It was Fisbee who caught the first glimpse of a relief expedition clipping
the rough seas on its lively way to rescue them, and, although his first
glimpse of the jaunty pennant of the relieving vessels was over the
shoulder of an iceberg, nothing was surer than that the craft was flying
to them with all good and joyous speed. The iceberg just mentioned
assumed--by no melting process, one may be sure--the form of a long
letter, first postmarked at Rouen, and its latter substance was as
follows:
"Henry and I have always believed you as selfish, James Fisbee, as you are
self-ingrossed and incapable. She has told us of your 'renunciation'; of
your 'forbidding' her to remain with you; how you 'commanded,' after you
had 'begged' her, to return to us, and how her conscience told her she
should stay and share your life in spite of our long care of her, but that
she yielded to your 'wishes' and our entreaty. What have you ever done for
her and what have you to offer her? She is our daughter, and needless to
say we shall still take care of her, for no one believes you capable of
it, even in that miserable place, and, of course, in time she will return
to her better wisdom, her home, and her duty. I need scarcely say we have
given up the happy months we had planned to spend in Dresden. Henry and I
can only stay at home to pray that her preposterous mania will wear itself
out in short order, as she will find herself unfitted for the ridiculous
task which she insists upon attempting against the earnest wishes of us
who have been more than father and mother to her. Of course, she has
talked volumes of her affection for us, and of her gratitude, which we do
not want--we only want her to stay with us. Please, please try to make her
come back to us--we cannot bear it long. If you are a man you will send
her to us soon. Her excuse for not returning on the day we wired our
intention to go abroad at once (and I may as well tell you now that our
intention to go was formed in order to bring affairs to a crisis and to
draw her away from your influence--we always dreaded her visit to you and
held it off for years)--her excuse was that your best friend, and, as I
understand it, your patron, had been injured in some brawl in that
Christian country of yours--a charming place to take a girl like her--and
she would not leave you in your 'distress' until more was known of the
man's injuries. And now she insists--and you will know it from her by the
next mail--on returning to Plattville, forsooth, because she has been
reading your newspaper, and she says she knows you are in difficulties
over it, and it is her moral obligation--as by some wild reasoning of her
own she considers herself responsible for your ruffling patron's having
been alone when he was shot--to go down and help. I suppose he made love
to her, as all the young men she meets always do, sooner or later, but I
have no fear of any rustic entanglements tor her; she has never been
really interested, save in one affair. We are quite powerless--we have
done everything; but we cannot alter her determination to edit your paper
for you. Naturally, she knows nothing whatever about such work, but she
says, with the air of triumphantly quelching all such argument, that she
has talked a great deal to Mr. Macauley of the 'Journal.' Mr. Macauley is
the affair I have alluded to; he is what she has meant when she has said,
at different times, that she was interested in journalism. But she is very
business-like now. She has bought a typewriter and purchased a great
number of soft pencils and erasers at an art shop; I am only surprised
that she does not intend to edit your miserable paper in water-colors. She
is coming at once. For mercy's sake don't telegraph her not to; your
forbiddings work the wrong way. Our only hope is that she will find the
conditions so utterly discouraging at the very start that she will give it
up and come home. If you are a man you will help to make them so. She has
promised to stay with that country girl with whom she contracted such an
incomprehensible friendship at Miss Jennings's.