The Open Question Part 43

If solving the riddle in "high Roman fas.h.i.+on" did not "make Death proud to take us," which he felt to be beside the mark, the more intimate realization that escape is possible seemed to rob life of her more intolerable menace. It was not food for fear or brooding, but for exultation, this recognition that, should other remedies fail, one might still do

"That thing that ends all other deeds, That shackles accidents, and bolts up change."

If the sovereign remedy had not been discovered in the past, the Nineteenth Century would have invented it. Never before had life been so hard for the many, never before had its value been so impugned. It might be true that every one should make a good fight. It could not be recommended to any but the craven that he should accept a degrading captivity in addition to defeat. Yet those were the terms upon which more than half the world lived. As for himself, it grew plainer and plainer that he should bear as many buffets as he could take like a man, but no one had a right to ask him to accept the disgraceful terms on which many of the excellent of earth were given their dole of bitter bread. As for the women, the power of human endurance was in them not glorified, as the foolish had thought, but debased, brutalized, a thing for scorn and pointing. It was this side of the subject that ultimately roused him out of the apathy that had threatened him. He had the sense of being secretly a lantern-bearer, of carrying under his coat a wonderful sort of Aladdin's lamp, and feeling it a selfish monopoly not to cry out his discovery in the streets. For this light, that had been so gallantly upborne, so well honored, of old, had been put out in the more effeminate times, and fallen to utter discredit in these new "dark ages." It was degraded to the uses of the vile, instead of s.h.i.+ning beacon-like upon the hill of honor, a guide less to the fallen than to those who would keep from falling. Men had so many new inventions to make, they had clean forgotten this. It was one of the lost arts, and had need of rediscovery and new proclaiming with the accent of our time.

A strange ardor of proselytism fell upon him as he looked upon those about him in whom he traced his own old fear of life: delicate women toiling in terror and incommunicable agony of spirit, or those others, more horrible still, accepting dully, or in the devil-may-care French fas.h.i.+on, an existence incredibly vile. Why were they not told

"Ye have no friend, But resolution and the briefest end."

It would be absurd to say not one would listen. He couldn't take up a paper without seeing that some desperate soul had made the discovery alone, unprompted, and with all the weight of Society, Law, the Church, and ignorant human shrinking against the anarchy of the act. It should be made less horribly hard, more admittedly honorable. Illogically enough, perhaps, these were not thoughts he felt it possible to share with a man in Driscoll's state of rapidly failing health. Gano would drop any questions in their later discussions that tended too much that way, and the conversation showed in this a curious alacrity. If Driscoll pursued the matter, Gano would even go the length of cutting the interview short. The intellectual barrier thus raised was the first check to the deepening friends.h.i.+p. For himself, from the day that Gano realized that life was voluntary, it became sweet. He found himself growing more light-hearted than he had thought it lay in him to be. He worked with a new zest. Poverty, hunger, they couldn't cow him now. He had the whip-hand of them. "I haven't forgotten," he said to himself, "what it's like to be well housed, and fed, and friended, and to listen without misgiving to the world's fairy-tales; but, remembering the gladdest day the old life had to give, I know it never brought me such a surging, G.o.d-like joy as the burst of that revelation, _We are free!_ If we endure the worst evils in this life, it is because we are willing to.

Even the meanest of mankind are not caught like vermin in a trap. Man's best boast and inalienable patent of n.o.bility is that he holds in his hand a key to all the prisons of the earth. He may open the door of escape for himself. How curious to feel anew the solace of the old Roman boast: In this the G.o.ds are less to be envied than the beggar or the slave; the high G.o.ds must live on, but man may die if he will. Oh, glad tidings of great joy! oh, the sweet, fresh air of liberty, the sense of power, the exaltation of the crushed and stifled spirit!" In his bare, ill-lighted room the man who had so long been the spoiled favorite of material good fortune, now with empty pockets, dinnerless, nearly friendless, would, nevertheless, lift up hopeful young hands in a defiant gladness, whispering to himself: "They taught me many things in many schools for many years, but no man ever whispered I was free! I had to find that out for myself."

In these latter days, when he went up-stairs to sit with Driscoll, he sometimes found a woman moving quietly about the room. When she had gone, there was always something there for the invalid's supper, and Gano would suppress the fact that he had brought a double provision in his pocket for an impromptu meal.

The woman wore one of those feature-destroying veils that made it impossible to judge much of her appearance, but Gano had a vague impression of slim middle age and unimpressive looks, soft ways, and a sort of "mother-tenderness" about her. But she was so colorless, so much more an influence than a person, that he did not realize he had never heard, or at least never noticed, her voice, till one evening she said _Bong soir_ in an amazing accent.

"Englis.h.!.+" commented Ethan, involuntarily, as the door closed.

"Australian," corrected the sick man.

"She's rather neglected you lately," remarked Gano, as a kind of apology for the unmistakable bulginess of his pockets.

He unloaded on the rickety table.

"I say, why do you bring all that truck in here?" Driscoll demanded, ungraciously.

"You keep quiet! You've got to have somebody to do your marketing for you, I suppose. I thought your Australian friend had thrown up the post."

"So she had," grumbled the invalid. "Women are d.a.m.ned selfish."

"Well, they repent sometimes; there's that in their favor."

Gano set about making coffee.

"She didn't repent," mumbled Driscoll.

"Oh, is this the last of her?"

"No; I only meant I had to send for her." And then they talked of other things.

The next time Gano saw the woman was after Driscoll got worse. He went up one night, and found him pallid, speechless, wrestling with one of his worst attacks of pain. The woman was bending over him.

"Please go and get that filled." She held out an empty bottle, hardly looking at Gano.

He hurried obediently down-stairs. Behind his anxiety for the man he had come to feel so much liking for, was a sense of surprise that the Australian was not so middle aged as he had thought. "She's not thirty-five," he speculated in between his wondering how Driscoll could get on without a night-nurse; "and she's not bad looking." He was back again, two steps at a time, with the medicine. Driscoll was quieter. The woman motioned the bottle away. She was taking his temperature.

"Hospital nurse," was Gano's mental comment upon the air of usage and competence. He sat there awhile, and then whispered:

"I'm in the room on the left at the bottom of the first flight, if you want me."

She nodded, and he went down to his work.

When he looked up from his writing it was a quarter to one. Had the woman gone and he not heard her pa.s.s? How was Driscoll? It was awfully quiet overhead. With a tightening of the nerves he took his lamp and hurried up-stairs. He knocked softly. No answer. Noiselessly, so that the invalid should not be wakened, if indeed he were not ... he opened the door. Driscoll was asleep, and breathing audibly. The woman was asleep too, sitting on the floor, her head leaning against the side of the bed, Driscoll's hand in one of hers. She looked still younger in the peace of sleep, though obviously older than Driscoll, softened out of her customary wooden immobility. Gano felt that he was seeing her real face for the first time: the mask had fallen. She could never have been pretty, but there was something in her face of n.o.bility that prevented a man from coming to an easy conclusion about her. Her black hair was sharply silhouetted against the white sheet. The hand that held Driscoll's wore a plain gold marriage-ring. She seemed to feel the light or the scrutiny of a strange glance, for she stirred and opened her gray eyes. Gano was momentarily embarra.s.sed--she not in the least. She turned quickly to look at the sleeper.

"Wait!" she whispered, as Gano seemed to be turning away.

She put her finger on the sick man's pulse, and, still kneeling there, counted the beats with absorbed, unselfconscious face. Gano was struck again with the "mother" quality in the woman. It gave all she did a definite modesty. She was getting up.

"Can you spare the light?" she whispered. "I forgot to bring--"

"Of course," interrupted Gano.

He set the lamp down, and turned to the door.

"Wait a moment."

She hung the _Figaro_ over the back of the chair between the sleeper and the light, then, quietly and without haste, she took her brown cape and hat off the peg and put them on. She leaned a moment over the sleeper, and then, "Come!" she signed rather then said, and they went softly out.

At the foot of the stairs she stopped.

"Can you get a candle and a piece of paper?"

"Yes; this is my room," said Gano, opening his door.

The moonlight came palely in at the single window. Without hesitation she had followed him. He lit the candle by his bed.

"I want to leave you my address," she said. "I think he'll be all right now, but if he should be worse don't leave him; send some one to this address--send a _fiacre_."

She scribbled on the piece of paper, and laid it by the candle.

"Do you think I ought to sit up with him?" Gano asked, watching her intently.

"No need to sit up; you can sleep on the sofa, can't you, or--"

"Or on the floor?" he asked, smiling a little at her matter-of-factness.

"Or on the floor," she repeated quietly. "Good-night."

She went out.

"Sha'n't I get you a cab?"

"No; I shall walk. Good-night;" and she was gone.

On the paper was written: