Foul Play - Dion Boucicault (the best books to read txt) 📗

in the cavern.

One day Helen had left him so employed, and was busy cooking the dinner at her own place, but, mind you, with one eye on the dinner and another on her patient, when suddenly she heard him shouting very loud, and ran out to see what was the matter.

He was roaring like mad, and whirling his arms over his head like a demented windmill.

She ran to him.

“Eureka! Eureka!” he shouted, in furious excitement.

“Oh, dear!” cried Helen; “never mind.” She was all against her patient exciting himself.

But he was exalted beyond even her control. “Crown me with laurel,” he cried; “I have solved the problem.” And up went his arms.

“Oh, is that all?” said she, calmly.

“Get me two squares of my parchment,” cried he; “and some of the finest gut.”

“Will not after dinner do?”

“No; certainly not,” said Hazel, in a voice of command. “I wouldn’t wait a moment for all the flesh-pots of Egypt.”

Then she went like the wind and fetched them.

“Oh, thank you! thank you! Now I want—let me see—ah, there’s an old rusty hoop that was washed ashore, on one of that ship’s casks. I put it carefully away; how the unlikeliest things come in useful soon or late!”

She went for the hoop, but not so rapidly, for here it was that the first faint doubt of his sanity came in. However, she brought it, and he thanked her.

“And now,” said he, “while I prepare the intelligence, will you be so kind as to fetch me the rushes?”

“The what?” said Helen, in growing dismay.

“The rushes! I’ll tell you where to find some.”

Helen thought the best thing was to temporize. Perhaps he would be better after eating some wholesome food. “I’ll fetch them directly after dinner,” said she. “But it will be spoiled if I leave it for long; and I do so want it to be nice for you to-day.”

“Dinner?” cried Hazel. “What do I care for dinner now? I am solving my problem. I’d rather go without dinner for years than interrupt a great idea. Pray let dinner take its chance, and obey me for once.”

“For once!” said Helen, and turned her mild hazel eyes on him with such a look of gentle reproach.

“Forgive me! But don’t take me for a child, asking you for a toy; I’m a poor crippled inventor, who sees daylight at last. Oh, I am on fire; and, if you want me not to go into a fever, why, get me my rushes.”

“Where shall I find them?” said Helen, catching fire at him.

“Go to where your old hut stood, and follow the river about a furlong. You will find a bed of high rushes. Cut me a good bundle, cut them below the water, choose the stoutest. Here is a pair of shears I found in the ship.”

She took the shears and went swiftly across the sands and up the slope. He watched her with an admiring eye; and well he might, for it was the very poetry of motion. Hazel in his hours of health had almost given up walking; he ran from point to point, without fatigue or shortness of breath. Helen, equally pressed for time, did not run; but she went almost as fast. By rising with the dawn, by three meals a day of animal food, by constant work, and heavenly air, she was in a condition women rarely attain to. She was trained. Ten miles was no more to her than ten yards. And, when she was in a hurry, she got over the ground by a grand but feminine motion not easy to describe. It was a series of smooth undulations, not vulgar strides, but swift rushes, in which the loins seemed to propel the whole body, and the feet scarcely to touch the ground. It was the vigor and freedom of a savage, with the grace of a lady.

And so it was she swept across the sands and up the slope,

<CENTER>_”Et vera incessu patuit Dea.“_<CENTER>

While she was gone, Hazel cut two little squares of seals’ bladder, one larger than the other. On the smaller he wrote: “An English lady wrecked on an island. W. longitude 103 deg. 30 min., S. latitude between the 33d and 26th parallels. Haste to her rescue.” Then he folded this small, and inclosed it in the larger slip, which he made into a little bag, and tied the neck extremely tight with fine gut, leaving a long piece of the gut free.

And now Helen came gliding back, as she went, and brought him a large bundle of rushes.

Then he asked her to help him fasten these rushes round the iron hoop.

“It must not be done too regularly,” said he; “but so as to look as much like a little bed of rushes as possible.”

Helen was puzzled still, but interested. So she set to work, and, between them, they fastened rushes all round the hoop, although it was a large one.

But, when it was done, Hazel said they were too bare.

“Then we will fasten another row,” said Helen, good-humoredly. And, without more ado, she was off to the river again.

When she came back, she found him up, and he said the great excitement had cured him—such power has the brain over the body. This convinced her he had really hit upon some great idea. And, when she had made him eat his dinner by her fire, she asked him to tell her all about it.

But, by a natural reaction, the glorious and glowing excitement of mind that had battled his very rheumatic pains was now followed by doubt and dejection.

“Don’t ask me yet,” he sighed. “Theory is one thing; practice is another. We count without our antagonists. I forgot they will set their wits against mine; and they are many, I am but one. And I have been so often defeated. Do you know I have observed that whenever I say beforehand, Now I am going to do something clever, I am always defeated. Pride really goes before destruction, and vanity before a fall.”

The female mind, rejecting all else, went like a needle’s point at one thing in this explanation. “Our antagonists?” said Helen, looking sadly puzzled. “Why, what antagonists have we?”

“The messengers,” said Hazel, with a groan. “The aerial messengers.”

That did the business. Helen dropped the subject with almost ludicrous haste; and, after a few commonplace observations, made a nice comfortable dose of grog and bark for him. This she administered as an independent transaction, and not at all by way of comment on his antagonists, the aerial messengers.

It operated unkindly for her purpose; it did him so much good that he lifted up his dejected head, and his eyes sparkled again, and he set to work, and, by sunset, prepared two more bags of bladder with inscriptions inside, and long tails of fine gut hanging. He then set to work, and, with fingers far less adroit than hers, fastened another set of rushes round the hoop. He set them less evenly, and some of them not quite perpendicular; and, while he was fumbling over this, and examining the effect with paternal glances, Helen’s hazel eye dwelt on him with furtive pity; for, to her, this girdle of rushes was now an instrument that bore an ugly likeness to the scepter of straw, with which vanity run to seed sways imaginary kingdoms in Bedlam or Bicetre.

And yet he was better. He walked about the cavern and conversed charmingly; he was dictionary, essayist, _raconteur,_ anything she liked; and, as she prudently avoided and ignored the one fatal topic, it was a delightful evening. Her fingers were as busy as his tongue. And, when he retired, she presented him with the fruits of a fortnight’s work, a glorious wrapper made of fleecy cotton inclosed in a plaited web of flexible and silky grasses. He thanked her, and blessed her, and retired for the night.

About midnight she awoke and felt uneasy. So she did what since his illness she had done a score of times without his knowledge—she stole from her lair to watch him.

She found him wrapped in her present, which gave her great pleasure; and sleeping like an infant, which gave her joy. She eyed him eloquently for a long time; and then very timidly put out her hand, and, in her quality of nurse, laid it lighter than down upon his brow.

The brow was cool, and a very slight moisture on it showed the fever was going or gone.

She folded her arms and stood looking at him; and she thought of all they two had done and suffered together. Her eyes absorbed him, devoured him. The time flew by unheeded. It was so sweet to be able to set her face from its restraint, and let all its sunshine beam on him; and, even when she retired at last, those light hazel eyes, that could flash fire at times, but were all dove-like now, hung and lingered on him as if they could never look at him enough.

Half an hour before daybreak she was awakened by the dog howling piteously. She felt a little uneasy at that; not much. However, she got up, and issued from her cavern, just as the sun showed his red eye above the horizon. She went toward the boat, as a matter of course. She found Ponto tied to the helm. The boat was empty, and Hazel nowhere to be seen.

She uttered a scream of dismay.

The dog howled and whined louder than ever.

 

CHAPTER XLI.

 

WARDLAW senior was not what you would call a tender-hearted man; but he was thoroughly moved by General Rolleston’s distress, and by his fortitude. The gallant old man! Landing in England one week and going back to the Pacific the next! Like goes with like; and Wardlaw senior, energetic and resolute himself, though he felt for his son, stricken down by grief, gave his heart to the more valiant distress of his contemporary. He manned and victualed the Springbok for a long voyage, ordered her to Plymouth, and took his friend down to her by train.

They went out to her in a boat. She was a screw steamer, that could sail nine knots an hour without burning a coal. As she came down the Channel, the general’s trouble got to be well known on board her, and, when he came out of the harbor, the sailors, by an honest, hearty impulse that did them credit, waited for no orders, but manned the yards to receive him with the respect due to his services and his sacred calamity.

On getting on board, he saluted the captain and the ship’s company with sad dignity, and retired to his cabin with Mr. Wardlaw. There the old merchant forced on him by loan seven hundred pounds, chiefly in gold and silver, telling him there was nothing like money, go where you will. He then gave him a number of notices he had printed, and a paper of advice and instructions. It was written in his own large, clear, formal hand.

General Rolleston tried to falter out his thanks. John Wardlaw interrupted him.

“Next to you I am her father; am I not?”

“You have proved it.”

“Well, then. However, if you do find her, as I pray to God you may, I claim the second kiss, mind that; not for myself, though; for my poor Arthur, that lies on a sickbed for her.”

General Rolleston assented to that in a broken voice. He could hardly speak.

And so they parted: and that sad parent went out to the Pacific.

To him it was indeed a sad and gloomy voyage; and the hope with which he went on board oozed gradually away