A Fool There Was | Page 3

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.

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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! A baby, eh?" He laughed, aloud. The broken peals came back to him from the sodden, smoke-stained rafters. "Strange that I should have come to-day.... A baby!" He laughed again, modulatedly. And then, with an air of sympathetic commiseration he said to the gray-haired old woman with the eyes of fire:
"Too bad that your daughter is not married--since she, I presume, is the mother! ... And the happy father?--he is--?" He stopped, waiting, smilingly.
The fierce, blazing eyes were set full upon his own. She said, in the patois that was of