I  THREE GENTLEMEN OF PHILADELPHIA

At three o’clock in the morning, Gast, McGill, and Ravant were going down Twentieth street, in the vicinity of Walnut street. They were locked together in the fashion of a Roman phalanx. And even then their going was unsteady. With the memory of his classical studies somewhat revived, Ravant repeated Cæsar’s commendation of the Roman formation.

A little later, and a little further down the street, where lived many of the city’s elect, they were protesting in over-vociferous melody that they would not go home till morning.

“Make it midday, for the sake of ver-sim-ili-tude,” begged Gast, breathless with the word, “for it is morning now. Behold!”

And thereupon he also remembered the invocations to the rising sun, in which the ancients abound, and produced one—according to his memory:

The officer on the corner of the square came and looked on amicably.

His applause made McGill realize that the voices of his comrades, unlike his own, had never excelled in melody. He, therefore, attached himself to a lamp-post, and, in the fashion of a precentor, proposed to instruct them in the difficulties of “Annie Laurie.”

But, in attaching himself to the lamp-post, he had detached himself from the critical right of the phalanx, which now floundered dismally and then incontinently disintegrated. The officer of the peace secured Ravant and Gast and anchored them to McGill—and “Annie Laurie” went terribly on.

It would have been hard enough to endure if it had not been mixed with liquors. But since it was so mixed it was not wonderful that anathema was belched at them from the windows of that halcyon neighborhood, and that they were then slammed violently shut.

But they were hardly prepared for a gun-shot in their direction.

“That’s right,” complained McGill; “if you can’t reform ’em, shoot ’em!”

“Mac, that man’s a pil-os-per,” argued Gast. “For, lo! these many years the sover-eign people have sought a cure for the drink evil. Well, he has found it. Shoot ’em. Eh, Ravey?”

Ravant said nothing. And now they awoke to the understanding that he had grown heavy between them.

A cab passed. The driver, an experienced nighthawker, drew up to them.

“Right this time,” said Gast. “This jag is going home imperially in a cab. It’ll be about all I’ll be able to do to walk my own to my happy home.”

The officer assisted in getting Ravant into the cab.

But suddenly his manner changed to savagery. They were under the direct light of the corner electric.

“Which of you did this?” he demanded.

Blood slowly trickled from a wound in Ravant’s head.

Gast had a drunken inspiration.

“That gun!” he whispered.

The officer caught upon this.

“Where was it fired from?”

This none of them in the least knew.

The officer took McGill and Gast to the station-house, where they were ignominiously searched. Ravant went to the hospital in a cab.

Presently, in a lucid interval, Ravant signed an affidavit setting forth that it was neither McGill nor Gast who had fired the shot. Upon this his two companions were released “under surveillance.”

And this was so odious to Gast that he swore to find out who it was had fired the shot.

The moment Ravant awoke to sanity at the hospital he demanded a drink of whiskey.

“The doctor has forbidden it,” said the nurse.

“Why?” shouted Ravant.

“Your head. He thinks it would take you much longer to get well—perhaps prevent your recovery altogether.”

“Call him!” Still in Ravant’s terrible voice. “I guess it’s my own head. And if I’d rather have an ounce of whiskey—more or less—than an ounce of brains—more or less—it’s my business and none of his.”

The little, frightened nurse did what he asked, and Ravant said to the doctor very much what he had said to the nurse. And the doctor answered him precisely what the nurse had answered.

“But,” he laughed in addition, “your head is certainly your own, and you are certainly sane enough to decide what you want done with it, though it is rather contrary to Dunglison’s ethics to let you. It doesn’t matter greatly either way, though. How much are you in the habit of taking?”

“All I can buy,” snarled Ravant.

The doctor laughed again and wrote a prescription for an ounce of whiskey.

“You don’t care whether I live or die, do you?” asked Ravant, odiously.

“Oh, quite as much as you do!” answered the doctor, with a certain jolly contempt for such a man. Then, to the nurse:

“I don’t think it will be necessary for me to see your patient again. Take care that he gets all he needs. My original instructions will do till he is discharged.”

“You don’t care either,” challenged Ravant, when the doctor had gone.

“Yes—I care—very much,” said the brave little nurse.

Ravant stared, then said:

“Well—hurry that whiskey here!”

And, presently, she brought it. Ravant saw only the hand which offered it to his famished soul. It trembled. As he took the glass he followed the arm up to the nurse’s face. That was very pale. When she was certain that he would drink it, she gasped and then choked down a bit of a sob.

“Now, what’s the matter with you?” cried Ravant, with brutal irritation.

“Noth—nothing,” faltered the nurse.

“You lie,” said Ravant. “I told you that it is my own head. Why don’t you want me to drink it?”

“Drink it!” begged the nurse, now in terror of him. “Please do!”

“I won’t! You’re both too dam’ anxious!”

He flung the frail glass against the wall, where it was broken. Then he turned his back upon the nurse, and, gripping the iron rods of his bed, bent them until they doubled and parted. He slept a little presently—breathing like a wounded beast. When he woke the little nurse was wiping up the spilled liquor. The terrible fragrance infested his very soul.

“Open the window!” Ravant shouted. “You are torturing me!”

The girl did this.

“Why did you make me smell the dam’ stuff?”

Then, a little more gently, before she could answer:

“Thank you. I can’t stand the smell of it—not the smell.”

The nurse laid a brave hand on his.

“I guess you’re the right sort,” he said hoarsely. “Put it there!”

He gripped the hand of the nurse as he would have done that of a man.

Afterward Ravant watched the girl as she “went about doing good” for him—as he gibed it. She tried to keep out of his vision.

“What in the devil are you about?” he commanded. “I want to look at you! It does me good—to look at you!”

She came, with a pink face, where he could see her.

“If it does you good—why, look at me!”

She tried to do it lightly—pose there—but her bosom heaved. Ravant saw this.

“Yes, I’ve stopped guessing. You are the right sort—inside. And you’re not half as ugly outside as I thought you at first. Or else you’ve grown prettier. I think it’s that. I suppose they make it a point to hire only ugly girls for nurses. Else the patients would marry ’em as fast as they could gather ’em in, and there would never be any nurses. But you’ve fooled ’em! Look in the glass!”

It was useless to resist what had now become affectionate brutality, and she did this. It was true that there was a glow in her hollow cheeks.

“Thank you!”

“By the Lord, you nearly laughed!” said Ravant, with entire seriousness. “Say—I’m going to like you. And I want you to try to like me. If I ever ask for whiskey again, don’t you give it to me, no matter if I curse you up hill and down dale. And I’ll try not to ask for it.”

The nurse stopped something which would have been a sob at maturity.

“But for God’s sake, don’t cry,” Ravant went on. “I hate women who cry. And I’m not hating you—I see that already.”

“I will not cry!” pledged the nurse.

“I believe you,” said Ravant. “Put it there. I won’t drink!”

And for the second time they shook hands.

“And yet,” mused Ravant, “I make you cry!”

There was an unwonted softness in his voice.

“I’m sorry I’m such a brute—I am a good deal of a brute—ain’t I?”

When she did not answer he shouted at her suddenly:

“Ain’t I?”

“Yes,” said the frightened nurse.

“And I’m a pig, too. That’s what the doctor called me the other day when he left, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“I heard him. And he’s right, too—though not so bully as you, at saying it.”

“The doctor is mistaken,” braved the girl. “I wouldn’t say it.”

Ravant gasped and sat up in bed.

“What?”

The girl repeated, without fear, what she had said.

And nothing had ever cowed Ravant as that did. It made him stop and think. It seemed as if he had never thought before—so primitive were his processes.

“I’ll just live up to that girl’s estimate of me—and fool her. I really thought I was a pig. Heavens!” He laughed with himself as if he were some one else. “It didn’t even offend me! But I’m glad I’m not a pig—to her—and I’ll stop being a brute. Especially to women. What was it mother used to say?”

Finally he remembered it:

“Always be gentle to all women. For some of them are mothers, and all of them are daughters of mothers.”

He said to himself that he had better write that out in a plain hand and paste it in his hat. Then he said he would go the hat one better—he would write it out and paste it in his head.

And I think he did this in some fashion. For he often remembered it. And at this time it was hard for him to remember things.

“Please!” she begged of him one day with her hands out to his, meaning that he should intermit his ceaseless watching of her. “I feel like the insect under the microscope.” She ended with that brief, halfway laugh.

“I won’t,” said Ravant. “It helps me. And that is what you are paid for doing.”

“Yes,” said the girl, at once relapsing into her shell. “That is what I am paid for!”

“The only thing you need to be a real beauty is a smile. Can’t you get further than halfway? Try it. You won’t break anything. Smile for the drunken pig one of those smiles that won’t come off.”

“Have you ever smiled?” retorted the girl.

“I grin all day,” answered Ravant.

“Yes—you grin.”

Ravant caught the subtlety and was both amazed at his nurse and shocked at himself. He remembered that it was very long since his face had known the smile of gentleness.

“Let’s learn the art together,” he laughed. “By the Lord, you are good for me!”

“Then I must admit that you are also good for me.”

“Smile!” commanded Ravant.

“I cannot,” laughed the girl.

Ravant laughed, and knew how splendid and strange this was to him.

“If you would do that more often, it would be good for you,” said Ravant again.

“And you would be—good!”

“Yes—” agreed the invalid, “if you would smile so for me—”

“Oh, I meant your own smile!” cried the blushing nurse.

Ravant looked upon this blush until it had much the effect that looking upon the wine when it is red used to have upon him.

“Here!” he cried.

The girl came toward him. He caught her face between his hands and rounded it there.

“I have taken all the lines away. You have no business to have them.”

“My life—” said the girl, simply. “Those lines are its history. They belong there.”

“Then can you read my history in mine?” asked the man.

“Yes.”

“Do they say that I am a brute?”

“Yes.”

“Plainly?”

“Quite plainly.”

“My God! Why did not some one tell me that secret before? We go about thinking our faces conceal the very things they shout aloud!”

He looked again at her face.

“Yes, yours speaks of sorrow—”

A silence then—

“What was it?”

“Others said what you have just said. That I was ugly. A woman has nothing—is nothing—without beauty. That is her one source of power.”

Ravant laughed incredulously.

“Women like me,” added the nurse.

One day the nurse told him—as he insisted—the mystery of his opulent situation.

The person who had fired the shot had learned the effect of it from the newspapers, and being rich and sorry, had put his fortune at the disposal of the victim, and none of it was to be spared if it might help in the least to make him perfectly well again. Every cent of the very many the person had was at his disposal. And that his disposal of it might be the more free from embarrassment, he preferred to remain anonymous himself, and to make the hospital, or the nurse herself, if the victim preferred that, his almoner.

“Preferred to remain anonymous!” laughed Ravant. “He preferred to keep out of jail. I’d have him there in no time if I knew who he was!”

“It appears,” said the nurse, “that he did not know his pistol was loaded.”

Ravant exploded again—first with mirth, then with vengeance.

“The infernal old sneak and liar! To shoot a man simply because he happened to be drunk! Thank God a jag is not capital yet! It is no excuse to say that he didn’t know it was loaded. When he took up that pistol, it was with intent to kill. And, if I still remember any law, that is enough to hang him—”

“But they don’t hang people,” gasped the little nurse, “for anything but murder, do they?”

“I was going to say if he had killed me.”

“Oh!”

“Anyhow, we’ll make it the dearest lesson to the gentlemen who do not know it is loaded that ever was taught! We will spend that last cent of his. If not, we’ll throw it away! We are going to Europe at his expense. I need that to complete my recovery. And even then I will always wear this plate on my head in memory of him! And we’ll let the newspapers have it. It may prevent some other drunkard from such happiness as I am now enjoying, and teach the idiot with an empty gun to respect it as if it were loaded. I’ll be a missionary to my drunken kind all the world over! What do you say? By the way, what is your name?”

“Brown,” said the nurse.

“Whew!” said the invalid. “We can’t change that—can we?”

“No.”

“Marriage would do it.”

“Yes.”

“Ravant is better than Brown, eh?”

But then he laughed—he had frightened her!

“What’s your first name?”

“Rachel.”

“Heavens! But we might call you Ray. Ray Brown is not impossible. Did you notice that when I spoke of going to Europe and spending the old man’s money, I said we?”

“Yes,” said the girl.

“And it didn’t appeal to you?—make your little heart flutter—Ray?”

“No.”

“But you would help to try to ruin the old man?”

“I think it just for you to punish him in that way—but I am only a nurse.”

“Well—you are going with me—and that is the end of it. I need you and shall need you for a long time. In fact, I shall need you always. But, since you won’t marry me, as a nurse you will go!”

“Impossible! Mr. Ravant!” gasped the girl.

“Which?” snarled Ravant, in the old manner.

“Going to Europe with you—as your nurse—alone—”

“Well, then, we’ll take a chaperon. The old man must pay for her too.”

The girl was silent.

“Look here. I noticed that you didn’t say that the other thing was—impossible! Marrying me?”

“Yes—that is impossible, too,” said the girl.

“Oh!”

“What?”

For his tone was sinister.

“I’ll become a sot again.”

“The doctor says that with that wound in your head it will kill you!”

Ravant laughed—the brutal laugh once more.

“Well, let it. You can’t open the gate of paradise and let me get one glimpse and then shut it in my face. I’ll go back to my own little paradise.”

He was laughing. But she caught the note of hopelessness under it.

“Do you mean to say that if I marry you—”

“I will be good.”

“Understand that I do not love you! Not at all!”

“No one does. Marry me anyhow. Marry me to get rid of me. If you fall in love with some one else, it is off.”

The girl sobbed. She was on her knees at his bed. He did not like this.

“Never mind—never mind—child. I only thought we could make it less expensive to the old man in that way. I could then stop your wages, and we would not need a chaperon. And I really fancied that this thing inside of me which yearns for you—can’t wait till the night is over and you and morning come—is love. But I don’t know what the thing is—I never had the symptoms before—speak to the doctor about it—tell him I have ceased to be a pig. But, perhaps you know. Do you? Were you ever in love?”

“No, sir,” answered the nurse.

“Stop crying!” thundered Ravant.

“Yes, sir,” said the little nurse.

“Well, thank God,” Ravant said, later on, “that you didn’t refuse me because you didn’t know me. I can’t fancy a better way of finding a man out than being his nurse. But I may not always be a brute. So, remember that I want to marry you, and, when you don’t think me too much of a brute think sometimes about marrying me—you may get used to it!”

“Yes, sir,” said the nurse.

“How much money have I?”

“About four dollars, sir.”

“I don’t blame you now. I thought there was at least ten in my clothes. Four dollars is mighty little to begin housekeeping upon. Keep it for me, will you, until the last cent of the gentleman who did not know it was loaded is gone.”

Later:

“You might as well come and help to spend the old man’s money. We will travel in private cars. Two maids for you, two valets for me. Our pictures in the newspapers. A retinue to smile welcome to us at each city. Another to weep as we depart. We shall leave a trail of American gold in our wake across Europe!”

He had caught her interest. Only he thought it was something which she said it was not.

“Look here. You do like me a little. I have seen you watch me while I pretended to sleep. And I’ll try to learn what love is and to make you love me. I think I can.”

The girl looked down.

“Look here, I was a gentleman and a lawyer before I was a drunkard, and I can be again, if any one cares to have me be. Please marry me!”

“I don’t love you,” said the girl again, with her head still down.

“I know. But I love you—I’m sure now that that is what it is. You see, it’s one of two things for me—you or rum. That’s why I’m working at it overtime. You won’t regret it—hanged if you do.”

Well, she did marry him, and she did not regret it—nor did he.

To me it is a wonder that she did not. For he had done the threatened newspapering so well that already upon their arrival at the steamer all the passengers were lined up to await them. And the smile they got there followed them to Europe, and into the most remote corners of the globe where they penetrated to escape it. It became at last a smile of contempt. And he began to understand that it was for him alone and that the world had exempted his wife from it.

“I’m glad for that,” he told her. “If I am to go about the world a cad and a fool, to be laughed at—I am glad that you are—”

“To be pitied as your victim?” laughed his happy wife. “No. I don’t want anything that is not yours, and you shall have nothing that is not mine.”

If they escaped it for a day, they never did for two. Always the servants were in line where they arrived, with the expectation of them in their banal faces. But always she was excepted.

“I wish I could rise with you,” sighed Ravant, whimsically. “I hate to be separated from you. But they won’t have me, and they won’t do without you. I suppose my claws still show somewhere.”

“Whither I go, you shall go,” his wife threatened. “I am too happy—that is what the world sees. What care I—for anything but joy and you!”

She kissed Ravant.

But presently her “beauty” and her “magnetism” began to be paragraphic with him in the newspapers—of which he said he was glad, and was not.

“Beloved,” he told her, “it is a pity you married me.”

“Why?—beloved also.”

“Because you might have had any one of the effete noblemen of Europe, and escaped newspapering.”

“But I would only have been satisfied with a crowned head.”

“I suppose even that is possible to the ‘prevalent goddess’”—he was reading from a newspaper.

“I have it!” laughed his wife, touching the plate which covered his wound.

And then, I am almost sorry to say, yet not quite, that a little mist came into the eyes of the Ravant who had once been a brute, and he remembered all those hospital days.

“How splendid you have become,” he said.

“Thanks to you,” she whispered in his arms, where still he was the savage Ravant and always would be.

“But all I am you have made of me!”

“But, too, all I am you have made of me!” she laughed.

“One thing I take credit for,” he joyed with her, “smiles do become your face.”

“And thought and care yours. The lines of which we once spoke—are gone! From both our faces! Is not that wonderful?”

“Wonderful,” he agreed.

Suddenly she was serious.

“I think we belong together. I thank God always that we met. You were what I needed—the man God meant to complete me. Before you came I was worse than you were before I came. Thank God we met—no matter how!”

“Not forgetting to thank the loaded gun! For a long time I have been sorry for the old man. It has not seemed long—but there are indications that the last cent has been reached. I would pay him back if I could!”

“You never, never could!” laughed his wife.

“But how much do you suppose we have spent?”

“Don’t know! Don’t know,” she chanted. “That is the beauty of it. We don’t have to! No accounts to keep! Money carefully ahead of us at each stopping place! It is like a slot machine! You put in a nickel and get a thousand dollars!”

“It’s wonderful how well he has done it. Hasn’t kicked or funked once! Well, when I get back to America I mean to hunt him up and get down on my knees and God bless him!” laughed Ravant.

“We’ll go together!” said his wife.

“Yes! And confess all! I’ll show him you! He’ll forgive us then and won’t regret—”

“His poverty!” laughed Ravant’s happy wife.

“Yes. Hang it! That’s the horror of it. Once I thought it would be the joy of it! And how he must have writhed under the newspapering! Such a sensitive chap as he is! It has been torture to even me. But I deserve that punishment.”

“You do!” cooed his wife.

“Let us go home,” said Ravant, “and live in a little house—alone!”

“Done!” cried his wife.

“We’ll change our names and the newspapers will not be able to find us!”

“Done!”

“But—there wasn’t any money here, you know” (it was Rouen).

“Perhaps in a day or two.”

So, at Rouen, they waited for the money to take them home to a new happiness.

One day she got a big letter with the American postmark. She laughed, made a certain mystery of it, and kept it from him.

“And this is my nurse!” he joyed.

“Yes!” she admitted.

He was opening a letter of his own which he was keeping from her.

“But there must be no secrets between chums.”

She tried to take the letter, but he withheld it.

“Ah, I must first confess? Well—how much do you love me?”

“As much as I can,” said her husband, seriously.

“I know that to be a great deal. How much can you forgive?”

Now she was in his arms.

“As much as I love,” said Ravant.

“Then I am quite safe.”

She crept a little deeper into his arms and opened her letter.

“Dearest, I married you under an assumed name.”

“Thank God!” laughed Ravant—“unless it is a worse one than Brown.”

“I could have been very happy as Mrs. Brown—as happy as I am as Mrs. Ravant.”

She ignored the rest and withdrew the contents of the letter. They appeared to be a deed.

“Dearest, I have a house. Are you angry that I am so rich? Part of an inheritance. But now it must be sold. This is from my lawyer. He tells me that I must sign the deed both with my proper maiden name and as your wife”—she stooped there to kiss him, and repeated the word—“and you must join in it as my husband. It is a bore to own a house, isn’t it, dearest?”

But her lightness found him full of terror. She heard him breathe:

“What was your maiden name?”

“Ruth Fenton,” smiled his wife.

Again that exclamation.

“What is it?” she begged.

“No,” he said. “There must be no secret between chums. My punishment has come. And it is greater than I could possibly have conceived. I must read you this, and then if you wish—go away from you.”

“Not while I am here,” she laughed, beginning to understand. “Whither thou goest, I will go. You can’t—cannot lose me—me, your lawful wife!”

Though she laughed with tremendous happiness, he read the letter through with no abatement of his terror.

“As you know, I have been all these two years finding the person who shot you. At last I have her—yes, her! It is a woman. Her name is Ruth Fenton. Her large fortune has been exhausted by your world-renowned extravagances, and she is now selling the last thing she owns—her house. I hope you feel as mean as I do—for you!

“Yes, I am the old man,” laughed Ravant’s happy wife into her husband’s face.

“Yes,” he said, and then again, “yes—you are—the—old—man! The old man! You! Me!”

“We!” cooed his wife.

“All those things I said about him were about you! To you!”

“Yes! Wasn’t it funny?”

A long time they sat there, she looking up, he down—eye to eye. But she never ceased to smile.

He tried to go.

“Not while I am here!” she laughed, and, slipping down, held him by the knees.

“No, beloved, after this there shall be, indeed, no secrets between us. I was so unhappy and alone that night that I meant to kill myself. No one cared for me, and I had to have some one care for me or die! My hand must have slipped, or, perhaps, I grew afraid. But God himself directed that bullet! You were mine and you were passing—going away from me! If you had gone on, we would never have met. It was the only way to stop you and give you to me, me to you. I went to the hospital and paid to nurse you. They said you needed no nursing, only care and quiet. And when they knew how important it was to me, for I told them all, they broke their rules all to pieces, and let me do it. And, now, dear one, you must keep what I have given you, what the good God has! You shall keep it!” (as he tried to dislodge her) “and you shall keep me! For I will not go! There, I am a beggar!” She laughed gloriously. “But the happiest beggar on earth, and you have got to support your happy beggar wife forever hereafter. That is to be your punishment.”

“Happy punishment!” was the thought which flashed through Ravant.

But he grimly put it out, and for one more last moment the old, brutal Ravant tried to come back. Alas! she was on the floor there before him, her elbows on his knees, her face, halting between smiles and tears, upraised to his, looking out of its glory of living hair, watching the portents there.

And when they did not develop fast enough toward joy, she locked her hands behind his neck suddenly and drew his head down, to the peril of a dislocation.

“You must stay to support your beggar wife; don’t you see?—won’t you understand?—and perhaps her beggar—child!”

“What!” cried Ravant, everything else out of his head in an instant.

“I always keep my biggest trump for the last, dearest. All women do, don’t they? It’s so lovely to play it then—when every one thinks all is lost. Oh, beloved! smile, laugh, shout with me! How can you go away now when you have a beggar wife to support, and a beggar—ch—! Ah! ha! ha!”

How could the old, brutal Ravant come back? He never did. How could he go? He did not.

“But we will not sell your house. We will go back, even if it must be in the steerage, and work together, live together, happily ever after!”

“Dominus vobiscum!” cried Ravant’s happy wife, leaping into his arms.

And all this, save the steerage, they did. And at this very moment they are living as happily as they planned.