Chapter 8

OF CERTAIN GOINGS.

It so happened that, on the winter after Jack Schuyler and Tom Blake graduated from college, death came to the big houses on the Avenue. Mrs. John Stuyvesant Schuyler went first; Mrs. Thomas Cathcart Blake went, almost, with her; for she had been by the bedside of her friend during all her illness; and her friend, going, had bestowed upon her its horrible heritage. And so she went, too.

Their going left in the two great houses, monstrous voids that might never be filled. John Stuyvesant Schuyler and Thomas Cathcart Blake loved their wives; and when a man has loved a woman, and that woman his wife, as these two had loved, it seems in a way to disrupt the cosmogony of things. It takes ambition from the brain, and the stamina from the spine; and the days are very, very long, while the nights are yet infinitely longer.

Thomas Cathcart Blake, in the vastness of all that now was not, forgot to care for himself. He, who had been jovial, became silent. Some times, of nights, he would walk alone for hours. The weather made no difference--in fact, he seldom noticed what the weather was. He was an old man now, close to sixty....

Dr. DeLancey, on a night visit, met him one thick, sodden night at the corner of Thirty-third Street and the Avenue, coming from the club. The good doctor bumbled out of his brougham, seized him by the arm and drew him wet and dripping into its protected interior.

"You fossiliferous-headed old chump," he howled, exasperatedly. "You pin- headed old amphibian. If your sole and utter ambition is to get pneumonia and die, I don't know any way in which you can better achieve your purpose. Sit down in the corner there and drink this," he extracted from his case a little flask of brandy, "or I'll ask the horse to come in and bite you!"

"Turn around there, Mose!" he yelled, "and drive to Mr. Blake's house."

Mose did so; and once there, the doctor, abusing and bullying his patient, got him upstairs and into the bed, and then applied to the protesting man who seldom had known what it was even to have a cold, all manner of exposurial antidotes.

"But the patient that you were going to see!" protested Thomas Cathcart Blake.

"No friend of mine," returned Dr. DeLancey. "Only a patient. Patients are plenty, but friends are few. Let him get someone else, or die, as he chooses. It's none of my business. Here, drink this." And he poured between the protesting lips of Thomas Cathcart Blake a nauseating draught of something that was most malodorous; for Dr. DeLancey was an allopath, and a good one.

But, good as he was, he was too late. Pneumonia had been before him; and, two weeks later, in spite of all that the good doctor, and several other equally good doctors, could do, Thomas Cathcart Blake died. And he didn't seem sorry at going.

Before he went, he called to him his son, and to that son he said many things. Most of the things that he said are neither your business nor mine. But of the things that he said, we may know one. He wanted his son to marry the daughter of the widow of Jimmy Blair.

Young Tom Blake, between the sobs that are becoming a man, answered:

"I want to, dad. I've always wanted to. And I will, if I can."

His father counselled, weakly:

"Get her honestly, boy, or not at all. If you get her, cherish her--give her everything that there is in you to give--for there's nothing that a man can give that a good woman doesn't deserve. Now, God bless you, son-- and--go."

Tom Blake clung to the sheets. It was hard to lose such a father and such a mother, and all within a six month. He cried, as you would cry, or I, and be glad that crying might be.... Dr. DeLancey, at length, managed to loosen his clenching fingers. Dr. DeLancey was crying, too; the tears ran down his veined cheeks to lose themselves in the hair of his cheeks. He tried to fume and fuss and splutter, as was his wont; but he couldn't. He could just put his hand around Tom Blake's heaving young shoulders, listen to his choking, broken sobs and say, over and over, and over again: "There, there, my boy! There, there! There, there!"

It's pretty hard, you know, to lose a father and a mother like that, and all within six months.