Chapter 63
"But, my dear girl, it's much worse than you think. You know those horrible birds' bath-tubs in which they bring your food at third-rate American hotels, loathsome saucers with squash and bits of grit in watery milk that they call cereals, and bony bits of chicken, well, imagine being fed like that when you're ill; imagine your bed covered with those infernal saucers. One of them always used to get left behind when Julie cleared away, and it always used to fall with a crash on the floor, and I used to wonder if the mess would tempt the c.o.c.kroaches into my room. And then Lebus used to come up and make noises in his throat and brag about Sulphurville, and I used to know by his wandering eye that he was looking for what he called the cuspidor, which I'd put out of sight. And Mrs. Lebus used to come up and suck her teeth at me until I felt inclined to strangle her."
"The sooner you're moved away the better," Sylvia said, decidedly.
"Oh yes, if you think it can be managed. But if not, Sylvia, for G.o.d's sake don't leave me alone."
"Are you really glad to see me?" she asked.
"Oh, my dear, it was like heaven opening before one's eyes!"
"Tell me about the girl you were fond of," she said, abruptly.
"What do you want to talk about her for? There's nothing to tell you, really. She had red hair."
Sylvia was glad that Arthur spoke of her with so little interest; it certainly was definitely comforting to feel the utter dispossession of that red-haired girl.
"Look here," said Sylvia. "I'm going to let these people suppose that I'm your long-lost relative. I shall pay their bill and bring the doctor down to see you. Arthur, I'm glad I've found you. Do you remember the cab-horse? Oh, and do you remember the cats in the area and the jug of water that splashed you? You were so unhappy, almost as unhappy as you were when I found you here. Have you always been treated unkindly?"
"I have had a pretty hard time," Arthur said.
"Oh, but you mustn't be sorry for yourself," she laughed.
"No, seriously, Sylvia, I've always had a lot of people against me."
"Yes, but that's such fun. You simply must be amused by life when you're with me. I'm not hard-hearted a bit, really, but you mustn't be offended with me when I tell you that really there's something a tiny bit funny in your being stranded in the Auburn Hotel, Sulphurville."
"I'm glad you think so," said Arthur, in rather a hurt tone of voice.
"Don't be cross, you foolish creature."
"I'm not a bit cross. Only I _would_ like you to understand that my illness isn't a joke. You don't suppose I should let you pay my bills and do all this for me unless it were really something serious."
Sylvia put her hand on his mouth. "I forgive you," she murmured, "because you really are ill. Oh, Arthur, _do_ you remember Hube? What fun everything is!"
Sylvia left him and went down-stairs to arrange matters with Mrs. Lebus.
"It was a relation, after all," she told her. "The Maddens have been related to us for hundreds of years."
"My! My! Now ain't that real queer? Oh, Scipio!"
Mr. Lebus came into view cleaning his nails with the same pen, and was duly impressed with the coincidence.
"Darned if I don't tell Pastor Gollick after next Sunday meeting. He's got a kind of hankering after the ways of Providence. Gee! Why, it's a sermonizing cinch."
There was general satisfaction in the Auburn Hotel over the payment of Arthur's bill.
"Not that I wouldn't have trusted him for another month and more," Mrs.
Lebus affirmed. "But it's a satisfaction to be able to turn round and say to the neighbors, 'What did I tell you?' Folks in Sulphurville was quite sure I'd never be paid back a cent. This'll learn them!"
Mr. Lebus, in whose throat the doubts of the neighbors had gathered to offend his faith, cleared them out forever in one sonorous rauque.
The druggist's account was settled, and though, when Sylvia first heard
Arthur made rapid progress when he was once out of the hospitable squalor of the Auburn Hotel, and the story of Sylvia's discovery of her unfortunate cousin became a romantic episode for all the guests of the Plutonian, a never-failing aid to conversation between wives waiting for their husbands to emerge from their daily torture at the hands of the ma.s.seurs, who lived like imps in the sulphurous glooms of the bath below; maybe it even provided the victims themselves with a sufficiently absorbing topic to mitigate the penalties of their cure.
Arthur himself expanded wonderfully as the subject of so much discussion. It gave Sylvia the greatest pleasure to see the way in which his complexion was recovering its old ruddiness and his steps their former vigor; but she did not approve of the way in which the story kept pace with Arthur's expansion. She confided to him how very personally the news of the sick Englishman had affected her and how she had made up her mind from the beginning that it was a stranded actor, and afterward, when she heard in the drug-store the name Madden, that it actually was Arthur himself. He, however, was unable to stay content with such an incomplete telepathy; indulging human nature's preference for what is not true, both in his own capacity as a liar and in his listeners' avid and wanton credulity, he transferred a woman's intimate hopes into a quack's tale.
"Then you didn't see your cousin's spirit go up in the elevator when you were standing in the lobby? Now isn't that perfectly discouraging?"
complained a lady with an astral reputation in Illinois.
"I'm afraid the story's been added to a good deal," Sylvia said. "I'm sorry to disappoint the faithful."
"She's shy about giving us her experiences," said another lady from Iowa. "I know I was just thrilled when I heard it. It seemed to me the most wonderful story I'd ever imagined. I guess you felt kind of queer when you saw him lying on a bed in your room."
"He was in his own room," Sylvia corrected, "and I didn't feel at all queer. It was he who felt queer."
"Isn't she secretive?" exclaimed the lady from Illinois. "Why, I was going to ask you to write it up in our society's magazine, _The Flash_.
We don't print any stories that aren't established as true. Well, your experience has given me real courage, Miss Scarlett. Thank you."
The astral enthusiast clasped Sylvia's hand and gazed at her as earnestly as if she had noticed a s.m.u.t on her nose.
"Yes, I'm sure we ought to be grateful," said the lady from Iowa. "My!
Our footsteps are treading in the unseen every day of our lives! You certainly are privileged," she added, wrapping Sylvia in a damp mist of benign fatuity.
"I wish you wouldn't elaborate everything so," Sylvia begged of Arthur when she had escaped from the deification of the two psychical ladies.
"It makes me feel so dreadfully old to see myself a.s.suming a legendary shape before my own eyes. It's as painful as being stuffed alive--stuffed alive with nonsense," she added, with a laugh.
Arthur's expansion, however, was not merely grafted on Sylvia's presentiment of his discovery in Sulphurville; he blossomed upon his own stock, a little exotically, perhaps, like the clumps of fiery cannas in the grounds of the hotel, but with a quite conspicuous effectiveness.
Like the cannas, he required protection from frost, for there was a very real sensitiveness beneath all that flamboyance, and it was the knowledge of this that kept Sylvia from criticizing him at all severely.
Besides, even if he did bask a little too complacently in expressions of interest and sympathy, it was a very natural reaction from his wretched solitude at the Auburn Hotel, for which he could scarcely be held culpable, least of all by herself. Moreover, was not this so visible recovery the best tribute he could have paid to her care? If he appeared to strut--for, indeed, there was a hint of strutting in his demeanor--he only did so from a sense of well-being. Finally, if any further defense was necessary, he was an Englishman among a crowd of Americans; the conditions demanded a good deal of compet.i.tive self-a.s.sertion.
Meanwhile summer was gone; the trees glowed with every shade of crimson.
Sylvia could not help feeling that there was something characteristic in the demonstrative richness of the American fall; though she was far from wis.h.i.+ng to underrate its beauty, the display was oppressive. She sighed for the melancholy of the European autumn, a conventional emotion, no doubt, but so closely bound up with old a.s.sociations that she could not wish to lose it. This cremation of summer, these leafy pyrotechnics, this holocaust of color, seemed a too barbaric celebration of the year's death. It was significant that autumn with its long-drawn-out suggestion of decline should here have failed to displace fall; for there was something essentially catastrophic in this ruthless bonfire of foliage.
It was not surprising that the aboriginal inhabitants should have been redskins, nor that the gorgeousness of nature should have demanded from the humanity it overwhelmed a readjustment of decorative values which superficial observers were apt to mistake for gaudy ostentation. Sylvia could readily imagine that if she had been accustomed from childhood to these crimson woods, these beefy robins, and these saucer-eyed daisies, she might have found her own more familiar landscapes merely tame and pretty; but as it was she felt dazzled and ill at ease. It's a little more and how much it is, she told herself, pondering the tantalizing similarity that was really as profoundly different as an Amazonian forest from Kensington Gardens.
Arthur's first flamboyance was much toned down by all that natural splendor; in fact, it no longer existed, and Sylvia found a freshening charm in his company amid these crimson trees and unfamiliar birds, and in this staring white hotel with its sulphurous exhalations. His complete restoration to health, moreover, was a pleasure and a pride that nothing could mar, and she found herself planning his happiness and prosperity as if she had already transferred to him all she herself hoped from life.
At the end of September the long-expected remittance arrived from Mrs.
Madden, and Sylvia gathered from the letter that the poor lady had been much puzzled to send the money.
"We must cable it back to her at once," Sylvia said.
"Oh, well, now it's come, is that wise?" Arthur objected. "She may have had some difficulty in getting it, but that's over now."
"No, no. It must be cabled back to her. I've got plenty of money to carry us on till we begin to work together."
"But I can't go on accepting charity like this," Arthur protested. "It's undignified, really. I've never done such a thing before."
"You accepted it from your mother."