Kitabı oku: «A Soldier's Trial: An Episode of the Canteen Crusade», sayfa 18
CHAPTER XXVII
EXEUNT OMNES
There is little left to tell. With the vanishing of the mysterious Blenke, "the man of the mournful eyes," there came swift unfolding of the pitiable scheme that, for a time, had set Minneconjou's nerves on edge, bewildering almost every man from the colonel down, and bedeviling most of the women. When one's own mother is ready to believe a man guilty, small blame to the rest of her kind and to the man's best friends that they should be of the same way of thinking. Moreover, neither then nor thereafter did Sandy Ray consider himself an innocent and injured person.
"If ever a fellow came within an ace of falling," said he to himself, and later to his best friend, his father, "it was I; for I believed her story – believed myself loved – believed she had been tricked into throwing me over for Dwight, and that, now that he had thrown her over because of it, and would have no more to do with her, she would soon be free. Then our marriage could follow. A greater ass than I has never lived, but I was sincere in my assininity."
Nor was Sandy Ray the ass he declared himself, for if ever that exquisite, catlike creature, Inez, loved anybody besides herself, she loved Sandy Ray, and was bent on winning him back, cost what it might. She quickly saw that his love for her lay dormant, not dead. She reveled in the joy of her probable power until, all on a sudden, one terrible night there came to her the shock of seeing a face she believed long since buried beneath the waves of the Pacific – that of the boy lover and husband who wooed and won her inflammable heart nearly five years earlier.
Blenke in a romantic epistle to Miss Sanford, Inez, through her lawyers, and her latest dupe, Stanley Foster – whose resignation from the army went eastward by the same train that bore him and that fair fugitive from Minneconjou – and finally the impeccable Farrells, all gave versions more or less veracious of that early marriage episode. But sifted down, this much of truth was ascertained. The two were cousins, with the vehement blood of the Antilles coursing in their veins. They loved, were married by a Texan justice of the peace, and, after a brief honeymoon across the Mexican line – a honeymoon of mingled bliss and battle – found the old people relentless and themselves squabbling and stranded. The elders swooped upon the girl-wife, bore her back to Texas and sent the strolling player to South America, with the promise never to return or bother them. They told her, and she refused to believe, that he speedily met his death at the hands of a jealous husband in Valparaiso. They later told her, and she fully believed, that, in defiance of his promise and in desire for her, he had determined to reclaim her as they were going to San Francisco, and was washed overboard from the Colima by a tidal wave. Inez, like a certain few of her sex, could believe anything possible for love – of her, and Stanley Foster went far toward confirming her views for as much as the month that followed their mad flight. Then, with his commission gone – and his illusions – he found himself bound to a woman whose fast-fading charms were no compensation for anything he had lost. Much of their misery, and her own, was told in metropolitan circles by Félicie, who applied unsuccessfully about this time to Mrs. Gerald Stuyvesant for the position of nursery governess, or bonne. Félicie had gone thither in hopes of extracting something from Foster's people, as nothing could be gotten from the Farrells since nothing short of extradition proceedings could induce their return to the States. It was the same miserable old story, and Sandy Ray many a time thanked Heaven, and Stone, and the senior surgeon, for the order that took him to the agency and away from Inez Dwight. Would he have succumbed had he stayed? Older and presumably wiser men have done worse, so why not Sandy? Perhaps mother and Priscilla were not all wrong in their forebodings.
But what a scene of love and repentance and rejoicing was that when those two women, Aunt Marion and her niece, compared notes over the episode of that night's vigil and Sandy's part therein. Then his story of his coming was true, after all! Priscilla had seen him entering the front gate; had heard him at the door; had heard him pass round to the side of the house. Blenke it was who, counterfeiting even the painful little limp that still hampered Sandy's movements, had caused so many to believe it was Billy Ray's firstborn, in the dead of night, invading the quarters of a brother-officer, to the scandal of the service. They saw it all now, these good people who had dreamed so wildly, and some few there were who went to Ray during the brief fortnight that followed her final disappearance and said: "We knew you couldn't have been guilty of such a thought," but Sandy did not thank them. In his downright impulsiveness he had gone to Stone and told him the truth, and said he had been guilty of such a thought, and asked the commander what he ought to say to Dwight; and Stone, after pondering over the matter, replied in effect, though not in these precise words, that he'd be d – elighted if he knew.
Time and Dwight solved that problem, as time solves others. The major remained not long at Minneconjou, nor did the Rays. The former, with little Jim ever at his side, went eastward for a while, whence letters came occasionally from both father and son. The latter found divided duties. An interesting event, an arrival extraordinary, called for the presence of Mrs. Ray in distant Manhattan, and Priscilla looked her last for many a day upon the fords of the Minneconjou and those hated tenements on the hither shore, to whose permanence and prosperity her own efforts had lent such unlooked-for aid. A wiser woman in many a way was Priscilla Sanford when she turned her clear eyes eastward again. Firm as before was her faith that she had a mission, but she had learned a lesson still needed by many of her sect, and by many of both sexes. She had a tale to unfold to most excellent theorists in the field that taught a new gospel in the cause of man's uplifting. They were found by Dwight and Jimmy at the seashore, late that summer, and Priscilla strolled hand in hand with her boy friend along the shining sands, and talked long and gravely with his sire as to the real way of reaching the moral nature of the enlisted soldier. They were joined by Sandy for a day or two in September – a rather grave-faced young gentleman, despite recent promotion and longed-for orders to join his troop in far Luzon. They were in no wise startled when a cable came from Colonel Ray – "Grandfather Billy" in spite of his looks – suggesting that they, too, come with Sandy. They were all at Manila in the late autumn, except the Dwights, and long before Christmas Priscilla had found in Colonel Blake, that old-time friend and comrade of Uncle Will, a most delighted listener to her theories. "Legs" was forever stumping round to the bungalow and starting Priscilla on her hobby, as he called it, and with preternatural gravity "drawing her out" as to the chief end of man. Somebody had told him of her Anti-Canteen and Soldiers' Aid Association at Minneconjou – and of its disruption, but he never twitted her as to that. It was the new scheme for the higher education and mental development of the soldier to which her energies were now bending, and as Blake was in town with little to do but nurse a wounded leg and serve on some perennial court-martial, he found his fun in frequent disquisitions with Priscilla, sometimes prolonging them until Mrs. Ray lost patience and drove him homeward, and privately wrote her liege lord, who was forever afield, running down ladrones, that he really must repress that irrepressible wag. "He isn't trying to flirt with Pris, is he?" asked Ray, inconsequently, on coming home, and was dull enough not to catch the full force of his wife's reply. "Flirt? Gerald Blake never knew how, and he's too much in love with his wife; and – besides – "
Priscilla was far too serious to flirt with any man, much as she might long to reform him. She did wish that the long, lank cavalryman could be induced to take her views as seriously as she took them herself, and as Major Dwight seemed to take them, for Dwight's letters were coming at regular intervals, and to Miss Sanford now rather than to Marion Ray, and for a time Priscilla read them aloud for the benefit of Blake, the scoffer, and that of Aunt Marion and Uncle Will, the ever-indulgent. And thus that warm, sunshiny Manila winter went its way and the summer rains began to flood the streets, and people took to aquatics, and excursions to Nagasaki and Yokohama; and thither flitted our friends, the elder Rays, with Blake to see them off, and a promise to keep Miss 'Cilla's library project moving. And the day the transport dropped them into waiting sampan in Nagasaki's wondrous harbor two packages of home letters were handed them by the resident quartermaster, just received by rail from Yokohama and the Nippon Maru, and that evening, on the broad white veranda of the old hotel, Priscilla Sanford's cheeks took on the hue of the summer sunset, and still Uncle Billy saw – and Aunt Marion said – nothing.
One afternoon, a few months later, the Sheridan dropped anchor a mile or more out in the shallow, land-locked bay of Manila, and the launches and lighters brought the army passengers ashore, many of them for their second visit to the Philippines; and just as the band at the kiosk on the Luneta began the daily concert, and carriages of every kind drew up along the curb, and officers in spotless white went cap-doffing from point to point, and fair women smiled and flirted their fans, Colonel Stone, but recently arrived, began telling for the twentieth time, at least, the story of the marvelous escapade by means of which the renowned Blenke secured his final freedom:
"Caught in Chicago; shipped back to the guard-house; shammed crazy, sir, till he fooled every surgeon in the Cheyenne Valley; got ordered to the government hospital for the insane; got supply of Skidmore whisky, properly doped; got the corporal drunk who went in charge of him, and, by gad, sir, got the corporal's outfit and papers and turned him over at Washington as the insane man; got his receipt and vanished – the last ever heard of him. What became of her? Oh, after her flare-up with that poor devil Foster – you know the child didn't live – she got back to Mexico somehow: women like her never die – but she'll never be able to bother Dwight. That marriage, of course, wasn't legal. He'd simply been tricked. No, old Dwight's a free man, and I reckon he'll think twice before he tries it again."
Whereupon Stone was swiftly kicked in the shin by the long-legged lieutenant-colonel of cavalry at his side, for, in his enthusiasm, the colonel had turned and addressed his closing remarks to the two ladies in the nearmost carriage, and one of them was reddening like the rose.
"Dwight's here, you owl," said Blake, in explanation, later. "Came in on the Sheridan this very afternoon, and he isn't so confounded free as you were in your remarks. Why – hadn't you heard? May be another case of 'out of the frying-pan into the fire' – a toss-up 'twixt 'Cilla and Charybdis, but – "
"Good Lord!" cried Stone, "and what did I say? You don't mean she's going to marry Dwight?"
"She can't help herself. He won't take no for an answer."
"Well – I'll – be – hanged," said Stone, reflectively, "and I ought to be. It's just what my wife said – when the daily readings were going on – would likely be the upshot of the whole business. She said more than that – and she knows women, too – that Priscilla Sanford would make for him the best kind of a wife."
