Accordingly, when Mr. Edward Raymer came out of the president's room at the Farmers' and Merchants' Bank the following morning, he was treading upon air. For in his mind's eye there was a fair picture of a great and successful industry to be built upon the substantial extension of credit promised by the capitalist whose presence chamber he had just quitted.
XIX
LOSS AND GAIN
Striving feebly as one who gathers up the shards and fragments after an explosion, Griswold remembered cloudily the supper of tasteless courses at the Hotel Chouteau, still less distinctly, a drive through the streets to a great, echoing railway station, a glare of lights too painful to be borne, and, last of all, an overpowering weariness shutting down upon him like a sudden closing in of darkness become thick and stifling.
Afterward there were vague impressions, momentary breaches in the wall of inclosing darkness when he had realized that he was curiously helpless, and that he was still on the train going somewhere, though he could not remember where. In one of these intervals a woman had stood beside him, and he seemed to remember that she had put her cool hand on his forehead.
Of the transition from the train to the bed in the upper room at Mereside, he recalled nothing, though the personalities of two strangers, the doctor and the nurse, obtruded themselves frequently in the later phases of the troubled dream, like figures in a shadow pantomime. Also, that suggestion of the presence of the woman with the cool palm became self-repeating; and finally, when complete consciousness returned, the dream impression was still so sharply defined that he was not surprised to find her standing at his bedside.
He did not recognize her. The memory of his supper companions of the Hotel Chouteau café was deeply buried under the dream débris, and the present moment was full of mild bewilderment. Yet the friendliness in her eyes seemed to shine out of some past which ought to be remembered.
Before he could frame any of the queries which came thronging to the door of the returned consciousness, she smiled and shook her head and forbade him.