But that was the first day, and before she had met the kindness and sympathy of those whose business it is to care for the patients, or felt the influences for good, the tendency to all the better impulses of our nature, which seems to pervade the very atmosphere of Clifton. Ethie felt this influence very soon, and her second letter to Aunt Barbara was filled with praise of Clifton, where she had made so many friends, in spite of her evident desire to avoid society and stay by herself. She had passed through the usual ordeal attending the advent of every new face, especially if that face be a little out of the common order of faces. She had been inspected in the dining room, and bathroom, and chapel, both when she went in and when she went out. She had been talked up and criticised from the way she wore her hair to the hang of her skirts, which here, as well as in Olney, trailed the floor with a sweep unmistakably aristocratic and stamped her as somebody. The sacque and hat brought from Paris had been copied by three or four, and pronounced distingué, but ugly by as many more, while Mrs. Peter Pry, of whom there are always one or two at every watering-place, had set herself industriously at work to pry into her antecedents to find out just who and what Miss Bigelow was. As the result of this research, it had been ascertained that the young lady was remotely connected with the Bigelows of Boston, and had something of her own--that she had spent several years abroad, and could speak both French and German with perfect ease; that she had been at the top of Mont Blanc, and passed part of a winter at St. Petersburg, and seen a crocodile in the river Nile, and a Moslem burying-ground in Constantinople, and had the cholera at Milan, the varioloid at Rome, and was marked between the eyes and on the chin, and was twenty-five years old, and did not wear false hair, nor use Laird's Liquid Pearl, as was at first suspected from the clearness of her complexion, and did wear crimping pins at night, and pay Annie, the bath-girl, extra for bringing up the morning bath, and was more interested in the chapel exercises when the great Head Center was there, and bought cream every morning of Mrs. King, and sat up at night long after the gas was turned off, and was there at Clifton for spine in the back and head difficulties generally. These few items, together with the surmise that she had had some great trouble--a disappointment, most likely, which affected her health--were all Mrs. Pry could learn, and she detailed them to anyone who would listen, until Ethelyn's history, from the Pry point of view, was pretty generally known and the most made of every good quality and virtue.
The Mrs. Pry of this summer was not ill-natured; she was simply curious; and as she generally said more good than evil of people, she was generally liked and tolerated by all. She was not a fashionable woman, nor an educated woman, though very popular with her neighbors at home, and she was there for numbness and swollen knees; and, having knit socks for four years for the soldiers, she now knit stockings for the soldiers' orphans, and took a dash every morning and screamed loud enough to be heard at the depot when she took it, and had a pack every afternoon, and corked her right ear with cotton, which she always took out when in a pack, so as to hear whatever might be said in the hall, her open ventilator being the medium of sound. This was Mrs. Peter Pry, drawn from no one in particular, but a fair exponent of characters found in other places than Clifton Springs. Rooming on the same floor with Ethelyn, whom she greatly admired, the good woman persisted until she overcame the stranger's shyness, and succeeded in establishing, first, a bowing, then a speaking, and finally, a calling acquaintance between them--the calls, however, being mostly upon one side, and that the prying one.
Ethie had been at Clifton for three or four weeks, and the dimensions of No. 101 did not seem half so circumscribed, as at first. On the whole, she was contented, especially after the man who snored, and the woman who wore squeaky boots, and talked in her sleep, vacated No. 102, the large, airy, pleasant room adjoining her own. There was no one in it now but Mary, the chambermaid, who said it was soon to be occupied by a sick gentleman, adding that she believed he had the consumption, and hoped his cough would not fret Miss Bigelow. Ethie hoped so too. Nervousness, and, indeed, diseases of all kinds, seemed to develop rapidly at Clifton, where one has nothing to do but to watch each new symptom, and report to physician or nurse, and Ethie was not an exception. She was very nervous, and she found herself dreading the arrival of the sick man, wondering if his coughing would keep her awake nights, and if the light from her candle shining out into the darkened hall would annoy and worry him, as it had worried the woman opposite, who complained that she could not rest with that glimmer on the wall, showing that somebody was up, who, might at any moment make a noise. That he was a person of consequence she readily guessed, for an extra pair of pillows was taken in, and the rocking-chair possessed of two whole arms, and No. 109, also vacant just then, was rifled of its round stand and footstool, and Mrs. Pry reported that Dr. F---- himself had been up to see that all was comfortable, and Miss Clark had ordered a better set of springs, with a new hair mattress, and somebody had put a bouquet of flowers in the room and hung a muslin curtain at the window.
"A big-bug, most likely," Mrs. Peter Pry said, when, after her pack, she brought her knitting for a few moments into Ethelyn's room and wondered who the man could be.
Ethelyn did not care particularly who he was, provided he did not cough nights and keep her awake, in which case she should feel constrained to change her room, an alternative she did not care to contemplate, as she had become more attached to No. 101 than she had at first supposed possible. Ethelyn was very anxious that day, and, had she believed in presentiments, she would have thought that something was about to befall her, so heavy was the gloom weighing upon her spirits, and so dark the future seemed. She was going to have a headache, she feared, and as a means of throwing it off, she started, after ten, for a walk to Rocky Run, a distance of a mile or more. It was a cool, hazy July afternoon, such as always carried Ethie back to Chicopee and the days of her happy girlhood, when her heart was not so heavy and sad as it was now. With thoughts of Chicopee came also thoughts of Richard, and Ethie's eyes were moist with tears as she looked wistfully toward the setting sun and wondered if he ever thought of her now or had forgotten her, and was the story true of his seeking for a divorce. That rumor had troubled Ethie greatly, and was the reason why she did not improve as the physician hoped she would when she first came to Clifton. Sitting down upon the bridge across the creek, she bowed her head in her hands and went over again all the dreadful past, blaming herself now more than she did Richard, and wishing that much could be undone of all that had transpired to make her what she was, and while she sat there the Western train appeared in view, and, mechanically rising to her feet, Ethie turned her steps back toward the Cure, standing aside to let the long train go by, and feeling, when it passed her, a strange, sudden throb, as if it were fraught with more than ordinary interest to her. Usually, that Western train, the distant roll of whose wheels and the echo of whose scream quickened so many hearts waiting for news from home, had no special interest for her. It never brought her a letter. Her name was never called in the exciting distribution which took place in the parlor or on the long piazza after the eight-o'clock mail had arrived, and so she seldom heeded it; but to-night there was a difference, and she watched the long line curiously until it passed the corner by the old brown farmhouse and disappeared from view. It had left the station long ere she reached the Cure, for she had walked slowly, and lights were shining from the different rooms, and there was a sound of singing in the parlor, and the party of croquet players had come up from the lawn, and ladies were hurrying toward the bathroom, when she came in and climbed the three flights of stairs which led to the fourth floor. There was a light shining through the ventilator of No. 102, the door was partly ajar, and the doctor was there, asking some questions of the tall figure, whose outline Ethelyn dimly descried as she went into her room. There was more talking after a little--more going in and out, while Mary Ann brought up some supper on a tray, and John brought up a traveling trunk much larger than himself, and then, without Mrs. Pry's assurance, Ethie knew that the occupant of No. 102 had arrived.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE OCCUPANT OF NO. 102
He did not cough, but he seemed to be a restless spirit, for Ethie heard him pacing up and down his room long after the gas was turned off and her own candle was extinguished. Once, too, she heard a long-drawn sigh, or groan, which made her start suddenly, for something in the tone carried her to Olney and the house on the prairie. It was late that night ere she slept, and when next morning she awoke, the nervous headache, which had threatened her the previous night, was upon her in full force, and kept her for nearly the entire day confined to her bed. Mrs. Pry was spending the day in Phelps, and with this source of information cut off, Ethelyn heard nothing of No. 102, further than the chambermaid's casual remark that "the gentleman was quite an invalid, and for the present was to take his meals and baths in his room to avoid so much going up and down stairs."
Who he was Ethelyn did not know or care, though twice she awoke from a feverish sleep with the impression that she had heard Richard speaking to her; but it was only Jim, the bath man, talking in the next room, and she laid her throbbing head again upon her pillow, while her new neighbor dreamed in turn of her and woke with the strange fancy that she was near him. Ethie's head was better that night; so much better that she dressed herself and went down to the parlor in time to hear the calling of the letters as the Western mail was distributed. Usually she felt but little interest in the affair further than watching the eager, anxious faces bending near the boy, and the looks of joy or disappointment which followed failure and success. To-night, however, it was different. She was not expecting a letter herself. Nobody wrote to her but Aunt Barbara, whose letters came in the morning, but she was conscious of a strange feeling of expectancy, and taking a step toward the table around which the excited group were congregated, she stood leaning against the column while name after name was called. First the letters, a score or two, and then the papers, matters of less account, but still snatched eagerly by those who could get nothing better. There was a paper for Mrs. More-house, and Mrs. Stone, and Mrs. Wilson, and Mrs. Turner, while Mr. Danforth had half a dozen or less, and then Perry paused a moment over a new name--one which had never before been called in the parlor at Clifton: