
[_A sudden and sharp boom interrupts him. Mrs. Ellston screams, while her husband indulges in language which, although somewhat inexcusably forcible, is yet to be regarded as not unnatural under the circumstances._]
_Mrs. E._ Oh, George, don't swear. It always seems so much worse to swear in danger; like tempting Providence; and I know there's going to be an explosion!
_Mr. E._ (_severely_) Don't talk nonsense! The engineer has gone to sleep and left the drafts open, that's all. Don't be so absurd.
[_There is another fusillade from the radiator, reinforced by the reverberations from the nursery, where a regiment of artillery seem to have begun target practice._]
_Mrs. E._ I _will_ go and get my baby! I know-- Oh, George, just hear it crash! Do get up and put the screen in front of it; that may turn off the pieces so they won't come this way.
_Mr. E._ (_scornfully_) Pieces of what? Noise?
_Mrs. E._ How can you make fun? If the engineer has gone to sleep, he's sure to blow up the whole hotel. I'm going to get up and dress myself, and take baby over to mother's!
_Mr. E._ (_with calm but cutting irony_) At three o'clock in the morning? Shall you walk, or call a carriage?
_Mrs. E._ (_beginning to sob in a dry and perfunctory fashion_) Oh, you are too cruel! You are perfectly heartless. I wonder you don't take that dear little innocent baby and hold him between you and the radiator for a shield.
_Mr. E._ That might be a good scheme, my dear, only the little beggar would probably howl so that I haven't really the moral courage to wake him.
[_The indignant reply of Mrs. Ellston is lost in the confused sound of the brays of a drove of brazen donkeys, which appear to be disporting themselves in the radiator. The noise of mighty rushing waters, the clanking of chains, the din of a political convention, the characteristic disturbances of a hundred factories and machine-shops, with the deafening whirr of all the elevated railways in the universe follow in turn._]
_Mrs. E._ I _will_ go and get my baby, and I will _go_ to mother's; and, what is more, we will never, never come back!
_Mr. E._ Oh, just as you please about going, my dear; only you know that if you desert my bed and board, the law gives the boy to me.
_Mrs. E._ I don't _believe_ it's any such thing; and if it is, it is because men made the law. Women wouldn't take a baby away from its mother.
_Mr. E._ Have what theories you choose, my dear; only please let me get a few crumbs of sleep, now the radiator has had the mercy to subside.
_Mrs. E._ You are a brute, and I won't ever speak to you again!
[_She firmly assumes a stony silence, and the radiator, after a few concluding ejaculations and metallic objurgations, also relapses into comparative stillness. Mr. Ellston's breathing begins to give strong indications that slumber has re-descended upon his weary frame._]
_Mrs. E._ (_starting up with the inspiration of an entirely new and startling idea_) George! George! George!
_Mr. E._ (_with less good humor than might be desired_) Eh?
_Mrs. E._ Wasn't it wonderful for baby to sleep through it all?
_Mr. E._ (_drowsily_) Yes; droll little beggar. His mother wasn't in the nursery to wake him, though.
_Mrs. E._ You don't suppose there is anything the matter with him? George! George, I say! you don't suppose the reason he sleeps so soundly is because he's sick?
[_To this conundrum Mr. Ellston offers no solution, and equally passes in silence queries in regard to the probability of the nurse's being awake, alive, well-disposed, and able to take care of baby in case of emergency. Mrs. Ellston sighs with the desperation of long-suffering anguish, and once more stillness reigns in the chamber. The lady again arouses herself, however, from an apparently sound nap to ask, in penetrating tones,--_]
"George, _do_ you think it will begin all over again?"
(_To which her brutal worser half grumbles out the reply_) "No! and that's where it is more endurable than a woman."
[_At which the radiator gives a chuckle so apt as to suggest the possession of a sinister consciousness on the part of that noisy instrument of torture. Mrs. Ellston groans, with the discouraged conviction that she is but one against two, and upon this theory at length consents to resume her interrupted slumbers._]
Tale the Fifth.
MÈRE MARCHETTE.
MÈRE MARCHETTE.
I.
It was half-past eleven of a hot July day in Paris. The sunlight lay over the whole city and shone nowhere more strongly than upon the great hospital of the Salpêtrière. The hush of noon brooded over all the place. Nobody was stirring unless forced to activity by some pressing duty. In the long white wards the patients were asleep or lying quiet in exhaustion under the burning fervor of the summer heat.
Down one of the corridors, where it seemed refreshingly cool after the warmth of the outer air from which he had come, a young man was passing. His step, though rapid, had the noiseless quality which bespeaks familiarity with the sick-room and the hospital. His figure was compact and nervous, his glance clear and keen. Dr. Jean Lommel was one of the house physicians of the Salpêtrière, although that he was not now making his regular rounds was evident from the fact that entering a certain ward he passed quickly to a bed near the middle of it without stopping at any of the others.
On the bed lay an old woman. Her face was one which showed great strength of character. It was of a marked peasant type, and for all its innumerable wrinkles, its sunken temples, the coarse texture of its skin, and the shrunken lips which showed the lack of teeth behind them, it was full of a nobility and kindliness which no ravages of time or disease could wholly hide. The hair that straggled in thin locks from beneath the white cap was hardly less snowy than the lawn which covered it; and when the patient opened her sunken eyes, as the doctor stopped beside the bed, they were bright and shining with a lustre which was not all either fever or anxiety. Her glance was one of intense and pitiful inquiry. The young man touched her white hair with the tips of his long, fine fingers in a pitying caress before he took hold of the withered wrist, shrunken and marked with blue veins, that lay outside the coverlid.
"In an hour, Mère Marchette," he said, answering her look--"in an hour he will be here; keep up a good heart. You do not suffer?"
The old woman feebly shook her head. The ghost of a smile, faint but full of happiness, shone on her face. She did not speak, but she thanked him with a look before she closed her eyes and lay motionless as before he had come.
The young man looked at her a moment, an expression of pity in his brown eyes; then with a sigh he turned away and moved softly down the ward again. By the door he encountered one of the nurses, who had risen and come forward to speak with him.
"Will she live, M. Lommel?"
"Yes," the doctor answered. "She has given all her energies for days to keeping alive till her grandson gets here. It is very singular," he went on, in a voice of low distinctness that could have been acquired only in sick-rooms, "how her instinct has taught her to save her strength. She neither moves nor speaks; she simply lives."
"She has been that way," the nurse returned, "ever since we told her that Pierre was coming. Will he be here by twelve?"
"Not till half-past twelve," Dr. Lommel replied. "I will return before then."
And he went out into the hot sunshine.
II.
Everybody connected with the ward of the Salpêtrière wherein she was had a kindly feeling for poor old Mère Marchette. The doctors and the nurses could not have been more kind or more tender had she been of their own blood. She was one of those who always win affection. She was so patient, so simple, so kindly. She was a peasant woman from Normandy, who had in her old age drifted to Paris with her grandson Pierre, a lad of sixteen years. All the rest of the family were dead. Pierre's father had been a soldier, and it was with the hope of securing a pension for the son that Mère Marchette had left her home and the life in Normandy she loved, to throw herself into Paris as into the sea. The dead soldier, however, had been mustered out before the malarial fever, contracted in the swamps of the Landes, had developed itself, and the pension could not be obtained. The disappointment was a bitter one, made worse by the fact that Mère Marchette had been told by one and another that the claim would have been granted had the case been properly managed. The poor old creature could not escape a feeling of self-blame in thinking that it was her want of keenness which had deprived Pierre of his pension. Her grandson for her represented the world, and to him she devoted all her energies. She toiled for him, and watched and suffered with that unselfish egotism possible only to the old and lonely.
Fortunately Pierre was a good lad, who returned his grandmother's love with a devotion hardly less complete than her own. They lived together in two attic rooms, where they passed the evenings sitting in the dark and talking of their Normandy home. They recalled the past and built endless air castles of the time when they should be able to return. They had grand plans of repurchasing the old cot where both of them had been born, and which had been lost by the foreclosure of a mortgage after the long illness of Pierre's father had ended. They were never tired of talking of what they would do then, and of devising little ways in which the worn-out old farm might be made more profitable. They remained as truly children of the soil as if they had been still in Normandy instead of in their attic in the midst of Paris.
In the daytime Mère Marchette went out to do work as charwoman, while Pierre had been fortunate enough to obtain a place as assistant in a little grocery in Rue M. le Prince. It was in connection with this that Pierre gave his grandmother the only real grief he ever caused her while they were together. Suddenly the boy began to stay away in the evening, and when Mère Marchette sought to know the reason he put her questions aside. One evening as she was making her way home she saw her grandson chatting with a girl at the door of a milliner's dingy shop. The heart of poor old Mère Marchette sunk within her. The castles in the air, from whose glittering towers had shone delusive lights to strengthen and encourage her, fell in ruins before her eyes. In a moment the burden of her age, her poverty, her weariness, seemed increased tenfold. Feebly she climbed the long stairs and sat down to wait, heartbroken. She had all the peasant's instinctive distrust of Paris: she had not been able to live in the Latin Quarter without comprehending something of the evil about her, although, happily for her, the worst features of Parisian life would have been so unintelligible that she might have seen them unmoved. She thought no evil now of Pierre, but she was seized with a terrible fear lest he might fall a victim to one of the sirens of the Latin Quarter, who, to Mère Marchette's thinking, destroyed soul and body alike.
Mère Marchette did not tell Pierre of the discovery she had made. She was only more gentle with him, while in secret she prayed more fervently. For some days longer the lad's mysterious absence continued, the sad hours of the evening stretching like long deserts of agony, over which the soul of Mère Marchette walked painfully with bleeding feet. And then one night Pierre came home with eyes aglow, and all was explained. He put into his grandmother's hand a little pile of francs, a sum pitiful enough in itself but large to them, and told how a milliner in the street beyond had employed him in moving boxes and clearing out the attics of her house, which were to be remodelled into lodgings. This had been his secret, and in his thought of the joyful surprise he was to give his grandmother he had forgotten the pain she might endure by misunderstanding his absence.
It was such trifles as this that were the great events in the life of Mère Marchette and Pierre. There was a tenderness, an unselfishness, an idyllic devotion in their love which no amount of wealth, or culture, or rank could have heightened; but in the lad's veins was the blood of a soldier, that stirred hot with the currents of a vigorous youth. Of the army he had dreamed from his cradle, and strong as was his love for Mère Marchette the force of destiny was stronger. It was the old tragedy of youth and age, of the absorption of maternal love and the restless impulses of the boy's heart. Pierre justified his desire to himself with the excuse that he could earn more money in the ranks; but his grandmother knew, only too well, the force of the instinct he had inherited. She had seen the same struggle in the life of his father.
When Pierre was eighteen he shouldered his musket and marched away, leaving poor old Mère Marchette as much a stranger in Paris as when she had come to it two years before to weep and pray alone. It would hardly be within the power of words to paint the anguish which lay between Pierre's departure and that hot July noon when Mère Marchette lay dying at the Salpêtrière. Always in Paris she had been like a wild thing, caged and bewildered, confused by the life that swirled about her in the great city, even when she had been sustained by the presence of Pierre. When he was gone the gentle old soul began to die of homesickness and heartbreak. For two years she fought death stolidly but persistently, refusing to acknowledge to herself that she was breaking down under the stress of loneliness and sorrow. She came of a race that died hard, and although she was past eighty she looked forward hopefully to the time when Pierre should leave the army and come back to live with her again.
But the struggle for existence in Paris was hard, even when the joy of working for Pierre sustained her; when he was gone it became intolerable. At the end of two years the strength and courage even of the sturdy Norman peasant woman were exhausted; and then a dreadful disease, which had before shown itself in her family, seemed to take advantage of her weakness to spring upon her. She had been a charwoman in the family of Jean Lommel's mother, and so it came about that through the influence of the young doctor she had been admitted to the Salpêtrière when she was already dying from cancer in the stomach.