A Fool There Was | Page 3

still
solemnly, still side by side, would inform the violet-eyed widow of
Jimmy Blair that the investments that her husband had made for her
had been very fortunate and that there was in the bank for her the sum
of many more hundreds of dollars than poor Jimmy himself could have
made in as many years. And she, deifying the man who had been her
husband, endowing him with the abilities of a Morgan, a Root and a
Rothschild, would believe all that they said; and she would tell the
neighbors; and they, being good neighbors, would nod, seriously,
unsmilingly. "Jimmy Blair was a wonderful, wonderful man," they
would say. And the violet eyes would grow soft and dim, and the
sensitive lips tremble a little, and the prettily- poised head would sink
forward upon the rounded breast. And she was less unhappy; for when
others love the one you love, even though that one be gone, it makes
the pain far, far less. Also, it is a great blessing to have about one those
who know enough not to know too much.
So it was of the three houses, and of those who lived therein.

[Illustration]
CHAPTER TWO.
OF CERTAIN OTHER PEOPLE.
In the littleness of things, it so happened that at a time when John
Stuyvesant Schuyler and Thomas Cathcart Blake, serious, solemn,
side-by- side, were telling the widow of Jimmy Blair that the Tidewater
Southern Railroad, in which her husband had largely interested himself
before his death, had declared an extra dividend that had enabled them
that day to deposit to her credit in the bank the sum of four thousand
two hundred and eighty-one dollars and seventy-three cents, in a little
hut on the black Breton coast a woman lay dying.
It was a bare hut, and noisome. In it it were perhaps better to die than to
live; and yet that one might not say. From before it one might gaze

upon league upon league of sullen sea, stretching to where, far in the
dim distance, lay the curve of the horizon upbearing the gray dome of
the sky.
Inside the hovel there was a smoke-stained fireplace beside which was
strewn an armful of faggots. There was before it a number of broken
and greasy dishes, filled with fragments of food. And all about on the
floor lay the litter of the sick-room.
The dying woman was stretched inert, moveless, upon a rough bed of
rope and rush. Perhaps she had been pretty once, in an animal way. She
was not now. Lips that doubtless had been red were white and drawn in
pain; and there was blood upon them, where white, even teeth had
bitten in the way that those who suffer have of trying to hide a greater
suffering beneath a lesser. The eyes, deep and dark, were dull and
half-hidden by their blue, transparent lids. And the cheeks were sunken,
and ghastly--touched by the hand of death.
A heavy, course-featured woman, thin hair streaked with gray, flat-
backed, flat-breasted, sat beside the rude bed, silent, motionless,
awaiting an end that she had so often watched in the sullen ferocity that
is of beast rather than of man. And on her lap lay a little, pink, puling
thing that whimpered and twisted weakly--a little, naked, thing half
covered by roughly-cast sacking.
The tiny, twisting thing whimpered. The woman beside the bed held it,
waiting. The woman on the bed moaned a little, and the glaze upon the
eyes grew more thick. And that was all.
There came to the ears that were not too new come or too far gone to
hear, the sound of hoof beats upon the turf. They came nearer.... They
stopped. Came the sound of spurred heels striking upon the trodden dirt
without the door.... There stood in the opening the figure of a man. He
was tall, and well-proportioned, though if anything a bit too slender--a
bit too graceful; and he was, if anything, a bit too well groomed. He
had light hair, and moustache. He had cold eyes that smiled; cold lips
that smiled. He stood in the doorway, trying to accustom his eyes to the
gloom within, the while playing a deft tattoo upon his booted calf with

light crop that he carried in his right hand.
"Well?" he said, at length, in the French that is of Paris. "Well? ... What
is all this?"
The tiny thing whimpered. The woman upon the bed moaned a little,
weakly. She, who sat beside it, looked up, eyes aflame. She said no
word.
The man in the doorway took a step forward, entering. He was still
smiling. He looked about him; and then he continued:
"Sick, eh? ... Dying? ... And that thing that you have in your--Ma foi!