The Queen of Sheba, and My Cousin the Colonel Part 17

"Bless me!" exclaimed the doctor, dropping the ignited match. "How could I forget you! I took such a great liking to you, too. I have thought of that awkward affair a thousand times. But, really, coming across you in this unexpected manner"--

"I suppose I have changed somewhat," Lynde broke in. "Dr. Pendegrast, I am in a very strange position here. It is imperative you should be perfectly frank with me. You will have to overlook my abruptness. Mr.

Denham may return any instant, and what I have to say cannot be said in his presence. I know that Miss Denham has been under your charge as a patient. I want to know more than that bare circ.u.mstance."

The doctor recoiled a step. "Of course," he said, recovering himself, "you must have recognized her."

"I met your friends six or seven weeks ago at Geneva," continued Lynde.

"I recognized Miss Denham at once; but later I came to doubt and finally to disbelieve that I had ever seen her elsewhere. I refused to accept the testimony of my eyes and ears because--because so much of my happiness depended on my rejecting it."

"Does Mrs. Denham know that you are in possession of the fact you mention? Denham of course doesn't."

"No; it is my meeting with you that he turned my discarded doubt into a certainty."

"Then, I beg of you," said Dr. Pendegrast throwing a glance across the quadrangle, "not to breathe a syllable of this; do not even think of it. It has been kept from every one--from even the most intimate friends of the family; Ruth herself is not aware of her temporary derangement."

"Miss Denham does not know it?"

"She has not the remotest suspicion of the misfortune which befell her three years ago."

"Miss Denham does not know it?" repeated Lynde in a dazed way.

"That--that seems impossible! Pardon me. How did it happen, Dr.

Pendegrast?"

"I a.s.sume that you are not asking me through idle curiosity," said the doctor, looking at him attentively.

"I have vital reasons for my question, Doctor."

"I do not see why I should not tell you, since you know so much. The family were in Florida that spring. Ruth had not been well for several months; they had gone South on her account. It was partly a pulmonary difficulty. On their return North, Ruth was prostrated by a typhoid fever. She recovered from that but with her mind strangely disordered.

The mental malady increased with her convalescence. Denham and I were old friends; he had faith in my skill, and she was placed in my care.

She was brought to the asylum because I could not attend to her anywhere else. I considered her case serious at first, even hopeless.

The human body is still a mystery, after science has said its last word. The human mind is a deeper mystery. While I doubted of her recovery, she recovered. At the first intimation of returning health, she was taken home; when her wandering thought came back to her she was in her own room. She remembered that she had been very ill, a long time ill; she had a faint impression that I had attended her meanwhile; but she remembered nothing more. The knowledge of her affliction was kept a secret from her--unwisely, I think. They put it off and put it off, until it became very awkward to tell her."

Lynde started as he recalled his conversation with Miss Denham on the rocks overhanging the Mer de Glace. With unwitting cruelty he had told Ruth her own pathetic story, and she had unconsciously pitied herself!

A lump came into his throat as he remembered it.

"That was a mistake," said Lynde, with an effort, "not to tell her."

"An absurd mistake. It has given my friends no end of trouble and embarra.s.sment."

"How long was she afflicted this way?"

"Something less than two months."

"It was the result of the fever?"

"That chiefly."

"It was not--hereditary?" Lynde lingered on the word.

"No."

"Then it is not likely to occur again?"

"I cannot think of anything more unlikely," returned the doctor, "unless the same conditions conspire, which is scarcely supposable, as I could easily prove to you. You can understand, Mr. Lynde, that this has been a sore trial to Denham and his wife; they have had no children, and their hearts are bound up in Ruth. The dread of a recurrence of the trouble has haunted them night and day in spite of all the arguments I could advance to rea.s.sure them. They have got what our French friends call a fixed idea, which is generally an idea that requires a great deal of fixing. The girl ought to marry--every woman ought to marry, it is her one mission; but between their affections and their apprehensions, my friends have allowed Ruth no opportunity to form attachments."

"I'm glad of that," said Lynde quietly.

"Are you!" snapped the doctor. "I am not. I would like to see her married some day. Meanwhile I would like to see a dozen lovers about her. It is as natural for a young girl to coquet as it is for a canary to peck at its seed or trim its bill on a bit of fishbone. It is had for the girl and the canary when they are prevented."

"There is something human in this crisp old doctor," said Lynde to himself, and then aloud: "So Mr. Denham has no matrimonial plans for her?"

"None whatever. Since Ruth's recovery the family have been constantly on the wing, either at home or abroad. Most of Ruth's life has been pa.s.sed over here. I trust to your discretion. You will perceive the necessity of keeping all this to yourself."

"I do, and I now see that your travelling with the Denhams is a circ.u.mstance in no way connected with the state of Miss Denham's health."

"Not in the most distant manner, Mr. Lynde. I am with them because they are my old friends. I was worn out with professional work, and I ran across the sea to recuperate. It is fortunate I did, since Ruth chances to need me."

Lynde pondered a moment, and then asked abruptly: "Does Mrs. Denham know of my former meeting with her niece?"

"I never breathed a word to Mrs. Denham on the subject of Ruth's escapade," replied the doctor. "It would have pained her without mending matters. Besides, I was not proud of that transaction."

Mrs. Denham's suppression of the doctor's name, then, in speaking of him to Lynde, had been purely accidental.

"Miss Ruth's strange hallucination, in her illness, as to personality, her fancy about the Queen of Sheba--what was that traceable to?" asked Lynde, after a pause.

"Heaven only knows. She was reading the Old Testament very much in those days. I have sometimes accepted that as an explanation. It often happens that a delusion takes its cue from something read, or thought, or experienced in a rational state. In the case of the man Blaisdell, for example--you remember him, with his marble s.h.i.+p? He was formerly an enterprising s.h.i.+p-builder; during the Southern war he filled a contract with government for a couple of ironclads, and made his fortune. The depression in s.h.i.+pping afterwards ruined him--and he fell to constructing marble vessels! He is dead, by the way. I wonder if his reason has been given back to him--in that other world."

Lynde did not speak immediately, and the doctor relighted his cigar, which had gone out.

"Dr. Pendegrast, you have lifted a crus.h.i.+ng weight from me. I cannot explain it to you now and here; but you shall know some day."

Dr. Pendegrast smiled. "I didn't recollect you at first, Mr. Lynde; my memory for names and faces is shockingly derelict, but I have retained most of my other faculties in tolerably good order. I have been unreserved with you because I more than suspect"--

The doctor's sentence was cut short by Mr. Denham, who entered at the instant. He had learned that there was no train for Geneva before the night-express. Lynde lighted the cigar which he had been unconsciously holding between his fingers all this while, and on the plea of cas.h.i.+ng a draft at a banker's left the two gentlemen together. He wandered absently into the Place de la Concorde, crossed the crowded bridge there, and plunged into the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter.

Finding his way back after an hour or so to the other bank of the Seine, he seated himself on one of those little black iron chairs which seem to have let themselves down like spiders from the lime-trees in the Champs Elysees, and remained for a long time in a deep study.

The meeting with Dr. Pendegrast had been so severe a shock to Lynde that he could not straightway recover his mental balance. The appalling shadow which the doctor's presence had for the moment thrown across him had left Lynde benumbed and chilled despite the rea.s.suring suns.h.i.+ne of the doctor's words. By degrees, however, Lynde warmed to life again; his gloom slipped off and was lost in the restless tides of life which surged about him. It was the hour when Paris sits at small green tables in front of the cafes and sips its absinthe or ca.s.sis; when the boulevards are thronged, and the rich equipages come and go. There was not a cloud in the tender blue sky against which the reddish obelisk of Luxor looked like a column of jet; the fountains were playing in the Place de la Concorde, and in the Tuileries gardens beyond the breeze dreamily stirred the foliage which hid from Lynde's view the gray facade of the gutted palace, still standing there, calcined and cracked by the fires of the Commune. Presently all this began to distract him, and when he returned to the hotel he was in a humor that would have been comparatively tranquil if so many tedious miles had not stretched between Paris and Chamouni.

He found Mr. Denham and Dr. Pendegrast delaying dinner for him. After dinner, seeing no prospect of renewing conversation in private with the doctor, Lynde killed the time by writing a voluminous letter to Flemming, whose name he had stumbled on in the pa.s.senger-list of a steamer advertised to sail two days later from Liverpool.

As Lynde took his seat in the railroad carriage that night he had a feeling that several centuries had elapsed since daybreak. Every moment was a month to him until he could get back to Chamouni. The thought that Ruth might be dangerously ill scarcely presented itself among his reflections. She was free, he loved her, and there was no reason why he should not try to win her, however strongly the Denhams might be opposed to him. His mind was perfectly easy on that score; they had no right to wreck the girl's future in their shallow fear. His two travelling companions shortly dropped asleep, but Lynde did not close his eyes during those ten weary hours to Macon. Thence to Geneva was five hours more of impatience. At Geneva the party halted no longer than was necessary to refresh themselves at a buffet near the station and hire a conveyance to Chamouni, which they reached two or three hours after sunset. The town still lay, as Lynde had left it, in the portentous shadow of the mountain, with the sullen rain dropping from the black sky.

Lynde drew an alarming augury from the circ.u.mstance that Mrs. Denham did not come down to greet them. It dawned upon him then for the first time with any distinctness that Ruth might be fatally ill. Mr. Denham, accompanied by Dr. Pendegrast, hastened to his wife's apartments, and Lynde stationed himself at the head of a staircase in the hall, where he waited nearly an hour in intolerable suspense before the doctor reappeared.

"What is it, Doctor?"

"Pneumonia. No," he added, divining Lynde's unspoken thought even before it had fairly shaped itself in his brain, "it is not the other business."