University of Virginia Library

II

AT The Hague the mother and child disappeared in the crowd, for which the

young husband gave devout thanks. Agatha was very tired, but now he had her to himself. At the hotel he inquired anxiously if the chambermaid spoke either English or French, and heaved a sigh of relief to learn that whatever woes she might have were impenetrably hidden from Agatha's sympathetic eyes in a thick cloud of Dutch. However, his sweet saint discovered by some feminine free-masonry, that the girl suffered from sick headaches, and insisted on giving away all her own stock of headache powders, brought from East Orange to ward off the terrible attacks which overcame her from time to time.

Harry did not discover this loss until a week later, in Brussels, when Agatha, pale and racked with suffering, confessed her gentle crime of kindness.

"My dear!" he protested. "Why couldn't you have given her a few of the powders and kept some for yourself?"

"Why, Harry, I shall never see her again. It was my last chance to help her!"

She closed her eyes with an air of resigned endurance which drove the tender-hearted Harry mad with impatient sympathy. None of the medicines he procured from the pharmacists of Brussels helped her, and the long day wore on in a slow agony to him, as he helplessly watched his wife grow paler and paler, and saw lines of pain etch themselves in her forehead. The women of his own family never had headaches, or, if they did, took some medicine that at once relieved them; and he had never seen the luxury of woe that is presented by a woman enjoying a "splitting headache."

He walked up and down the balcony outside their rooms, smoking furiously, cursing the chambermaid in The Hague, and — no, he couldn't blame his wife for being too much of an angel for this world. His feelings were not soothed by the thought that the American consul, a great friend of his, had arranged a garden fête for them that afternoon, where he was to meet some business men with whom he hoped to enter into relations. Not for his own sake did he regret missing this affair; he was quite honest in his feeling about that, but he knew Agatha would have enjoyed it, and his heart swelled to think what a sensation her blond beauty and pretty, vivacious ways would have made.

Toward evening, however, when he stepped into the bedroom and found his wife asleep, all other emotions were swept away in his flood of tender rejoicing that the ordeal of pain was past. As he stood looking at her, lying like a lily in the huge hotel bed, he said to himself that he had never loved her more. The next day the pain had gone, but she was still pale and weak. Harry took her out for a drive, watching with a loving rapture as the color came back to her cheeks.

At a turn of the road they came suddenly upon a singular sight. One of the little Belgian soldiers sat on the edge of the ditch beside the highway, weeping loudly and openly, his thin, dark face twisted into the shamelessly grotesque contortions of a child. "Oh, oh! What can be the matter?" cried Agatha.

Harry's heart went down with an apprehensive plunge, but he obeyed his wife's signal and stopped the carriage beside the absurd and pitiable figure. In the conversation which followed he was totally at a loss, speaking no French, and being unable to follow what seemed to be a most amazing dialogue. The little soldier, a boy as he now appeared, sobbed out some long story, to which Agatha listened, her sweet face glowing with sympathy and pity. When he finished, she seemed to take a sudden resolution. With a guilty look at her husband, which roused his liveliest fears, she entered upon a long and animated speech that left the little soldier quite breathless. He stared at her in incredulity, and then, with a childlike change to elation, he nodded his head a great many times.

"Harry, dear, please give me your purse," Agatha said; and then, in an eager rush, she went on: "Don't say a word to me now. I'll explain later!"

In a profound silence, incredulous on the part of the soldier, exalted on the part of Agatha, and filled with the darkest premonitions on the part of Harry, she counted out six golden napoleons, and with a flood of directions and instructions gave them to her beneficiary, who crossed himself half timorously, as at a miracle.

"I don't wonder he doesn't think it's real!" exclaimed Harry to himself with a grim irony.

The carriage drove on, and Agatha turned to her husband and "explained." It was a bizarre story, bearing on the face of it, to Harry's experienced eyes, the most patent signs of imposture. The fellow's name was Alphonse; he was an orphan, French by parentage, and he had been serving his time of military duty. On his return to his native village, he found a series of dreadful changes. His aunt, with whom he had lived, was dead; the house was sold to strangers; there was no one to welcome him; and, worst and most crushing of all, his sweetheart, his adored Fifi, had deserted him for a wealthy farmer of the neighborhood.

Harry listened to the tale in silence. He was waiting for the sequel, which was quite as bad as he had feared. Agatha had been overcome with sympathy for the lonely, love-sick lad, had been seized with a desire to punish the inconstant Fifi, and had told him that they would take him back to America with them — Harry groaned aloud — and would get him something to do there.

"Why, Harry, he can go steerage, and that doesn't cost anything! And you always say that any able-bodied man can earn his living in America — that's the beauty of our dear country; and oh, think what Fifi will feel when he goes back and shows her all that money and tells her he's going to America. You know that's the promised land to them here!"

Harry broke in impatiently.

"You don't suppose for a moment you will ever see him again, do you? You stop on the highway, give money to a total stranger, and imagine he will turn up at a rendezvous six weeks from now! Really, Agatha, I'm sorry to have to speak so decidedly, but we have no money to throw away like that!"

His wife took his hand tenderly in hers.

"You dear, soft-hearted fellow! You talk so sternly and look so fierce I'm almost afraid of you, but all the time I know just as well" — this with an infinitely caressing accent — "that you're as pleased to do a good action as I. Just think how you would have felt if you'd come out to East Orange some day and found I was going to be married to somebody else! Why, you're as sorry for poor little Alphonse as I. You dear! Sometimes, Harry darling" — with a soft, pathetic sigh — "I'd almost lose my faith in human nature if it weren't for your kindness and goodness."