And, except for the release from pain, he rejoiced less and less in his
recovery. He remembered a tedious sickness of his childhood and how
beautiful he had thought the world, when he began to get well, how
electric the open air blowing in at the window, how green the smile of
earth, and how glorious to live and see the open day again. He had none of
that feeling now. No pretty vision came again near his bed, and he beheld
his convalescence as a mistake. He had come to a jumping-off place in his
life--why had they not let him jump? What was there left but the weary
plod, plod, and dust of years?
He could have gone back to Carlow in better spirit if it had not been for
the few dazzling hours of companionship which had transformed it to a
paradise, but, gone, left a desert. She, by the sight of her, had made him
wish to live, and now, that he saw her no more, she made him wish to die.
How little she had cared for him, since she told him she did not care,
when he had not meant to ask her. He was weary, and at last he longed to
find the line of least resistance and follow it; he had done hard things
for a long time, but now he wanted to do something easy. Under the new
genius--who was already urging that the paper should be made a daily--the
"Herald" could get along without him; and the "White-Caps" would bother
Carlow no longer; and he thought that Kedge Halloway, an honest man, if a
dull one, was sure to be renominated for Congress at the district
convention which was to meet at Plattville in September--these were his
responsibilities, and they did not fret him. Everything was all right.
There was only one thought which thrilled him: his impression that she had
come to the hospital to see him was not a delusion; she had really been
there--as a humane, Christian person, he said to himself. One day he told
Meredith of his vision, and Tom explained that it was no conjuration of
fever.
"But I thought she'd gone abroad," said Harkless, staring.
"They had planned to," answered his friend. "They gave it up for some
reason. Uncle Henry decided that he wasn't strong enough for the trip, or
something."
"Then--is she--is she here?"
"No; Helen is never here in summer. When she came back from Plattville,
she went north, somewhere, to join people she had promised, I think."
Meredith had as yet no inkling or suspicion that his adopted cousin had
returned to Plattville. What he told Harkless was what his aunt had told
him, and he accepted it as the truth.
Mrs. Sherwood (for she was both Mr. and Mrs. Sherwood) had always
considered Fisbee an enigmatic rascal, and she regarded Helen's defection
to him in the light of a family scandal to be hushed up, as well as a
scalding pain to be borne. Some day the unkind girl-errant would "return
to her wisdom and her duty"; meanwhile, the less known about it the
better.