Doctor Hathern's daughters

by Mary Jane Holmes

Fanny could not sleep, and as the wind increased and the ship rolled more and more she decided that if she must drown it should be with her clothing on. She got out of her berth and steadying herself by it reached up for her dress which she had hung upon a hook and which was swinging out in straight lines, with everything else which could swing. Heretofore she had only been afraid. Now, however, she was suddenly conscious of a new sensation so overmastering that she crept back into her berth, wondering if she were dying, as the cold, clammy feeling crept from her toes up to the roots of her hair, which seemed in her nervous imagination to stand on end. As yet there was no other feeling in her stomach than one of faintness and chill,—but when she raised her head the nausea was so severe that the Colonel was roused from his sleep and came at once to her aid.

“Am I dying?” she asked, and he answered with a laugh, “Dying! No. It’s only seasickness. You will soon be over it.”

All night the retching and nausea continued, and when the grey dawn came struggling through the porthole Fanny was as limp and white and still as if she were dead.

The Colonel had called the doctor and stewardess when his remedies failed, and they had removed her from the berth to the couch under the window where she would have more air and light. And there she lay, motionless, for if she stirred so much as a finger or turned her head the terrible paroxysm seized and shook her until there was scarcely strength in her to move. It was the worst case he had ever seen, the doctor said, as the day wore on and she did not improve. He had said this a good many times when he knew his patients wished to be exceptions, but he meant it now, and became greatly interested in the young bride, who puzzled him somewhat. As the seasickness decreased it was succeeded by a severe pain in the head, with a burning fever, so that at times she was delirious, and said things the Colonel would have given much if she had left unsaid. Jack troubled her, or rather his eyes, which were always looking at her. Many eyes he must have had, as they were everywhere, and especially upon the wedding ring and the solitaire. Here they blinded her if her hand lay outside the sheet. If she covered it up, she saw them still;—not as distinctly, but saw them looking at her, sometimes mockingly, but oftener reproachfully and full of pain.

“Jack, Jack, go away!” she would say imploringly, and once, when the Colonel was standing by her, she slipped the rings from her finger and handing them to him said, “His eyes are on them all the time. Take them away, and perhaps I shan’t see them so often.”

The Colonel took the rings and put them in his vest pocket, with a feeling that he was beginning to reap in some small measure what he had sown. It did not take long for his friends to know about the mysterious Jack whose eyes haunted his wife, and one lady, bolder and more curious than the others, asked him, “Who is Jack? Her brother?”

“He is not her brother,” was the curt reply, and the gleam in the Colonel’s eyes warned the lady not to pursue the subject.

“Curse him!” the Colonel said to himself, as he went up on deck and in the face of a fierce north-easter walked back and forth for half an hour or more, his hands in his pockets and his head bent down as if to break the force of the wind which beat so furiously upon him, but which he didn’t feel at all.

A hurricane would scarcely have moved him, so bitter were his thoughts and so deeply wounded his pride. He knew the ways of a ship and how the passengers, shut up within themselves, hailed anything like gossip and made the most of it, and he knew they were discussing his affairs and building up theories with regard to the Jack whose eyes sat on his wife’s pillow,—on the door,—on the window,—and lastly on her wedding ring, which she had discarded. A few had been in to see her and what they had not heard the stewardess had told, and every possible conclusion was drawn with regard to the matter. All this he guessed as he walked the deck cursing his rival, who, far away, was seeing Fanny’s face just as she saw his, for this was on Tuesday night, when Jack was at his worst.

“Curse him, and her, too, for loving a poor country fellow like that in preference to me,” the Colonel said, and the emphasis on the me told how infinitely superior he though himself to Jack Fullerton and people like him.