The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales

by John Charles Dent

"O woman, in our hour of ease,
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please;
When pain and anguish wring thy brow,
A ministering angel thou!"

She rose and approached the bed, while her gaze rested mildly upon his face. Drawing forth her handkerchief, she wiped the salt tears from his cheeks with a caressing hand. To him lying there in his helplessness, she seemed no unfit earthly representative of that Divine Beneficence "whose blessed task," says Thackeray, "it will one day be to wipe the tear from every eye." Her gentleness caused the springs to well forth afresh, and the prostrate form was convulsed by sobs. She sat by his side on the bed, and staunched the miniature flood with a tender touch. By-and-by calm returned, and he sank into a profound and apparently dreamless sleep.

When he again awoke it was broad daylight. The first object on which his eyes rested was the patient watcher who had never left her post the whole night long, and who still sat in an armchair at his bedside, ready to minister to his comfort. As soon as she perceived that he was awake she approached and took his wasted hand in her own. He gazed steadily in her face, but could find no words to speak.

"You are rested now, are you not?" she murmured, scarcely above her breath.

After a while he found his voice and asked how long he had slept. Being enlightened on the point, he expressed his belief that it was time for him to rise.

"Not yet," was the response; "you shall have your breakfast first, and then it will be time enough to think about getting up. I forbid you to talk until you have had something to eat," she added, playfully. "Lie still for a few minutes, while I go and see about a cup of tea." And so saying she left him to himself.

Presently she returned, bearing a tray and eatables. She quietly raised him to a sitting posture, and placed a large soft pillow at his back. He submitted to her ministrations like a child. It was long since he had been tended with such care, and the position doubtless seemed a little strange to him. After drinking a cup of tea and eating several morsels of the good things set before him he evidently felt refreshed. His eyes lost somewhat of their lack-lustre air of confirmed invalidism, and his voice regained a measure of its natural tone. When he attempted to rise and dress himself, however, he betrayed such a degree of bodily feebleness that his wife forbade him to make further exertions. He yielded to her importunities, and remained in bed, which was manifestly the best place for him. He was pestered by no unnecessary questions to account for his presence, Mrs. Savareen rightly considering that it was for him to volunteer any explanations he might have to make whenever he felt equal to the task.

After a while his little boy was brought in to see the father of whom he dimly remembered to have heard. His presence moved the sick man to further exhibitions of tearful sensibility, but seemed, on the whole, to have a salutary effect. Long absence and a vagabond life had not quenched the paternal instinct, and the little fellow was caressed with a fervor too genuine to admit of the possibility of its being assumed. Master Reggie received these ebullitions of affection without much corresponding demonstrativeness. He could not be expected to feel any vehement adoration for one whom he had never seen since his earliest babyhood, and whose very name for some months past had been permitted to sink out of sight. His artless prattle, however, was grateful in the ears of his father, who looked and listened as if entranced by sweet strains of music. His wasted—worse than wasted—past seemed to rise before him, as the child's accents fell softly upon his ear, and he seemed to realize more than ever how much he had thrown away.

In the course of the forenoon Mrs. Savareen's stepmother took her place in the sick chamber, and she herself withdrew to another room to take the rest of which she was by this time sorely in need. The invalid would not assent to the proposal to call in a physician. He declared that he was only dead tired, and that rest and quiet would soon restore him without medicine, in so far as any restoration was possible. And so the day passed by.

In the evening the wife again took her place at the bedside, and she had not been there long ere her husband voluntarily began his chapter of explanations. His story was a strange one, but there was no room to doubt the truth of any portion of it.