CHAPTER IV

UNDER THE AFTER AWNING

Sidewalks along Fifth Avenue were packed with persons of all nationalities, representatives of every variety of industrial activity in the life of the City. There was a reviewing stand erected in front of the ma.s.sive library that displayed its lines of architectural beauty in place of the sloping, age-gray walls of the old reservoir at Bryant Square. City officials and families of officers in the troops soon to pa.s.s were a.s.sembled there to witness this march of soldiers on their way to entrain for the Mexican border. They were filled with the zeal of patriots, because their comrades had been foully killed on that same border by a treacherous foe, and they were being sent to avenge that insult against the life and dignity of their nation.

Came the rhythmic beat of feet on the pavement; came the blare of the band. The two swung together into a harmony of marching. These boys, ordered to the front, were going, steadfastly, as in duty bound. They loved this "send-off." They marched with vigor in their steps, because ten thousand handkerchiefs waved from the windows along the line of march.

On the sidewalks was a.s.sembled a strange crowd. There were the stenographers taking their noonday outing. Many were carefully over-powdered and perfumed. They were dressed after the latest fashion--a long way after it!

But the Midinettes were a very small proportion of those wild to see the real soldiers.

All New York had heard the troops were to march that day. And all New York turned out to see the regiments.

There are a myriad phases of metropolitan life. Those phases were ill.u.s.trated that day in the crowds along the line of march. The bulk of those cl.u.s.tering at the curb were of a sort eager for a free show. In the countless loft buildings bordering the avenue were hordes of men and women too busy in earning a pitiful wage to think of anything so frivolous as a procession, with banners waving and bands playing. But while these had no thought of marching troops, there were innumerable others. For New York is a city gigantic. Within it are hosts. Some of these always are idle. Some, always eager for the free show of the streets.

So, to-day, when the troops are to march by with shrill of fife and blatant noise of band, the mult.i.tude comes scurrying, curious to see, patriotic with the emotional patriotism of one just become a citizen of a free country, where before he was the unrecognized and unhonored subject of despotism, from which he fled in search of liberty.

New York is a city of millions. It is the biggest city on earth. It is the melting pot of nations. The crowd that lines the curb is of one sort. There is another sort marching the length of the avenue. And this is a mixture to bewilder any beholder. A countryman from New Jersey, with his wife and children comes to-day for this splendid free show of the troops that are to march; the countrymen from the reaches of New York along the Hudson, with the same purpose; his fellows from Long Island, from Connecticut. With these alien figures, treading the princ.i.p.al city street of the world, are others. Those who walk there daily walk there again to-day. The clubman, coated, hatted, gloved to perfection, takes his accustomed stroll on the avenue, and looks with contemptuous disgust on the crowd that forces him to walk gingerly where usually he struts as a master. He, too, is a patriot and he means to see the march of the troops, and to applaud it--but from his club window, if ever he is able to make his way there through the perspiring congestion of the motley crowd.

There is a crew of money-makers, busy along the avenue on an occasion such as this. These are hordes of itinerant merchants moving up and down with things to sell to the crowd. They offer canes and instruments of noise that by a twist of the wrist make a horrible din. Especially, they offer American flags--bigger or smaller according to the purchaser's taste and purse. These are bought with eagerness by the crowd, and the fakers reap a harvest from the enthusiasm of those a.s.sembled to witness the marching soldiers.

The boy with a box is dominant. Wherever a short, but eager watcher stands to look, the boy comes, with his offer of a box to stand on, a box to sit on, as the purchaser may please, for the nominal cost of ten cents. Always, one finds at hand this boy, with the box that he offers for your sitting or for your feet, as you will. One box bought, he shows another, offering it for sale. Whence he comes with boxes so mult.i.tudinous none may guess. But he goes away with nickles and dimes enough perhaps to provide an income that will continue over until another day of parade.

In the reviewing stand, there was seated a girl who watched the marching troops with an intentness that had in it something of desperation, something of despair. Yet, as the soldiers pa.s.sed, she gave them little heed. She was always looking toward those advancing, as if in search for something that meant more to her than this moving ma.s.s of troops.

A band pa.s.sed. Behind it, at the head of his men, rode Colonel Marion.

As he came opposite the reviewing stand, his eyes swept over the crowd seated on the tiers of benches. They rested on the face of the girl, who had been so anxiously watching. He smiled and saluted. The girl--his daughter Ethel--waved her handkerchief eagerly in response. Then she turned, and spoke to the young man who sat beside her. There was love, touched with reverence, in her voice.

"Isn't Daddy splendid!"

Her companion, Roy Morton, answered with sincerity, in which was a tincture of irrepressible bitterness.

"He's every inch a soldier."

The bitterness came from the fact that a broken tendon--received during his last football fight for Yale--disqualified him for military service, for which he longed more than ever in this hour when he saw the girl beside him so thrilled by the pomp of war, when he saw her pride and exultation in the military bearing of the father she revered. He felt that he must seem a slacker in her eyes, even though she knew that no fault of his own kept him at home, while others marched away to serve their country.

For Roy loved Ethel and his chief desire always was to show perfect in her eyes. For that matter, he was successful enough, since the girl loved him. Their troth was plighted, and in due time they would be married with the full approval of Colonel Marion, who both liked and respected his prospective son-in-law. So, in preparation for his own absence from home on military service, he strictly charged Roy to watch over Ethel and guard her from any possible peril. It was only a father's instinctive act in protection of his child. As a matter of fact, what danger could by any possibility threaten the well-being of this Ethel, who would remain living quietly in her father's New York house, along with the elderly cousin who acted as chaperon to the motherless girl, and the staff of old and faithful servants?

During the summer weeks that followed the departure of her father, Ethel lived happily enough, content with a routine of life that included entertainments of the usual social sort and especially the almost constant company of her lover.

One of her favorite diversions was a visit to her father's yacht, which lay at its moorings off Eighty-fourth Street in the North River. There was only a caretaker left on board during the Colonel's absence, but Ethel was fond of spending an afternoon in solitary enjoyment on the yacht. Under the after awning she would sit at ease in the low wicker chair, by turns reading, watching the ceaseless traffic of the river, musing on love and happiness--which meant, always, Roy.

Came a day when Roy was summoned home by the illness of his mother.

Ethel went with him to the station and saw him off. It was long after noon when she had given the last word of farewell and the last kiss of tenderness to her lover. Ethel thought that she would like to seek the repose of the yacht for a period of tranquil meditation in the luxurious depths of her favorite chair under the after awning.

She rode to the dock in a taxicab, and the yacht's tender took her to the vessel. It was just then that a great steamer pa.s.sed, and as she would have mounted the stairs to the yacht's deck an unexpected swell from the pa.s.sing steamer smote the stairs so violently that Ethel was thrown back into the boat she had just left, with an ankle crushed under her own weight.

The girl realized that it was badly sprained. She gave orders that she should be carried on board the yacht forthwith. She decided then that she would send home for whatever might be needed--and, too, for the family physician.

With the a.s.sistance of the caretaker she managed to reach her cabin, and then sent the fellow to bring the physician in all haste. She pulled off her outer garments and donned a kimono, and crawled into her berth, to await the Doctor's coming.

It was within the hour that the little tender came back toward the yacht, carrying a pa.s.senger.

This was Doctor Gifford Garnet, the family physician. He hurried up the companion way, and went at once to his patient's stateroom. A very short examination sufficed. He saw the girl was suffering excruciating pain from the injury to her ankle.

The physician himself was a victim of morphia. And, too, he was a man of imagination--a most dangerous quality in one of his profession. Now, as he regarded the girl, he realized the intense suffering caused to her by the wrenched tendons in the ankle. That thought of suffering sickened his sensitive nature, so that he felt an emotion almost of nausea from the pain he knew her to be enduring.... And he was a coward. Pain had come to him often. Because he was a coward, he had fled from it--interposing morphia as a shield against its attack. So, now, in sympathy for the anguish endured by the girl he turned to the drug to give her relief from suffering. He made an injection into Ethel's arm.... The girl watched his movement with listless eyes. Then she sighed and smiled as she felt the gentle sting of the needle. At once she sank into an untroubled sleep.

Dr. Garnet regarded her for a moment with a curiously contemplative stare. Then he grinned grimly, pulled up his coat and shirt-sleeve, and pressed the piston of the hypodermic, driving a heavier charge of the drug into his own blood.

One minute he spent in deft examination of the injured ankle, then bandaged it. Afterward, he left the girl, and went up on deck, where he stood staring through long minutes toward the fleecy ma.s.ses of c.u.mulus clouds that lay along the New Jersey horizon.

CHAPTER V

A PRISONER OF MORPHIA

It was mid-forenoon of the following day when Ethel awoke from the profound sleep superinduced by the drug. It was with a vast astonishment that her startled eyes took in the surroundings of the stateroom. There was a blank wall straight opposite her widely gazing eyes, where should have stood a dressing table of Circa.s.sian walnut, topped by the long oval mirror always ready to show her the reflected loveliness of her face. And there should have been also lying exposed on the polished surface of the table an orderly and beautiful array of those things that make for a woman's beauty--the creams that cleanse a skin too delicate for the harsh water poured from city mains; in a gold-topped bottle a lotion for the hair, delicate and effective; in dainty phials essences of perfume, subtle, yet curiously pervasive, with the fragrance of joyous springtime. Indeed, a medley of the arts evolved through the ages for the perfecting of that beauty, which, after all, is G.o.d-given--a thing not to be attained by the processes of even the most skilled beauty-doctors....

But Ethel possessed the thing itself. To her the accessories were but absurdities--unnecessary and wanton, means whereby to emphasize a natural loveliness.

There should have been a glimmer of pure white light from the back of a hair brush, lying on the dressing table. Ethel had loved the purity of that ivory surface. She had loved it so much that she refused to have it broken by the superimposition upon it of initials wrought cleverly in silver or gold or platinum. That brush meant so much to her! Night by night, she toiled with it. After she had undone the ma.s.ses of her bronze-gold hair, she worked over them, with a sybaritical, meticulous care.

She was used to sitting in negligee and having her maid brush the strands. That brushing made the hair resplendent.... Now, Ethel looked--there was no dressing table--no mirror--nothing, of the sort that she was accustomed to see when she awoke in the morning.

She thought again of her own bedroom at home. She was minded to take her bath, which must be drawn and waiting.... And then, suddenly, that blank wall there before her eyes hammered upon her consciousness.

She was stricken with a curious sense of horror in this instant of realization that she was in some unknown place--absolutely apart from the dear, familiar things of home.

For a few horrid instants that shock of a vague terror pressed upon her like a destroying incubus.

A moment later, recollection thronged upon her. She remembered everything--the coming to the yacht, the fall, the wrenched ankle, the arrival of the physician, the almost dainty pain of the needle thrust into her flesh. And then Ethel began to think that it would be pleasant to be an invalid on board the yacht for a long time. It would need only a judicious selection of guests to make a voyage the most agreeable of diversions.

Just then she was startled into a new emotion. She realized the rhythmic beating of the engines.... The yacht was already under way.

For a little, Ethel was too stunned by the shock of surprise to take action. To her, it was inconceivable that the yacht should be thus voyaging. It should be still lying at anchor in the North River. Her father could have given no orders for its sailing. She had not. There was no one else with authority to command the movements of the craft. It should be lying at anchor in its berth.... But it was not. There was the pulse from the engines, the gentle swing of the hull to prove that a journey was begun. A journey--whither or wherefore she could not even guess.

Ethel put her feet out of the berth, and winced with pain from the movement of the injured ankle. But she set her teeth in grim determination, and stood up, putting her weight on the sound foot. Then she hobbled to the port, and looked out. She saw the highlands of New Jersey slipping gently past. She recognized the lightship. There was no longer room for doubt. The yacht had put to sea.

Ethel remained staring out of the port-hole for a long hour, during which the New Jersey coast unrolled a panorama of varied loveliness. And throughout all that hour, the girl was in a maze of wonder over this thing that had befallen. She could make no guess as to the meaning of it all. She found herself dazed by the unexpected situation. Yet, a certain instinct warned her of danger. She did not in the least understand the nature of the peril, the cause of it, the effect. But somehow a subconscious intelligence guided her to the realization that this inexplicable situation was fraught with portents of evil. Her fear sharpened when she found that the door of the stateroom was locked from the outside.

Moving with care that she might not cause herself more pain by strain in the injured ankle, she looked for and found a pencil and a sheet of paper, on which she scribbled a note to her lover.

"Mr. Roy Morton, "Birchwood Camp, "Naha.s.sane, N. Y.