ELISABETH. [Footnote: That is right. Up to this the printer has had his way. Now we will have ours, she and I, and spell her name properly. Together we shall manage him.]
I cut the rest of it off, because I am the editor and want to begin again here myself, and what is the use of being an editor unless you can cut "copy"? Also, it is not good for woman to allow her to say too much. She has already said too much about that letter. I have got it in my pocket, and I guess I ought to know. "Your own Elisabeth"—was not that enough? For him, with his poor, saddened life, peace be to its memory! He loved her. That covers all. How could he help it?
If they did not think I had lost my senses before, they assuredly did when that telegram reached Ribe. Talk about the privacy of the mails (the telegraph is part of the post-office machinery there), official propriety, and all that—why, I don't suppose that telegraph operator could get his coat on quick enough to go out and tell the amazing news. It would not have been human nature, certainly not Ribe human nature. Before sundown it was all over town that Jacob Riis was coming home, and coming for Elisabeth. Poor girl! It was in the Christmas holidays, and she was visiting there. She had been debating in her own mind whether to tell her mother, and how; but they left her precious little time for debate. In a neighborhood gathering that night one stern, uncompromising dowager transfixed her with avenging eye.
"They say Jacob Riis is coming home," she observed. Elisabeth knitted away furiously, her cheeks turning pink for all she made believe she did not hear.
"They say he is coming back to propose to a certain young lady again," continued the dowager, pitilessly, her voice rising. There was the stillness of death in the room. Elisabeth dropped a stitch, tried to pick it up, failed, and fled. Her mother from her seat observed with never-failing dignity that it blew like to bring on a flood. You could almost hear the big cathedral bell singing in the tower. And the subject was changed.
But I will warrant that Ribe got no wink of sleep that night, the while I fumed in a wayside Holstein inn. In my wild rush to get home I had taken the wrong train from Hamburg, or forgot to change, or something. I don't to this day know what. I know that night coming on found me stranded in a little town I had never heard of, on a spur of the road I didn't know existed, and there I had to stay, raging at the railroad, at the inn, at everything. In the middle of the night, while I was tossing sleepless on the big four-poster bed, a drunken man who had gone wrong fell into my room with the door and a candle. That man was my friend. I got up and kicked him out, called the landlord and blew him up, and felt much better. The sun had not risen when I was posting back to the junction, counting the mile-posts as we sped, watch in hand.
If mother thought we had all gone mad together, there was certainly something to excuse her. Here she had only a few weeks before forwarded with a heavy heart to her son in America Elisabeth's flat refusal to hear him, and when she expected gloom and despair, all at once his letters overflowed with a hysterical happiness that could only hail from a disordered mind. To cap it all, Christmas Eve brought her the shock of her life. Elisabeth, sitting near her in the old church and remorsefully watching her weep for her buried boys, could not resist the impulse to steal up behind, as they were going out, and whisper into her ear, as she gave her a little vicarious hug: "I have had news from Jacob. He is very happy." The look of measureless astonishment on my mother's face, as she turned, recalled to her that she could not know, and she hurried away, while mother stood and looked after her, for the first time in her life, I verily believe, thinking hard things of a fellow-being—and of her! Oh, mother! could you but have known that that hug was for your boy!
Counting hours no longer, but minutes, till I should claim it myself, I sat straining my eyes in the dark for the first glimmer of lights in the old town, when my train pulled up at a station a dozen miles from home. The guard ran along and threw open the doors of the compartments. I heard voices and the cry:—
"This way, Herr Doctor! There is room in here," and upon the step loomed the tall form of our old family physician. As I started up with a cry of recognition, he settled into a seat with a contented—
"Here, Overlaerer, is one for you," and I was face to face with my father, grown very old and white. My heart smote me at the sight of his venerable head.