A Fool and His Money

by George Barr McCutcheon

This was Tuesday. They were coming on Thursday, and the train reached the station mentioned at half-past twelve at night. So you will see it was a jolly arrangement.

I put Mr. Bangs up in my best guest-chamber, and, be it said to my credit, the Countess did not have to suggest it to me. As we said good night to her on the little landing at the top of the stairs, she took my bandaged paw between her two little hands and said:

"You will soon be rid of me forever, Mr. Smart. Will you bear with me patiently for a little while longer?" There was a plaintive, appealing note in her voice. She seemed strangely subdued.

"I can bear with you much easier than I can bear the thought of being rid of you," I said in a very low voice. She pressed my clumsy hand fiercely, and I felt no pain.

"You have been too good to me," she said in a very small voice. "Some day, when I am out of all this trouble, I may be able to tell you how much I appreciate all you have done for me."

An almost irresistible—I was about to say ungovernable—impulse to seize her in my arms came over me, but I conquered it and rushed after Mr. Bangs, as blind as a bat and reeling for a dozen steps or more. It was a most extraordinary feeling.

I found myself wondering if passion had that effect on all men. If this was an illustration of what a real passionate love could do to a sensible, level-headed person, then what, in heaven's name, was the emotion I had characterised as love during my placid courtship of the faintly remembered typewriter? There had been no such blinding, staggering sensation as this. No thoughts of physical contact with my former inamorata had left me weak and trembling and dazed as I was at this historic moment.

Bangs was chattering in his glib English fashion as we descended to my study, but I did not hear half that he said. He looked surprised at two or three of the answers I made to his questions, and I am sure there were several of them that I didn't respond to at all. He must have thought me an unmannerly person.

One remark of his brought me rather sharply to my senses. I seemed capable of grasping its awful significance when all the others had gone by without notice.

"If all goes well," he was saying, "she should be safely away from here on the fourteenth. That leaves less than ten days more, sir, under your hospitable roof."