Aladdin & Co.: A Romance of Yankee Magic
very life, and few so poor to do him reverence. I had been so proud of
his splendid and dominant strength that this, I think, was the thing
that brought the bitterness of failure most keenly home to me. I could
not feel satisfied with Josie. There were good reasons why she might
have refused to choose between Jim and the man who had ruined him, while
there was danger of her choice itself becoming the occasion of war
between them. But that was over now, and Cornish was victorious.
Gradually the fear grew upon me that we had rated Josie's womanhood
higher than she herself held it, and that Cornish was to win her also.
He had that magnetism which so attracted her as a girl, but that I had
believed incapable of holding her as a woman. And now he had wealth, and
Jim was poor, and the whole world stood with its back to us, and Josie
held aloof. I was afraid he would speak of it, every time he tried to
talk.
That night when the evening papers came out with all their plenitude of
bad news (for we had pleased Watson by dying on the evening papers'
time), it was a dark moment for us. Jim lay silent and unmoving, as if
all his ebullient energy had gone forever. The physician omitted the
dressing of his wound, because, he said, he feared the patient was not
strong enough to bear it: and this, as well as the strange semi-stupor
of the sufferer, frightened me. Jim had said little, and most of his
words had been of the trivial things of the sick-room. Only once did he
refer to the great affairs in which we had been for so long engrossed.
"What day is this?" he asked.
"Friday," said I, "the twenty-first."
"By this time," said he feebly, "we must be pretty well shot to rags."
"Never mind about that," said I, holding his hands in mine. "Never mind,
Jim!"
"Some of those gophers," said he, after a while, "used to learn to ...
rub their noses ... in the dirt ... and always stick their heads
up--outside the snare!"
"Yes," said I, "I remember. Go to sleep, old man!"
I thought him delirious, and he knew and resented it; being evidently
convinced that he had just made a wise remark. It touched me to hear
him, even in his extremity, return to those boyhood days when we trapped
and hunted and fished together. He saw my pitying look.
"I'm all right," said he; but he said no more.
The nurse came in, and told me that Mrs. Barslow wished to see me in the
library. I went down, and found Josie and Alice together.
"I got a letter from--from Mr. Cornish," said she, "telling me that he
was returning from Chicago to-night, and was coming to see me. I ran
over, because--and told mamma to say that I couldn't see him."
"See him by all means," said I with some bitterness. "You should make
it a point to see him. Mr. Cornish is a success. He alone of us all has
shown real greatness."
And it dawned upon me, as I said it, what Jim had meant by his reference
to the gopher which learns to stick its head up "outside the snare."
"I want to ask you," said Josie, "is it all true--what was in the paper
to-night about all of you, Mr. Hinckley and yourself, and--all of you
having failed?"
"It is only a part of the truth," I replied. "We are ruined absolutely."
She said nothing by way of condolence, and uttered no expressions of
regret or sympathy. She was apparently in a state of suppressed
excitement, and started at sounds and movements.
"Is Mr. Elkins very ill?" said she at length.
"So ill," said Alice, "that unless he rallies soon, we shall look for
the worst."
No more at this than at the other ill news did Josie express any regret
or concern. She sat with her fingers clasped together, gazing before her
at the fire in the grate, as if making some deep and abstruse
calculation. But when the door-bell rang, she started and listened
attentively, as the servant went to the door, and then returned to us.
"A gentleman, Mr. Cornish, to see Miss Trescott," said the maid. "And he
says he must see her for a moment."
"Alice," said Josie, under her breath, "you go, please! Say to him that
I cannot see him--now! Oh, why did he follow me here?"
"Josie," said Alice dramatically, "you don't mean to say that you are
afraid of this man! Are you?"
"No, no!" said the girl doubtfully and distressfully; "but it's so hard
to say 'No' to him! If you only knew all, Alice, you wouldn't blame
me--and you'd go!"
"If you're so far gone--under his influence," said Alice, "that you
can't trust yourself to say 'No,' Josephine Trescott, go, in Heaven's
name, and say 'Yes,' and be the wife of a millionaire--and a traitor and
scoundrel!"
As Alice said this she came perilously near the histrionic standard of
the tragic stage. Josie rose, looked at her in surprise, in which there
seemed to be some defiance, and walked steadily out to the parlor. I was
glad to be out of the affair, and went back to Jim. I stood regarding my
broken and forsaken friend, in watching whose uneasy sleep I forgot the
crisis downstairs, when I was startled and angered by the slamming of
the front door, and heard a carriage rattle furiously away down the
street.
Soon I heard the rustle of skirts, and looked up, thinking to see my
wife. But it was Josie. She came in, as if she were the regularly
ordained nurse, and stepped to the bedside of the sleeping patient. The
broken arm in its swathings lay partly uncovered; and across his wounded
brow was stretched a broad bandage, below which his face showed pale and
weary-looking, in the half-stupor of his deathlike slumber: for he had
become strangely quiet. His uninjured arm lay inertly on the
counterpane beside him.
She took his hand, and, seating herself on the bed, began softly
stroking and patting the hand, gazing all the time in his face. He
stirred, and, turning his eyes toward her, awoke.
"Don't move, my darling," said she quietly, and as if she had been for a
long, long time quite in the habit of so speaking to him; "don't move,
or you'll hurt your arm." Then she bent down her head, lower and lower,
until her cheek touched his.
"I've come to sit with you, Jim, dear," said she, softly--"if you want
me--if I can do you any good."
"I want you, always," said he.
She stooped again, and this time laid her lips lingeringly on his; and
his arm stole about the slim waist.
"If you'll just get well," she whispered, "you may have me--always!"
He passed his fingers over her hair, and kissed her again and again.
Then he looked at her long and earnestly.
"Where's Al?" said he; "I want Al!"
I came forward promptly. I thought that this violation of the doctor's
regulation requiring rest and quiet had gone quite far enough.
"Al," said he, still holding her hand, "do you remember out there by the
windmill tower that night, and the petunias and four-o'clocks?"
"Yes, Jim, I remember," said I. "But you mustn't talk any more now."
"No, I won't," said he, and went right on; "but even before that, and
ever since, I haven't wanted anything we've been trying so hard to get,
half as much as I've wanted Josie; and now--we lost the fight, didn't
we? Things have been slipping away from us, haven't they? Gone, aren't
they?"
"Go to sleep now, Jim," said I. "Plenty of time for those things when
you wake up."
"Yes," said he; "but before I do, I want you to tell me one thing,
honest injun, hope to die, you know!"
"Yes," said I; "what is it, Jim?"
"I've been seeing a lot of funny things in the dark corners about here;
but this seems more real than any of them," he went on; "and I want you
to tell me--_is this really Josie_?"
"Really," I assured him, "really, it is."
"Oh, Jim, Jim!" she cried, "have you learned to doubt my reality, just
because I'm kind! Why, I'm going to be good to you now, dearest, always,
always! And kinder than you ever dreamed, Jim. And I'm going to show you
that everything has not slipped away from you, my poor, poor boy; and
that, whatever may come, I shall be with you always. Only get well; only
get well!"
"Josie," said he, smiling wanly, "you couldn't kill me--now--not with an
ax!"
THE END.
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