CHAPTER VIII

THE WHITE MESSENGER

In spite of Bivens's protest Stuart returned to New York on the first train the morning after the coaching party reached the house.

"Stay a week longer," the little man urged, "and I'll go with you; we'll go together, all of us, in my car. I'm getting worse here every day. I've got to get back to my doctors in New York."

"I'm sorry, Cal," he answered quickly, "but I must leave at once."

Nan allowed him to go without an effort to change his decision. A strange calm had come over her. She drove to the station with him in silence. He began to wonder what it meant.

As he stepped from the machine she extended her hand, with a tender smile, and said in low tones:

"Until we meet again."

He pressed it gently and was gone.

He reached New York thoroughly exhausted and blue. The struggles through which he had passed had left him bruised. He spent a sleepless night on the train fighting its scenes over and over. He had told her their relations on any terms must cease, and yet he knew instinctively that another struggle was possible on her return. He made up his mind at once to avoid this meeting.

The sight of Harriet seated on the stoop of the old home by the Square watching a crowd of children play brought a smile back to his haggard face.

He waved to her a block away and she sprang to her feet answering with a cry of joy. The startling contrast between the women struck him again. She met him at the corner with outstretched hands.

"What a jolly scene, little pal!" he cried. "What's the kid's convention about?"

"They've come to honour me with their good wishes on my voyage."

"What voyage?" he asked in surprise.

"Oh, you didn't know--I've an engagement to sing on the Continent this summer--the news came the day you left. Isn't that fine? I sail next week."

A sudden idea struck him. He dropped the bag he was carrying and exclaimed:

"By George, it is just the thing!"

"What?" she asked with a puzzled look.

"Let me go with you, girlie?"

"Oh, Jim, if you only would, I'd be in heaven! You have never been across. I'd chaperone you and show you everything you ought to see. Please go! Say you will! You've said you would, and you can't say no--you're going, you're going!"

"I will!" he said with decision. "You've booked your passage?"

"Yes, but I'll change it to suit you. Oh, goodie, goodie! You're going, you're going! I'm perfectly happy!"

He found business which required a week and booked his passage with Harriet's on a Cunarder which sailed in ten days.

A week later Nan and Bivens returned to their New York house. The papers were full of stories of his failing health. A sensational evening sheet issued an extra announcing that he was dying. The other papers denied the report as a fake. All reporters were denied admission to the Riverside home, and in consequence the press devoted five times the space to his illness they otherwise would have given.

Two days after her arrival Nan telephoned to Stuart.

"You must come up to see Cal to-night," she said earnestly, "he is asking for you."

"Is he really dangerously ill?" Stuart interrupted.

"It's far more serious than the papers suspect. He has had another attack of his old trouble. The doctors say he has a fighting chance--that's all. You'll come?"

"Yes, early to-morrow morning. I've an important engagement to-night that will keep me until twelve o'clock. I'm sailing for Europe day after to-morrow."

A sudden click at the other end and he was cut off. His experienced ear told him it was not an accident. The sound could only have been made by the person to whom he was talking quickly hanging up the receiver. He waited a moment and called Nan back to the telephone.

"You understand, Nan?"

"Yes, we were cut off."

"Tell him I'll be up early in the morning, by ten o'clock, surely. Good night."

The answer was the merest whisper:

"Good night."

It was just dawn when Stuart's telephone rang and he leaped from bed startled at the unusual call.

He seized the receiver and could hear no voice. Apparently some one was fumbling at the other end and he felt the impression of a woman's sleeve or dress brushing the instrument.

"Well, well," he cried in quick, impatient tones, "what is it? What's the matter?"

"Is that you?" came the faint echo of a woman's voice.

"Who is this, please?"

"Jim, don't you know my voice! It's Nan!"

"I didn't recognize it. You spoke so queerly. What is it, Nan?"

"For heaven's sake come at once. Cal was taken dangerously ill at two o'clock. The doctors have been with him every moment. He doesn't get any better. He keeps calling for you. He insisted on my telephoning. I'm frightened. I want to see you. Please come?"

"At once, of course, I'll be there in half an hour--three quarters at the most."

"Thank you," she gasped, and hung up her receiver.

Stuart's cab whirled up town through rivers of humanity pouring down to begin again the round of another day. At Fourteenth, Forty-second, Fifty-ninth, Sixty-sixth and Seventy-second the crash and roar of the subterraneous rivers caught his ear as the black torrents of men and women swirled and eddied and poured into the depths below. In all the hurrying thousands not one knew or cared a straw whether the man of millions in his silent palace on the Drive lived or died. To-morrow morning it would be the same, no matter what his fate, and the next day and the next.

"A strange old world!" he mused as his cab swung into the Drive and dashed up to the great house. A liveried servant opened the iron gates wide. He was evidently expected. The chauffeur threw the little cab up the steep turn with a rush. He sprang out and entered the hall with quick silent tread.

The house was evidently in hopeless confusion. Servants wandered in every direction without order. Doctor after doctor passed in and out and the sickening odour of medicines filled the air. A group of newspaper reporters stood at the foot of the grand stairway, discussing in subdued whispers his chances of life and the probable effect of his death on the market. The last barrier was down and through the confusion and panic Stuart could feel the chill of the silently approaching presence. Slowly, remorselessly, the white messenger of Eternity was drawing near.

Nan stood shivering at the head of the stairs, pale, dishevelled, her dark eyes wide and staring with a new expression of terror in their depths.

"How is he, Nan?"

She stared at him a moment without seeming to understand until Stuart repeated his question.

"Worse," she stammered through chattering teeth. "The doctors say he can't possibly live. He has been calling for me for the last hour. I--can't--go!"

"Why?"

"I'm afraid!"

He took her hand. It was cold and he felt a tremour run through her body at his touch.

"Come, come, Nan, you're not a silly child, but a woman who has passed through scenes in life that held tragedies darker than death!"

"I can't help it; I'm afraid," she cried, shivering and drawing closer.

"Come, drive out of your thoughts the old foolish shadows that make the end of life a horror. To me dying has come to mean the breaking of bars. You taught me this the day you killed my soul."

"Hush, Jim!"

"It's true, don't be foolish," he whispered. "The day you killed me, long ago, I was lonely and afraid at first, and then I saw that death is only the gray mystery of the dawn. Come, I'm ashamed of you. If Cal is calling, go to him at once. You must see him."

"I can't! Tell him that I'm ill."

"I won't lie to him in such an hour."

Shivering in silence she led Stuart to the door of Bivens's room and fled to her own.

On another magnificent bed of gleaming ebony inlaid with rows of opals, thousands of opals, Stuart found the little shrivelled form. The swarthy face was white and drawn, the hard thin lips fallen back from two rows of smooth teeth in pitiful, fevered weakness. He was trying to talk to the pastor of his church, while the fashionable clergymen bent over him with an expression of helpless misery, now and then wiping the perspiration from his sleek, well-fed neck.

"I want you to go into that next room and pray," the little man gasped. "I haven't done anything very good or great yet, but I have plans, great plans! Tell them to God, ask Him to give me a chance. Ten years more--or five--or one--and I'll do these things."

The shifting eyes caught sight of Stuart. He released the minister's hand and raised his own to his friend.

"Jim!"

The preacher moved aside with a sigh of relief and softly tiptoed out of the room as Stuart took the outstretched hand.

"It's awfully good of you to come up here so soon," he began feebly. "I've some plans I want you to carry out for me right away. You see I never thought before of the world as a place where there were so many men and women sick and suffering--thousands and tens and hundreds of thousands. These doctors say that every night in New York alone there are half a million people sick or bending over the beds of loved ones who are suffering, and two hundred die every day."

He paused for breath, and the black eyes stared at his friend.

"Jim, I can't die! I haven't lived! I've got to get up from here and do some things I've meant to do--all those sick people--I've got to do something for them. I'm going to build palaces for the lame, the halt, the sick, the blind. I'm going to gather the great men of science from the ends of the earth and set them to work to lift this shadow from the world."

A sudden pain seized and convulsed his frail body and Stuart called the doctors from the next room.

They stood by in helpless sympathy.

"Can't you stop this pain?" the financier gasped in anger. "What are you here for? Am I not able to buy enough morphine to stop this hellish agony?"

His family doctor bent and said:

"Your heart action is too low just now, Mr. Bivens, you can't stand it."

"Well, I can't stand this! Give it to me, I tell you!"

The doctor took a hypodermic syringe, filled it with water and injected it into his arm.

While Stuart watched the pitiful trick, his eye wandered over the magnificent trappings of the room.

"What irony of Fate!" he exclaimed, under his breath. "Not a clod hopper in the field, nor a blacksmith at his anvil who would change places with him now--the poorest negro who sings at his plow is richer."

The sufferer stared and beckoned to Stuart.

Handing him a key which he drew from beneath his pillow he cried:

"Unlock the right-hand top-drawer of that safe, Jim--the door is open. Hand me those bundles of stocks and bonds and ask those doctors to come in here."

Stuart complied with his request, and Bivens spread the brilliant coloured papers on the white covering of his bed, while the doctors drew near.

"Listen now, gentlemen," he began, still gasping with pain. "You're our greatest living doctors, I'm told. Well, I'm not willing to die, I won't die--do you hear? I'm only forty-nine years old. You see here thirty millions in gilt-edged stocks and bonds. Well, there are three of you, I'll give you ten millions each to take this stone off of my breast that's smothering me and give me five years more of life. My friend Stuart here is witness to this deed of gift--my word is pledged before him and before God--I'll make good. Do you understand? Ten millions each! Can you grasp the meaning, the sweep and power and grandeur of such an offer? Now, gentlemen, do your best for me. Just five years more--well, we won't haggle over terms--give me one year more and I'll not complain!"

The three men of science stood with folded helpless arms and made no effort to keep back the tears. They had seen many men die. It was nothing new--and yet the pity and pathos of this strange appeal found its way to the soul of each. They never envied a millionaire again.

They retired for another consultation. Stuart replaced the papers and put the key in Bivens's outstretched hand.

It was plain that he was sinking rapidly.

"Ask Nan to come here a minute," he said feebly.

Stuart walked to the door and whispered to a servant. When he returned to the bedside, the dying man looked up into his face gratefully.

"You don't know how it helps me to have you near, Jim, old boy. I'm lonely! Nan I guess is ill and broken down. I've lavished millions on her. I've given her all I possess in my will, but somehow we never found happiness. If I could only have been sure of the deep, sweet, unselfish love of one human soul on this earth! If I could only have won a girl's heart when I was poor; but I was rich, and I've always wondered whether she really loved me for my own sake. At least I've always thanked God for you. You've been a real friend. Our hearts were young together and you stood by me when--I--was--a--poor--lonely--friendless--dog----"

His voice sank low and he gasped painfully for breath. Stuart knew the end had come. He bent low and whispered:

"Give me your hand, Cal, old boy, we must say goodbye. I must go in a minute."

To his surprise the hand was not extended.

An hour later when the covering was turned back from the dead body he saw that the smooth little cold hand had gripped the key to his treasures in a last instinctive grasp.

Stuart drew the curtains of scarlet and gold, touched a spring and raised the massive broad window. The death-chamber was flooded with fresh balmy air and dazzling sunlight. All that was left of him who boasted his mastery of the world lay on the magnificent bed, a lump of white cold flesh and projecting bones. The little body looked stark and hideous in the sunlight.

The reporters down stairs were prying into his affairs like so many ferrets to find out how much he left. One of them asked Stuart his opinion.

The lawyer gazed at the young reporter, thoughtfully, while he slowly answered:

"There's only one thing sure, young man, he left it all!"

Through the open window Stuart caught the perfume of flowers on the lawn. The Italian gardeners were working on the flower beds the little man loved. The great swan-like form of a Hudson River steamer swept by, piling the white foam of the clear waters on her bow, bearing high on the side the gilded name of a man who was once Bivens's associate in great ventures, but who was now wearing a suit of convict's stripes behind the walls of a distant prison.

A long line of barges loaded with brick for new houses came floating down the stream behind a busy little tug. On the soft morning breezes the young Southerner's keen car caught the twang of a banjo and the joyous music of negro brickmen singing an old-fashioned melody of his native state; while over all, like an eternal chorus, came the dim muffled roar of the city's life.

He looked again at the lump of cold clay, and wondered what was passing in the soul of the woman who was now the heir of all his millions.

Why had she shown such strange and abject terror over his death--an event she had foreseen and desired? He recalled the hoarse unnatural voice and the blind fumbling at her telephone.

A horrible suspicion suddenly flushed through his mind!

He determined to know at once. A few skilful questions would reveal the truth. She might be able to conceal it from the world, but not from him. He called a servant and asked to see Mrs. Bivens immediately.

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