Read Ebook: Vistas of New York by Matthews Brander

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Ebook has 338 lines and 24401 words, and 7 pages

cannot know," he wrote, "what this is to me. It is my life--it is the making of my life; and if I should die to-night, I should not have lived in vain, for I have tasted joy, and death cannot rob me of that."

Of course the engagement must needs be long, because he was as yet in no position to support a wife; but he had been admitted to the bar, and he could soon make his way, with the stimulus he had now.

I was called out of town suddenly about that time, and I saw him for a few minutes only before I left New York. He was overflowing with happiness, and he could talk about nothing but the woman he loved--how beautiful she was! how clever! how accomplished! how devoted to his mother! In the midst of his rhapsody he was seized by a fit of violent coughing, and I saw the same danger signal in his cheeks which had preceded the break-down in his senior year. I begged him to take care of himself. With a light laugh he answered that he intended to do so--it was his duty to do so, now that he did not belong to himself.

In the fall, when I came back to the city, I found him in the office of a law firm, the head of which had been an intimate of his father's. The girl he was to marry went one night a week to dine with her grandmother, and he came to me that evening and talked about her. As the cold weather stiffened, his cough became more frequent, and long before Christmas I was greatly alarmed by it. He consulted a distinguished doctor, who told him that he ought to spend the winter in a drier climate--in Colorado, for example.

It was on Christmas eve that year that he brought me the frog that played the trombone. Ever since the first Christmas of our friendship we had made each other little presents.

"This is hardly worth giving," he said, as he placed the china shell on the corner of my desk, where it stands to this day. "But it is quaint and it caught my fancy. Besides, I've a notion that it is the tune of one of Heine's lyrics set by Schubert that the fellow is trying to play. And then I've a certain satisfaction in thinking that I shall be represented here by a performer of marvelous force of lung, since you seem to think my lungs are weak."

A severe cough seized him then, but, when he had recovered his breath, he laughed lightly, and said: "That's the worst one I've had this week. However, when the spring warms me up again I shall be all right once more. It wasn't on me that the spring poet wrote the epitaph:

'It was a cough That carried him off; It was a coffin They carried him off in.'"

"You ought to go away for a month at least," I urged. "Take a run down South and fill your lungs with the balsam of the pines."

"That's what my mother wants me to do," he admitted; "and I've half promised to do it. If I go to Florida for January, can you go with me?"

I knew how needful it was for him to escape from the bleakness of our New York winter, so I made a hasty mental review of my engagements. "Yes," I said, "I will go with you."

He held out his hand and clasped mine firmly. "We'll have a good time," he responded, "just we two. But you must promise not to object if I insist on talking about her all the time."

As it turned out, I was able to keep all my engagements, for we never went away together. Before the new year came there was a change in my friend's fortunes. The man who had pretended to invest for them the proceeds of his father's life-insurance policy absconded, leaving nothing behind but debts. For the support of his mother and himself my friend had only his own small salary. A vacation, however necessary, became impossible, and the marriage, which had been fixed for the spring, was postponed indefinitely. He offered to release the girl, but she refused.

Through a classmate of ours I was able to get my friend a place in the law department of the Denver office of a great insurance company. In the elevated air of Colorado he might regain his strength, and in a new city like Denver he might find a way to mend his fortunes. His mother went with him, of course, and it was beautiful to see her devotion to him. I saw them off.

"She bore the parting very bravely," he said to me. "She is braver than I am, and better in every way. I wish I were more worthy of her. You will go and see her, won't you? There's a good fellow and a good friend. Go and see her now and then, and write and tell me all about her--how she looks and what she says."

I promised, of course, and about once a month I went to see the woman my friend loved. He wrote me every fortnight, but it was often from her that I got the latest news. His health was improving; his cough had gone; Denver agreed with him, and he liked it. He was working hard, and he saw the prospect of advancement close before him. Within two years he hoped to take a month off, and return to New York and marry her, and bear his bride back to Colorado with him.

When I returned to town the next October I expected to find two or three letters from my friend awaiting me. I found only one, a brief note, telling me that he had been too busy to write the month before, and that he was now too tired with overwork to be able to do more than say how glad he was that I was back again in America, adding that a friend at hand might be farther away than one who was on the other side of the Atlantic. The letter seemed to me not a little constrained in manner. I did not understand it; and with the hope of getting some light by which to interpret its strangeness, I went to call on her. She refused to see me, pleading a headache.

It was a month before I had a reply to my answer to his note, and the reply was as short as the note, and quite as constrained. He told me that he was well enough himself, but that his mother's health worried him, since Denver did not agree with her, and she was pining to be back in New York. He added a postscript, in which he told me that he had dined a few nights before with the local manager of the insurance company, and that he had met the manager's sister, a wealthy widow from California, a most attractive woman, indeed. With needless emphasis he declared that he liked a woman of the world old enough to talk sensibly.

Another month passed before I heard from him again, and Christmas had gone and the new year had almost come. The contents of this letter, written on Christmas eve, when the frog that played the trombone had been sitting on the corner of my desk for just a year, was as startling as its manner was strange. He told me that his engagement was broken off irrevocably.

If my own affairs had permitted it, I should have taken the first train to Denver to discover what had happened. As it was I went again to call on the landlady's daughter. But she refused to see me again. Word was brought me that she was engaged, and begged to be excused.

About a fortnight later I chanced to meet on a street corner the classmate who had got my friend the Denver appointment. I asked if there was any news.

"Isn't there!" was the response. "I should think there was, and lots of it! You know our friend in Denver? Well, we have a telegram this morning: his health is shaky, and so he has resigned his position."

"Resigned his position!" I echoed. "What does that mean?"

"That's what we wanted to know," replied my classmate, "so we telegraphed to our local manager, and he gave us an explanation right off the reel. The manager has a sister who is the widow of a California millionaire, and she has been in Denver for the winter, and she has met our friend; and for all she is a good ten years older than he is, she has been fascinated by him--you know what a handsome fellow he is--and she's going to marry him next week, and take him to Egypt for his health."

"He's going to marry the California widow?" I asked, in astonishment. "Why, he's enga--" Then I suddenly held my peace.

"He's going to marry the California widow," was the answer,--"or she's going to marry him; it's all the same, I suppose."

Two days later I had a letter from Denver confirming this report. He wrote that he was to be married in ten days to a most estimable lady, and that they were to leave his mother in New York as they passed through. Fortunately he had been able to make arrangements whereby his mother would be able to live hereafter where she pleased, and in comfort. He invited me to come out to Colorado for the wedding, but hardly hoped to persuade me, he said, knowing how pressing my engagements were. But as their steamer sailed on Saturday week they would be at a New York hotel on the Friday night, and he counted on seeing me then.

I went to see him then, and I was shocked by his appearance. He was thin, and his chest was hollower than ever. There were dark lines below his liquid eyes, brighter then than I had ever seen them before. There were two blazing spots on his high cheek-bones. He coughed oftener than I had ever known him, and the spasms were longer and more violent. His hand was feverishly hot. His manner, too, was restless. To my surprise, he seemed to try to avoid being alone with me. He introduced me to his wife, a dignified, matronly woman with a full figure and a cheerful smile. She had a most motherly manner of looking after him and of anticipating his wants; twice she jumped up to close a door which had been left open behind him. He accepted her devotion as a matter of course, apparently. Once, when she was telling me of their projects--how they were going direct to Egypt to remain till late in the spring, and then to return to Paris for the summer, with a possible run over to London before the season was over--he interrupted her to say that it mattered little where he went or what he did--one place was as good as another.

When I rose to go he came with me out into the hotel corridor, despite his wife's suggestion that there was sure to be a draught there.

He thrust into my hand a note-book. "There," he said, "take that; it's a journal I started to keep, and never did. Of course you can read it if you like. In the pocket you will find a check. I want you to get some things for me after I've gone; I've written down everything. You will do that for me, I know."

I promised to carry out his instructions to the letter.

"Then that's all right," he answered.

At that moment his wife came to the door of their parlor. "I know it must be chilly out in the hall there," she said.

"Oh, I'm coming," he responded.

Then he grasped my fingers firmly in his hot hand. "Good-by, old man," he whispered. "You remember how I used to think the frog that played the trombone was trying to execute a Heine-Schubert song? Well, perhaps it is--I don't know; but what I do know is that it has played a wedding march, after all. And now good-by. God bless you! Go and see my mother as often as you can."

He gave my hand a hearty shake, and went back into the parlor, and his wife shut the door after him.

I had intended to go down to the boat and see him off the next morning, but at breakfast I received a letter from his wife saying that he had passed a very restless night, and that she thought it would excite him still more if I saw him again, and begging me, therefore, not to come to the steamer if such had been my intention. And so it was that he sailed away and I never saw him again.

In the note-book I found a check for five hundred dollars, and a list of the things he wished me to get and to pay for. They were for his mother mostly, but one was a seal-ring for myself. And there was with the check a jeweler's bill, "To articles sent as directed," which I was also requested to pay.

The note-book itself I guarded with care. It was a pocket-journal, and my friend had tried to make it a record of his life for the preceding year. There were entries of letters received and sent, of money earned and spent, of acquaintances made, of business appointments, of dinner engagements, and of visits to the doctor. Evidently his health had been failing fast, and he had been struggling hard to keep the knowledge not only from his mother, but even from himself. While he had set down these outward facts of his life, he had also used the note-book as the record of his inward feelings. To an extent that he little understood, that journal, with its fragmentary entries and its stray thoughts, told the story of his spiritual experience.

Many of the entries were personal, but many were not; they were merely condensations of the thought of the moment as it passed through his mind. Here are two specimens:

"We judge others by the facts of life--by what we hear them say and see them do. We judge ourselves rather by our own feelings--by what we intend and desire and hope to do some day in the future. Thus a poor man may glow with inward satisfaction at the thought of the hospital he is going to build when he gets rich. And a wealthy man can at least pride himself on the fortitude with which he would, if need be, bear the deprivations of poverty."

"To pardon is the best and the bitterest vengeance."

Toward the end of the year the business entries became fewer and fewer, as though he had tired of keeping the record of his doings. But the later pages were far fuller than the earlier of his reflections--sometimes a true thought happily expressed, sometimes, more often than not perhaps, a mere verbal antithesis, such as have furnished forth many an aphorism long before my friend was born. And these later sentiments had a tinge of bitterness lacking in the earlier.

"There are few houses," he wrote, in October, apparently, "where happiness is a permanent boarder; generally it is but a transient guest; and sometimes, indeed, it is only a tramp that knocks at the side door and is refused admittance."

"Many a man forgets his evil deeds so swiftly that he is honestly surprised when any one else recalls them."

Except the directions to me for the expenditure of the five hundred dollars, the last two entries in the book were written on Christmas morning. One of these was the passage which smote me most when I first read it, for it struck me as sadness itself when written by a young man not yet twenty-five:

"If we had nothing else to wish, we should at least wish to die."

At the time I did not seize the full significance of the other passage, longer than this, and far sadder when its meaning was finally grasped.

"The love our parents gave us we do not pay back, nor a tithe of it, even. We may bestow it to our children, but we never render it again to our father and our mother. And what can equal the love of a woman for the son she has borne? No peak is as lofty, and no ocean is as wide; it is fathomless, boundless, immeasurable; it is poured without stint, unceasing and unfailing. And how do we men meet it? We do not even make a pretense of repaying it, most of us. Now and again there may be a son here and there who does what he can for his mother, little as it is, and much as he may despise himself for doing it: and why not? Are there not seven swords in the heart of the Mater Dolorosa? And what sort of a son is he who would add another?"

Although I had already begun to guess at the secret of my friend's conduct, a mystery to all others, it was the first of these two final entries in his note-book which came flashing back into my memory one evening toward the end of March, ten weeks or so after he had bidden me good-by and had gone away to Egypt. I was seated in my library, smoking, when there came a ring at the door, and a telegram was handed to me. I laid my cigar down on the brownish-yellow shell, at the crinkled edge of which the green frog was sitting, reaching out his broken arms for the trombone whereon he had played in happier days. I saw that the despatch had come by the cable under the ocean, and I wondered who on the other side of the Atlantic had news for me that would not keep till a letter could reach me.

I tore open the envelope. The message was dated Alexandria, Egypt, and it was signed by my friend's widow. He had died that morning, and I was asked to break the news to his mother.

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