Part 19

“Croup, sorr. Crowed awful all last night. Throat’s all full up. Ain’t no better th’s mornin’.”

“Have you had a doctor?” asked Fitzhugh, with the solicitude of a fond parent.

And all that day as he went about his regulated succession of duties, the thought went with him like a weight of cold lead of little Marcus crowing mirthlessly on a sick-bed, and of Julia Duncan’s firm dictum: “If he falls ill and dies that’s your fault.”

He had an engagement to walk with the girl in the afternoon, and he kept the appointment with eagerness, but for the first time failed to forget everything else in the charm of her presence. There was an impressiveness about her manner.

“He’s a pretty ill baby.” Her lips closed tight and the bright head nodded. “I was there this afternoon.”

But she would not discuss the situation with the miserable cadet, who went back again and again from her sunshine to the cloud that hung over him.

“Don’t talk any more about that wretched young coachman,” she pleaded. “There are so many jolly things; what is the use of dwelling on the bad ones?”

And Fitzhugh, for all his admiration, could not help wondering if she were a little heartless. He had the latest Wipes’s bulletin before he went to bed, and it was unfavorable. Little Marcus was distinctly worse. The young man lay awake with pangs of remorse and fear of retribution gnawing at him. When he slept, the haggard face of an unknown child and its ghastly, hoarse crowing—Wipes’s word had taken disagreeable hold on his imagination—haunted him. He waited for the soldier with sick impatience, and the first glimpse of the man’s face was enough.

“Wipes! Don’t tell me—” His voice failed.

“Kid’s dead, sorr,” was Wipes’s terse response, and Fitzhugh fell in his chair as if struck there by a blow.

The worst had come, probably exposure, expulsion from the academy, the shame and disappointment of his people, his career ruined before its beginning, and, worst of all, a life lost by his silly play. There seemed to be no crack in the blackness that descended upon him. Wipes was vague and unsatisfactory about arrangements.

“F’r me t’ look afther th’ job to-day, sorr. Don’t think of ut till t’morr’r,” was all he would say, and the boy was too sick at heart to press the point.

It was all he could do to crawl about from one recitation, one drill to another, and as to not thinking of it “till to-morrow,” as Wipes suggested—he thought of nothing else. It was a Wednesday, and that night he was to dine at the Emersons with Miss Duncan. Only one other cadet was there, and while he sang rag-time songs with Mrs. Emerson, Fitzhugh and the girl went outside, where the spring twilight was dying across river and hills and filtering through the sweeping elms which stand, like stately old officers, all along the gravelled driveways.

Little Julia Duncan looked up at the tall cadet, his white face towering above her grim and miserable in the dull light. “What is it? You look desperately ill. You hardly spoke at the table. Is anything wrong?”

“Wrong?” His voice was full of reproach. “Don’t you know that child is dead—little Marcus?”

The girl dropped into a chair and put her head on her hands against the piazza-railing. Her shoulders were shaking a little. That was too much for Fitzhugh in his overwrought condition. He put his hand tremblingly against the ribbons and lace on her shoulder and it slipped down, past the short sleeve, over the warm arm, to her fingers.

“Dear—don’t cry,” he said. “Are you crying for me?”

Swiftly her face lifted and a shock caught the boy as he saw the blue-green eyes full of the well-known laughter. His hand left hers with a start, and he drew himself up.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I made a great mistake. I thought you were gentle—” The rush of his feelings drowned the sentence that tried to be restrained. “I didn’t know before how cold-blooded a girl could be,” he cried roughly. “I thought you everything that was womanly. I gave you credit for being sorry for a chap in trouble. But I was wrong. You’re no friend to me; you’re amused because I’m wretched; you think it’s a joke that a poor little child has died from my fault; I don’t believe you have any heart.” The boy’s bitterly wounded feeling was in his shaking voice.

Then looking down at her, she lifted her face to his and he saw an astonishing sight. The bright eyes, their mischievous dancing all quiet, were filling slowly with tears.

“I’m sorry you think so badly of me,” she said, and her voice broke in the words. Then: “I’m going to tell you—Jack may kill me, but it has gone on long enough. I won’t have you tortured for Jack or anybody. It’s all—one—big—lie!”

Fitzhugh gasped, shivered with hope. “Lie! Little Marcus isn’t dead?”

Then the laughter broke through the tears softly for a moment, and her voice was sweet as a child’s as it trembled between the two. “Dead, no! Nor alive either! He’s just as dead as he is alive. There isn’t any little Marcus—there never was. It’s all a joke of those wretched boys in the infirmary. They cooked it up among them there, and Mr. Carruthers did the letter. Jack wrote me, and I coached Wipes, and kept them posted every day. I thought it was so good for Jack to be amused. But I didn’t know it would make you really unhappy. They were going further, they were going to have a mock funeral and make you come, but I told them I wouldn’t help in that. And Jack said then I must keep still and not tell you. It was to be to-morrow. Will you forgive me? Will you take back those bad names?”

I think Fitzhugh, the cadet, must have interrupted Miss Duncan rudely then, for Captain Fitzhugh, the officer, stopped and laughed and would not tell me what happened next.

The Empire State Express, leaving the shining Hudson forgotten in the background, rolled into Albany as he finished the tale. He stood up to put on his overcoat, but bent from his erect six feet in air to stare outside, as the train stopped slowly.

“I should think you’d have gotten even with that girl,” I reflected aloud, my mind still on the story.

Captain Fitzhugh smiled and nodded at a charming woman with beautiful bright hair who looked up eagerly at the car windows.

“I did,” he said as he held out his hand to me for good-by. “I did. I married her.”

Transcriber’s Notes

pg 67 Changed: You! Hoorray! Glory has come upon us to: You! Hooray! Glory has come upon us

pg 261 Changed: though I can’t imgine to: though I can’t imagine