Read Ebook: Interrupted by Pansy

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 250 lines and 16616 words, and 5 pages

"Are you Harold Chessney?" she asked as though a new thought came to her with the union of the two names, "and are you going to the Rocky Mountains?"

"I am Harold Chessney," he said, smiling, "and I have in mind a trip to the Rocky Mountains, if I can make my plans in that direction what I wish. But why this should be of interest to you passes my comprehension." Of course this last he thought.

She did not leave him long in doubt.

"Is Louis Ansted going with you?"

She seemed to answer the look.

There was no time for more. Alice Ansted came up, and claimed the stranger as an acquaintance, and stood talking with him for a moment and expressed extreme anxiety that he should find her brother in the city the next day.

"He is somewhere in town, but we never know where. Still, I could give you a dozen addresses, at any one of which you might find him. I hope you will not return without seeing him."

"I shall not," Mr. Chessney said, decidedly. "Is he inclined to accompany me, do you think? Has he mentioned to you my designs?"

"Yes, and would go if it were not for--Mr. Chessney, if you could make mamma understand. No one seems able to. Claire Benedict has tried and failed; and what she fails in, perhaps can not be done. I don't know, but something must be done, and that speedily."

Almost Claire Benedict's words repeated. The newcomer walked home in almost silence. As they neared Harry's door, he said:

"What is young Ansted about just now?"

"Drinking hard, sir; he is running down hill very fast. If you don't get him away with you, I am afraid he will go to the dogs in a hurry."

"Is he still on terms of special intimacy with the VanMarters?"

"Well, as to that, I do not know. Things look mixed. He rails against Willis VanMarter once in a while, when he has been taking enough to make him imprudent, and Miss Alice seems to have broken with them altogether; at least, Willis does not come out any more, I think, and Miss Alice is not in town often; but Mrs. Ansted seems to be as intimate with them as ever, and Louis goes there with his mother. I don't know anything about it, but it looks like a house divided against itself. If I had such a mother as Louis Ansted has, I don't believe I would try to be anybody."

"Mothers don't seem to count for much sometimes, my boy."

"You mean with their sons, and I dare say you mean me, Uncle Harold; but it is not true. My mother always counted for ten times more than you think. It was she who held me back. If Louis Ansted had a tenth part of the craving for liquor that I have, with his mother to push him, he would have been gone long ago, beyond reach. I don't know but he is now. He has been going down very fast in the last few weeks."

"What is the accelerating cause?"

"That I don't positively know. Partly, it is the natural result of a bad habit indulged, I suppose; but there are other influences at which I can guess. Still, it is pure guesswork. I am not in any one's confidence, except when Louis has been drinking too much, he says to me things that he would not want me to know if he were sober, and those, of course, I don't repeat. I think that his mother is bent on this union of the two houses, VanMarter's and theirs, and I think neither Louis nor Miss Alice are of her mind in the matter; and I think, moreover, that Louis would rather have an hour of Miss Benedict's society than a lifetime of Miss Eva VanMarter's, and I don't think he can get what he wants. Now, isn't that an interesting little romance for a young fellow like me to think out, especially when I don't know a thing about it? The only fact is that Louis Ansted is in great danger, and nobody seems to have much influence over him--at least, nobody who uses it in the right direction."

"His sister seems to be roused. I was surprised to hear her speak as she did."

"His sister is not the woman she was when you saw her last. She has been under Miss Benedict's influence all winter."

"Evidently you incline to the belief that Miss Benedict is a remarkable woman," his uncle said, with a slight laugh. "Why has she not been exerting her influence to help poor Louis?"

"She has tried as hard as a woman can. But, Uncle Harold, she is not the sort of woman to promise to marry a man merely to save him from becoming a drunkard."

"I should hope not," Mr. Chessney answered promptly.

AN ESCAPED VICTIM.

IN the quiet of Harry's own room, his uncle having spent fifteen minutes in silent and apparently puzzled thought, suddenly asked a question:

"When did Louis go into town?"

"Several days ago. He has a way of disappearing suddenly, not giving the family an idea of where he is going or when he expects to return, and when he does get back he shows to any one who is not blind, that he has been pretty low down."

"They expect him back to-morrow?"

"Why, as to that, they have been expecting him ever since he went away. I heard Miss Alice say that he went unexpectedly, leaving word that he should probably be back to dinner."

"Harry, my boy, I am almost inclined to think that I ought to start out to-night, and try to look him up."

"To-night! Why, Uncle Harold, how could you? It would be midnight and after before you could reach the city, and then where would you go? The addresses that Miss Alice can give you must be respectable places, with closed doors to-night."

"That is true," Mr. Chessney answered, after a thoughtful pause; "it would be a wild kind of proceeding, apparently, with very little excuse; and yet I am someway impressed that it is the thing to do."

Alas for the Christian world which believes in theory, that there is a direct link between the seen and the unseen, by which the earnest soul can be told in what way to walk, and, in practice, thinks it must search out its own way! Mr. Chessney did not go out in search of his friend. He did not even ask his Master whether it was his will that the apparently "wild proceeding" should be attempted. He prayed, it is true; and he prayed for Louis Ansted, but only in a general way; and he retired to rest, saying within himself that directly after breakfast he would go into town and see what he could do.

Before he was awake the next morning, the piazza of the little country hotel, where he stopped, was filled with loungers who had something unusual and exciting to talk about. There were a dozen different stories, it is true; but out of them all the interested listener could glean certain things which were painfully likely to be facts. There had been a runaway--to that all parties agreed; and Louis Ansted had been in the carriage, and had been thrown; but whether he was killed, or only seriously hurt, or whether the horse had taken fright at the approaching train, or whether the driver had attempted to cross the railroad-track in the face of the train, or whether there had been any train at all, authorities differed. It was still early when Harry Matthews knocked at his uncle's door with the confused particles of story.

"And you don't know whether he is living, or not?" asked the startled uncle who was now making his toilet with all possible speed.

"No, I can't find out. Some of them say he was killed instantly, and others have it that he was only stunned, and has revived. It may be nothing but a scare. South Plains has so little excitement that it is apt to make as much as it can out of everything. Uncle Harold, I can't go up there and find out, for my train will be due in five minutes, and I must be at the telegraph office, you know."

"Yes; I will be down in less than five minutes, and will go immediately up there. I hope it is chiefly talk." Yet when he was left alone, he said aloud and mournfully: "If I had only followed my impressions last night!"

He had occasion to say it, or, at least, to think it often, in the days which followed. South Plains had not exaggerated, this time. Louis Ansted was not dead--at least, the heart was beating; but he lay a bruised, unconscious heap among the snowy draperies of his bed--his soiled and matted clothing, which as yet they had not dared remove, telling to the practiced eye a story of more than a mere runaway. The skillful doctor, who had already been summoned from the city, was silent as well as skillful. He issued his orders in as few words as possible, and kept his own counsel, until, left alone with Mr. Chessney for a moment, in answer to the question, "What does this stupor mean?" he shook his head.

"Hard to tell. It was on him before the accident, if that gives you any light."

It gave him bitter light, and made him groan in spirit over the fact that he had been tempted to go out in the night and hunt for his friend, and had not gone.

Later in the day, bits of the facts came to him. Louis Ansted had been alone; had hired a horse at the livery and started for home. "More under the influence of liquor than usual, perhaps," the reluctant hostler at the livery had admitted, "still, I thought he would get through all right." For the rest, the silent lips on the bed told no tales. He had been found, not very far from the railroad crossing, lying under a tree, and the horse had made his way back to the stables. Whether a train had frightened the animal, or whether being left to himself while the driver sank into a drunken sleep had caused his alarm, or how the accident had occurred, was left to conjecture.

His mother continually repeated the story--and succeeded in making herself believe it--that a vicious horse had been given him, who evidently became unmanageable at the sound of the locomotive; but some of the listeners went out and said that there was no train passing between the hours that the horse left the stables and returned there, and the doctor shrugged his shoulders and said nothing.

Then followed one of those periods of waiting and watching which some people know all about; the miseries of which can only be understood by having to live them. The trip to the Rocky Mountains was indefinitely postponed, and Harold Chessney, having made a journey to the city, and rearranged his business, returned to take his place among the watchers.

In this way passed weeks, while the soul of the injured man hovered on the edge of another world. Gradually the excitement in the village calmed down, and everywhere outside of that house on the hill every-day life went on again. Mr. Chessney came and went, keeping a hand on his business interests where he must, but keeping the most of his thoughts and the most of his time waiting, in the hope that consciousness would return once more to the wreck on the bed. There was one other who watched and waited, too, though she could not now go to the house to inquire. She could pray; and this she did. Sometimes it seemed to her that every thought was a prayer for that periled soul. And often and often she, too, had to think:

"What if I had been more anxious, and earnest, and constant, while the body was comparatively in health--might not things possibly have been different?"

It was in the middle of the night, and Mr. Chessney sat alone with the sick man. There was nothing to do but wait, and he had prevailed upon other weary watchers to rest, and let him take his turn. So there was only himself to be startled by a low voice from one who had been for so many weeks speechless: "Harold, is it you?"

Great was the rejoicing in the troubled home the next morning. Louis was awake and conscious, knew them all, smiled feebly on his mother, and watched hungrily every movement of Mr. Chessney.

The worst was over; he would gain rapidly now. So the mother said, with eager voice and joyful eyes. Alice looked up questioningly when Mr. Chessney remained silent and grave, and as soon as opportunity came, asked her anxious question:

"Mr. Chessney, I can see that you do not share mamma's joy. Do you think the indications unfavorable?"

"I don't know, Miss Ansted. I am not a physician, only a nurse, and I hope I may be mistaken; but it is true that I am anxious."

And the doctor, when he came, expressed no surprise and no pleasure over the change.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet