Chapter XVI: Mark and Tom

It was the morning of Fanny’s wedding day and the house in Madison Avenue was a scene of great excitement. Flowers and ferns and palms, and florists arranging them, were everywhere. Presents were constantly arriving until the room set apart for them could scarcely hold any more. Cards had been sent to Fanny’s father and Tom, who were in San Francisco, Mark at the Palace Hotel and Tom in a wholesale grocery. A pretty remembrance had come from each, with a letter from Mark wishing his daughter every possible happiness. So far as practicable Tom’s promise to Inez had been kept. Only a few of the people robbed were known to him or Mark by name. To these at intervals money had been sent, which produced nearly as great a sensation as the hold-ups had done. That the brigands had reformed or left the country was evident and Mark and Tom often heard the subject discussed, but Mark never joined in the discussion, or in any other. He was a silent, broken man, doing his work faithfully, but keeping apart by himself, with a sad, far-away look on his face, as if his thoughts were always with the two graves on the mountain side of the Yosemite.

Tom, whose temperament was different, was more social. It was seldom, however, that anything called a smile to his face, for he, too, was nearly always thinking—not so much of Inez’s grave as of the scene on the road and her face as it looked at him when bidding him go before she shot him, as she would shoot a dog. Just before Christmas he asked leave of his employer to go for a day to Salt Lake City. On his return he said to Mark, “It is all right. They are on the way.”

A few days later, and on the morning of the wedding day, Fanny and Roy were sitting together behind a forest of palms and azaleas, when the door bell rang for the twentieth time within an hour.

“Another present, I’ll bet you,” Roy said. “We shall have enough to set up a bazaar.”

“I hope it isn’t a clock. I have four already,” Fanny rejoined, going forward to take the carefully sealed package sent by express from Salt Lake City.

“Salt Lake City!” Fanny repeated, examining the package curiously. “Do we know anybody there? What do you suppose it is?”

Roy could not explain the presentiment he had as to what it was. He had expected something of the kind long before this, for he remembered that Inez had said, “Fanny will have her diamonds.”

“Open the package and see what it is,” he said.

The seals of wax were broken, the box opened, and Fanny gave a start of surprise as she saw the linen bag she had sewed with so much care into the ribbons on her hat.

“Mother! Look here! The diamonds!” she cried, laying them one by one on her mother’s lap.

They were all there and unharmed except as they were a little dim for want of cleaning.

“Who could have found them and sent them?” Fanny kept saying.

Roy felt sure he knew, but said nothing, while Mrs. Prescott suggested that the person who found them intended at first to keep them,—then, failing to dispose of them, decided to send them to New York.

“Yes, but how did he know where I lived, or that I was to be married to-day?” Fanny asked.

Roy tided over that difficulty by saying, “Easy enough, your mother advertised for them to be sent here if they were found, and the man or woman, whoever it is, happened to forward them in the nick of time. Providential dispensation, don’t you see?”

He was decking Fanny with the jewels as he talked, and she accepted his theory as she accepted everything from him.

“I shall write to father this very day that I have them. He will be so glad, and Tom, too. I dare say the poor fellow has hunted over every foot of ground between that place and Clark’s several times.”

Roy’s shoulders always gave a little shrug when Fanny talked in this strain, and he now left her while she wrote a few hurried lines to her father telling him her diamonds had come and asking if he had any idea who sent them.

“I am so happy,” she wrote, “for in a few hours I shall be Roy’s wife. I wish you could be here, and Inez. Oh, if she were only alive she would be my maid of honor and eclipse me with her beauty. Dear Inez. It makes me cry every time I think of her up among the mountains with the snow piled over her grave, and I so happy here with Roy. Think of me to-night and bless me, dear father. Mother is to give me away, but I shall fancy it is you. Good bye. Your loving daughter, Fanny Hilton, soon to be Fanny Mason.”

Mark read this letter to Tom, who said after a moment, “She is a splendid girl. I don’t think she takes after her mother.”

“Or her father, either,” Mark rejoined.

“Where does she get her lovely traits of character?” was Tom’s next remark, and for the first time since Inez died a smile broke over Mark’s face, as he replied, “It must be from ’Tina. From all descriptions I have had of that unfortunate lady Fanny looks like her.”

“I guess she does,” Tom said, then added, “I am glad the diamonds reached her safely. That chapter is closed and a great weight off my mind. I wonder if Inez knows?”

“Of course she does, and is glad as we are,” was Mark’s reply, and the diamonds were never mentioned again between them.

Mark was failing, and after he knew the diamonds were safe with Fanny, he began to go down rapidly.

“I feel as if I had been broken on the rack until every joint was loosened and every nerve crushed,” he said to Tom. “There is nothing to live for. Inez is dead; I shall never see Fanny again, and it is better so. But I do long for the hills and ponds of Ridgefield and Uncle Zach and Dotty. Do you think they’d be glad to see me? They don’t know what I am. Nobody knows but you and me.”

Tom wasn’t so sure about Roy. He believed that young man had his suspicions, and was equally sure he would keep them to himself.

“I know Uncle Zach and Dotty would be glad to see you, and in the spring we will go there,” he said to Mark, who, buoyed up with this hope, counted the weeks as they passed away, knowing the while that his strength was slipping from him and leaving him so weak that he staid all day in his room where Tom came every night to see him, and Mark, who had forgotten all the blame he had ever attributed to him, clung to him, as if he had been his son.

“I shan’t go to Ridgefield. I’ve given that up,” he said to Tom one day in March. “It’s the cottage now in the valley I want to see. How soon do you think we can go there?”

Tom didn’t know, and his face was very grave as he looked at his old comrade, who was so surely dying. Spring came early that year and as soon as it was at all practicable Tom took Mark by easy stages to the cottage. He had been there himself to see that it was made ready for the sick man and had passed a most uncomfortable time. He was neither a coward, nor superstitious, but during the three days and nights he spent alone in the cottage he suffered what he called the tortures of the damned. He heard or saw Inez everywhere. Saw her flitting in and out from room to room; heard her singing as she used to sing in her glad girlhood, and felt her kisses on his cheeks just as he felt them on the night of their betrothal. They were real kisses then which made his pulse beat with ecstasy; they were shadowy kisses now, which burned where they touched him, while his lips were purple with cold. Once he called to her, “Inez, Inez, do you know I am here?”

Then in his disordered imagination he fancied he heard again the shriek which had curdled his blood when she sprang over the wheel and confronted him.

“I am not afraid,” he said to himself, “but I wish Mark was here, or even Nero. I ought to have brought the dog, although he does not take to me as he used to do. I believe he knows something. Lucky he can’t talk.”

A week later Mark was there in the old familiar place, where everything spoke to him of Inez. He had no such fancies as Tom, and took Inez’s room for his own, sleeping in her bed, sitting in her chair by the window watching the light of the first summer days as it crept over the mountains, and knowing it was for the last time. Once he went to the closet where Inez’s dresses were hung, and taking them down looked at them with eyes, which could not shed a tear. On the one she wore on the day of the hold-up he gazed the longest. It was the last in which he had ever seen her and he recalled just how she looked in it when he helped her to a seat by the driver and remembered with a pang her soiled, crumpled condition when she came back with a look on her face he would never forget. There was a bit of dry mud still clinging to the skirt and he brushed it off carefully and shook from the dress every particle of soil and dirt and hung it away with the other gowns, leaving the closet door open so that from his bed where he lay a good part of the time he could see them and feel through them a nearness to Inez.

Everything he could do for him Tom did, and the two men lived alone through the months of May and June, when the tourist season commenced and the valley was again full of life and stir, and pilgrimages were made to Inez’s grave as to the grave of a saint. It was covered with flowers and some of these Mark pressed and sent to Fanny, who wrote to him every week and whose letters helped to prolong his life. But like Inez, he had lost his grip, and early in July he died quietly, like going to sleep, and there were three graves on the hill behind the cottage.

Tom was alone, with only Nero for company. Since the hold-up he had fancied that the dog avoided him. He had been much in Inez’s room during her illness and constantly with Mark until he died. He had stood by Inez’s grave when she was lowered into it and had lain by it for days after as if watching for her reappearance. And now he and Tom stood by Mark’s grave, the only mourners there, and Tom’s hand rested on Nero’s head as if asking for sympathy, which the sagacious animal gave. He seemed to know they were alone, and when the burial, which took place at sunset, was over and the people gone and Tom sat in the gathering twilight with his head upon a table and his hand hanging at his side, Nero crept to his feet, licking his hand and rubbing against him as he had not done in a year. Then Tom cried, as he said, “Bless you, Nero; if you have forgiven me I am not quite alone in the world. We will stick together, old fellow, but not here. You may like to sit by their graves, wondering why they don’t come back, but I can’t endure it. I am going away and you are going with me,—miles and miles away, old chap, where it will not be as lonesome as it is here, and where one at least will be glad to see me.”

A letter received by Mark from Fanny a few days before he died had decided Tom upon his future, and three weeks later, when a carriage full of tourists came from a hotel to see the grave of the girl who was always spoken of as “the heroine of the valley,” the cottage was closed and Tom was gone.