Friday, the Thirteenth: A Novel

by Thomas William Lawson

“ROBERT BROWNLEY CREATES THE MOST DISASTROUS PANIC IN THE HISTORY OF WALL STREET AND SPREADS WRECK AND RUIN THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY.”

A hideous picture seared its every light and shade on my mind, through my heart, into all my soul. A frenzied-finance harvest scene with its gory crop; in the centre one living-dead, part of the picture, yet the ghost left to haunt the painters, one of whom was already cowering before the black and bloody canvas.

Well did the word-artist who wrote over the door of the madhouse, “Man can suffer only to the limit, then he shall know peace,” understand the wondrous wisdom of his God. Beulah Sands had gone beyond her limit and was at peace.

The awful groaning stopped and an ashen pallor spread over Bob Brownley’s face. Before I could catch him he rolled backward upon the floor as dead. Bob Brownley, too, had gone beyond his limit. I bent over him and lifted his head, while the sweet woman-child knelt and covered his face with kisses, calling in a voice like that of a tiny girl speaking to her doll, “Bob, my Bob, wake up, wake up; your Beulah wants you.” As I placed my hand upon Bob’s heart and felt its beats grow stronger, as I listened to Beulah Sands’s childish voice, joyously confident, as it called upon the one thing left of her old world, some of my terror passed. In its place came a great mellowing sense of God’s marvellous wisdom. I thought gratefully of my mother’s always ready argument that the law of all laws, of God and nature, is that of compensation. I had allowed Bob’s head to sink until it rested in Beulah’s lap, and from his calm and steady breathing I could see that he had safely passed a crisis, that at least he was not in the clutches of death, as I had at first feared.

Bob slept. Beulah Sands ceased her calling and with a smile raised her fingers to her lips and softly said, “Hush, my Bob’s asleep.” Together we held vigil over our sleeping lover and friend, she with the happiness of a child who had no fear of the awakening, I with a silent terror of what should come next. I had seen one mind wafted to the unknown that day. Was it to have a companion to cheer and solace it on its far journey to the great beyond? How long we waited Bob’s awakening I could not tell. The clock’s hands said an hour; it seemed to me an age. At last his magnificent physique, his unpoisoned blood and splendid brain pulled him through to his new world of mind and heart torture. His eyelids lifted. He looked at me, then at Beulah Sands, with eyes so sad, so awful in their perplexed mournfulness, that I almost wished they had never opened, or had opened to let me see the childlike look that now shone from the girl’s. His gaze finally rested on her and his lips murmured “Beulah.”

“There, Bob, I thought you would know it was time to wake up.” She bent over and kissed him on the eyes again and again with the loving ardour a child bestows upon its pets.

He slowly rose to his feet. I could see from his eyes and the shudder that went over him as he caught sight of the paper on the desk that he was himself; that memory of the happenings of the day had not fled in his sleep. He rose to his full height, his head went up, and his shoulders back, but only from habit and for an instant. Then he folded Beulah Sands to his breast and dropped his head upon her shoulder. He sobbed like a father with the corpse of his child.

“Why, Bob, my Bob, is this the way you treat your Beulah when she’s let you sleep so your beautiful eyes would be pretty for the wedding? Is this the way to act before this kind man who has come to take us to the church? Naughty, naughty Bob.”

I looked at her, at Bob, in horror. I was beginning to realise the absolute deadness of this woman. From the first look I had known that her mind had fled, but knowledge is not always realisation. She did not even know who I was. Her mind was dead to all but the man she loved, the man who through all those long days of her suffering she had silently worshiped. To all but him she was new-born.

At the sound of “wedding,” “church,” Bob’s head slowly rose from her shoulder. I saw his decision the instant I caught his eye; I realised the uselessness of opposing it, and, sick at heart and horrified, I listened as he said in a voice now calm and soothing as that of a father to his child, “Yes, Beulah, my darling, I have slept too long. Bob has been naughty, but we will make up for lost time. Get your hat and cloak and we’ll hurry to the church or we will be late.”