The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon Part 17

It was then that another veil dropped from before her.

"Then is that why, do you think, people devote themselves to those low, common things--great saints and those that give up their own lives?"

"I think so, yes."

"It is a real relief to them?"

"Why not? ..."

She fell asleep on the broad window-seat, her head on her arms, and when she woke and groped for her bed in the dark, the balcony was empty.

There was no bustle of departure: a grave hand-shaking from the daughters, a kiss on the mother's withered, rosy cheek.

"Come back again, do," said the old woman and the doctor commented upon this as they sat in the train.

"That is a great compliment," he said. "I never knew her to say that except to a long-time patient of mine that stayed a long time (more's the pity!) with them. 'Come back,' said Mother to her. 'Come soon, deary, for the house will miss your grey dress so soft on the floor.'

They would have cured her if anybody could."

"Then you don't consider her cured?" she said with a shock of disappointment. "I am so sorry. But it is surely a wonderful place--one can't talk about it, but I see you know."

"Oh, yes, I know," he said briefly. "I saw you would pull through in great shape there. This patient I spoke of used to tell me that the duty of her life, here and through Eternity, ought by rights to be the preaching of the gospel she learned there. Well--maybe it is, for all we know. If I could have cured her, she would have been a great--a really great novelist, I think."

"If you could have--" she gasped, seizing his arm, "you mean----"

"I mean that I couldn't," he answered simply. "She died there. I dreamed of her last night."

THE GYPSY

Very early in the last century, while Napoleon still reigned over Europe and the people went journeys in post-chaises through England, John Appleyard, the only son of a thriving Suss.e.x farmer, met, while walking across one of his father's fields, a troup of gypsies camping under a hedge. Among them was a dark young woman, very lovely, with straight, heavy brows and a yard of thick blue-black hair, which she was drying in the wind at the moment, having washed it in the brook.

John looked at her hard, walked by, turned, looked again, and stood staring so long that a surly gypsy father slipped a fowling-piece into his elbow and approached him menacingly.

"My daughter, young sir," he said shortly, "may sleep in a wagon and not eat off chayny plates as the like o' you do, but I'll have none eying her like that, be who he may, for she's a good girl, she is, and the best man that walks is none too good to be her husband!"

"Am I good enough?" says John Appleyard, quietly.

And as a matter of fact he married her in the parish church in three weeks' time, and his mother cried herself sick.

It was no use trying to live at the farm, after that, for the neighbours smiled and pointed, and the old farmer was scandalised at his new relatives, and though he had nothing against his handsome daughter-in-law personally, felt himself a marked man and counted the spoons every night. So John, who had never loved farming, compounded for half the outlying land, which he sold very shrewdly, left his only sister the farm, shook hands all 'round and sailed with Lilda, his wife, for the United States of America.

On the voyage he made friends with the captain, who took a great liking to him (and had no dislike, the pa.s.sengers said, for Mistress Lilda), and put him in the way of business with a thriving grain-merchant of Boston, Ma.s.sachusetts, whom, after twenty prosperous years, he bought out, and founded the house of Appleyard. He had fondly hoped that this house should outlast the century, but his only son was no merchant, and all for the sea and its constant change and chance, and John was too sensible to blame the lad's roving soul to any one but Nature. So with a sigh and a thrill of how his old father must have felt, he bought a fine trading-packet for young John and established his daughter's husband (she was a steady, prudent girl) as his partner and heir.

John II did wonderfully well and found himself at fifty the owner of the most flouris.h.i.+ng packet line in the States, with his only son prize-man at Harvard University and a daughter who nearly whitened his hair by her mad plan for acting in public on the stage. The son went early into buying and selling on 'Change, and was a weighty bank president by the time his daughter had finished her schooling.

This was a trifle more elaborate and thorough-going than most girls of twenty could boast at that time, and for three reasons. First, because she had a brilliant mind and great powers of concentration; next, because John III was not a little vain, in a quiet way, of all his Greek and Latin and historical research; and had plenty of leisure for imparting them; last, because his son--and only other child--had been a disappointment to him in that line, not only failing to repeat his father's brilliant college record, but proving actually slow at his books and decidedly averse to study, though a steady, competent accountant and investor.

So Lilda, named for her great-grandmother by John III's lady (who, being of Knickerbocker descent, laid great stress on family names), added to the somewhat doubtful accomplishments of a fas.h.i.+onable finis.h.i.+ng school a great part of what her own daughter, years later, learned at the then popular woman's college. Nor was other and more practical lore neglected, for her maternal grandmother, a notable _hausfrau_ of the old school, taught her, in two long summers at her great country estate on the Hudson River, all the household arts and duties that girls of her own age were beginning to despise. So that when, after a brilliant debut in New York and a winter season there in which her wit and beauty, to say nothing of her horsemans.h.i.+p and exquisite dancing had made her the belle of that critical metropolis (not too large, then, for one reigning toast), she married one of the country's most prominent young lawyers, already suggested for high posts abroad, it was felt that America would honour both herself and whatever Court should receive these two young fortunates from her hands.

There is a picture of her in the Court dress in which she made her bow to Queen Victoria, standing at the foot of a Roman stairway of yellowish marble, near a fountain, her baby boy clinging to her hand.

Under the blue-black of her heavy hair, her cheeks are tinted like wall-ripened peaches; her strong, curved figure is just the Flora and Juno of the ancient city's statuary.

There is still whispered, in a few old New York houses that have kept their white marble and black walnut, the audacious story of Lilda Appleyard's falling-in-love. It was at the Philadelphia Centennial of '76, whither her father had taken her for a long visit, for its educational influences. He used to say that women had little chance of acquiring practical information of the large and comprehensive order, and that no one would ever know without a trial what of all that sort their brains could or could not take in. The progress of the world, he said, was no greater than the progress of its homes, "and that," he used to wind up, "is no more nor less than the progress of their women."

So Miss Lilda studied the progress of all three at the Centennial, and took sage notes in a little red morocco book, and the proud banker read them in private for years afterward to his friends. But she was not engaged in this interesting occupation by night as well as day, you may rest a.s.sured. Many a ball and high tea did Philadelphia's ladies offer their visiting friends, and there was not one of any consequence that failed to beg the honour of Miss Lilda Appleyard's company. And her luggage was by no means limited to the little red morocco book!

A party from New York had come in a special train to Philadelphia for three days at the Centennial, and the occasion was seized by the wife of an army officer to give a large ball in her great house in Germantown. All visiting Knickerbockers who might expect to be asked anywhere were asked to attend this ball, and Lilda's maid a.s.sured the hotel chambermaid that she never had known her young lady so hard to suit. And finally, after three different trials, to pick out that strange black mousseline-de-soie! She looked like pictures of foreigners, to tell you the truth, her young lady did! Of course, her grandmamma's pearls would make anything dressy, and there's no denying the black made her arms and neck look like ivory--but to s.n.a.t.c.h up that flame-coloured scarf her grandpapa had brought from India, and knot it over her shoulder at the last minute! It was downright outlandish.

Mrs. Appleyard would never have liked it.

She had a high, staglike carriage of the head, and as she was rather tall, she looked over most of her girl companions. Halfway through the dance she raised this dark head a little higher and stared.

"Who is that man?" she asked abruptly.

"Elliot Lestrange," the girls told her, "but he doesn't care for women.

He's very proud."

"I should like to meet him," she said simply.

They t.i.ttered and teased her, but after all, she was a belle, and Mr.

Lestrange was sent for. The young dancing man who undertook the message told freely how Lestrange had said,

"Oh, hang it all, I'm not dancing to-night!"

"But she's Miss Appleyard, of Boston and New York--she's a beauty!"

"Then she must have plenty of beaux, Clarke, without me!"

So young Mr. Clarke took his little revenge (for after all, he had used his dance with the dark beauty for this stupid errand and resented it), and in presenting the chilly hero, said maliciously,

"Here is Mr. Lestrange, Miss Appleyard--but he says you must have plenty of beaux without him!"

"That is just it," returned the calm Lilda, looking straight at the grey eyes that faced her under the thick honey-coloured hair (Lestrange, though of Huguenot descent, was curiously blonde). "I have _not_ enough beaux--without Mr. Lestrange! Will you have the next waltz, Mr. Lestrange--Mr. Clarke's, I believe it is?"

"Thank you, yes, and this schottische, too, if I may," says Lestrange.

The young people standing about said that they never took their eyes off each other from the moment she spoke to him, and that they swung into the dance like automatons, leaving her lawful squire, a young Philadelphian, irate and ridiculous.

"These may be New York manners," he said sourly, "but they would never do in a _civilized city_!"

His opinion was a matter of indifference to the couple.

They are supposed to have talked very little, but danced frequently together. As the young ladies were putting on their capes and cloaks, just before the dawn, one among them shrieked suddenly across the room.

"Why, Lilda! where is your flame-coloured scarf! You've lost it!"

"I gave it away," she said briefly.

They gasped.