“He’s a pretty ill baby.” Her lips closed tight and the bright head nodded. “I was there this afternoon.”
But she would not discuss the situation with the miserable cadet, who went back again and again from her sunshine to the cloud that hung over him.
“Don’t talk any more about that wretched young coachman,” she pleaded. “There are so many jolly things; what is the use of dwelling on the bad ones?”
And Fitzhugh, for all his admiration, could not help wondering if she were a little heartless. He had the latest Wipes’s bulletin before he went to bed, and it was unfavorable. Little Marcus was distinctly worse. The young man lay awake with pangs of remorse and fear of retribution gnawing at him. When he slept, the haggard face of an unknown child and its ghastly, hoarse crowing—Wipes’s word had taken disagreeable hold on his imagination—haunted him. He waited for the soldier with sick impatience, and the first glimpse of the man’s face was enough.
“Wipes! Don’t tell me—” His voice failed.
“Kid’s dead, sorr,” was Wipes’s terse response, and Fitzhugh fell in his chair as if struck there by a blow.
The worst had come, probably exposure, expulsion from the academy, the shame and disappointment of his people, his career ruined before its beginning, and, worst of all, a life lost by his silly play. There seemed to be no crack in the blackness that descended upon him. Wipes was vague and unsatisfactory about arrangements.
“F’r me t’ look afther th’ job to-day, sorr. Don’t think of ut till t’morr’r,” was all he would say, and the boy was too sick at heart to press the point.
It was all he could do to crawl about from one recitation, one drill to another, and as to not thinking of it “till to-morrow,” as Wipes suggested—he thought of nothing else. It was a Wednesday, and that night he was to dine at the Emersons with Miss Duncan. Only one other cadet was there, and while he sang rag-time songs with Mrs. Emerson, Fitzhugh and the girl went outside, where the spring twilight was dying across river and hills and filtering through the sweeping elms which stand, like stately old officers, all along the gravelled driveways.
Little Julia Duncan looked up at the tall cadet, his white face towering above her grim and miserable in the dull light. “What is it? You look desperately ill. You hardly spoke at the table. Is anything wrong?”