Honor Edgeworth; Or, Ottawa's Present Tense Part 22

"Why did you wear that cruel little rose-bud to-night, Miss Edgeworth?"

This is the sort of pleasant thing that Honor dislikes: whose memory or antic.i.p.ation is always sweeter than the actual experience. She did not look at him this time, but still, toying with her spoon and gla.s.s, she answered slowly:

"Because--I like it best of all the flowers--"

"On account of its--" interrupted Vivian, and then paused, looked at her, and waited,

"Yes, exactly," Honor said, looking straight into his deep eyes, this time. "It is on that very account."

"I was going to say--'meaning'--" he almost whispered back.

"Well--?" Honor drawled indifferently.

"Take it off then--it is the only unbecoming thing about you."

"I infer," returned Honor, slightly arching her brows, "that you expect me to obey your word of command?"

"Which I spoke without the meanest right to do so, I suppose?" Vivian said humbly, "in that case, I cancel it and apologize."

"That is still, almost another command," she retorted provokingly.

"How so?" asked her listener, becoming interested.

"For pardon," Honor said, "I never knew a man who did not flatter himself that his apology satisfied for the grossest indiscretion."

He stood aimlessly up, and knocked a withered leaf of oleander from a tall branch that scented the spot where they were sitting, but instead of returning to his seat, he leaned his crossed arms on the back of her broad chair, and looking down on her, answered:

"Why are you a little less generous to us, poor unfortunates than you are to every one else?"

He was so gentle to her, he could not reproach her with a fault, and he had therefore called this a less degree of generosity.

Honor began to feel the effects of playing with dangerous tools, but without knowing that such an experience, is the greatest danger that can beset an untried life.

"How rashly you do presume, Mr. Standish," said Honor, "as if you could tell, positively, what I thought of 'you poor unfortunates.'"

"As if you could help showing us, your lack of appreciation in every possible way," he returned, still leaning on the cus.h.i.+oned back of the chair, where she rested her head languidly.

"Then, let it be so, for if you judge me by my action only, without bringing any of your own calculations to bear, I will be satisfied with the result."

"Miss Edgeworth," began he, changing his tone to one of curious interest and earnestness, "have you a bosom friend?"

Honor looked suddenly up at him, and grew serious.

"I have acquaintances who presume to question me, as though they had the rights of one," she said, sinking lazily back in her chair.

"Then, they usurp _somebody's_ privileges, by so doing--do they not?"

The girl looked indignantly at him, and only withdrew her powerful glance slowly, as she said:

"Mr. Standish, I find it strange, that you should think me utterly different from other girls; pray, undeceive yourself I have my friends, and loves, and follies, and caprices like the rest and will have all my life. I expect to to be just as foolish in my love affairs some day, as you men generally consider most girls to be."

"I hope so," he answered meaningly, and as she rose to leave the conservatory, for another dance, she heard him mutter: "for my sake."

CHAPTER XXVII.

"He whom thou fearest will, to ease its pain, Lay his cold hand upon thy aching heart, Soothe the terrors of thy troubled brain, And bid the shadows of earth's griefs depart."

--_A Proctor_

"You had better watch him closely, Mrs. Pratt, his condition is precarious, and as he has been thrown on your hands, do not treat him shabbily--"

"You ken bet I'll not," said the matronly female, who stood half hidden in the humble doorway, from which Dr. Belford had just made his exit.

"Lawks, doctor dear, I'll have an eye to him, jest as if he was my very own. It'ud not be me 'at would neglec' any Christian that fate had thrown on me hands."

"I thought so," said the doctor, half apologetically. "I'll call again shortly," and then, gathering in the fringe of his carriage ap.r.o.n, Dr.

Belford bade Mrs. Pratt a temporary farewell, and was off.

The small shabby brown door closed gently enough, and separated Mrs.

Pratt from the whole moving ma.s.s of animate confusion that reigned in the streets outside. As she stopped, on her way through the narrow pa.s.sage within, to straighten the rag mat at the door of the front room, she sighed perplexedly and soliloquized resignedly:

"Fever! above all things else--bless the sickness--likely as not it could be the death o' me, and yet, how could I send the lad away or go back on him now."

A hissing noise from the kitchen, transported the meditative Mrs. Pratt in a wonderful hurry from her philanthropic reasoning to a saucepan of potatoes that were bubbling furiously in the water, over a good fire in her cracked cooking stove; but though she busied herself with her daily duties for the next hour, her face was unusually serious, and her mind agitated. She was reflecting earnestly on the new charge that had been thrust upon her, and wondering whether a tough old woman who had never had the measles could escape the contagion of typhoid fever,

Mrs. Pratt had a small faded cottage all to herself, the substantial token of the late John Pratt's esteem, before he left for his long journey to the better land; and though the locality was a poor one, and the neighbors noisy and rough, this particular dwelling impressed one strongly with in idea of the "shabby genteel" in all its painful gentility, and also filled the heart with a ready sympathy for the "old decency" that yet survived within those paintless, sunburnt shutters, and those faded, pitted walls.

But inside this uncomfortable appearance of washed-out brick and well-ripened wood, there was comfort and cleanliness and quiet. The front room, with its stiff cane rocker and chairs, its round table and well-adorned mantelpiece, its cretonne-covered lounge and tapestry carpet, was not a bad sample at all, of a drawing-room in a third-rate boarding house.

Upstairs, on the first and highest story, were three small, but scrupulously neat rooms, two of which looked out into the street, and the other into the common yard of some dozen neighbors. In the largest apartment of all, which was the aristocratic bedroom, was a narrow, iron bedstead, a little square, antique bureau, an open wash-stand, with a prim white basin set into a hole in it to fit, and a clean diaper towel, folded respectably across the pitcher that did not match the bowl. The boards, though bare, were yellow as gold. The faded shutters were closed, and failing hooks were fastened to a nail in the shabby sill by a piece of aged pink tape. On a small table by the bed-side, were bottles and tumblers and remnants of rough delicacies, that bespoke sickness.

The loud, heavy breathing of an invalid, was all that disturbed the quiet of Mrs. Pratt's best room, and this came irregularly, but oppressed and labored, from the prostrate form on the little iron bed behind the door.

Over the spotless linen of the warm bed, two hot, washed hands were lying, and buried in the small, soft pillows, was the flashed, feverish face of a young man. His brow was contracted and every feature bore the impress of the foul disease that had made him its victim. The dry, parched lips moved eagerly at intervals, and the thin fingers clutched one another in feverish excitement; the drowsy lids were only half closed, and great drops of perspiration were standing out on the poor flushed face.

Care and intense anxiety were legibly traced on the well carved features. The mouth was drawn in at its corners, the brow was furrowed by deep lines, and the black hair was well sprinkled with the grey dust of a hard and a bitter experience acquired on the road of life's fatiguing duties.

This sad, silent young man was well known in the neighborhood as "Mrs.

Pratt's boarder," and when, after defying a serious indisposition for days, he came home one night to his little room, a helpless victim to its ravages, everyone said they were truly sorry, and counselled Mrs.

Pratt to treat him "decent." Here he lay through long, sleepy, sultry days, dozing and raving, and tossing in the madness and delirium of fever, and suffering terribly, through endless nights of suffocation and torment.

Poor Mrs. Pratt had done her best, n.o.bly and well, she had called in the doctor of best repute, and had advanced the "coppers" herself, such trust had she placed in the young fellow, wherewith to provide him with the necessary remedies and delicacies. When he was "real" bad she sat up herself to watch, and invited the widow Brady or some other interesting neighbor to keep her company.

Dr. Belford was a man of unrivalled skill in his profession, and to say the best of him was a true friend to the needy and the poor. No hour of the night was too late for him to answer their pleading cry, and hence it was that he became the very idol of the dest.i.tute of a great city.

He had come into Chapel Alley, at Mrs. Pratt's anxious request, and had p.r.o.nounced her lodger, to be in the height of "typhoid fever." The case was even more dangerous than he cared to pretend, and the circ.u.mstances that had driven a respectable young fellow, such as his patient looked, to seek lodgings in a dilapidated quarter like Chapel Alley were such as engaged his sympathies at once.