The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain Page 20

  About that time Rosannah Ethelton, propped in the window seat of her bedchamber, book in hand, was gazing vacantly out over the rainy seas that washed the Golden Gate, and whispered to herself, “How different he is from poor Burley, with his empty head and his single little antic talent of mimicry!”

  2

  Four weeks later Mr. Sidney Algernon Burley was entertaining a gay luncheon company, in a sumptuous drawing-room on Telegraph Hill, with some capital imitations of the voices and gestures of certain popular actors and San Franciscan literary people and Bonanza grandees. He was elegantly upholstered, and was a handsome fellow, barring a trifling cast in his eye. He seemed very jovial, but nevertheless he kept his eye on the door with an expectant and uneasy watchfulness. By and by a nobby lackey appeared; and delivered a message to the mistress, who nodded her head understandingly. That seemed to settle the thing for Mr. Burley; his vivacity decreased little by little, and a dejected look began to creep into one of his eyes and a sinister one into the other.

  The rest of the company departed in due time, leaving him with the mistress, to whom he said:

  “There is no longer any question about it. She avoids me. She continually excuses herself. If I could see her, if I could speak to her only a moment—but this suspense—”

  “Perhaps her seeming avoidance is mere accident, Mr. Burley. Go to the small drawing-room up-stairs and amuse yourself a moment. I will despatch a household order that is on my mind, and then I will go to her room. Without doubt she will be persuaded to see you.”

  Mr. Burley went up-stairs, intending to go to the small drawing-room, but as he was passing “Aunt Susan’s” private parlor, the door of which stood slightly ajar, he heard a joyous laugh which he recognized; so without knock or announcement he stepped confidently in. But before he could make his presence known he heard words that harrowed up his soul and chilled his young blood. He heard a voice say:

  “Darling, it has come!”

  Then he heard Rosannah Ethelton, whose back was toward him, say:

  “So has yours, dearest!”

  He saw her bowed form bend lower; he heard her kiss something—not merely once, but again and again! His soul raged within him. The heart-breaking conversation went on:

  “Rosannah, I knew you must be beautiful, but this is dazzling, this is blinding, this is intoxicating!”

  “Alonzo, it is such happiness to hear you say it. I know it is not true, but I am so grateful to have you think it is, nevertheless! I knew you must have a noble face, but the grace and majesty of the reality beggar the poor creation of my fancy.”

  Burley heard that rattling shower of kisses again.

  “Thank you, my Rosannah! The photograph flatters me, but you must not allow yourself to think of that. Sweetheart?”

  “Yes, Alonzo.”

  “I am so happy, Rosannah.”

  “Oh, Alonzo, none that have gone before me knew what love was, none that come after me will ever know what happiness is. I float in a gorgeous cloudland, a boundless firmament of enchanted and bewildering ecstasy!”

  “Oh, my Rosannah!—for you are mine, are you not?”

  “Wholly, oh, wholly yours, Alonzo, now and forever! All the day long, and all through my nightly dreams, one song sings itself, and its sweet burden is, ‘Alonzo Fitz Clarence, Alonzo Fitz Clarence, Eastport, state of Maine!’”

  “Curse him, I’ve got his address, anyway!” roared Burley, inwardly, and rushed from the place.

  Just behind the unconscious Alonzo stood his mother, a picture of astonishment. She was so muffled from head to heel in furs that nothing of herself was visible but her eyes and nose. She was a good allegory of winter, for she was powdered all over with snow.

  Behind the unconscious Rosannah stood “Aunt Susan,” another picture of astonishment. She was a good allegory of summer, for she was lightly clad, and was vigorously cooling the perspiration on her face with a fan.

  Both of these women had tears of joy in their eyes.

  “So ho!” exclaimed Mrs. Fitz Clarence, “this explains why nobody has been able to drag you out of your room for six weeks, Alonzo!”

  “So ho!” exclaimed Aunt Susan, “this explains why you have been a hermit for the past six weeks, Rosannah!”

  The young couple were on their feet in an instant, abashed, and standing like detected dealers in stolen goods awaiting Judge Lynch’s doom.

  “Bless you, my son! I am happy in your happiness. Come to your mother’s arms, Alonzo!”

  “Bless you, Rosannah, for my dear nephew’s sake! Come to my arms!”

  Then was there a mingling of hearts and of tears of rejoicing on Telegraph Hill and in Eastport Square.

  Servants were called by the elders, in both places. Unto one was given the order, “Pile this fire high with hickory wood, and bring me a roasting-hot lemonade.”

  Unto the other was given the order, “Put out this fire, and bring me two palm-leaf fans and a pitcher of ice-water.”

  Then the young people were dismissed, and the elders sat down to talk the sweet surprise over and make the wedding plans.

  Some minutes before this Mr. Burley rushed from the mansion on Telegraph Hill without meeting or taking formal leave of anybody. He hissed through his teeth, in unconscious imitation of a popular favorite in melodrama, “Him shall she never wed! I have sworn it! Ere great Nature shall have doffed her winter’s ermine to don the emerald gauds of spring, she shall be mine!”

  3

  Two weeks later. Every few hours, during some three or four days, a very prim and devout-looking Episcopal clergyman, with a cast in his eye, had visited Alonzo. According to his card, he was the Rev. Melton Hargrave, of Cincinnati. He said he had retired from the ministry on account of his health. If he had said on account of ill-health, he would probably have erred, to judge by his wholesome looks and firm build. He was the inventor of an improvement in telephones, and hoped to make his bread by selling the privilege of using it. “At present,” he continued, “a man may go and tap a telegraph wire which is conveying a song or a concert from one state to another, and he can attach his private telephone and steal a hearing of that music as it passes along. My invention will stop all that.”

  “Well,” answered Alonzo, “if the owner of the music could not miss what was stolen, why should he care?”

  “He shouldn’t care,” said the Reverend.

  “Well?” said Alonzo, inquiringly.

  “Suppose,” replied the Reverend, “suppose that, instead of music that was passing along and being stolen, the burden of the wire was loving endearments of the most private and sacred nature?”

  Alonzo shuddered from head to heel. “Sir, it is a priceless invention,” said he; “I must have it at any cost.”

  But the invention was delayed somewhere on the road from Cincinnati, most unaccountably. The impatient Alonzo could hardly wait. The thought of Rosannah’s sweet words being shared with him by some ribald thief was galling to him. The Reverend came frequently and lamented the delay, and told of measures he had taken to hurry things up. This was some little comfort to Alonzo.

  One forenoon the Reverend ascended the stairs and knocked at Alonzo’s door. There was no response. He entered, glanced eagerly around, closed the door softly, then ran to the telephone. The exquisitely soft and remote strains of the “Sweet By-and-By” came floating through the instrument. The singer was flatting, as usual, the five notes that follow the first two in the chorus, when the Reverend interrupted her with this word, in a voice which was an exact imitation of Alonzo’s, with just the faintest flavor of impatience added:

  “Sweetheart?”

  “Yes, Alonzo?”

  “Please don’t sing that any more this week—try something modern.”

  The agile step that goes with a happy heart was heard on the stairs, and the Reverend, smiling diabolically, sought sudden refuge behind the heavy folds of the velvet window-curtains. Alonzo entered and flew to the telephone. Said he:

  “R
osannah, dear, shall we sing something together?”

  “Something modern?” asked she, with sarcastic bitterness.

  “Yes, if you prefer.”

  “Sing it yourself, if you like!”

  This snappishness amazed and wounded the young man. He said:

  “Rosannah, that was not like you.”

  “I suppose it becomes me as much as your very polite speech became you, Mr. Fitz Clarence.”

  “Mister Fitz Clarence! Rosannah, there was nothing impolite about my speech.”

  “Oh, indeed! Of course, then, I misunderstood you, and I most humbly beg your pardon, ha-ha-ha! No doubt you said, ‘Don’t sing it any more to-day.’”

  “Sing what any more to-day?”

  “The song you mentioned, of course. How very obtuse we are, all of a sudden!”

  “I never mentioned any song.”

  “Oh, you didn’t?”

  “No, I didn’t!”

  “I am compelled to remark that you did.”

  “And I am obliged to reiterate that I didn’t.”

  “A second rudeness! That is sufficient, sir. I will never forgive you. All is over between us.”

  Then came a muffled sound of crying. Alonzo hastened to say:

  “Oh, Rosannah, unsay those words! There is some dreadful mystery here, some hideous mistake. I am utterly earnest and sincere when I say I never said anything about any song. I would not hurt you for the whole world. . . . Rosannah, dear! . . . Oh, speak to me, won’t you?”

  There was a pause; then Alonzo heard the girl’s sobbings retreating, and knew she had gone from the telephone. He rose with a heavy sigh, and hastened from the room, saying to himself, “I will ransack the charity missions and the haunts of the poor for my mother. She will persuade her that I never meant to wound her.”

  A minute later the Reverend was crouching over the telephone like a cat that knoweth the ways of the prey. He had not very many minutes to wait. A soft, repentant voice, tremulous with tears, said:

  “Alonzo, dear, I have been wrong. You could not have said so cruel a thing. It must have been some one who imitated your voice in malice or in jest.”

  The Reverend coldly answered, in Alonzo’s tones:

  “You have said all was over between us. So let it be. I spurn your proffered repentance, and despise it!”

  Then he departed, radiant with fiendish triumph, to return no more with his imaginary telephonic invention forever.

  Four hours afterward Alonzo arrived with his mother from her favorite haunts of poverty and vice. They summoned the San Francisco household; but there was no reply. They waited, and continued to wait, upon the voiceless telephone.

  At length, when it was sunset in San Francisco, and three hours and a half after dark in Eastport, an answer to the oft-repeated cry of “Rosannah!”

  But, alas, it was Aunt Susan’s voice that spake. She said:

  “I have been out all day; just got in. I will go and find her.”

  The watchers waited two minutes—five minutes—ten minutes. Then came these fatal words, in a frightened tone:

  “She is gone, and her baggage with her. To visit another friend, she told the servants. But I found this note on the table in her room. Listen: ‘I am gone; seek not to trace me out; my heart is broken; you will never see me more. Tell him I shall always think of him when I sing my poor “Sweet By-and-By,” but never of the unkind words he said about it.’ That is her note. Alonzo, Alonzo, what does it mean? What has happened?”

  But Alonzo sat white and cold as the dead. His mother threw back the velvet curtains and opened a window. The cold air refreshed the sufferer, and he told his aunt his dismal story. Meantime his mother was inspecting a card which had disclosed itself upon the floor when she cast the curtains back. It read, “Mr. Sidney Algernon Burley, San Francisco.”

  “The miscreant!” shouted Alonzo, and rushed forth to seek the false Reverend and destroy him; for the card explained everything, since in the course of the lovers’ mutual confessions they had told each other all about all the sweethearts they had ever had, and thrown no end of mud at their failings and foibles—for lovers always do that. It has a fascination that ranks next after billing and cooing.

  4

  During the next two months many things happened. It had early transpired that Rosannah, poor suffering orphan, had neither returned to her grandmother in Portland, Oregon, nor sent any word to her save a duplicate of the woeful note she had left in the mansion on Telegraph Hill. Whosoever was sheltering her—if she was still alive—had been persuaded not to betray her whereabouts, without doubt; for all efforts to find trace of her had failed.

  Did Alonzo give her up? Not he. He said to himself, “She will sing that sweet song when she is sad; I shall find her.” So he took his carpet-sack and a portable telephone, and shook the snow of his native city from his arctics, and went forth into the world. He wandered far and wide and in many states. Time and again, strangers were astounded to see a wasted, pale, and woe-worn man laboriously climb a telegraph-pole in wintry and lonely places, perch sadly there an hour, with his ear at a little box, then come sighing down, and wander wearily away. Sometimes they shot at him, as peasants do at aeronauts, thinking him mad and dangerous. Thus his clothes were much shredded by bullets and his person grievously lacerated. But he bore it all patiently.

  In the beginning of his pilgrimage he used often to say, “Ah, if I could but hear the ‘Sweet By-and By’!” But toward the end of it he used to shed tears of anguish and say, “Ah, if I could but hear something else!”

  Thus a month and three weeks drifted by, and at last some humane people seized him and confined him in a private mad-house in New York. He made no moan, for his strength was all gone, and with it all heart and all hope. The superintendent, in pity, gave up his own comfortable parlor and bed-chamber to him and nursed him with affectionate devotion.

  At the end of a week the patient was able to leave his bed for the first time. He was lying, comfortably pillowed, on a sofa, listening to the plaintive Miserere of the bleak March winds and the muffled sound of tramping feet in the street below—for it was about six in the evening, and New York was going home from work. He had a bright fire and the added cheer of a couple of student-lamps. So it was warm and snug within, though bleak and raw without; it was light and bright within, though outside it was as dark and dreary as if the world had been lit with Hartford gas. Alonzo smiled feebly to think how his loving vagaries had made him a maniac in the eyes of the world, and was proceeding to pursue his line of thought further, when a faint, sweet strain, the very ghost of sound, so remote and attenuated it seemed, struck upon his ear. His pulses stood still; he listened with parted lips and bated breath. The song flowed on—he waiting, listening, rising slowly and unconsciously from his recumbent position. At last he exclaimed:

  “It is! it is she! Oh, the divine flatted notes!”

  He dragged himself eagerly to the corner whence the sounds proceeded, tore aside a curtain, and discovered a telephone. He bent over, and as the last note died away he burst forth with the exclamation:

  “Oh, thank Heaven, found at last! Speak to me, Rosannah, dearest! The cruel mystery has been unraveled; it was the villain Burley who mimicked my voice and wounded you with insolent speech!”

  There was a breathless pause, a waiting age to Alonzo; then a faint sound came, framing itself into language:

  “Oh, say those precious words again, Alonzo!”

  “They are the truth, the veritable truth, my Rosannah, and you shall have the proof, ample and abundant proof!”

  “Oh, Alonzo, stay by me! Leave me not for a moment! Let me feel that you are near me! Tell me we shall never be parted more! Oh, this happy hour, this blessed hour, this memorable hour!”

  “We will make record of it, my Rosannah; every year, as this dear hour chimes from the clock, we will celebrate it with thanksgivings, all the years of our life.”

  “We will, we will, Alonzo!”

 
“Four minutes after six, in the evening, my Rosannah, shall henceforth—”

  “Twenty-three minutes after twelve, afternoon, shall—”

  “Why, Rosannah, darling, where are you?”

  “In Honolulu, Sandwich Islands. And where are you? Stay by me; do not leave me for a moment. I cannot bear it. Are you at home?”

  “No, dear, I am in New York—a patient in the doctor’s hands.”

  An agonizing shriek came buzzing to Alonzo’s ear, like the sharp buzzing of a hurt gnat; it lost power in traveling five thousand miles. Alonzo hastened to say:

  “Calm yourself, my child. It is nothing. Already I am getting well under the sweet healing of your presence. Rosannah?”

  “Yes, Alonzo? Oh, how you terrified me! Say on.”

  “Name the happy day, Rosannah!”

  There was a little pause. Then a diffident small voice replied, “I blush—but it is with pleasure, it is with happiness. Would—would you like to have it soon?”

  “This very night, Rosannah! Oh, let us risk no more delays. Let it be now!—this very night, this very moment!”

  “Oh, you impatient creature! I have nobody here but my good old uncle, a missionary for a generation, and now retired from service—nobody but him and his wife. I would so dearly like it if your mother and your Aunt Susan—”

  “Our mother and our Aunt Susan, my Rosannah.”

  “Yes, our mother and our Aunt Susan—I am content to word it so if it pleases you; I would so like to have them present.”

  “So would I. Suppose you telegraph Aunt Susan. How long would it take her to come?”

  “The steamer leaves San Francisco day after tomorrow. The passage is eight days. She would be here the 31st of March.”

  “Then name the 1st of April; do, Rosannah, dear.”

  “Mercy, it would make us April fools, Alonzo!”

  “So we be the happiest ones that that day’s sun looks down upon in the whole broad expanse of the globe, why need we care? Call it the 1st of April, dear.”

  “Then the 1st of April it shall be, with all my heart!”

  “Oh, happiness! Name the hour, too, Rosannah.”