Majorie Daw | Page 5

are. State your case. Write me a long, quite
letter. If you are violent or abusive, I'll take the law to you.
III.
JOHN FLEMMING TO EDWARD DELANEY.
August 11, 1872.
Your letter, dear Ned, was a godsend. Fancy what a fix I am in--I, who
never had a day's sickness since I was born. My left leg weighs three
tons. It is embalmed in spices and smothered in layers of fine linen, like
a mummy. I can't move. I haven't moved for five thousand years. I'm of
the time of Pharaoh.
I lie from morning till night on a lounge, staring into the hot street.
Everybody is out of town enjoying himself. The brown-stone- front
houses across the street resemble a row of particularly ugly coffins set
up on end. A green mould is settling on the names of the deceased,
carved on the silver door-plates. Sardonic spiders have sewed up the
key-holes. All is silence and dust and desolation. --I interrupt this a
moment, to take a shy at Watkins with the second volume of Cesar
Birotteau. Missed him! I think I could bring him down with a copy of
Sainte-Beuve or the Dictionnaire Universel, if I had it. These small
Balzac books somehow do not quite fit my hand; but I shall fetch him
yet. I've an idea that Watkins is tapping the old gentleman's Chateau
Yquem. Duplicate key of the wine-cellar. Hibernian swarries in the
front basement. Young Cheops up stairs, snug in his cerements.
Watkins glides into my chamber, with that colorless, hypocritical face
of his drawn out long like an accordion; but I know he grins all the way
down stairs, and is glad I have broken my leg. Was not my evil star in
the very zenith when I ran up to town to attend that dinner at
Delmonico's? I didn't come up altogether for that. It was partly to buy
Frank Livingstone's roan mare Margot. And now I shall not be able to
sit in the saddle these two months. I'll send the mare down to you at
The Pines--is that the name of the place?
Old Dillon fancies that I have something on my mind. He drives me
wild with lemons. Lemons for a mind diseased! Nonsense. I am only as
restless as the devil under this confinement--a thing I'm not used to.

Take a man who has never had so much as a headache or a toothache in
his life, strap one of his legs in a section of water- spout, keep him in a
room in the city for weeks, with the hot weather turned on, and then
expect him to smile and purr and be happy! It is preposterous. I can't be
cheerful or calm.
Your letter is the first consoling thing I have had since my disaster, ten
days ago. It really cheered me up for half an hour. Send me a screed,
Ned, as often as you can, if you love me. Anything will do. Write me
more about that little girl in the hammock. That was very pretty, all that
about the Dresden china shepherdess and the pond-lily; the imagery a
little mixed, perhaps, but very pretty. I didn't suppose you had so much
sentimental furniture in your upper story. It shows how one may be
familiar for years with the reception-room of his neighbor, and never
suspect what is directly under his mansard. I supposed your loft stuffed
with dry legal parchments, mortgages, and affidavits; you take down a
package of manuscript, and lo! there are lyrics and sonnets and
canzonettas. You really have a graphic descriptive touch, Edward
Delaney, and I suspect you of anonymous love-tales in the magazines.
I shall be a bear until I hear from you again. Tell me all about your
pretty inconnue across the road. What is her name? Who is she? Who's
her father? Where's her mother? Who's her lover? You cannot imagine
how this will occupy me. The more trifling, the better. My
imprisonment has weakened me intellectually to such a degree that I
find your epistolary gifts quite considerable. I am passing into my
second childhood. In a week or two I shall take to India rubber rings
and prongs of coral. A silver cup, with an appropriate inscription,
would be a delicate attention on your part. In the mean time, write!
IV.
EDWARD DELANEY TO JOHN FLEMMING.
August 12, 1872.
The sick pasha shall be amused. Bismillah! he wills it so. If the
story-teller becomes prolix and tedious--the bow-string and the sack,
and two Nubians to drop him into the Piscataqua! But truly, Jack, I
have a hard task. There is literally nothing here--except the little girl
over the way. She is swinging in the hammock at this moment. It is to
me compensation for