speech was freighted with meaning, whose looks were all significant.
The words of the proprietor of a rich coal mine have a golden sound,
and his common sayings are repeated as if they were solid wisdom.
Philip wished to be alone; his good fortune at this moment seemed an
empty mockery, one of those sarcasms of fate, such as that which spreads
a dainty banquet for the man who has no appetite. He had longed for
success principally for Ruth’s sake; and perhaps now, at this very moment
of his triumph, she was dying.
“Shust what I said, Mister Sderling,” the landlord of the Ilium hotel
kept repeating. “I dold Jake Schmidt he find him dere shust so sure as
noting.”
“You ought to have taken a share, Mr. Dusenheimer,” said Philip.
“Yaas, I know. But d’old woman, she say ‘You sticks to your pisiness.
So I sticks to’em. Und I makes noting. Dat Mister Prierly, he don’t
never come back here no more, ain’t it?”
“Why?” asked Philip.
“Vell, dere is so many peers, and so many oder dhrinks, I got ’em all set
down, ven he coomes back.”
It was a long night for Philip, and a restless one. At any other time
the swing of the cars would have lulled him to sleep, and the rattle and
clank of wheels and rails, the roar of the whirling iron would have only
been cheerful reminders of swift and safe travel. Now they were voices
of warning and taunting; and instead of going rapidly the train seemed to
crawl at a snail’s pace. And it not only crawled, but it frequently
stopped; and when it stopped it stood dead still and there was an ominous
silence. Was anything the matter, he wondered. Only a station probably.
Perhaps, he thought, a telegraphic station. And then he listened
eagerly. Would the conductor open the door and ask for Philip Sterling,
and hand him a fatal dispatch?
How long they seemed to wait. And then slowly beginning to move, they
were off again, shaking, pounding, screaming through the night. He drew
his curtain from time to time and looked out. There was the lurid sky
line of the wooded range along the base of which they were crawling.
There was the Susquehannah, gleaming in the moon-light. There was a
stretch of level valley with silent farm houses, the occupants all at
rest, without trouble, without anxiety. There was a church, a graveyard,
a mill, a village; and now, without pause or fear, the train had mounted
a trestle-work high in air and was creeping along the top of it while a
swift torrent foamed a hundred feet below.
What would the morning bring? Even while he was flying to her, her gentle
spirit might have gone on another flight, whither he could not follow
her. He was full of foreboding. He fell at length into a restless doze.
There was a noise in his ears as of a rushing torrent when a stream is
swollen by a freshet in the spring. It was like the breaking up of life;
he was struggling in the consciousness of coming death: when Ruth stood
by his side, clothed in white, with a face like that of an angel,
radiant, smiling, pointing to the sky, and saying, “Come.” He awoke with
a cry–the train was roaring through a bridge, and it shot out into
daylight.
When morning came the train was industriously toiling along through the
fat lands of Lancaster, with its broad farms of corn and wheat, its mean
houses of stone, its vast barns and granaries, built as if, for storing
the riches of Heliogabalus. Then came the smiling fields of Chester,
with their English green, and soon the county of Philadelphia itself, and
the increasing signs of the approach to a great city. Long trains of
coal cars, laden and unladen, stood upon sidings; the tracks of other
roads were crossed; the smoke of other locomotives was seen on parallel
lines; factories multiplied; streets appeared; the noise of a busy city
began to fill the air; –and with a slower and slower clank on the
connecting rails and interlacing switches the train rolled into the