CHAPTER X.
Fromthat silent contest of wills Octave came out conqueror. There was no resisting her merry audacity, with its underlying principle to strengthen it, and Melville was the first to speak. He did so in his own peculiar fashion, and his cousin answered after hers.
To her surprise, he did not make himself half so disagreeable as she had expected. It may be that he, too, felt drawn to the high-spirited girl whose whole life was such a contrast to his own; or it may be that his heart was softened by the reports from the apartment of his grandmother, whom he had really loved in his own selfish fashion, even though he had tormented her in so unmanly a manner. Then, too, there was sound common-sense at the bottom of his nature, and he could but see that it was an impossibility for even energetic Aunt Ruth to look after three invalids in as many separate places.
“With Grandmother Amy thrown in for good measure,” concluded Octave, quietly.
Twenty-four hours proved the experiment a success, and another twenty-four made Melville wonder how he had ever managed without this new companion, though she did scarcely one thing he desired her to do.
“You’ve been coddled and babied till you aren’t half a boy, Melville Capers; and a good thing it is for you that your grandmother is sick and I have come to take her place. Not a bit of coddling you’ll get from me, so you needn’t look for it!”
If he fretted, she laughed. If he read sentimental or melancholy poems, as he was given to doing, she repeated Mother Goose. If he praised Dickens, she lauded Scott. If he complained of his cruel portion in life, she ridiculed him and told him it was his own fault.
“What do you mean?” he demanded, after this last seemingly heartless assertion.
“Why, I heard Aunt Ruth say that, if you had not been so afraid of trying heroic treatment when you were little, you might have been cured. Even when you first came here, and that is only three years ago. But you cried, and ‘couldn’t,’and your poor grandmother loved you so she ‘wouldn’t,’ and so you have no one to blame for a wasted life but your own cowardly self.”
“Octave Pickel! You are rightly named.”
“I think so. My family is an honorable one.”
“But you are Pickel by name and the sourest kind of a pickle by nature.”
“Sharp, not sour. That is, none too sour. It doesn’t do to have everything sweet—like you.”
“I hate you! I want you to go out of this room.”
“I can’t. The doctor forbids me to walk, or even try.”
Melville fixed his eyes upon her face in a long, questioning gaze. Then he gave a great sigh—which was almost a sob. Octave’s own look did not falter, and out of the depths of her warm, wholesome heart she echoed the sigh.
“Well, and how—how do you like it?” Melville’s question came bitterly, fiercely.
Octave’s merry eyes filled with a sympathy that the boy could not fail to see was wholly genuine. “Cousin Melville, I do not like it at all. I can hardly bear it, even for these few days or weeks Ishall have to endure it; and I cannot bear that you should submit to it so tamely. You must not—you shall not!” cried the girl, excitedly.
She understood perfectly, with the electric perception of youth, that the cripple had compared her temporary helplessness with his own, which he supposed incurable. She had been longing to have just this subject come up between them, for down in her heart she had hidden a daring thought.
The thought had been caused by a talk with her Uncle Fritz; which, however, that soft-hearted man had little intention should bear just such fruit.
He had said that he believed the boy could be helped, or that he could have been, by a difficult and painful operation which a celebrated surgeon of his own country, now inspecting the American hospitals, had once successfully performed.
The thought had come like a flash to Octave then and there; and, with a minuteness which her fond uncle thought an admirable thirst for knowledge pure and simple, she had questioned him of the operation in all its details. Now, Mr. FritzPickel always protested that a famous surgeon had been lost to the world when his father had apprenticed him to business; and it was his recreation, still, to “walk the hospitals” with his many friends among the doctors, and he would grow most enthusiastic over any difficult or particularly “beautiful” case which they reported to him or allowed him to see.
So he fell innocently into Octave’s little trap, and the girl was now fortified with all the information she required. The opportunity she craved had come, and, though she trembled a little, she improved it.
Melville had naturally asked, “What do you mean?”
“I mean that, according to my Uncle Fritz, you are not what you think,—incurable.”
“The best physicians in the country have said I am!” cried the lad, mournfully.
“There is a better than the best, and he is ‘in the land’ now, if you will see him.”
“Who sent you in here to distress me like this?”
“My love for you.”
“Your love! A pretty way you take of showing it!”
“I think it is the best way, Cousin Melville.”
“It is cruel to raise false hopes like that.”
“Pooh! Are you any worse off for hearing about this great surgeon? If you are so indifferent to yourself that you will not endure a little suffering to be made well, you are certainly too small-minded to be very greatly hurt; and if you are willing, isn’t it love for you that has prompted me to find out all about it, and tell you? I thought I’d sound you first, yourself, because it all rests with you. Then, if you had any sense, I would get Uncle Fritz, who is as wise as the wisest where surgery is concerned, to tell you everything he knows. He doesn’t know that I am going to talk with you, nor anybody; and no one need know if you do not choose differently.”
“Octave, if I were never so willing, Grandmother Capers would never allow it.”
“No, Melville; I know that. But—why hide it? You know, you must know, what the others all think, that dear old Mrs. Capers is just slowly and gently dying. She cannot live very long towait upon you, even if she gets up from this strange sickness which nobody understands exactly, and I should think you would like to change places and do a few things for her, who has done so many for you.”
Poor Octave had been sorely troubled by Mrs. Capers’s illness. All the household had reassured her again and again that she was mistaken, but she could not help fancying that her little brother’s encounter with “the Witch of Endor” had something to do with his victim’s fading away. And, since she could do nothing for her personally, she longed beyond telling to help the grandson who was more to the doting old heart than its own life. After she ceased speaking the cousins lay each very quiet for a long time. Octave was frightened by her own temerity, now that the deed had really been done; and in Melville’s breast hope and despair surged up and down tumultuously.
So occupied, indeed, were they with their own thoughts that they did not perceive the entrance of a frail little figure of a woman, which glided softly in its old familiar way to the foot of Melville’s lounge.
“What is that, my darling, about your being cured?” said a pathetically feeble voice, so suddenly that both the hearers started violently.
Mrs. Capers had seated herself on the lounge, but so weakly and tremblingly that the others expected to see her fall. Octave half slipped from her low bed, forgetting her own injury in her eagerness to support the tottering old lady; but she was arrested as much by the words which followed as by the exquisite torture of her injured ankle.
“Melville, I have heard the whole talk. I—I am going to die—as this young girl says. I am not sorry, except for you; and now I am not sorry at all. I could not bear to see you suffer any more, or to endure—an operation,—even though it might cure you. I love—I love you too well. But, when I am gone, I want you to try it, if—if you have the courage. There will be money enough, plenty of money to pay anything this great doctor asks. Promise me, darling; that is, if—you don’t mind, if you wish to, that you—will see this surgeon. I shall die happy then.”
The sick woman’s long speech, and her eagerness to utter it, exhausted her. Appalled by the unexpected effect of their own words, the children gazed at her in helpless silence. But suddenly, upon the wan features turned so anxiously toward Melville, there came a change which even his inexperienced eye was swift to interpret.
With a strength born of excitement,—or given by God,—he forced his useless body downward upon the lounge until he could clasp and hold his grandmother’s head against his breast.
Then a rapture, born of her great love for him and of her gratitude for his unwonted tenderness, illumined the aged face: “My darling—my darling!” she cried faintly. And, as if over-weighted by happiness, the white lids closed above the faded eyes which had looked for so little in this world.
For a long time the stillness remained unbroken. Then a groan burst from the lips of the lad who had held a great love lightly—till it was lost.