LITTLE MARCUS
LITTLE MARCUS
LITTLE MARCUS
Captain Fitzhugh told me this story as we sat in the last seat of the last car of the Empire State Express, west-bound, and flung off the line of the Hudson River Railway from the reel of the gilt-iron observation-car just outside. Misty mountains lay on turquoise sky, cotton-wool clouds hung over the broad silver of the river; patches of vivid green—yellow-green of juicy grass, gray-green of shadowy willows, black-green of pine-trees—shouted aloud of the spring. “There’s the old Point!” Captain Fitzhugh said suddenly, breaking off a sentence to say it.
The low mass of the West Point stables lay gray across the river, and beside it the round-arched end of the Riding School. The Memorial Building, new and magnificent, stood higher up, and the slender shaft of the War Monument shot above the trees by the Parade Ground. A bit of the hotel showed near it. If you knew the Point you could see the whole well-groomed place through the scrap of foreground—thecrossing paths, the sweeping drives, the big empty Parade, the row of officers’ quarters that looked across from white-curtained, hospitable windows.
Captain Fitzhugh shook his head with a reminiscent smile, and stared dreamily at the fast vanishing hillside. Then it was gone, and he turned to me. “I remembered a tale of my youth in that two minutes,” he explained.
“I was looking at Flirtation Walk and thinking of the blue eyes and brown that have made my poor old leather heart beat, under those trees. Then I got around to the corps, and my class, and then suddenly I remembered little Marcus. Do you think it would bore you to hear about little Marcus?” It was unnecessary to answer. He went on. “It was the worst hole I was ever in, and I used to be an expert on holes. Duncan was my wife that year—Jack Duncan of the ‘Fighting 9th.’”
“Your wife that year!”
“You don’t know the expression?” asked Captain Fitzhugh. “The cadets call their roommates wives.” He smiled. “Well, then, Duncan was mywife, you see, and Hill and Carruthers were across the hall, and we four were thicker than thieves. The tactical officers had a bad time with us, for what one didn’t think of another did, and the rest covered up his tracks.”
“What did you do?” I asked, settling myself comfortably into my blue velvet chair.
“We raised Cain. We did all the old tricks, and a good lot of new ones out of our own mighty intellects. We kept an afternoon tea-table up the chimney all winter, not that we liked tea, but we liked to break regulations. Then Carruthers went to New York every Saturday night for months—all one winter—in civilian dress-clothes which he wasn’t supposed to have. His patent leathers lived in my arctic overshoes. There was much other nonsense, but the liveliest was the little Marcus episode. It began when Hill and Carruthers were in our room one night, and we got speculating how far it was possible for cadets—for us—to go. We discussed old scrapes and suggested new ones, and finally one of the four struck out the great idea.”
Captain Fitzhugh’s easy tones went on, full ofpresent joy of life and past whirlwinds of mischief, and as he talked the Hudson River rolled away unseen, for the tale held me. Yet the words of it are as lost as the sunshine of that May morning. The atmosphere of the post, and flavor of cadets’ quarters, the West Point argot, not to be reproduced, the little touches which make local color, these could be rightly given only by an army officer and an ex-cadet. So I must tell the story as it stays in my memory—the simple tale of little Marcus.
I could see the four soldierly lads, in their gray uniforms, as Captain Fitzhugh talked, in the bare, orderly room, and I could imagine how their jaws dropped as the inspired one brought out “the great idea”; for young Machiavelli, searching for a deed of daring, had suggested that they should keep a baby in their rooms for a week. The grotesqueness of the thought made it the more appealing, and at once they planned a beginning. Carruthers was singled out to correspond with an orphan asylum. His aunt in New York was interested in one and he had been there with her and remembered the address. On the instant he wrote, and his letter ran:
“Matron St. Winifred’s Orphan Asylum.
“Dear Madam: My sister and I, being maiden ladies of thirty and seventy years of age—”
“Gosh!” remarked Hill. “Sisters! Why didn’t you make them grandmother and grandchild?”
“What?” Carruthers looked up annoyed. “What’s the trouble? Oh—well, that is far apart. I’ll join the dames.” He scratched a figure. “Fifty and fifty-one—that’s safe, isn’t it?”
“Go ahead,” was the consensus of opinion.
“Of fifty and fifty-one years of age, and being very lonely alone together, as we have neither of us ever succeeded in getting married—”
“Or seldom,” murmured Hill.
Carruthers glanced sternly at him.
“Desire to purchase or obtain by gift a sound, kind, and well-broken child, of about one year, light-colored preferred, with good wind and good eyes, and, if possible, no vices.”
“Send that to a horse exchange,” advised Jack Duncan.
“Tommy-rot!” said Carruthers politely, and went on.
“We would like to have such child sent to us for a week on approval, and guarantee to treat it with perfect kindness and hygiene. As reference for the integrity and spotlessness of our characters we are happy to name—”
“Who the deuce are we happy to name?” inquired Carruthers despondently. “That queers it.”
There was deep thought. “Here’s a name,” suggested Duncan. “It sounds like those two nice old ladies, the Misses Bellingham, who live down near Highland Falls. Just sign it their name and give the chaplain for reference.”
“The chaplain!” The boys gasped.
“Just the thing,” said Duncan confidently. “He’ll give them a rattling recommend, and he’s too much of a gentleman to tell them their charactersare questioned. Besides, he’ll never think of it again after he mails the letter. I know the chaplain. He’s a good sort—he doesn’t fuss.”
“Proceed!” ordered the chorus.
Carruthers read aloud as he wrote:
“we are—happy to—name—that noble and uplifting—leader of—religious thought—”
“The chaplain would swat you if he heard you call him that.”
“Hill,” said Carruthers, with irritation, “you’ve done nothing but criticise and kick. If you can write better, do it. As far as I can see there’s not a fault in this letter, so far. Now let me finish. Where was I? Oh—‘leader of religious thought.’ That’s enough about the chaplain.
“Anticipating news of our sweet charge, who will become, we hope, the support of our declining years, we remain,
“Sincerely yours in hope,“The Misses Bellingham.
“Now, Hill, any more criticism?”
“If the asylum people think the old ladies are going to make the child support them, they won’t send it,” objected Hill gloomily. “And it’s not etiquettical to sign your name ‘The Misses Bellingham.’ Ought to sign it their front names and no title.”
“But I don’t know their front names,” complained Carruthers.
“Might be Letitia and Mary,” suggested Duncan. “Make ’em that and have the letter sent in charge of Fitzhugh, else it will go straight to Letitia.”
“Why in charge of me?” Fitzhugh straightened suspiciously.
“Because you’ve been sitting there asleep, and haven’t helped a hair, and it’s time we made you,” his wife answered, with severity. “Georgy, put in a P. S., and say it’s more convenient, owing to the storms, to have an answer sent in charge of Letitia’s and Mary’s nephew, Cadet Theodore Fitzhugh,” he directed the author.
Carruthers scribbled obediently.
“Why the storms?” Hill ventured. “There aren’t any storms.”
“Oh, don’t be such a fuss!” said Duncan. “Of course there aren’t, but it prevents suspicion to give reasons, and they won’t investigate our weather.”
There was silence for a moment while the boys stood over Carruthers, an erect and stately young trio in their gray and gold, and contemplated his finished labors. Duncan and Fitzhugh, leaning on each other’s shoulders, nodded with satisfaction, and Carruthers grinned with modest pride.
“Good work, lad!” said Fitzhugh, and slapped the scribe.
But Hill put his lips together. “Now look here!” he said; “that letter’s no good.”
“No good!” echoed Duncan and Fitzhugh, and Carruthers asked frowning:
“What do you mean?”
“Why, this”—Hill sat on the edge of the chair and put his elbows on the table aggressively—“it’s not businesslike. It’s drivel, and it’s too long. You ought to talk to the point and not put on frills.”
Carruthers threw down his pencil. “All right then—you do it.”
Duncan, the conservative, was wary. “Your letter’s a good one,Ithink, Georgy,” he said; “but we want the best possible. Hill might have something still better up his sleeve, and we’ll need the devil and all his works to worry us through this. Take some paper, Mountain-tops, and see if you can beat Georgy.”
Hill pulled the pad toward him, helped himself to the pencil, and wrote fiercely. Then, running his fingers through his thick black locks with an air, he read:
“Matron St. Winifred’s Orphan Asylum.
“Dear Madam: Please notify if you can send to address below, on approval for one week, one white child, nine months old, weight thirty pounds, no teeth, blue eyes. Adoption to follow if satisfactory. Refer to Reverend Edgar Stuyvesant, Chaplain.
“Very truly,“(Misses)Letitia and Mary Bellingham.“CareCadet Theodore Fitzhugh,“U. S. Military Academy,“West Point, N. Y.”
“There!” Hill looked at his colleagues to mark the effect.
Duncan voiced the sentiments of the three.
“Won’t do, Topsy.” He shook his head gently but firmly. “You’d never get one to order exactly like that. What do you think they’d do if they hadn’t it in stock—whittle the kid to thirty pounds? And pull its teeth? It’s all right, you know, if you were ordering chickens, but Georgy’s has more feeling, more what you’d expect from old ladies with a kid in their eye. I think we’ll send Georgy’s letter, won’t we, boys? Here, you—copy it.”
And Carruthers was planted with pen and ink while the others discussed ways and means.
“It’ll need peculiar things to drink,” said Hill, undiscouraged by his lack of success. “My sister has one that size, little Jimmie, and it drinks—let’s see—something you see advertised. I don’t know but it’s some sort of whiskey.”
“Oh, no,” said Duncan decidedly. “I’m sure it couldn’t. Awful way to begin to raise a kid. I’m against that.”
“Well, perhaps I’ve got it twisted,” acknowledged Hill. “But it’s one of those things.”
“Little Jimmie has naps,” went on Hill. “They sing him to sleep.”
“Holy Moses!” groaned Fitzhugh, who was the musician. “I see myself singing this thing to sleep!”
“And they change little Jimmie’s dresses afternoons, and put on clean ones—why, sometimes he’s dressed as much as four times a day.” Hill’s face was rapt with reminiscent pride.
“Look here, Topsy,” said Fitzhugh nervously; “you’d better not get the idea that this kid is to be modelled on your little Jimmie. Not much. If it comes out alive from its outing to the country, it’s all we ask. Most of the time we’ve got to keep it up the chimney.”
“Let’s turn Wipes on the case,” suggested Jack Duncan, the fruitful thinker. “He has kids of his own, and he can get points from his wife. He’ll keep it dark, too.”
For Wipes was an old collaborator in crime. He was what the cadets call a “policeman,” an orderly detailed to take care of cadets’ quarters.
“Little Jimmie has a crib, white iron and brass,” Hill struck in, quite carried away by poetic possibilities. “We’ll have to have something for ouryoung one to sleep in. And toys, you know. I could write my sister for some of little Jimmie’s—”
“Hill,” broke in Fitzhugh, “cut it out. You’re losing your mind. Thought you wanted to be businesslike. This infant isn’t going to live in luxury. It’s going to live, wehope, but that’s all. Leave your sister’s kid lay.”
Duncan, tactful as always, put in his word. “Anyway, there’s no use settling things till we hear from Mrs. St. Winifred. First, we’ll mail Georgy’s letter. Then, if they’ll let us have the kid, we’ll call in Wipes and plan our campaign with that breadth of foresight which has before led our banners to victory.”
Five days later saw Fitzhugh a widowed sojourner in his room, with silence across the hall where Hill’s and Carruthers’s steps were wont to echo. Scarlet fever had broken out in the academy, and the three, Jack Duncan, Carruthers, and Hill, were among the first to be sent to the infirmary. The cases were light, but the disease broke up the gay partnership, and Fitzhugh was low-spirited.
As he came into his room there were letters on his table. He took them up half-heartedly and slipped them through his hands. Two bills, a letter from his mother and—he glanced at the printed words in the corner of the other envelope. “St. Winifred’s Orphan Asylum.” His blood ran cold. In the worry of his friends’ illness he had entirely forgotten that letter of Georgy Carruthers’s, mailed the morning after the council of war. He held the long envelope by two fingers, and stared at it as if afraid to open it. Then he took courage, cut the flap, and drew out a page or more of handwriting. This is what he read:
“Misses Letitia and Mary Bellingham.
“Dear Madams: Your letter of the seventh was received and we are happy to look forward to placing one of our little ones in your care. We wrote to the chaplain, as suggested, and the response was gratifying. Therefore, as we are satisfied with the home offered, we shall not wait to hear further from you, but send by four o’clock train on Friday, in charge of an attendant, little Marcus.”
The paper dropped from the boy’s hand as if a bullet had struck it, and his lips moved in wordless anathema. He sat for a moment stunned by the blow, then picked up the letter and read on.
“We send him, as advised, to your nephew, Cadet Theodore Fitzhugh.”
The lad groaned.
“He is a fine child of ten months. Feed him condensed milk. It should be prepared in the following way.”
Fitzhugh skipped four lines.
“This should be fed to him every—”
He skipped again. His eyes wandered down the page, and he read aloud, in a gasping voice, bits of sentences:
“His bath should be tested with a thermometer.” “Must have four hours a day of fresh air.” “Sleeps every morning from ten to—”
He sprang to his feet, dashing the letter to the floor, and marched back and forth across his room, muttering. Then he rubbed his eyes as if to see better. “What under the canopyamI going to do?” he groaned.
A subdued but firm knock rat-a-tat-tatted at the door. “Come in,” moaned the cadet, too lost in misery to try to pull himself together, and in the open doorway Wipes stood saluting.
Wipes was a tall, ugly soldier with a large nose, a red complexion, and a wooden expression. Fitzhugh greeted him like a messenger from heaven.
“Wipes! Oh, Wipes!” he cried in a bleat of joy. “I’d rather see you than any one on earth.”
“Very good, sorr,” said Wipes, and saluted again. Under his stolidity was a heart much like hominy served for breakfast—as warm, as soft, as steaming with fragrant kindliness. In spite of experience, such a greeting flattered him to its depths. It was five minutes before the boy’s nervous statement made apparent impression on the slaty surface of Wipes’s intellect. Then a smile expanded slowlyover the hatchet face, as if a mountainside had cracked.
“Wipes, if you grin like that I’ll kill you,” said Fitzhugh, exasperated, and Wipes answered respectfully:
“Very good, sorr.”
Fitzhugh went on. “It’s up to you to get me out of this hole. It’s the worst one yet, but you’ve never failed me, Wipesy. Now tell me what can be done? The kid’s due”—he took out his watch—“oh, momma! In an hour. Something’s got to be done, and quick.”
“If ye’d excuse me, sorr,” said Wipes, “Oi’ve ’n idea.”
“I’ll excuse you this time,” Fitzhugh agreed. “Get it out of your system.”
“F’r me to meet th’ kid, sorr, and sind him back.”
For one moment of exquisite relief Fitzhugh felt almost sentimental toward Wipes. Of course! Why had he not thought of it? He wrung the soldier’s hand till the cracked-rock smile split his face again, and then he rushed into arrangements. Wipes’s words were few and direct, and what he said heseemed to swallow back half-way out, as if with regret at the outlay. But Fitzhugh was equal to the talking. Wipes was to say that the Misses Bellingham had suddenly decided to go abroad for a year, and had given up the idea of adopting a child; that they were on the point of so writing the matron when her promptness forestalled them; the trip of attendant and child was to be paid for, so that there should be no discussion. The young man brought out some bills.
“Wipes, I’m broke, but it’s cheap at bankruptcy.”
But the soldier refused the money. “F’r me to sind in th’ bill, sorr, whin th’ job’s done,” he remarked half-way down his throat.
Wipes went off, and Fitzhugh watched him from his window as the ship that bore the cargo of his safety or destruction. His figure, fine and erect, swung with vigorous strides along the diagonal path that crosses the Parade, and the boy, his eyes glued on that one dark-blue spot, did not see another figure advancing to meet it, till the man stopped sharply. Then, with a jump of his pulse, he saw who it was. But why should Julia Duncan be talking toWipes? However, there was no time to meditate over that—it wouldn’t help to be late to cavalry-drill.
But a vision haunted him as he took hurdles with his arms crossed, and made flying leaps over his horse galloping down the tan-bark. It was the vision of a slim figure in a tailor-gown, a glory of red-gold hair gleaming under the black of her hat. That was all he had seen as she talked to Wipes, but he knew the details, the laughing face, the brilliant white, small teeth almost always showing, and the mischievous eyes with tawny lashes. A fascinating face, full of charm; and the drowsy voice, with a reedy note, like a child’s voice just awakened, the quick wit, and innocently naughty ways—he remembered all that, too.
In and out through the strenuous mazes of cavalry-drill went the glint of red hair and the shine of white teeth, and the echo of her laugh. The evening was his own till nine o’clock, and “a spirit in his feet” led him to the house where she stayed, Colonel Emerson’s house, looking up the river.
“What were you talking to Wipes about, on the Parade this afternoon?”
“Who is Wipes?” demanded the laughing, slow voice, and Fitzhugh thought how pleasant a thing it was to realize a vision and an echo.
“Why, Wipes—our policeman. You oughtn’t to talk to the men; they’re not allowed luxuries reserved for the corps.”
“Oh, you mean that bright-red soldier, Weiber—I forgot Jack called him Wipes. Why, I know him. Fascinating man! I know his wife, too. She’s not just fascinating; she’s always scrubbing the children, and I’m sure she’s right, for they never look finished. I go to see her sometimes. That is, I went yesterday.” And Fitzhugh reflected how nice it was in girls to go to see poor soldiers’ families. It flashed across him that perhaps he would stroll down to visit the Wipeses some day himself, when he knew she was to be there.
Nine o’clock was removed from eight by about five minutes that evening, and his dreams afterward were empty of little Marcus and filled with a bewitching, mischievous personality. But a shock was in store for him. The next day when Wipes appeared, his vermilion face seemed longer. Fitzhugh had waited for him feverishly.
“Is it all right, Wipesy? Did you get him off without trouble? How much do I owe you?”
“F’r me to sind in th’ bill whin th’ job’s done,” gulped Wipes.
“Isn’t it done? What do you mean? Why isn’t it done?”
Wipes, in throaty gurgles, told his tale. The attendant had thrust the child into the soldier’s arms and jumped back on the train, refusing to listen to reason. She was not going back to New York, she was going up the river to visit her cousin—she had no further concern with the baby than to deliver him at West Point. She laughed at the idea of taking him back to the city. The train went on, and Wipes was left standing with little Marcus howling in his arms.
Such was the tale. Fitzhugh stared in horror. He gasped before he could speak.
“Wipes,” he whispered, “where is it? Here?”
“Yis, sorr—me wife’s got it.”
Fitzhugh breathed again—how good, how thoughtful of Wipes—and he had never dreamed of this obvious plan, either. Mrs. Wipes—of course—what more natural?
“Wipes, you’re a fine fellow—you’re glorious, old Wipesy!” he exploded. “Tell your wife I’ll pay anything she wants—anything. Only keep it. Will she keep it? It’s only a week. She will, won’t she? You tell her to keep it, Wipesy.”
“Very good, sorr. I’ll tell ’r. She’ll keep ’t,” the soldier answered in vocal shorthand, and Fitzhugh, trembling still, shaken with emotion, was yet relieved and grateful. Wipes turned to go, then wheeled. “Miss Duncan, sorr.”
Fitzhugh opened startled eyes at him. “What about Miss Duncan?” he demanded, with dignity.
“Oi met ’r with th’ kid ’n me arrms.”
“Well? She knows you have children, doesn’t she?”
Wipes shook his head. “’Twas tagged.”
“Tagged?”
“‘To Cadet The’dore Fitz’ugh.’” The name sounded like a sneeze.
“Oh!” The boy fell back in his chair. “And she read it, of course. What did you tell her?”
“Oi said ’twas yer pa’s coachman’s kid, sorr, th’t’d need of air.”
Fitzhugh’s people lived in New York. It was far-fetched, but yet the gods were good, for they might have lived in San Francisco. Fitzhugh blessed the soldier again. “Wipes, you’re a lot brighter than you look. What did she say?”
“She said how good ’twas ’f ye, sorr, t’ remimber th’ poor.”
Fitzhugh smiled placidly and was aware of a warm feeling around his heart.
“Oi told ’r ye’d not like ut mintioned outside, sorr.”
“Wipes,” said Fitzhugh, “you’re a born gentleman, you certainly are. Your tact is remarkable. I’ll make this up to you somehow, Wipesy.”
“F’r me to sind in th’ bill whin th’ job’s done,” repeated Wipes oracularly, and went.
To the nervous and lonely cadet it was a godsend that he could even partly discuss his dilemma with Julia Duncan. He longed to tell her the whole situation, but feared her teasing spirit. She would worry him unmercifully, and it might make him ridiculous in her eyes—he dared not risk that. It was not so bad to pose as a philanthropist, unintentionally ofcourse. He chuckled with satisfaction at the accidental air of the discovery—of how he appeared not to let his right hand know the good his left was doing. But he must see her and talk to her about it.
The next day was Sunday, and when the cadets had formed and marched away after service, a gallant and soldierly sight, he dashed back from his quarters to the chapel door, and walked home with her. He blessed Colonel Emerson for living far around the turn, beyond the Parade—a quarter of a mile more with her was worth while.
She began talking about the leaves that were coming on the trees, the spring in the air, the misty look over the piled hills beyond the river, and Fitzhugh fairly jumped with nervousness. It would seem like ostentation to lug in the coachman’s baby before she spoke of it; but here they were half-way around the square, and she was still going on about springtime! And her eyes were dancing as if it were the best joke in the world. He wrenched the conversation off by main force.
“How is Jack, Miss Julia? Does he write you at all?”
“Every day.” She glanced up at him. “Every morning I get a nasty letter that smells like a drug-store, and every afternoon I send him a nice, clean one. I shall write him something about you to-day.”
“About me?” Fitzhugh tried to be careless. “Is there anything interesting enough about me to put in writing?”
The girl’s glancing eyes seemed to watch him. “Yes, indeed. I’m going to tell him how good you are.” The cadet felt a dash of discomfort, and the drawling, soft voice went on. “I think he’ll be surprised. Isn’t it a new thing, this Coachman’s Babies’ Fresh Air Society of yours and Mr. Wipes?”
The cadet stammered. “I—it was an accident—I—I didn’t mean any one to know about it.”
“That makes it twice as good. It’s wonderful that a young man should take such an interest in the poor and in children, but that you should go to the trouble of getting one up here and keeping it for—a week, didn’t Weiber say? And then to be so modest about any one’s knowing it! Really, that’s perfectly fine of you! Shows so much generosityand thoughtfulness, and at the same time such an unostentatious sort of character!”
Fitzhugh wondered afterward if there was a touch of mockery in the grave interest of her tone, but at the moment he felt that he was all of that and more, and the feeling was agreeable.
“Don’t,” he said. “You praise me too much.” And he almost forgot, in his satisfaction, the true history of that baby.
“Not a bit. I’d enjoy praising you more.” Fitzhugh jumped, for a laugh came running over the edge of the sentence. “It’s nothing—only a joke I thought of,” she went on quickly, and so easy was her laughter always that he only smiled in approval. “I called on little Marcus yesterday afternoon, and found him a cunning rat. Don’t you want Mrs. Weiber to bring him up to see you some day?”
“No—Heavens, no!” said Fitzhugh promptly, in alarm, and again the laughter bubbled over.
“You’re not half properly interested in him; you ought to be trundling him about the Parade in the Weibers’s baby-carriage every afternoon. You know you’re responsible for that child every minute he ishere—do you know that? You are. If he gets health and strength out of his visit, it’s to your credit; but if he falls ill and dies—that’s your fault, just the same.”
“Oh, don’t,” groaned Fitzhugh. “What a thing to say! Don’t say it.”
“Oh, I have to—it’s true,” Miss Duncan responded firmly. “He doesn’t look strong. But it was very good of you to have him up, and I’m sure I hope he won’t die or anything.”
Dancing eyes and white teeth joined in the smile that softened this ominous last speech, and Fitzhugh swung away down the shaded country street with a cold dislike of the innocent little Marcus in the bottom of his heart, but a very warm feeling for the innocent-seeming Miss Duncan filling all other space.
Neither Miss Duncan nor Wipes could persuade the cadet to see his charge. There he drew the line. But the horrid fact of its presence in the post weighed less and less upon him, and the daily accounts from the girl and the soldier began even to amuse him. He was planning how he could boast to the threelads of his skilfulness in putting the affair through by his unaided intellect. It grew to be a habit to expect, as the carpentered visage of Wipes appeared in his doorway, the report of:
“F’r me to say from th’ missis, sorr, ’s how’s the kid’s hearty.”
A habit of a few days, for one morning there was silence, and Wipes’s head wobbled solemnly. Fitzhugh did not pay much attention. Wipes’s manner was not dramatic enough in its shading to convey a very instant impression.
“Kid all right?” asked the boy cheerfully.
“F’r me to say from th’ missis, sorr, as how’s the kid’s awful sick.”
Fitzhugh dropped his book on the floor, and the front legs of his chair came down with a crash.
“What the deuce do you mean, Wipes?”
“Croup, sorr. Crowed awful all last night. Throat’s all full up. Ain’t no better th’s mornin’.”
“Have you had a doctor?” asked Fitzhugh, with the solicitude of a fond parent.
And all that day as he went about his regulated succession of duties, the thought went with him likea weight of cold lead of little Marcus crowing mirthlessly on a sick-bed, and of Julia Duncan’s firm dictum: “If he falls ill and dies that’s your fault.”
He had an engagement to walk with the girl in the afternoon, and he kept the appointment with eagerness, but for the first time failed to forget everything else in the charm of her presence. There was an impressiveness about her manner.
“He’s a pretty ill baby.” Her lips closed tight and the bright head nodded. “I was there this afternoon.”
But she would not discuss the situation with the miserable cadet, who went back again and again from her sunshine to the cloud that hung over him.
“Don’t talk any more about that wretched young coachman,” she pleaded. “There are so many jolly things; what is the use of dwelling on the bad ones?”
And Fitzhugh, for all his admiration, could not help wondering if she were a little heartless. He had the latest Wipes’s bulletin before he went to bed, and it was unfavorable. Little Marcus was distinctly worse. The young man lay awake with pangsof remorse and fear of retribution gnawing at him. When he slept, the haggard face of an unknown child and its ghastly, hoarse crowing—Wipes’s word had taken disagreeable hold on his imagination—haunted him. He waited for the soldier with sick impatience, and the first glimpse of the man’s face was enough.
“Wipes! Don’t tell me—” His voice failed.
“Kid’s dead, sorr,” was Wipes’s terse response, and Fitzhugh fell in his chair as if struck there by a blow.
The worst had come, probably exposure, expulsion from the academy, the shame and disappointment of his people, his career ruined before its beginning, and, worst of all, a life lost by his silly play. There seemed to be no crack in the blackness that descended upon him. Wipes was vague and unsatisfactory about arrangements.
“F’r me t’ look afther th’ job to-day, sorr. Don’t think of ut till t’morr’r,” was all he would say, and the boy was too sick at heart to press the point.
It was all he could do to crawl about from one recitation, one drill to another, and as to not thinkingof it “till to-morrow,” as Wipes suggested—he thought of nothing else. It was a Wednesday, and that night he was to dine at the Emersons with Miss Duncan. Only one other cadet was there, and while he sang rag-time songs with Mrs. Emerson, Fitzhugh and the girl went outside, where the spring twilight was dying across river and hills and filtering through the sweeping elms which stand, like stately old officers, all along the gravelled driveways.
Little Julia Duncan looked up at the tall cadet, his white face towering above her grim and miserable in the dull light. “What is it? You look desperately ill. You hardly spoke at the table. Is anything wrong?”
“Wrong?” His voice was full of reproach. “Don’t you know that child is dead—little Marcus?”
The girl dropped into a chair and put her head on her hands against the piazza-railing. Her shoulders were shaking a little. That was too much for Fitzhugh in his overwrought condition. He put his hand tremblingly against the ribbons and lace on her shoulder and it slipped down, past the short sleeve, over the warm arm, to her fingers.
“Dear—don’t cry,” he said. “Are you crying for me?”
Swiftly her face lifted and a shock caught the boy as he saw the blue-green eyes full of the well-known laughter. His hand left hers with a start, and he drew himself up.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I made a great mistake. I thought you were gentle—” The rush of his feelings drowned the sentence that tried to be restrained. “I didn’t know before how cold-blooded a girl could be,” he cried roughly. “I thought you everything that was womanly. I gave you credit for being sorry for a chap in trouble. But I was wrong. You’re no friend to me; you’re amused because I’m wretched; you think it’s a joke that a poor little child has died from my fault; I don’t believe you have any heart.” The boy’s bitterly wounded feeling was in his shaking voice.
Then looking down at her, she lifted her face to his and he saw an astonishing sight. The bright eyes, their mischievous dancing all quiet, were filling slowly with tears.
“I’m sorry you think so badly of me,” she said,and her voice broke in the words. Then: “I’m going to tell you—Jack may kill me, but it has gone on long enough. I won’t have you tortured for Jack or anybody. It’s all—one—big—lie!”
Fitzhugh gasped, shivered with hope. “Lie! Little Marcus isn’t dead?”
Then the laughter broke through the tears softly for a moment, and her voice was sweet as a child’s as it trembled between the two. “Dead, no! Nor alive either! He’s just as dead as he is alive. There isn’t any little Marcus—there never was. It’s all a joke of those wretched boys in the infirmary. They cooked it up among them there, and Mr. Carruthers did the letter. Jack wrote me, and I coached Wipes, and kept them posted every day. I thought it was so good for Jack to be amused. But I didn’t know it would make you really unhappy. They were going further, they were going to have a mock funeral and make you come, but I told them I wouldn’t help in that. And Jack said then I must keep still and not tell you. It was to be to-morrow. Will you forgive me? Will you take back those bad names?”
I think Fitzhugh, the cadet, must have interruptedMiss Duncan rudely then, for Captain Fitzhugh, the officer, stopped and laughed and would not tell me what happened next.
The Empire State Express, leaving the shining Hudson forgotten in the background, rolled into Albany as he finished the tale. He stood up to put on his overcoat, but bent from his erect six feet in air to stare outside, as the train stopped slowly.
“I should think you’d have gotten even with that girl,” I reflected aloud, my mind still on the story.
Captain Fitzhugh smiled and nodded at a charming woman with beautiful bright hair who looked up eagerly at the car windows.
“I did,” he said as he held out his hand to me for good-by. “I did. I married her.”