Chapter 24. And Unexpectedly The Last

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_ CHAPTER XXIV. AND UNEXPECTEDLY THE LAST

We had seen the two great rivers sweep into each other's arms in a broad glory of sunlit water, meeting at the bosky end of a wooded promontory, and yes! there was the Susquehanna glittering far beneath--the beautiful name I had so often seen and wondered about, painted on the sides of giant freight-cars! Yes, there was actually the great legendary river. It was a very warm, almost sultry noonday, more like midsummer than mid-October, and the river was almost blinding in its flashing beauty. Loosening our knapsacks, we called a halt and, leaning over the railing guarding the precipitous bank, luxuriated in the visionary scene. So high was the bank, and so broad the river, that we seemed lifted up into space, and the river, dreamily flowing beneath a gauze veil of heat-mist, seemed miles below us and drowsily unreal. Its course inshore was dotted with boulders, in the shadows of which we could see long ghostly fishes lazily gliding, and a mud-turtle, with a trail of little ones, slowly moving from rock to rock.

Suddenly Colin put his hand to his head, and swayed toward me, as though he were about to faint.

"I don't know what's the matter, old man," he said, "but I think I had better sit down a minute." And he sank by the roadside.

Unlike himself, he had been complaining of fatigue, and had seemed out of sorts for a day or two, but we had thought nothing of it; and, after resting a few minutes, he announced himself ready for the road again, but he looked very pale and walked with evident weariness. As a roadside cottage came in sight, "I wonder if they could give us a cup of tea," he said; "that would fix me up, I'm sure." So we knocked, and the door was opened by a pathetic shadow of an old woman, very poor and thin and weary-looking, who, although, as we presently learned, she was at the moment suffering from the recent loss of one eye, made us welcome and busied herself about tea, with an unselfish kindness that touched our hearts, and made us reflect on the angelic goodness of human nature--sometimes.

She looked anxiously, mother-like, at Colin, and persuaded him to lie down and rest awhile in her little parlour, and, while he rested, she and I talked and she told me how she had come by her blind eye--an odd, harmless-sounding cause. She had been looking up into one of her apple-trees, one day, a few weeks ago, and an apple had fallen and struck her in the eye. Such innocent means does Nature sometimes use for her cruel accidents of disease and death! Just an apple falling from a tree,--and you are blind! A fly stings you, on a Summer day, and you die.

Colin, rested and refreshed, we once more started on our way, but, bravely as he strode on, there was no disguising it--my blithe, happy-hearted companion was ill. Of course we both assured the other that it could be nothing, but privately our hearts sank with a vague fear we did not speak. At length, after a weary four miles, we reached Towanda.

"I'm afraid," said poor Colin, "I can walk no more to-day. Perhaps a good night's rest will make me all right." We found an inn, and while Colin threw himself, wearied, on his bed, I went out, not telling him, and sought a doctor.

"And you've been walking with this temperature?" said the learned man, when he had seated himself at Colin's bedside and felt his wrist. "Have you been drinking much water as you went along? ... H'm--it's been a very dry Summer, you know."

And the words of our friend in the buggy came back to us with sickening emphasis. O those innocent-looking fairy wells and magic mirrors by the road-side! And I thought, too, of the poor old blinded woman and the falling apple. Was Nature really like that?

And then the wise man's verdict fell on our ears like a doom.

"Take my advice, and don't walk any more, but catch the night train for New York."

Poor Colin! But there was no appeal.

The end of our trip had come, suddenly, unreasonably, stupidly, like this.

"So we've got to be shot into New York like a package through a tube, after all!" said Colin. "No lordly gates of the Hudson for us! What a fool I feel, to be the one to spoil our trip like this!"

And the tears glistened in our eyes, as we pressed each other's hand in that dreary inn bedroom, with the shadow of we knew not what for Colin over us--for our comradeship had been very good, day by day, together on the open road.

Our train did not go till midnight, so we had a long melancholy evening before us; but the doctor had given Colin some mysterious potion containing rest, and presently, as I sat by his side in the gray twilight, he fell into a deep sleep--a sleep, alas! of fire and wandering talk. It was pitiful to hear him, poor fellow--living over again in dreams the road we had travelled, or making pictures of the road he still dreamed ahead of us. Never before had I realized how entirely his soul was the soul of a painter--all pictures and colour.

"O my God!" he would suddenly exclaim, "did you ever see such blue in your life!" and then again, evidently referring to some particularly attractive effect in the phantasmagoria of his fever, "it's no use--you must let me stop and have a shot to get that, before it goes."

One place that seemed particularly to haunt him was--Mauch Chunk. He had been there before, and, as we had walked along, had often talked enthusiastically of it. "Wait till we get to Mauch Chunk," he said; "then the real fun will begin." And now, over and over again, he kept making pictures of Mauch Chunk, till I could have cried.

"Dramatic black rocks," he would murmur, "water rushing from the hills in every direction--clean-cut, vivid scenery--like theatres--the road runs by the side of a steel-blue river at the bottom of a chasm, and there is hardly room for it--the houses cling to the hillside like swallows' nests--here and there patches of fresh green grass gleam among the rocks, and, high up in the air on some dizzy ledge, there is a wild apple-tree in blossom--it is all black rocks and springs and moss and tumbling water--"

Then again his soul was evidently walking in the Blue Mountains, and several times he repeated a phrase of mine that had taken his fancy: "And now for the spacious corridors of the Highlands, and the lordly gates of the Hudson."

Then he would suddenly half awaken and turn to me, realizing the truth, and say:

"O our beautiful journey--to end like this!" and fall asleep again.

And once more I fell to thinking of fairy springs by the roadside, and apples falling innocently from the bough, and how the beautiful journey we call life might some day suddenly end like this, with half the beautiful road untravelled--the rest sleep and perchance dreams.

* * * * *

But Colin did not die. He is once more painting out in the sun, and next year we plan to stand again on that very spot by the Susquehanna, and watch the shadows of great fishes gliding through the dreamy water, and the mud-turtle with her trail of little ones moving from rock to rock--and then we shall strike out on the road again, just where we left off that October afternoon; but the reader need not be afraid--we shall not write a book about it.

ENVOI

And now the merry way we took
Is nothing but a printed book;

We would you had been really there,
Out with us in the open air--

For, after all, the best of words
Are but a poor exchange for birds.

Yet if, perchance, this book of ours
Should sometimes make you think of flowers,

Orchards and barns and harvest wain,
"It was not written all in vain--"

So authors used to make their bow,
As, Gentle Reader, we do now.

[THE END]
Richard Le Gallienne's essays: October Vagabonds

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