CHAPTER XXX
THE GIPSY RING
The chill touch of autumn was in the air when the big steamer that brought Mrs. Spottiswoode and Echo home, crept up the bay to her wharf in the teeming North River. They arrived at daylight and the early morning found them safe aboard a Pullman rolling southward.
Looking out across the filmy glory of the October fields and the woods in their golden regalia epauletted in red, Echo thought of the day she had sailed away. She had been wretched then, and with all the tonic of fresh scenes and the savour of change, was she not as wretched now? For no letter from home had chronicled Harry Sevier's return, and moreover the knowledge that Craig had been taken half around the world to test the greatest surgical skill the planet afforded, had made his recovery, with all it might imply for her, an imminent possibility.
As she followed Mrs. Spottiswoode into the dining-car for luncheon, a lank, familiar form sprang up from a table.
"Mr. Malcolm!" she cried, and found both her hands instantly swallowed in a pair of big palms.
He was an extraordinary man, this Thomas Malcolm, whom his intimates dubbed, affectionately, "Tom." His father had begun life brilliantly, had begun to make a name and place for himself in professional life, when he had yielded to the vice of drinking, had speedily sunk himself in poverty, and had died in some slum corner wretched and unredeemed, leaving behind him a widow and a boy of ten who, with grim determination, had set himself to earn a living for both. He had but just begun to succeed in this when disease, its seeds sown in privation, took his mother from him. By dint of night-work he had gained a common-school education and had tutored himself through a southern university. At twenty-five he had founded an obscure Mission in the city which had known his father's disgrace, where for thirty years he had devoted himself to work among the rum-sodden and depraved. There was none so besotted as to be turned from his door; he was a familiar figure in the night-court and a welcome weekly visitor at the Penitentiary, few of whose inmates he did not know personally. At fifty-five no man was more beloved in the community in which he laboured, and most of all was he valued and respected by those who knew his history, and understood how the hatred of liquor had become to the boy a consuming fire that had driven him to this life of undeviating self-denial and strenuous conflict with the most sordid of vices.
Looking down at Echo from his great height, gaunt, raw-boned and with a saturnine twinkle in his cavernous eyes, his homely sallow face softened to a wonderful smile. "Why!" he said. "It's a monstrous time since we've met, my dear!" and to Mrs. Spottiswoode—"I saw your names on the passenger-list in the paper this morning, but I thought New York would have kept you at least a week."
"Not me!" she returned. "We took in all the new plays in London and spent all our money in Paris. I've no ambition now above my winter roses!" She extended her hand to Malcolm's companion.