Part 11

The night did not witness the tragedy he anticipated, though. Next day, Frank Dobb came to see me--a compliment he had not paid me for months. He was the incarnation of abject misery, and so nervous that he could scarcely speak intelligibly.

"I saw you in the crowd last night, old man," he said, looking at the floor and twisting and untwisting his fingers. "What do you think of it? A nice life for a fellow to lead, eh?"

What else could I reply than, "Why do you lead it then?"

"Why?" he repeated, breaking into a hollow, uneasy laugh. "Why, because I love her, damn me! and I deserve it all."

"Is this what you came to tell me?" I asked.

"No," he answered, "of course not. The fact is, I want you to help me out of a hole. That row last night has settled me with McGilp. He came to see me about a lot of pictures for a sale he is getting up out West, and the senora kept up such a nagging that he got sick and suggested that we should go to 'The Studio' for a chop and settle the business there. She swore I shouldn't go, and that she would follow us if I did. I thought she'd not go that far; but she did. So the McGilp affair is off for good, I know. He's disgusted, and I don't blame him. What I want of you is this. Buy that Hoguet you wanted last year."

The picture was one I had fancied and offered him a price for in his palmy days, one that he had picked up abroad. I was only too glad to take it and a couple more, for which I paid him at once; and next evening, at dinner, I heard that he had levanted. "Walked out this morning," said Smith, "and sent a messenger an hour after with word that he had already left the city. She came in to me with the letter in one hand and a dagger in the other. She swears he has run away with another woman, and says she's going to have her life, if she has to follow her around the world."

She did not carry out her sanguinary purpose, though. There were some consultations with old Dobb and then the studio was to let again. Some one told me she had returned to Cuba, where she proposed to live on the allowance her father-in-law had made her husband and which he now continued to her.

I had almost forgotten her when, several years later, in the lobby of the Academy of Music, she touched my arm with her fan. She was promenading on the arm of a handsome but beefy-looking Englishman, whom she introduced to me as her husband. I had not heard of a divorce, but I took the introduction as information that there had been one. The Englishman was a better fellow than he looked. We supped together after the opera, and I learned that he had met Mrs. Dobb in Havana, where he had spent some years in business. I found her a changed woman--a new woman, indeed, in whom I only now and then caught a glimpse of her old indolent, babyish and foolish self. She was not only prettier than ever, but she had become a sensible and clever woman. The influence of an intelligent man, who was strong enough to bend her to his ways, had developed her latent brightness and taught her to respect herself as well as him.

I met her several times after that, and at the last meeting but one she spoke of Frank for the first time. Her black eyes snapped when she uttered his name. The devil was alive in them, though love was dead.

I told her that I had heard nothing of him since his disappearance.

"But I have," she said, showing her white teeth in a curious smile.

"Indeed!" I replied, quite astounded.

"The coward!" she went on bitterly; "and to think I could ever have loved such a thing as he! Do you know, Mr. X., that I never knew he had been married till after he had fled? Then his father told me how he had courted my father's money, with his wife lying dead at home. Oh! Senor Francisco, Senor Francisco! Before I heard that, I wanted to kill the woman who had stolen you from me. The moment after I could have struck you dead at my feet."

She threw her arm up, holding her fan like a dagger. I believed her, and so would any one who had seen her then.

"I had hardly settled in Havana," she continued, "before I received a letter from him. Already he wanted to come back to me. Had the other woman tired of him already? I asked myself, or was it really true, as his father had told me, that he had fled alone? I answered the letter, and he wrote again. Again I answered, and so it was kept up. For two years I played with the love I now knew was worthless. He was traveling round the world, and a dozen times wanted to come directly to me. I insisted that he should keep his journey up--as a probation, you see. He submitted. But oh! how he did love me!"

The exultation with which she told this was absolutely fiendish. I could see in it, plainer than any words could tell it to me, the scheme of vengeance she had carried out, the alternating hopes and torments to which she had raised, and into which she had plunged him. I could see him wandering around the globe, scourged by remorses, agonized by doubts, and maddened by despairs, accepting the lies she wrote him as inviolable pledges, and sustaining himself with the vision of a future never to be fulfilled. She read the expression of my face, and laughed.

"Was it not an idea?" she asked. "Was that not better than this?"

And again she stabbed the air with her fan.

"But--pardon me the question--but you have begun the confidence," I said. "How will it end?"

"It has ended," she answered.

"How?"

"I had been divorced while I was writing to him. A year ago he was to be in London, where I was to meet him. While he was sailing from the Cape of Good Hope I was being married to a man who loved me for myself, and to whom I had confided all. Instead of my address at the London post office he received a notification of my marriage, addressed to him in my own hand and mailed to him by myself. He wrote once or twice still, but my husband indorsed the letters with his own name and returned them unopened. He may be dead for all I know, but I hope and pray he is still alive, and will remain alive and love me for a thousand years."

She opened her arms, as if to hug her vengeance to her heart, and looked at me steadily with eyes that thrilled me with their lambent fire. No wonder the wretched vagabond loved her! What a doom his selfishness and his duplicity had invoked upon him! I believe if he could have seen her as I saw her then, so different from and better than he knew her to be, he would have gone mad on the spot. Poor Mrs. Dobb the first was indeed avenged.

We sipped our chocolate and talked of other things, as if such a being as Frank Dobb had never been. Her husband joined us and we made an evening of it at the theatre. I knew from the way he looked at me, and from the increased warmth of his manner, that he was conversant with his wife's having made a confidant of me. But I do not think he knew how far her confidence had gone. I have often wondered since if he knew how deep and fierce the hatred she carried for his predecessor was. There are things women will reveal to strangers which they will die rather than divulge to those they love.

I saw them off to Europe, for they were going to establish themselves in London, and I have never seen or directly heard from them since. But some months after their departure I received a letter from Robinson, who has been painting there ever since his picture made that great hit in the Salon of '7--.

"I have odd news for you," he wrote. "You remember Frank Dobb, who belonged to our old Pen and Pencil Club, and who ran away from that Cuban wife of his just before I left home? Well, about a year ago I met him in Fleet street, the shabbiest beggar you ever saw. He was quite tight and smelled of gin across the street. He was taking a couple of drawings to a penny dreadful office which he was making pictures for at ten shillings a piece. I went to see him once, in the dismalest street back of Drury Lane. He was doing some painting for a dealer, when he was sober enough, and of all the holes you ever saw his was it. I soon had to sit down on him, for he got into the habit of coming to see me and loafing around, making the studio smell like a pub, till I would lend him five shillings to go away. I heard nothing of him till the other day I came across an event which this from the Telegraph will explain."

The following newspaper paragraph was appended:

"The man who shot himself on the door-step of Mr. Bennerley Green, the West India merchant, last Monday, has been discovered to be an American who for some time has been employed furnishing illustrations to the lower order of publications here. He was known as Allan, but this is said to have been an assumed name. He is stated to be the son of a wealthy New Yorker, who discarded him in consequence of his habits of dissipation, and to have once been an artist of considerable prominence in the United States. All that is known of the suicide is the story told by the servant, who a few minutes after admitting his master and mistress upon their return from the theatre, heard the report of a pistol in the street, and on opening the door found the wretched man dead upon the step. The body was buried after the inquest at the charge of the eminent American artist, Mr. J. J. Robinson, A. R. A., who had known him in his better days."

The second husband of Mrs. Frank Dobb is Mr. Bennerley Green, the West India merchant.--_The Continent._

* * * * *

CONSUMPTION CURED.

An old physician, retired from practice, having had placed in his hands by an East India missionary the formula of a simple vegetable remedy for the speedy and permanent cure of Consumption, Bronchitis, Catarrh, Asthma and all throat and Lung Affections, also a positive and radical cure for Nervous Debility and all Nervous Complaints, after having tested its wonderful curative powers in thousands of cases, has felt it his duty to make it known to his suffering fellows. Actuated by this motive and a desire to relieve human suffering, I will send free of charge, to all who desire it, this recipe, in German, French, or English, with full directions for preparing and using. Sent by mail by addressing with stamp, naming this paper. W. A. NOYES, _149 Power's Block_, _Rochester_, _N. Y._

Many cures for snoring have been invented, but none have stood the test so well as the old reliable clothes-pin.

A Clergyman says that the baby that pulls whiskers, bites fingers, and grabs for everything it sees has in it the elements of a successful politician.

A Hartford man has a Bible bearing date 1599. It is very easy to preserve a Bible for a great many years, because--because--well, we don't know what the reason is, but it is so, nevertheless.

A Vermont man has a hen thirty years old. The other day a hawk stole it, but after an hour came back with a broken bill and three claws gone, put down the hen and took an old rubber boot in place of it.

Alexander Gumbleton Ruffleton Scufflton Oborda Whittleton Sothenhall Benjaman Franklin Squires is still a resident of North Carolina, aged ninety-two. The census taker always thinks at first that the old man is guying.

A little five-year-old friend, who was always allowed to choose the prettiest kitten for his pet and playmate before the other nurslings were drowned, was taken to his mother's sick room the other morning to see the two tiny new twin babes. He looked reflectively from one to the other for a minute or two, then, poking his chubby finger into the plumpest baby, he said decidedly, "Save this one."

In promulgating your esoteric cogitation on articulating superficial sentimentalities and philosophical psychological observation, beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your conversation possess a clarified conciseness, compact comprehensiveness, coalescent consistency, and a concatenated cognancy; eschew all conglomerations of flatulent garrulity and jejune babblement. In other words, don't use such big words.

HOW HE WAS "SLEIGHED."

A boy once took it in his head That he would exercise his sled.

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And as he laughed, before he knewed, He from that sliding sled was slude.

Upon the slab where he was laid They carved this line: "This boy was sleighed."

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GENERAL NEWS.

St. Louis is to have a dog show about the middle of April.

South Chicago had a $75,000 fire on the night of the 17th.

New York is to have a new water supply to cost $30,000,000.

There are about 50,000 Northern tourists in Florida at this time.

Another conspiracy against the Government is brewing in Spain.

A sister of John Brown, of Osawatomie is a resident of Des Moines.

Dakota will spend nearly a million and a half for school purposes this year.

King's Opera House and several adjacent buildings at Knoxville, Tenn., were burned Monday night.

A child in Philadelphia has just been attacked by hydrophobia from the bite of a dog three years ago.

Captain Traynor, who once crossed the Atlantic in a dory, now proposes to make the trip in a rowboat.

During the present century 150,000,000 copies of the Bible have been printed in 226 different languages.

The Governor General at Trieste was surprised Tuesday by the explosion of a bomb in front of his residence.

The man who fired the first gun in the battle of Gettysburg lives in Malvern, Iowa. His name is Dick Gidley.

St. Patrick's Day was appropriately (as the custom goes) celebrated in Chicago, and the other large cities of the country.

Kansas has 420 newspapers, including dailies, weeklies, semi-weeklies, monthlies, semi-monthlies, tri-monthlies, and quarterlies.

A Dubuque watchmaker has invented a watch movement which has no dial-wheels, and is said will create a revolution in watch-making.

In the trial of Orrin A. Carpenter for the murder of Zura Burns, now in progress at Petersburg, Illinois, the prosecution has rested its case.

All the members of the United States Senate signed a telegram to Simon Cameron, now in Florida, congratulating him on his eighty-fifth birthday.

The inventor of a system of electric lighting announces that he is about to use the water-power at Niagara to furnish light to sixty-five cities.

The British leaders in Egypt have offered a reward of $5,000 for the capture of Osman Digma, the rebel leader, whom Gen. Graham has now defeated in two battles.

The Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe road is at war with the Western Union Telegraph Company in Texas, and sends ten-word messages through that State for fifteen cents.

Thirty-four counties and twenty-one railroads between Pittsburg and Cairo report fifty-five bridges destroyed by the February flood. The estimated cost of replacing them is $210,000.

There is a movement on foot in Chicago which may result in the holding of both the National Conventions in Battery D Hall, which is said to have better acoustic properties than the Exposition Building.

It is reported that more than six thousand Indians are starving at Fort Peck Agency. Game has entirely disappeared, and those Indians who have been turning their attention to farming, raised scarcely anything last year.

The announcement is made at St. Louis that the Pacific Express Company lost $160,000 by Prentiss Tiller and his accomplices, and that $25,000 of the amount is still missing. Tiller, the thief, and a supposed accomplice, are under arrest.

The British House of Commons was in session all last Saturday night, considering war measures. It is rumored that Parliament will be dissolved, and a new election held to ascertain if the Ministry measures are pleasing to the majority of the people.

The crevasse at Carrollton, Louisiana, has been closed. A break occurred Monday morning in the Mulatto levee, near Baton Rouge, and at last advices was forty feet wide and six feet deep, threatening all the plantations down to Plaquemine.

The Egyptian rebels, as they are called, fight with great bravery. So far, however, they have been unable to cope with their better armed and disciplined enemy, but it is reported that they are not at all discouraged, but swear they will yet drink the blood of the Turks and their allies from England.

FINANCIAL AND COMMERCIAL.

OFFICE OF THE PRAIRIE FARMER,} CHICAGO. March 18, 1884. }

There was a better feeling in banking circles on Monday but transactions were not heavy. Interest rates remain at 5@7 per cent.

Eastern exchange sold between banks at 25c per $1,000 premium.

Foreign exchange unchanged.

The failures in the United States during the past seven days are reported to have numbered 174, and in Canada and the Provinces 42, a total of 216, as compared with 272 for the previous week, a decrease of 56. The decrease is principally in the Western, Middle, and New England States. Canada had the same number of failures as for the preceding week.

GRAIN AND PROVISIONS.