bring the message when it comes.”
“Oh, may I? God bless you.”
He was gone; and none too soon; her lips were already quivering, and now
she broke down. Through her sobbings her words broke from time to time.
“Oh, he is gone. I have lost him, I shall never see him any more. And
he didn’t kiss me good-bye; never even offered to force a kiss from me,
and he knowing it was the very, very last, and I expecting he would, and
never dreaming he would treat me so after all we have been to each other.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, what shall I do, what shall I do! He is a dear, poor,
miserable, good-hearted, transparent liar and humbug, but oh, I do love
him so–!” After a little she broke into speech again. “How dear he is!
and I shall miss him so, I shall miss him so! Why won’t he ever think to
forge a message and fetch it?–but no, he never will, he never thinks of
anything; he’s so honest and simple it wouldn’t ever occur to him.
Oh, what did possess him to think he could succeed as a fraud–and he
hasn’t the first requisite except duplicity that I can see. Oh, dear,
I’ll go to bed and give it all up. Oh, I wish I had told him to come and
tell me whenever he didn’t get any telegram–and now it’s all my own
fault if I never see him again. How my eyes must look!”
CHAPTER XXIV.
Next day, sure enough, the cablegram didn’t come. This was an immense
disaster; for Tracy couldn’t go into the presence without that ticket,
although it wasn’t going to possess any value as evidence. But if the
failure of the cablegram on that first day may be called an immense
disaster, where is the dictionary that can turn out a phrase sizeable
enough to describe the tenth day’s failure? Of course every day that the
cablegram didn’t come made Tracy all of twenty-four hours’ more ashamed
of himself than he was the day before, and made Sally fully twenty-four
hours more certain than ever that he not only hadn’t any father anywhere,
but hadn’t even a confederate–and so it followed that he was a double-
dyed humbug and couldn’t be otherwise.
These were hard days for Barrow and the art firm. All these had their
hands full, trying to comfort Tracy. Barrow’s task was particularly
hard, because he was made a confidant in full, and therefore had to humor
Tracy’s delusion that he had a father, and that the father was an earl,
and that he was going to send a cablegram. Barrow early gave up the idea
of trying to convince Tracy that he hadn’t any father, because this had
such a bad effect on the patient, and worked up his temper to such an
alarming degree. He had tried, as an experiment, letting Tracy think he
had a father; the result was so good that he went further, with proper
caution, and tried letting him think his father was an earl; this wrought
so well, that he grew bold, and tried letting him think he had two
fathers, if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to, so Barrow withdrew one
of them and substituted letting him think he was going to get a
cablegram–which Barrow judged he wouldn’t, and was right; but Barrow
worked the cablegram daily for all it was worth, and it was the one thing
that kept Tracy alive; that was Barrow’s opinion.
And these were bitter hard days for poor Sally, and mainly delivered up
to private crying. She kept her furniture pretty damp, and so caught
cold, and the dampness and the cold and the sorrow together undermined
her appetite, and she was a pitiful enough object, poor thing. Her state
was bad enough, as per statement of it above quoted; but all the forces
of nature and circumstance seemed conspiring to make it worse–and
succeeding. For instance, the morning after her dismissal of Tracy,
Hawkins and Sellers read in the associated press dispatches that a toy
puzzle called Pigs in the Clover, had come into sudden favor within the