"Of course I shall care to know!"
Miss Hitchcock's voice trembled, and then steadied itself, as she added,—"And I am glad you are thinking of it."
* * * * *
With a sense of relief Sommers found himself alone, and free to return to the temple, to Alves, for the last time. The day had been crowded with insistent, petty details, and he marvelled that he had submitted to them patiently. In the chamber where the dead woman lay it was strangely still—deserted by all things human. He locked the doors and sat down for his second night of watch, reproaching himself for the hours he had lost this day. But when he looked at the cold, white face upon the pillow, that already seemed the face of one who had travelled far from this life, he felt that it had been best as it was. He kissed the silent lips and covered the face; he would not look at it again. Alves had gone. To-morrow he would lay this body in the little burial plot of the seminary above the Wisconsin lakes.
Already Alves had bequeathed him something of herself. She had returned him to his fellow-laborers with a new feeling toward them, a humbleness he had never known, a desire to adjust himself with them. He was sensitive to the kindness of the day,—White's friendly trust, Leonard's just words, Miss Hitchcock's generosity. As the sense of this life faded from the woman he loved, the dawn of a fairer day came to him. And his heart ached because she for whom he had desired every happiness might never respond to human joy.
CHAPTER XI
During the next two years the country awoke from its torpor, feeling the blood tingle in its strong limbs once more, and rubbing its eyes in wonder at its own folly. Some said the spirit of hope was due to the gold basis; some said it was the good crops; some said it was the prospect of national expansion. In any event the country got tired of its long fit of sulks; trade revived, railroads set about mending their tracks, mills opened—a current of splendid vitality began to throb. Men took to their business with renewed avidity, content to go their old ways, to make new snares and to enter them, all unconscious of any mighty purpose. Those at the faro tables of the market increased the stakes and opened new tables. New industrial companies sprung up overnight like mushrooms, watered and sunned by the easy optimism of the hour. The rumors of war disturbed this hothouse growth. But the "big people" took advantage of these to squeeze the "little people," and all worked to the glory of the great god. In the breast of every man on the street was seated one conviction: 'This is a mighty country, and I am going to get something out of it.' The stock market might bob up and down; the gamblers might gain or lose their millions; the little politicians of the hour might talk blood and iron by the pound of Congressional Record; but the great fact stared you in the face—every one was hopeful; for every one there was much good money somewhere. It was a rich time in which to live.
Remote echoes of this optimism reached Sommers. He learned, chiefly through the newspapers, that Mr. R. G. Carson had emerged from the obscurity of Chicago and had become a celebrity upon the metropolitan stage after "the successful flotation of several specialties." Mr. Brome Porter, he gathered from the same source, had built himself a house in New York, and altogether shaken the dust of Chicago from his feet. Sommers passed him occasionally in the unconsolidated air of Fifth Avenue, but the young doctor had long since sunk out of Brome Porter's sphere of consciousness. Sommers thought Porter betrayed his need of Carlsbad more than ever, and he wondered if the famous gambler had beguiled Colonel Hitchcock into any of his ventures. But Sommers did not trouble himself seriously with the new manifestations of gigantic greed. Unconscious of the fact that from collar-button to shoe-leather he was assisting Mr. Carson's industries to yield revenues on their water-logged stocks, he went his way in his profession and labored. For the larger part of the time he was an assistant in a large New York hospital, where he found enough hard work to keep his thoughts from wandering to Carson, Brome Porter, and Company. In the feverish days that preceded the outbreak of the Cuban war, he heard rumors that Porter had been caught in the last big "flotation," and was heavily involved. But the excitement of those days destroyed the importance of the news to the public and to him.
Sommers resolved to find service in one of the military hospitals that before long became notorious as pestholes. From the day he arrived at Tampa, he found enough to tax all his energies in trying to save the lives of raw troops dumped in the most unsanitary spots a paternal government could select. In the melee created by incompetent officers and ignorant physicians, one single-minded man could find all the duties he craved. Toward the close of the war, on the formation of a new typhoid hospital, Sommers was put in charge. There one day in the heat of the fight with disease and corruption he discovered Parker Hitchcock, who had enlisted, partly as a frolic, an excuse for throwing off the ennui of business, and partly because his set were all going to Cuba. Young Hitchcock had come down with typhoid while waiting in Tampa for a transport, and had been left in Sommers's camp. He greeted the familiar face of the doctor with a welcome he had never given it in Chicago.
"Am I going to die in this sink, doctor?" he asked, when Sommers came back to him in the evening.