I sighed contentedly; the future just then, however dark the sky might be, was radiant with the most varied lights of anticipation and of promise. My hand moved an apparently unopened letter, or perhaps, in its vague stirring over the desk before me, had dislodged it from some crevice in the drawers, or beneath the folios and baskets, and I abruptly became conscious of ITS presence. It was a human utterance—that letter—it might have cried out to me with the incisive agony of its menacing contents. It might I say—perhaps it did—but through the coarse obstructive mechanism of my ears its voice, that should have crashed around me like the call of Fate, was utterly unheard, and it lay there just an overlooked and silent scrap of paper.
I turned to it lazily, but in the next instant my eyes, apprehensive through that nervous divination of thought, that writes a message in our souls before we read or hear it, recognized the hand-writing of Gabrielle. I felt the racing blood leave my cheeks, and stir my heart with feverish palpitations. No letter from my sister was due now; only last week I had received one. I could scarcely keep my fingers still enough to tear open its cover. I knew; I knew. O! God how certainly I knew, that in the blackness of the darkening day a greater blackness, behind that spotless white paper, would rush out to overwhelm my life!
In the fading light leaning against the door-sill as the men and women of the street hurried homeward, with backward glances at the now onrushing columns of dusky vapor in the sky, I read the letter. I shuddered in the fear lest in the uncontrolled frenzy of my heart some treacherous cry, some blackguard defiance of the Almighty, might bring them around me in consternation and in anger.
My eyes glazing slowly with the rising paralysis of terror read this:
Dear Brother,
Something has happened. Alfred, Blanchette is sick—vraiment—quite sick. I am now home in St. Choiseul nursing her. She asks for you, Alfred. Could you come? Perhaps it would be well—Je dis peut-etre seulement—and yet, Alfred, I believe it would be best. You could help her wonderfully. Even yet, say, you will come, and things will be better.
Ah! my brother, I am sorry. O! so sorry to write this, but you see there is nothing to be done but to—shall I say it?—Alfred, Blanchette is very sick. It is a fever. The doctors reassure us, but because Blanchette calls for you so often, they are convinced that it would be good—very good—perhaps indispensable; you understand. Come Alfred—Come, come. We will tell her you are coming.
Gabrielle; St. Choiseul,
1900
The paper crumpled in my hands; something like a vapor clouded my eyes, and hearing in my ears was suffocated in a sullen roar that came from nowhere, and then I felt myself smashed against the pavement, at the door of the office, and some undissipated residue of cognition recorded the fact, that I was being lifted and carried away.
And when again the coordinated senses revealed sensibly to me my surroundings, I was on a bed in the hospital, in a wide white room, with a nurse and a doctor, and in my own ears now sounded my own voice, and all it said was compressed in struggling cries: "Je viens, Je viens, Je viens—I come, I come, I come!"