“His strength was as the strength of ten,Because his heart was pure,”
“His strength was as the strength of ten,Because his heart was pure,”
quoted the young man, laughing lightly. “Idon’t know that I should have thought it, in this case. You’ve taken a fancy to the fellow.”
“I always respect an unmixed motive when I see it,” she replied, shortly. “But I’ve been in practice too long to take sudden fancies. There is no profession like ours, Doctor, for putting the sympathies under double picket guard.”
She stiffened a little in her manner. She did not like to be thought an over-enthusiastic woman—womanish, unused to the world.
The weather, soon after the arrival of theMercy, took a terrible mood, and a prolonged drought settled upon Calhoun. The days dawned lurid and long. The nights fell dewless and deadly. Fatal and beautiful colors lurked in the swamps, and in the sifting dust, fine and hard, blown by siroccos across the glare of noon, like sands on the shores of the Lake of Fire. The pestilence walked in darkness, and the destruction wasted at midday. Men died, in that little town of a few thousand souls, at the rate of a score a day—black and white, poor and rich, clean and foul, saint and sinner. The quarantine laws tightened. Vessels fled by the harbor mouth under full sail, and melted like helpless compassion upon the fiery horizon. Trains upon the Shore Line shot through and thundered past the station; they crowded on steam; the fireman and his stoker averted their faces as they whirled by. The world turned her back upon Calhoun, and the dying town was shut in with her dead. Only, at long intervals, theMercy, casting anchor far down the channel, sent up by Scip, the weak, black boatman, the signs of human fellowship—food, physician, purse, medicine—that spoke from the heart of the North to the heart of the South, and upheld her in those well-remembered days.
Zerviah Hope, volunteer nurse, became quickly enough a marked man in Calhoun. He more than verified Doctor Dare’s prognosis. Where the deadliest work was to be done, this man, it was observed, asked to be sent. Where no one else would go, he went. What no one else would do, he did. He sought the neglected, and the negroes. He braved the unclean, and the unburied. With the readiness of all incisive character acting on emergencies, he stamped himself upon the place and time. He went to his task as the soldier goes to the front under raking fire, with gleaming eyes and iron muscles. The fever of the fight was on him. He seemed to wrestle with disease for his patients, and to trample death beneath his feet. He glowed over his cures with a positive physical dilation, and writhed over his dead as if he had killed them. He seemed built of endurance more than mortal. It was not known when he slept, scarcely if he ate. His weariness sat upon him like a halo. He grew thin, refined, radiant. In short, he presented an example of that rare spectacle which never fails to command spectators—a common man possessed by an uncommon enthusiasm.
What passed with him at this time in that undiscovered sea which we call a man’s inner life, it would not be easy to assert. So far as we can judge, all the currents of his nature had swelled into the great, pulsing tide of self-surrender, which swept him along. Weakness, wrong, memory, regret, fear, grief, pleasure, hope,—all the little channels of personal life,—ran dry. He was that most blessed of human creatures, a man without a past and without a future, and living in a present nobler than the one could have been or the other could become. He continued to be a silent man, speaking little, excepting to his patients, and now and then, very gently, to the lady, Dr. Dare. He was always pliable to the influence of a woman’s voice or to womanly manner. He had, in the presence of women, the quick responsiveness and sudden change of color and sensitiveness of intonation which bespeak the man whose highest graces and lowest faults are likely to be owing to feminine power.
This was a quality which gave him remarkable success as a nurse. He was found to be infinitely tender, and of fine, brave patience. It was found that he shrank from no task because it was too small, as he had shrunk from no danger because it was too great. He became a favorite with the sick and with physicians. The convalescent clung to him, the dying heard of him and sent for him, the Relief Committee leaned upon him, as in such crises the leader leans upon the led. By degrees,he became greatly trusted in Calhoun; this is to say, that he became greatly loved.
I have been told that, to this day, many people personally unknown to him, whose fate it was to be imprisoned in that beleaguered town at that time, and who were familiar with the nervous figure and plain, intense countenance of the Northern nurse, as he passed, terrible day after terrible day, to his post, cannot hear of him, even now, without that suffusion of look by which we hold back tears; and that, when his name took on, as it did, a more than local reputation, they were unable to speak it because of choking voices. I have often wished that he knew this.
It was the custom in Calhoun to pay the nurses at short, stated intervals,—I think once a week, on Saturday nights. The first time that Hope was summoned to receive his wages, he evinced marked emotion, too genuine not to be one of surprise and repugnance.
“I had not thought,—” he began, and stood, coloring violently.
“You earn your five dollars a day, if anybody in Calhoun does,” urged the official, with kindly brusqueness.
“It is not right; I do not wish to take the money,” said the nurse, with agitation. “I do not wish to be paid for—saving—human life. I did not come to the fever district to make money; I came to save life—to save life!” he added, in a quick whisper. He had not slept for four nights,and seemed, they noticed, more than usually nervous in his manner.
“The money is yours,” insisted the treasurer.
“Very well,” said Hope, after a long silence; and no more was said about it. He took his wages and walked away up the street, absorbed in thought.
One morning, he went to his lodgings to seek a little rest. It was about six o’clock, and people were already moving in the hot, thirsty streets. The apothecaries’ doors were open, and their clerks were astir. The physicians drove or walked hastily, with the haggard look of men whose days and nights are too short for their work, and whose hope, and heart as well, have grown almost too small. Zerviah noticed those young Northern fellows among them, Frank and Remane, and saw how they had aged since they came South,—brave boys, both of them, and had done a man’s brave deed. Through her office window, as he walked past, he caught a glimpse of Dr. Dare’s gray dress and blonde, womanly head of abundant hair. She was mixing medicines, and patients stood waiting. She looked up and nodded as he went by; she was too busy to smile. At the door of the Relief Committee, gaunt groups hung, clamoring. At the telegraph office, knots of men and women gathered, duly inspiring the heroic young operator,—a slight girl,—who had not left her post for now many days and nights. Her chief had the fever last week,—was taken at the wires,—livedto get home. She was the only person alive in the town who knew how to communicate with the outer world. She had begun to teach a little brother of hers the Morse alphabet,—“That somebody may know, Bobby, if I—can’t come some day.” She, too, knew Zerviah Hope, and looked up; but her pretty face was clouded with the awful shadow of her own responsibility.
“We all have about as much as we can bear,” thought Zerviah, as he went by. His own burden was lightened a little that morning, and he was going home to get a real rest. He had just saved his last patient—the doctor gave him up. It was a young man, the father of five very little children, and their mother had died the week before. The nurse had looked at the orphans, and said: “He’s got to live.” This man had blessed him this morning, and called the love of heaven on his head and its tender mercy on his whole long life. Zerviah walked with quick step. He lifted his head, with its short, black, coarse hair. His eyes, staring for sleep, flashed, fed with a food the body knows not of. He felt almost happy, as he turned to climb the stairs that led to the attic shelter where he had knelt and watched the dawn come on that first day, and given himself to God and to the dying of Calhoun. He had always kept that attic, partly because he had made that prayer there. He thought it helped him to make others since. He had not always been a man who prayed. The habit was new, and required culture. He hadguarded it rigidly since he came South, as he had his diet and regimen of bathing, air, and other physical needs.
On this morning that I speak of, standing with his almost happy face and lifted head, with his foot upon the stairs, he turned, for no reason that he could have given, and looked over his shoulder. A man behind him, stepping softly, stopped, changed color, and crossed the street.
“I am followed,” said the nurse.
He spoke aloud, but there was no one to hear him. A visible change came over his face. He stood uncertain for a moment; then shut the door and crawled upstairs. At intervals he stopped on the stairs to rest, and sat with his head in his hands, thinking. By and by he reached his room, and threw himself heavily upon his bed. All the radiance had departed from his tired face, as if a fog had crept over it. He hid it in his long, thin, humane hands, and lay there for a little while. He was perplexed—not surprised. He was not shocked—only disappointed. Dully he wished that he could get five minutes’ nap; but he could not sleep. Not knowing what else to do, he got upon his knees presently, in that place by the window he liked to pray in, and said aloud:
“Lord, I didn’t expect it; I wasn’t ready. I should like to sleep long enough to decide what to do.”
After this, he went back to bed and lay still again, and in a little while he truly slept. Notlong; but to those who perish for rest, a moment of unconsciousness may do the work of a cup of water to one perishing of thirst. He started, strengthened, with lines of decision forming about his mouth and chin; and, having bathed and cleanly dressed, went out.
He went out beyond the town to the hut where Scip the boatman lived. Scip was at home. He lived quite alone. His father, his mother and four brothers had died of the plague since June. He started when he saw Hope, and his habitual look of fear deepened to a craven terror; he would rather have had the yellow fever than to have seen the Northern nurse just then. But Zerviah sat down by him on the hot sand, beside a rather ghastly palmetto that grew there, and spoke to him very gently. He said:
“TheMercycame in last night, Scip.—I know. And you rowed down for the supplies. You heard something about me on board theMercy. Tell me, Scip.”
“He’s a durn fool,” said Scip, with a dull show of passion.
“Who is a durn fool?”
“That dem mate.”
“So it was the mate? Yes. What did he say, Scip?”
“I never done believe it,” urged Scip, with an air of suddenly recollected virtue.
“But you told of it, Scip.”
“I never told nobody but Jupiter, the durn fool!” persisted Scip.
“Who is Jupiter?”
“Doctor Remane’s Jupiter, him that holds his hoss, that he brung up from the fever. He said he wouldn’t tell. I never done believe it,never!”
“It seems to me, Scip,” said Zerviah, in a low, kind voice, “that I wouldn’t have told if I’d been you. But never mind.”
“I never done mean to hurt you!” cried Scip, following him into the road. “Jupiter the durn, he said he’d never tell. I never told nobody else.”
“You have told the whole town,” said Zerviah Hope, patiently. “I’m sorry, but never mind.”
He stood for a moment looking across the stark palmetto, over the dusty stretch of road, across the glare, to the town. His eyes blinded and filled.
“It wouldn’t have been a great while,” he said. “I wish you hadn’t, Scip, but never mind!”
He shook the negro gently off, as if he had been a child. There was nothing more to say. He would go back to his work. As he walked along, he suddenly said to himself:
“She did not smile this morning! Nor the lady at the telegraph office, either. Nor—a good many other folks. I remember now.... Lord!” he added aloud, thought breaking into one of his half-unconscious prayers, which had the more pathos because it began with the rude abruptnessof an apparent oath,—“Lord! what in the name of heaven am I going to do about it?”
Now, as he was coming into the little city, with bowed head and broken face, he met Doctor Dare. She was riding on her rounds upon a patient, Southern tackey, and she was riding fast. But she reined up and confronted him.
“Mr. Hope! There is a hateful rumor brought from New York about you. I am going to tell you immediately. It is said—”
“Wait a minute!” he pleaded, holding out both hands. “Now. Go on.”
“It is said that you are an escaped convict,” continued the lady, distinctly.
“It is false!” cried the nurse, in a ringing voice.
The doctor regarded him for a moment.
“I may be wrong. Perhaps it was not so bad. I was in a cruel hurry, and so was Doctor Frank. Perhaps they said a discharged convict.”
“What else?” asked Zerviah, lifting his eyes to hers.
“They said you were just out of a seven years’ imprisonment for manslaughter. They said you killed a man—for jealousy, I believe; something about a woman.”
“What else?” repeated the nurse, steadily.
“I told them Idid not believe one word of it!” cried Marian Dare.
“Thank you, madam,” said Zerviah Hope, after a scarcely perceptible pause; “but it is true.”
He drew one fierce breath.
“She was beautiful,” he said. “I loved her; he ruined her; I stabbed him!”
He had grown painfully pale. He wanted to go on speaking to this woman, not to defend or excuse himself, not to say anything weak or wrong, only to make her understand that he did not want to excuse himself; in some way, just because shewasa woman, to make her feel that he was man enough to bear the burden of his deed. He wanted to cry out to her, “You are a woman! Oh, be gentle, and understand how sorry a man can be for a deadly sin!” but his lips were parched. He moved them dryly; he could not talk.
She was silent at first. She was a prudent woman; she thought before she spoke.
“Poor fellow!” she said, suddenly. Her clear blue eyes overflowed. She held out her hand, lifted his, wrung it, dropped it, and softly added, “Well, never mind!” much as if he had been a child or a patient,—much as he himself had said, “Never mind!” to Scip.
Then Zerviah Hope broke down.
“I haven’t got a murderer’s heart!” he cried. “It has been taken away from me. I ain’t so bad—now. I meant to be—I wanted to do—”
“Hush!” she said. “You have, and you shall. God is fair.”
“Yes,” said the penitent convict, in a dull voice, “God is fair, and so he let ’em tell of me. I’ve got no fault to find withHim. So nigh as I canunderstand Almighty God, He means well.... I guess He’ll pull me through some way.... But I wish Scip hadn’t told just now. I can’thelpbeing sorry. It wasn’t that I wanted to cheat, but”—he choked—“the sick folks used to like me. Now, do you think I’d ought to go on nursing, Doctor? Do you think I’d ought to stop?”
“You are already an hour late,” replied the woman of science, in her usual business-like voice. “Your substitute will be sleepy and restless; that affects the patient. Go back to your work as fast as you can. Ask me no more foolish questions.”
She drew her veil; there was unprofessional moisture on her long, feminine lashes. She held out her hearty hand-grasp to him, touched the tackey, and galloped away.
“She is a good woman,” said Zerviah, half aloud, looking down at his cold fingers. “She touched me, and she knew! Lord, I should like to have you bless her!”
He looked after her. She sat her horse finely; her gray veil drifted in the hot wind. His sensitive color came. He watched her as if he had known that he should never see her again on earth.
A ruined character may be as callous as a paralyzed limb. A ruined and repentant one is in itself an independent system of sensitive and tortured nerves.
Zerviah Hope returned to his work, shrinking under the foreknowledge of his fate. He felt as if he knew what kind of people would remind himthat they had become acquainted with his history, and what ways they would select to do it.
He was not taken by surprise when men who had lifted their hats to the popular nurse last week, passed him on the street to-day with a cold nod or curious stare. When women who had reverenced the self-sacrifice and gentleness of his life as only women do or can reverence the quality of tenderness in a man, shrank from him as if he were something infectious, like the plague,—he knew it was just, though he felt it hard.
His patients heard of what had happened, sometimes, and indicated a feeling of recoil. That was the worst. One said:
“I am sorry to hear you are not the man we thought you,” and died in his arms that night.
Zerviah remembered that these things must be. He reasoned with himself. He went into his attic, and prayed it all over. He said:
“Lord, I can’t expect to be treated as if I’d never been in prison. I’m sorry I mind it so. Perhaps I’d ought not to. I’ll try not to care too much.”
More than once he was sure of being followed again, suspiciously or curiously. It occurred to him at last that this was most likely to happen on pay-days. That puzzled him. But when he turned, it was usually some idler, and the fellow shrank and took to his heels, as if the nurse had the fever.
In point of fact, even in that death-strickentown, to be alive was to be as able to gossip as well people, and rumor, wearied of the monotonous fever symptom, found a diverting zest in this shattered reputation.
Zerviah Hope was very much talked about in Calhoun; so much, that the Relief Committee heard, questioned, and experienced official anxiety. It seemed a mistake to lose so valuable a man. It seemed a severity to disturb so noble a career. Yet who knew what sinister countenance the murderer might be capable of shielding beneath his mask of pity? The official mind was perplexed. Was it humane to trust the lives of our perishing citizens to the ministrations of a felon who had so skillfully deceived the most intelligent guardians of the public weal? There was, in particular, a chairman of a sub-committee (on the water supply) who was burdened with uneasiness.
“It’s clear enough what broughthimto Calhoun,” said this man. “What do you suppose the fellow does with his five dollars a day?”
The Committee on the Water Supply promptly divided into a Sub-Vigilance, and to the Sub-Vigilance Committee Zerviah Hope’s case was referred. The result was, that he was followed on pay-day.
One Saturday night, just as the red-hot sun was going down, the sub-committee returned to the Relief Office in a state of high official excitement, and reported to the chief as follows:
“We’ve done it. We’ve got him. We’ve foundout what the fellow does with his money. He puts it—”
“Well?” for the sub-committee hesitated.
“Into the relief contribution-boxes on the corners of the street.”
“What!”
“Every dollar. We stood and watched him count it out—his week’s wages. Every mortal cent that Yankee’s turned over to the fund for the sufferers. He never kept back a red. He poured it all in.”
“Follow him next week. Report again.”
They followed, and reported still again. They consulted, and accepted the astounding truth. The murderer, the convict, the miserable, the mystery, Zerviah Hope,—volunteer nurse, poor, friendless, discharged from Sing Sing, was proved to have surrendered to the public charities of Calhoun, every dollar which he had earned in the service of her sick and dying.
The Committee on the Water Supply, and the Sub-Vigilance Committee stood, much depressed, before their superior officer. He, being a just man, flushed red with a noble rage.
“Where is he? Where is Zerviah Hope? The man should be sent for. He should receive the thanks of the committee. He should receive the acknowledgments of the city. And we’ve set on him like detectives! hunted him down! Zounds! The city is disgraced. Find him for me!”
“We have already done our best,” replied thesub-committee, sadly. “We have searched for the man. He cannot be found.”
“Where is the woman-doctor?” persisted the excited chief. “She recommended the fellow. She’d be apt to know. Can’t some of you find her?”
At this moment, young Dr. Frank looked haggardly into the Relief Office.
“I am taking her cases,” he said. “She is down with the fever.”
It was the morning after his last pay-day—Sunday morning, the first in October; a dry, deadly, glittering day. Zerviah had been to his attic to rest and bathe; he had been there some hours since sunrise, in the old place by the window, and watched the red sun kindle, and watched the dead-carts slink away into the color, and kneeled and prayed for frost. Now, being strengthened in mind and spirit, he was descending to his Sabbath’s work, when a message met him at the door. The messenger was a negro boy, who thrust a slip of paper into his hand, and, seeming to be seized with superstitious fright, ran rapidly up the street and disappeared.
The message was a triumphal result of the education of the freedmen’s evening school, and succinctly said:
“ive Gut IT. Nobuddy Wunt Nuss me. Norr no Docter nEther.“P. S.Joopiter the Durn hee sed he’d kerry This i dont Serpose youd kum.Scip.”
“ive Gut IT. Nobuddy Wunt Nuss me. Norr no Docter nEther.
“P. S.Joopiter the Durn hee sed he’d kerry This i dont Serpose youd kum.
Scip.”
The sun went down that night as red as it had risen. There were no clouds. There was no wind. There was no frost. The hot dust curdled in the shadow that coiled beneath the stark palmetto. That palmetto always looked like a corpse, though there was life in it yet. Zerviah came to the door of Scip’s hovel for air, and looked at the thing. It seemed like something that ought to be buried. There were no other trees. The everglades were miles away. The sand and the scant, starved grass stretched all around. Scip’s hut stood quite by itself. No one passed by. Often no one passed for a week, or even more. Zerviah looked from the door of the hut to the little city. The red light lay between him and it, like a great pool. He felt less lonely to see the town, and the smoke now and then from chimneys. He thought how many people loved and cared for one another in the suffering place. He thought how much love and care suffering gave birth to, in human hearts. He began to think a little of his own suffering; then Scip called him, sobbing wretchedly. Scip was very sick. Hope had sent for Dr. Dare. She had not come. Scip was too sick to be left. The nurse found his duty with the negro. Scip was growing worse.
By and by, when the patient could be left for a moment again, Zerviah came to the air once more. He drew in great breaths of the now cooler night. The red pool was gone. All the world was filled with the fatal beauty of the purple colors that hehad learned to know so well. The swamps seemed to be asleep, and to exhale in the slow, regular pulsations of sleep. In the town, lamps were lighted. From a hundred windows, fair, fine sparks shone like stars as the nurse looked over. There, a hundred watchers tended their sick or dead, or their healing, dearly loved, and guarded ones. Dying eyes looked their last at eyes that would have died to save them; strengthening hands clasped hands that had girded them with the iron of love’s tenderness, through the valley of the shadow, and up the heights of life and light. Over there, in some happy home, tremulous lips that the plague had parted met to-night in their first kiss of thanksgiving.
Zerviah thought of these things. He had never felt so lonely before. It seemed a hard place for a man to die in. Poor Scip!
Zerviah clasped his thin hands and looked up at the purple sky.
“Lord,” he said, “it is my duty. I came South to do my duty. Because he told of me, had I ought to turn against him? It is a lonesome place; he’s got it hard, but I’ll stand by him.... Lord!”—his worn face became suddenly suffused, and flashed, transfigured, as he lifted it—“Lord God Almighty! You stood by me!Icouldn’t have been a pleasant fellow to look after. You stood bymein my scrape! I hadn’t treatedYouany too well.... You needn’t be afraid I’ll leave the creetur.”
He went back into the hut. Scip called, and he hurried in. The nurse and the plague, like two living combatants, met in the miserable place and battled for the negro.
The white Southern stars blazed out. How clean they looked! Zerviah could see them through the window, where the wooden shutter had flapped back. They looked well and wholesome—holy, he thought. He remembered to have heard some one say, at a Sunday meeting he happened into once, years ago, that the word holiness meant health. He wondered what it would be like, to be holy. He wondered what kinds of people would be holy people, say, after a man was dead. Women, he thought,—good women, and honest men who had never done a deadly deed.
He occupied his thoughts in this way. He looked often from the cold stars to the warm lights throbbing in the town. They were both company to him. He began to feel less alone. There was a special service called somewhere in the city that night, to read the prayers for the sick and dying. The wind rose feebly, and bore the sound of the church-bells to the hut. There was a great deal of company, too, in the bells. He remembered that it was Sunday night.
It was Monday, but no one came. It was Tuesday, but the nurse and the plague still battled alone together over the negro. Zerviah’s stock of remedies was as ample as his skill. He hadthought he should save Scip. He worked without sleep, and the food was not clean. He lavished himself like a lover over this black boatman; he leaned like a mother over this man who had betrayed him.
But on Tuesday night, a little before midnight, Scip rose, struggling on his wretched bed, and held up his hands and cried out:
“Mr. Hope! Mr. Hope! I never done mean to harm ye!”
“You have not harmed me,” said Zerviah, solemnly. “Nobody ever harmed me but myself. Don’t mind me, Scip.”
Scip put up his feeble hand; Zerviah took it; Scip spoke no more. The nurse held the negro’s hand a long time; the lamp went out; they sat on in the dark. Through the flapping wooden shutter the stars looked in.
Suddenly, Zerviah perceived that Scip’s hand was quite cold.
He carried him out by starlight, and buried him under the palmetto. It was hard work digging alone. He could not make a very deep grave, and he had no coffin. When the earth was stamped down, he felt extremely weary and weak. He fell down beside his shovel and pick to rest, and lay there in the night till he felt stronger. It was damp and dark. Shadows like clouds hung over the distant outline of the swamp.
The Sunday bells in the town had ceased.There were no sounds but the cries of a few lonely birds and wild creatures of the night, whose names he did not know. This little fact added to his sense of solitude.
He thought at first he would get up and walk back to the city in the dark. An intense and passionate longing seized him to be among living men. He took a few steps down the road. The unwholesome dust blew up through the dark against his face. He found himself so tired that he concluded to go back to the hut. He would sleep, and start in the morning with the break of the dawn. He should be glad to see the faces of his kind again, even though the stir of welcome and the light of trust were gone out of them for him. They lived, they breathed, they spoke. He was tired of death and solitude.
He groped back into the hut. The oil was low, and he could not relight the lamp. He threw himself in the dark upon his bed.
He slept until late in the morning, heavily. When he waked, the birds were shrill in the hot air, and the sun glared in.
“I will go now,” he said, aloud. “I am glad I can go,” and crept to his feet.
He took two steps—staggered—and fell back. He lay for some moments, stricken more with astonishment than alarm. His first words were:
“Lord God! After all—after all I’ve gone through—Lord God Almighty, if You’ll believe it—I’vegot it!”
This was on Wednesday morning. Night fell, but no one came. Thursday—but outside the hut no step stirred the parched, white dust. Friday—Saturday—no voice but his own moaning broke upon the sick man’s straining ear.
His professional experience gave him an excruciating foresight of his symptoms, and their result presented itself to him with horrible distinctness. As one by one he passed through the familiar conditions whose phases he had watched in other men a hundred times, he would have given his life for a temporary ignorance. His trained imagination had little mercy on him. He weighed his chances, and watched his fate with the sad exactness of knowledge.
As the days passed, and no one came to him, he was aware of not being able to reason with himself clearly about his solitude. Growing weak, he remembered the averted faces of the people for whom he had labored, and whom he had loved. In the stress of his pain their estranged eyes gazed at him. He felt that he was deserted because he was distrusted. Patient as he was, this seemed hard.
“They did not care enough for me to miss me,” he said, aloud, gently. “I suppose I was not worth it. I had been in prison. I was a wicked man. I must not blame them.”
And again:
“They would have come if they had known. They would not have let mediealone. I don’tthinkshewould have done that. I wonder where she is? Nobody has missed me—that is all. I must not mind.”
Growing weaker, he thought less and prayed more. He prayed, at last, almost all his time. When he did not pray, he slept. When he could not sleep, he prayed. He addressed God with that sublime familiarity of his, which fell from his lips with no more irreverence than the kiss of a child falling upon its mother’s hand or neck.
The murderer, the felon, the outcast, talked with the Almighty Holiness, as a man talketh with his friends. The deserted, distrusted, dying creature believed himself to be trusted by the Being who had bestowed on him the awful gift of life.
“Lord,” he said, softly, “I guess I can bear it. I’d like to see somebody—but I’ll make out to get along.... Lord! I’m pretty weak. I know all about these spasms. You get delirious next thing, you know. Then you either get better or you never do. It’ll be decided by Sunday night. Lord! Dear Lord!” he added, with a tender pause, “don’tYouforget me! I hopeYou’llmiss me enough to hunt me up.”
It grew dark early on Saturday night. The sun sank under a thin, deceptive web of cloud. The shadow beneath the palmetto grew long over Scip’s fresh grave. The stars were dim and few. The wind rose, and the lights in the city, where watchers wept over their sick, trembled on the frailbreeze, and seemed to be multiplied, like objects seen through tears.
Through the wooden shutter, Zerviah could see the lights, and the lonely palmetto, and the grave. He could see those few cold stars.
He thought, while his thoughts remained his own, most tenderly and longingly of those for whom he had given his life. He remembered how many keen cares of their own they had to carry, how many ghastly deeds and sights to do and bear. It was not strange that he should not be missed. Who was he?—a disgraced, unfamiliar man, among their kin and neighborhood. Why should they think of him? he said.
Yet he was glad that he could remember them. He wished his living or his dying could help them any. Things that his patients had said to him, looks that healing eyes had turned on him, little signs of human love and leaning, came back to him as he lay there, and stood around his bed, like people, in the dark hut.
“They loved me,” he said: “Lord, as true as I’m alive, they did! I’m glad I lived long enough to save life,to save life! I’m much obliged to You for that! I wish there was something else I could do for them.... Lord! I’d be willing to die if it would help them any. If I thought I could do anything that way, toward sending them a frost—
“No,” he added, “that ain’t reasonable. A frost and a human life ain’t convertible coin. He don’t do unreasonable things. May be I’ve lostmy head already. But I’d be glad to. That’s all. I suppose I canaskYou for a frost.That’sreason.
“Lord God of earth and heaven! that made the South and North, the pestilence and destruction, the sick and well, the living and the dead, have mercy on us miserable sinners! Have mercy on the folks that pray to You, and on the folks that don’t! Remember the old graves, and the new ones, and the graves that are to be opened if this hellish heat goes on, and send us a blessed frost, O Lord,as an act of humanity! And if that ain’t the way to speak to You, remember I haven’t been a praying man long enough to learn the language very well,—and that I’m pretty sick,—but that I would be glad to die—to give them—a great, white, holy frost. Lord, a frost! Lord, a cool, white, clean frost, for these poor devils that have borne so much!”
At midnight of that Saturday he dozed and dreamed. He dreamed of what he had thought while Scip was sick: of what it was like, to be holy; and, sadly waking, thought of holy people—good women and honest men, who had never done a deadly deed.
“I cannot be holy,” thought Zerviah Hope; “but I can pray for frost.” So he tried to pray for frost. But by that time he had grown confused, and his will wandered pitifully, and he saw strange sights in the little hut. It was as if he were not alone. Yet no one had come in.Shecould not come at midnight. Strange—howstrange! Who was that who walked about the hut? Who stood and looked at him? Who leaned to him? Who brooded over him? Who put arms beneath him? Who looked at him, as those look who love the sick too much to shrink from them?
“I don’t know You,” said Zerviah, in a distinct voice. Presently he smiled. “Yes, I guess I do. I see now. I’m not used to You. I never saw You before. You are Him I’ve heered about—God’s Son! God’s Son, You’ve taken a great deal of trouble to come here after me. Nobody else came. You’re the only one that has remembered me. You’re very good to me.
“... Yes, I remember. They made a prisoner ofYou. Why, yes! They desertedYou. They letYoudie by Yourself. What did You do it for? I don’t know much about theology. I am not an educated man. I never prayed till I come South.... I forget—What did You do it for?”
A profound and solemn silence replied.
“Well,” said the sick man, breaking it in a satisfied tone, as if he had been answered, “I wasn’t worth it ... but I’m glad You came. I wish they had a frost, poor things!Youwon’t go away? Well, I’m glad. Poor things! Poor things! I’ll take Your hand, if You’ve no objections.”
After a little time, he added, in a tone of unutterable tenderness and content:
“DearLord!” and said no more.
It was a quiet night. The stars rode on as if there were no task but the tasks of stars in all theuniverse, and no sorrow keener than their sorrow, and no care other than their motion and their shining. The web of cloud floated like exhaling breath between them and the earth. It grew cooler before the dawn. The leaves of the palmetto over Scip’s grave seemed to uncurl, and grow lax, and soften. The dust still flew heavily, but the wind rose.
The Sunday-bells rang peacefully. The sick heard them, and the convalescent and the well. The dying listened to them before they left. On the faces of the dead, too, there came the look of those who hear.
The bells tolled, too, that Sunday. They tolled almost all the afternoon. The young Northerner, Dr. Remane, was gone,—a reticent, brave young man,—and the heroic telegraph operator. Saturday night they buried her. Sunday, “Bobby” took her place at the wires, and spelled out, with shaking fingers, the cries of Calhoun to the wide, well world.
By sunset, all the bells had done ringing and done tolling. There was a clear sky, with cool colors. It seemed almost cold about Scip’s hut. The palmetto lifted its faint head. The dust slept. It was not yet dark when a little party from the city rode up, searching for the dreary place. They had ridden fast. Dr. Frank was with them, and the lady, Marian Dare. She rode at their head. She hurried nervously on. She was pale, and still weak. The chairman of the Relief Committee was with her, and the sub-committee and others.
Dr. Dare pushed on through the swinging doorof the hut. She entered alone. They saw the backward motion of her gray-sleeved wrist, and came no farther, but removed their hats and stood. She knelt beside the bed, and put her hand upon his eyes. God is good, after all. Let us hope that they knew her before they closed.
She came out, and tried to tell about it, but broke down, and sobbed before them all.
“It’s a martyr’s death,” said the chief, and added solemnly, “Let us pray.”
He knelt, and the others with him, between the buried negro and the unburied nurse, and thanked God for the knowledge and the recollection of the holy life which this man had lived among them in their hour of need.
They buried him, as they must, and hurried homeward to their living, comforting one another for his memory as they could.
As for him, he rested, after her hand had fallen on his eyes. He who had known so deeply the starvation of sleeplessness, slept well that night.
In the morning, when they all awoke, these of the sorrowing city here, and those of the happy city yonder; when they took up life again with its returning sunrise,—the sick and the well, the free and the fettered, the living and the dead,—the frost lay, cool, white, blessed, on his grave.
By Alvey A. Adee.
⁂Putnam’s Magazine, August, 1870.
There was something about the wholesome sleepiness of Freiberg, in Saxony, that fitted well with the lazy nature of Ronald Wyde. So, having run down there to spend a day or two among the students and the mines, and taking a liking to the quaint, unmodernized town, he bodily changed his plans of autumn-travel, gave up a cherished scheme of Russian vagabondage, had his baggage sent from Dresden, and made ready to settle down and drowse away three or four months in idleness and not over-arduous study. And this move of his led to the happening of a very strange and seemingly unreal event in his life.
Ronald Wyde was then about twenty-five or six years old, rather above the medium height, with thick blue-black hair that he had an artist-trick of allowing to ripple down to his neck, dark hazeleyes that were almost too deeply recessed in their bony orbits, and a troublesome growth of beard that, close-shaven as he always was, showed in strong blue outline through the thin and rather sallow skin. His address was singularly pleasing, and his wide experience of life, taught him by years of varied travel, made him a good deal of a cosmopolitan in his views and ways, which caused him to be looked upon as a not over-safe companion for young men of his own age or under.
Having made up his mind to winter in Freiberg, his first step was to quit the little hotel, with its mouldy stone-vaulted entrance and its columned dining-room, under whose full-centered arches close beery and smoky fumes lingered persistently, and seek quieter student-lodgings in the heart of the town. His choice was mainly influenced by a thin-railed balcony, twined through and through by the shoots of a vigorous Virginia creeper, that flamed and flickered in the breezy October sunsets in strong relief against the curtains that drifted whitely out and in through the open window. So, with the steady-going and hale old Frau Spritzkrapfen he took up his quarters, fully persuading himself that he did so for the sake of the stray home-breaths that seemed to stir the scarlet vine-leaves more gently for him, and ignoring pretty Lottchen’s great, earnest Saxon eyes as best he could.
A sunny morning followed his removal to Frau Spritzkrapfen’s tidy home. There had been aslight rain in the early night, and the footways were yet bright and moist in patches that the slanting morning rays were slowly coaxing away. Ronald Wyde, having set his favorite books handily on the dimity-draped table, which comprised for him the process of getting to rights, and having given more than one glance of amused wonderment at the naïve blue-and-white scriptural tiles that cased his cumbrous four-story earthenware stove, and smiled lazily at poor Adam’s obvious and sudden indigestion, even while the uneaten half-apple remained in his guilty hand, he stepped out on his balcony, leaned his elbows among the crimson leaves, and took in the healthful morning air in great draughts. It was a Sunday; the bells of the gray minster hard by were iterating their clanging calls to the simple townsfolk to come and be droned to in sleepy German gutturals from the carved, pillar-hung pulpit inside. Looking down, he saw thick-ankled women cluttering past in loose wooden-soled shoes, and dumpy girls with tow-braids primly dangling to their hips, convoying sturdy Dutch-built luggers of younger brothers up the easy slope that led to the church and the bells. Presently Frau Spritzkrapfen and dainty Lottchen, rosy with soap and health, slipped through the doorway beneath him out into the little church-bound throng, and, as they disappeared, left the house and street somehow unaccountably alone. Feeling this, Ronald Wyde determined on a stroll.
Something in the Sabbath stillness around him led Ronald away from the swift clang and throbbing hum of the bells and in the direction of the old cemetery. Passing through the clumsy tower-gate that lifts its grimy bulk sullenly, like a huge head-stone over the grave of a dead time of feudalism, he reached the burial-ground and entered the quiet enclosure. The usual touching reverence of the Germans for their dead was strikingly manifest around him. The humbler mounds, walled up with rough stones a foot or two above the pathway level, carried on their crests little gardens of gay and inexpensive plants; while on the tall wooden crosses at their head hung yellow wreaths, half hiding the hopeful legend, “Wiedersehen.” The more pretentious slabs bore vases filled with fresh flowers; while in the grate-barred vaults, that skirted the ground like the arches of a cloister, lay rusty heaps of long-since mouldered bloom, topped by newer wreaths tossed lovingly in to wilt and turn to dust in their turn, like those cast in before them in memory of that other dust asleep below.
Turning aside from the central walk that halved the cemetery, Ronald strolled along, his hands in his pockets, his eyes listlessly fixed on the orange-colored fumes and rolling smoke that welled out of tall chimneys in the hollow beyond, an idle student-tune humming on his lips, and his thoughts nowhere, and everywhere, at once. Happening to look away from the dun smoke-trail for an instant, he found something of greater interestclose at hand. An old man stooped stiffly over a simple mound, busied among the flowers that hid it, and by his side crouched a young girl, perhaps fourteen years old, who peered up at Ronald with questioning, velvet-brown eyes. The old man heard the intruder’s steps crunching in the damp gravel, and slowly looked up too.
“Good morning, mein Herr,” said Ronald, pleasantly.
The old man remained for an instant blinking nervously, and shading his eyes from the full sunlight that fell on his face. A quiet face it was, and very old, seamed and creased by mazy wrinkles that played at aimless cross-purposes with each other, beginning and ending nowhere. His thick beard and thin, curved nose looked just a little Jewish, and seemed at variance with his pale blue eyes that were still bright in spite of age. And yet, bearded as he was, there was a lurking expression about his features that bordered upon effeminacy, and made the treble of his voice sound even more thin and womanish as he answered Wyde’s greeting.
“Good morning, too, mein Herr. A stranger to our town, I see.”
“Yes; but soon not to be called one, I hope. I am here for the winter.”
“A cold season—a cold season; our northern winters are very chilling to an old man’s blood.” And slouching together into a tired stoop, he resumed his simple task of knotting a few flowersinto a clumsy nosegay. Ronald stood and watched him with a vague interest. Presently, the flowers being clumped to his liking, the old man pried himself upright by getting a good purchase with his left hand in the small of his back, and so deliberately that Ronald almost fancied he heard him creak. The girl rose too, and drew her thin shawl over her shoulders.
“You Germans love longer than we,” said Ronald, glancing at the flowers that trembled in the old man’s bony fingers, and then downwards to the quiet grave; “a lifetime of easy-going love and a year or two of easier-forgetting are enough for us.”
“Should I forget my own flesh and blood?” asked the old man, simply.
Ronald paused a moment, and, pointing downwards, said:
“Your daughter, then, I fancy?”
“Yes.”
“Long dead?”
“Very long; more than fifty years.”
Ronald stared, but said nothing audibly. Inwardly he whispered something about being devilish glad to make the wandering Jew’s acquaintance, rattled the loose gröschen in his pocket, and turned to follow the tottering old man and firm-footed child down the walk. After a dozen paces they halted before a more ambitious tombstone, on which Ronald could make out the well-remembered name of Plattner. The childtook the flowers and laid them reverently on the stone.
“It seems to me almost like arriving at the end of a pilgrimage,” said Ronald, “when I stand by the grave of a man of science. Perhaps you knew him, mein Herr?”
“He was my pupil.”
“Whew!” thought Ronald, “that makes my friend here a centenarian at least.”
“My pupil and friend,” the feeble voice went on; “and, more than that, my daughter’s first lover, and only one.”
“Ach so!” drawled Ronald.
“And now, on her death-day, I take these poor flowers from her to him, as I have done all these years.”
Something in the pathetic earnestness of his companion touched Ronald Wyde, and he forthwith took his hands out of his pockets, and didn’t try to whistle inaudibly—which was a great deal for him to do.
“I know Plattner well by his works,” he said; “I once studied mineralogy for nearly a month.”
“You love science, then?”
“Yes; like every thing else, for diversion.”
“It was different with him,” quavered the old man, pointing unsteadily to the head-stone. “Science grew to be his one passion, and many discoveries rewarded him for his devotion. He was groping on the track of a far greater achievement when he died.”
“May I ask what it was?” said Ronald, now fairly interested.
“The creation and isolation of the principle of Life!”
This was too much for Ronald Wyde; down dived his restless hands into his trowsers’ pockets again, and the gröschen rattled as merrily as before.
“I have made quite a study of biology, and all that sort of thing,” said he; “and, although a good deal of a skeptic, and inclined to follow Huxley, I can’t bring myself to conceive of life without organism. Such theorizing is, to my mind, on a par with the illogical search for the philosopher’s stone and a perpetual motor.”
The old man’s eyes sparkled as he turned full upon Ronald.
“You dismiss the subject very airily, my young friend,” he cried; “but let me tell you that I—I, whom you see here—have grappled with such problems through a weary century, and have conquered one of them.”
“And that one is—”
“The one that conquered Plattner!”
“Do I understand you to claim that you have discovered the life-principle?”
“Yes.”
“Will you permit an utter stranger to inquire what is its nature?”
“Certainly. It is twofold. The ultimate principle of life is carbon; the cause of its combinationwith water, or rather with the two gaseous elements of water, and the development of organized existence therefrom, is electricity.”
Ronald Wyde shrugged his broad shoulders a little, and absently replied,
“All I can say, mein Herr, is, that you’ve got the bulge on me.”
“I beg your pardon—”
“Excuse me; I unconsciously translated an Americanism. I mean that I don’t quite understand you.”
“Which means that you do not believe me. It is but natural at your age, when one doubts as if by instinct. Would you be convinced?”
“Nothing would please me better.”
With the same painful effort as before, the old man straightened himself and made a piercing clairvoyant examination into and through Ronald Wyde’s eyes, as if reading the brain beyond them.
“I think I can trust you,” he mumbled at last. “Come with me.”
Leaning on the young girl’s arm, the old philosopher faltered through the cemetery and into the town, followed by Wyde, his hands again pocketed for safety. Groups of released church-goers, sermon-fed, met them, and once in a while some stout burgher would nod patronizingly to Ronald’s guides, and get in response a shaky, sidelong roll of the old man’s head, as if it were mounted on a weak spiral spring. Further on they intersected a knot of students, who eyed themaskance and exchanged remarks in an undertone. Keeping on deeper into the foul heart of the town, they passed through swarms of idle children playing sportlessly, as poverty is apt to play, in the dank shadows of the narrow street. They seemed incited to mirth and ribaldry by the sight of Ronald’s new friend, and one even ventured to hurl a clod at him; but this striking Ronald instead, and he facing promptly to the hostile quarter from whence it came, caused a sudden slinking of the crowd into unknown holes, like a horde of rats, and the street was for a time empty save for the little party that threaded it. Ronald began to think that the old man’s sanity was gravely called in doubt by the townsfolk, and would readily have backed out of his adventure but for the curiosity that had now got the upper hand of him.
Presently the old man sidled into a dingy doorway, like a tired beast run to earth, and Ronald followed him, not without a wish that the architect had provided for a more efficient lighting of the sombre passage-way in which he found himself. A sharp turn to the right after a dozen groping-paces, a narrow stairway, a bump or two against unexpected saliences of rough mortared wall, two steps upward and one very surprising step downward through a cavernous doorway that took away Ronald’s breath for a moment, and sent it back again with a hot, creeping wave of sudden perspiration all over him, as is the waywith missteps, and two more sharp turns, brought the three into a black no-thoroughfare of a hall, whose further end was closed by a locked door. The girl here rubbed a brimstone abomination of a match into a mal-odorous green glow, and by its help the old man got a tortuous key into the snaky opening in the great lock, creakily shot back its bolt, swung open the door, and motioned Ronald to enter.
He found himself in a long and rather narrow room, with a high ceiling, duskily lighted by three wide windows that were thickly webbed and dusted, like ancestral bottles of fine crusty Port. A veritable den it was, filled with what seemed to be the wrecks of philosophical apparatus dating back two or three generations—ill-fated ventures on the treacherous main of science. Here a fat-bellied alembic lolled lazily over in a gleamy sand-bath, like a beach-lost galleon at ebb-tide; and there a heap of broken porcelain-tubing and shreds of crucibles lay like bleaching ship-ribs on a sullen shore. Beyond, by the middle window, stood a furnace, fireless, and clogged with gray ashes. Two or three solid old-time tables, built when joiners were more lavish of oaken timber than nowadays, stood hopelessly littered with retorts, filtering funnels, lamps, ringstands, and squat-beakers of delicate glass, caked with long-dried sediment, all alike dust-smirched. Ronald involuntarily sought for some huge Chaldaic tome, conveniently open at a favorite spell, or a handycrocodile or two dangling from the square beams overhead, but saw nothing more formidable than a stray volume of “Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.” Taking this up and glancing at its fly-leaf, he saw a name written in spidery German script, almost illegible from its shakiness—“Max Lebensfunke.”
“Your name?” he asked.
“Yes, mein Herr,” answered the old man, taking the volume and caressing it like a live thing in his fumbling hands. “This book was given to me by the great Kant himself,” he added.
Reverently replacing it, he advanced a few steps toward the middle of the room. Ronald followed, and, turning away from the windows, looked further around him. In striking contrast to the undisturbed disorder, so redolent of middle-age alchemy, was the big table that flanked the laboratory through its whole length. It began with a powerful galvanic battery, succeeded by a wiry labyrinth of coils and helices, with little keys in front of them like a telegraph-office retired from business; these gave place to many-necked jars wired together by twos and threes, like oath-bound patriots plotting treason; beyond them stood a great glass globe, connected with a sizable air-pump, and filled with a complexity of shiny wires and glassware; next loomed up a huge induction-magnet, carefully insulated on solid glass supports; and at the further extremity of the table lay—a corpse.
Ronald Wyde, in spite of his many-sided experience of dissection-rooms, and morgues, and other ghastlinesses to which he had long since accustomed himself from principle, drew back at the sight—perhaps because he had come to this strange place to clutch the world-old mystery of the life-essence, and found himself, instead, confronted on its threshold by the equal mystery of death.
Herr Lebensfunke smiled feebly at this movement.
“A subject received this morning from Berlin,” he said, in answer to Wyde’s look of inquiry. “A sad piece of extravagance, mein Herr—a luxury to which I can rarely afford to treat myself.”
Ronald Wyde bent over the body and looked into its face. A rough, red face, that had seemingly seen forty years of low-lived dissipation. The blotched skin and bleary eyes told of debauchery and drunkenness, and a slight alcoholic fœtidness was unpleasantly perceptible, as from the breath of one who sleeps away the effects of a carouse.
“I hope you don’t think of restoring this soaked specimen to life?” said Ronald.
“That is still beyond me,” answered the old man, mournfully. “As yet I have not created life of a higher grade than that of the lowest zoöphytes.”
“Do you claim to have done as much as that?”
“It is not an idle claim,” said Herr Lebensfunke, solemnly. “Look at this, if you doubt.”
“This” was the great crystal globe that rosefrom the middle of the long table, and dominated its lesser accessories, as some great dome swells above the clustered houses of a town. Tubes passing through its walls met in a smaller central globe half filled with a colorless liquid. Beneath this, and half encircling it, was an intricate maze of bright wire; and two other wires dipped into it, touching the surface of the liquid with their platinum tips. Within the liquid pulsed a shapeless mass of almost transparent spongy tissue.
“You see an aggregation of cells possessed of life—of a low order, it is true, but none the less life,” said the philosopher, proudly. “These were created from water chemically pure, with the exception of a trace of ammonia, and impregnated with liquid carbon, by the combined action of heat and induced electricity, in vacuo. Look!”
He pressed one of the keys before him. Presently the wire began to glow with a faint light, which increased in intensity till the coil flamed into pure whiteness. Removing his finger, the current ceased to flow, and the wire grew rapidly cool.
“I passed the whole strength of sixty cups through it to show you its action. Ordinarily, with one or two carbon cells, and refining the current by triple induction, the temperature is barely blood-warm.”
“Pardon an interruption,” said Ronald. “You spoke of liquid carbon; does it exist?”
“Yes; here is some in this phial. See it—how pure, how transparent! how it loves and hoardsthe light!” The old man held the phial up as he spoke, and turned it round and round. “See how it flashes! No wonder, for it is the diamond, liquid and uncrystallized. Think how these fools of men have called diamonds precious above all gems through these many weary years, and showered them on their kings, or tossed them to their mistresses’ feet, never dreaming that the silly stone they lauded was inert, crystallized life!”
“Can’t you crystallize diamonds yourself?” asked Wyde, “and make Freiberg a Golconda and yourself a Crœsus?”
“It could be done, after the lapse of thousands of years,” replied Herr Lebensfunke. “Place undiluted liquid carbon in that inner globe, keep the coil at a white heat, and if Adam had started the process, his heir-at-law would have a koh-i-noor to-day, and a nice lawsuit for its possession.”
Ronald Wyde bent toward the globe once more and examined the throbbing mass closely, whistling softly meanwhile.
“If you can create this cellular life, why not develop it still higher into an organism?”
“Because I can only create life—not soul. Years ago I was a freethinker, now my discoveries have made me a deist; for I found that my cells, living as they were, and possessing undoubted parietal circulation, were not germs; and though they might cluster into a bulk like this, as bubbles do to form froth, to evolve an animal or plantfrom them was far beyond me; that needs what we call soul. But, in searching blindly for this higher power, I grasped a greater discovery than any I had hoped for—the power to isolate life from its bodily organism.”
“You have to keep the bottle carefully corked, I should imagine,” laughed Ronald.
“Not quite,” said Herr Lebensfunke, joining in the laugh. “Life is not glue. My grand discovery is the life-magnet.”
“Which has the post of honor on your table here, has it not?” inquired Ronald, drawing his hand from his pocket and pointing to the insulated coil.
The old man glanced keenly at his hand as he did so; at which Ronald seemed confused, and pocketed it again abruptly.
“Yes, that is the life-magnet. You see this bent glass tube surrounded by the helix? That tube contains liquid carbon. I pass through the helix a current of induced electricity, generated by the action of these sixty Bunsen cups upon a succession of coils with carbon cores, and the magnet becomes charged with soulless life. I reverse the stream—what was positive now is negative, and the same magnet will absorb life from a living being to an extent only to be measured by thousands of millions.”
“Then, what effect is produced on the body you pump the life from?”
“Death.”
“And what becomes of the soul?”
“I don’t quite know. I fancy, however, that the magnet absorbs that too.”
“Can it give it back?”
“Certainly; otherwise my life-magnet would belie its name, and be simply an ingenious and expensive instrument of death. By reversing the conditions, I can restore both soul and life to the body from which I drew them, or to another body, even after the lapse of several days.”
“Have you ever done so?”
“I have.”
Ronald looked reflectively downward to his boot-toe, but seemed to find nothing there—except a boot-toe.
“I say, my friend,” he spoke at last, “haven’t you got a pin you can stick in me? I’d like to know if I’m dreaming.”
“I can convince you better than by pins,” replied Herr Lebensfunke. “Let me see that hand you hide so carefully.”
Ronald Wyde slowly drew it from his pocket, as reluctantly as though it were a grudged charity dole, and extended it to the old man. Its little finger was gone.
“A defect that I am foolishly sensitive about,” said he. “A childish freak—playing with edged tools, you know. A boy-playmate chopped it off by accident: I cut his head open with his own hatchet, and made an idiot of him for life—that’s all.”
“I could do this,” said Herr Lebensfunke, pausing on each word as if it were somewhat heavy, and had to be lifted out of his cramped chest by force; “I could draw your entity into that magnet, leaving you side by side with this corpse. I could dissect a finger from that same corpse, attach it to your own dead hand by a little of that palpitating life-mass you have seen, pass an electric stream through it, and a junction would be effected in three or four days. I could then restore you to existence, whole, and not maimed as now.”
“I don’t quite like the idea of dying, even for a day,” answered Wyde. “Couldn’t you contrive to lend me a body while you are mending my own?”
“You can take that one, if you like.”
Ronald Wyde looked once more at the sodden features of the corpse, and smiled lugubriously.
“A mighty shabby old customer,” he said, “and I doubt if I could feel at home in his skin; but I’m willing to risk it for the sake of the novelty of the thing.”
The old philosopher’s thin face lit up with pleasure.
“You consent, then?” he chuckled in his womanish treble.
“Of course I do. Begin at once, and have done with it.”
“Not now, mein Herr; some modifications must be made in the connections—mere matters of detail. Come again to-night.”
“At what hour?”
“At ten. Mein Vögelein, show the Herr the way out.”
The girl, who had been moving restlessly about the room all this time, with her wild brown eyes fixed now on Ronald, now on the old man, and oftener in a shy, inquisitive stare on the corpse, lit a dusty chemical lamp and led the way down the awkward passages and stairs. Ronald tried to start a conversation with her as he followed.
“You are too young, my birdling, to be accustomed to such sights as this upstairs.”
“Birdling is not too young, she’s almost fourteen,” said the girl, proudly. “And she likes it, too; it makes her think of mother. Mother went to sleep on that table, mein Herr.”
“Poor thing! she’s half-witted,” thought Wyde as he passed into the street. “By-by, birdie.”