The American Claimant, Mark Twain [great novels to read txt] 📗

have to tell you whom I have been talking with last night, and then you will be embarrassed.’”

Tracy couldn’t know he was to be invited for the morrow, or he might have waited. As it was, he was too miserable to wait any longer; for his last hope—a letter—had failed him. It was fully due to-day; it had not come. Had his father really flung him away? It looked so. It was not like his father, but it surely looked so. His father was a rather tough nut, in truth, but had never been so with his son—still, this implacable silence had a calamitous look. Anyway, Tracy would go to the Towers and —then what? He didn’t know; his head was tired out with thinking— he wouldn’t think about what he must do or say—let it all take care of itself. So that he saw Sally once more, he would be satisfied, happen what might; he wouldn’t care.

He hardly knew how he got to the Towers, or when. He knew and cared for only one thing—he was alone with Sally. She was kind, she was gentle, there was moisture in her eyes, and a yearning something in her face and manner which she could not wholly hide—but she kept her distance. They talked. Bye and bye she said—watching his downcast countenance out of the corner of her eye—

“It’s so lonesome—with papa and mamma gone. I try to read, but I can’t seem to get interested in any book. I try the newspapers, but they do put such rubbish in them. You take up a paper and start to read something you thinks interesting, and it goes on and on and on about how somebody—well, Dr. Snodgrass, for instance—”

Not a movement from Tracy, not the quiver of a muscle. Sally was amazed —what command of himself he must have! Being disconcerted, she paused so long that Tracy presently looked up wearily and said:

“Well?”

“Oh, I thought you were not listening. Yes, it goes on and on about this Doctor Snodgrass, till you are so tired, and then about his younger son— the favorite son—Zylobalsamum Snodgrass—”

Not a sign from Tracy, whose head was drooping again. What supernatural self-possession! Sally fixed her eye on him and began again, resolved to blast him out of his serenity this time if she knew how to apply the dynamite that is concealed in certain forms of words when those words are properly loaded with unexpected meanings.

“And next it goes on and on and on about the eldest son—not the favorite, this one—and how he is neglected in his poor barren boyhood, and allowed to grow up unschooled, ignorant, coarse, vulgar, the comrade of the community’s scum, and become in his completed manhood a rude, profane, dissipated ruffian—”

That head still drooped! Sally rose, moved softly and solemnly a step or two, and stood before Tracy—his head came slowly up, his meek eyes met her intense ones—then she finished with deep impressiveness—

“—named Spinal Meningitis Snodgrass!”

Tracy merely exhibited signs of increased fatigue. The girl was outraged by this iron indifference and callousness, and cried out—

“What are you made of?”

“I? Why?”

“Haven’t you any sensitiveness? Don’t these things touch any poor remnant of delicate feeling in you?”

“N—no,” he said wonderingly, “they don’t seem to. Why should they?”

“O, dear me, how can you look so innocent, and foolish, and good, and empty, and gentle, and all that, right in the hearing of such things as those! Look me in the eye—straight in the eye. There, now then, answer me without a flinch. Isn’t Doctor Snodgrass your father, and isn’t Zylobalsamum your brother,” [here Hawkins was about to enter the room, but changed his mind upon hearing these words, and elected for a walk down town, and so glided swiftly away], “and isn’t your name Spinal Meningitis, and isn’t your father a doctor and an idiot, like all the family for generations, and doesn’t he name all his children after poisons and pestilences and abnormal anatomical eccentricities of the human body? Answer me, some way or somehow—and quick. Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it and see me going mad before your face with suspense!”

“Oh, I wish I could do—do—I wish I could do something, anything that would give you peace again and make you happy; but I know of nothing— I know of no way. I have never heard of these awful people before.”

“What? Say it again!”

“I have never—never in my life till now.”

“Oh, you do look so honest when you say that! It must be true—surely you couldn’t look that way, you wouldn’t look that way if it were not true—would you?”

“I couldn’t and wouldn’t. It is true. Oh, let us end this suffering— take me back into your heart and confidence—”

“Wait—one more thing. Tell me you told that falsehood out of mere vanity and are sorry for it; that you’re not expecting to ever wear the coronet of an earl—”

“Truly I am cured—cured this very day—I am not expecting it!”

“O, now you are mine! I’ve got you back in the beauty and glory of your unsmirched poverty and your honorable obscurity, and nobody shall ever take you from me again but the grave! And if—”

“De earl of Rossmore, fum Englan’!”

“My father!” The young man released the girl and hung his head.

The old gentleman stood surveying the couple—the one with a strongly complimentary right eye, the other with a mixed expression done with the left. This is difficult, and not often resorted to. Presently his face relaxed into a kind of constructive gentleness, and he said to his son:

“Don’t you think you could embrace me, too?”

The young man did it with alacrity. “Then you are the son of an earl, after all,” said Sally, reproachfully.

“Yes, I—”

“Then I won’t have you!”

“O, but you know—”

“No, I will not. You’ve told me another fib.”

“She’s right. Go away and leave us. I want to talk with her.”

Berkeley was obliged to go. But he did not go far. He remained on the premises. At midnight the conference between the old gentleman and the young girl was still going blithely on, but it presently drew to a close, and the former said:

“I came all the way over here to inspect you, my dear, with the general idea of breaking off this match if there were two fools of you, but as there’s only one, you can have him if you’ll take him.”

“Indeed I will, then! May I kiss you?”

“You may. Thank you. Now you shall have that privilege whenever you are good.”

Meantime Hawkins had long ago returned and slipped up into the laboratory. He was rather disconcerted to find his late invention, Snodgrass, there. The news was told him that the English Rossmore was come,

—“and I’m his son, Viscount Berkeley, not Howard Tracy any more.”

Hawkins was aghast. He said:

“Good gracious, then you’re dead!”

“Dead?”

“Yes you are—we’ve got your ashes.”

“Hang those ashes, I’m tired of them; I’ll give them to my father.”

Slowly and painfully the statesman worked the truth into his head that this was really a flesh and blood young man, and not the insubstantial resurrection he and Sellers had so long supposed him to be. Then he said with feeling—

“I’m so glad; so glad on Sally’s account, poor thing. We took you for a departed materialized bank thief from Tahlequah. This will be a heavy blow to Sellers.” Then he explained the whole matter to Berkeley, who said:

“Well, the Claimant must manage to stand the blow, severe as it is. But he’ll get over the disappointment.”

“Who—the colonel? He’ll get over it the minute he invents a new miracle to take its place. And he’s already at it by this time. But look here— what do you suppose became of the man you’ve been representing all this time?”

“I don’t know. I saved his clothes—it was all I could do. I am afraid he lost his life.”

“Well, you must have found twenty or thirty thousand dollars in those clothes, in money or certificates of deposit.”

“No, I found only five hundred and a trifle. I borrowed the trifle and banked the five hundred.”

“What’ll we do about it?”

“Return it to the owner.”

“It’s easy said, but not easy to manage. Let’s leave it alone till we get Sellers’s advice. And that reminds me. I’ve got to run and meet Sellers and explain who you are not and who you are, or he’ll come thundering in here to stop his daughter from marrying a phantom. But— suppose your father came over here to break off the match?”

“Well, isn’t he down stairs getting acquainted with Sally? That’s all safe.”

So Hawkins departed to meet and prepare the Sellerses.

Rossmore Towers saw great times and late hours during the succeeding week. The two earls were such opposites in nature that they fraternized at once. Sellers said privately that Rossmore was the most extraordinary character he had ever met—a man just made out of the condensed milk of human kindness, yet with the ability to totally hide the fact from any but the most practised character-reader; a man whose whole being was sweetness, patience and charity, yet with a cunning so profound, an ability so marvelous in the acting of a double part, that many a person of considerable intelligence might live with him for centuries and never suspect the presence in him of these characteristics.

 

Finally there was a quiet wedding at the Towers, instead of a big one at the British embassy, with the militia and the fire brigades and the temperance organizations on hand in torchlight procession, as at first proposed by one of the earls. The art-firm and Barrow were present at the wedding, and the tinner and Puss had been invited, but the tinner was ill and Puss was nursing him—for they were engaged.

The Sellerses were to go to England with their new allies for a brief visit, but when it was time to take the train from Washington, the colonel was missing.

Hawkins was going as far as New York with the party, and said he would explain the matter on the road.

The explanation was in a letter left by the colonel in Hawkins’s hands. In it he promised to join Mrs. Sellers later, in England, and then went on to say:

The truth is, my dear Hawkins, a mighty idea has been born to me within the hour, and I must not even stop to say goodbye to my dear ones. A man’s highest duty takes precedence of all minor ones, and must be attended to with his best promptness and energy, at whatsoever cost to his affections or his convenience. And first of all a man’s duties is his duty to his own honor—he must keep that spotless. Mine is threatened. When I was feeling sure of my imminent future solidity, I forwarded to the Czar of Russia—perhaps prematurely—an offer for the purchase of Siberia, naming a vast sum. Since then an episode has warned me that the method by which I was expecting to acquire this money— materialization upon a scale of limitless magnitude—is marred by a taint of temporary uncertainty. His imperial majesty may accept my offer at any moment. If this should occur now, I should find myself painfully embarrassed, in fact financially inadequate. I could not take Siberia. This would become known, and my credit would suffer.

Recently my private hours have been dark indeed, but the sun shines main, now; I see my way; I shall be able to meet my obligation, and without having to ask an extension of the stipulated time, I think. This grand new idea of mine—the sublimest I have ever conceived, will save