Fool There Was — Of Certain Other Goings; Two Boys and a Doctor

OF CERTAIN OTHER GOINGS.

John Stuyvesant Schuyler's end was different.

He was a man reserved--a man who thought much and told little.

His illness baffled Dr. DeLancey at first; but then he knew what the disease was; although to it he could give no polysyllabic name of Latin, and for it he could prescribe no remedies; for the cure had gone from the hands of man into the hands of God.

And to the hands of God, John Stuyvesant Schuyler went, at length, to find it; and who shall say that his quest was unsuccessful?

He, too, on his dying bed called his son to him; and to this son he said many things; and among these things was that it had ever been the dearest wish of her that had gone as well as of him that was about to go that their son should wed the daughter of the widow of Jimmy Blair.

And Jack Schuyler, sobbing by the side of the great, mahogany bed in the great, dark room, even as he had sobbed beside the same bed in the same room so short a time before, promised, as Tom Blake had promised, that all that he might do to bring to wife the girl his parents desired for him as wife, he would do; and not from any obeisance to filial reasons, but because he wanted to--because he loved her--had always loved her.

It was good old Dr. DeLancey who repeated his offices in this case, as in the other; and he repeated them in the same way, patting the broad, throbbing young shoulders--reiterating with twitching lips, his "There, there, boy!

There, there, there!"

--reiterating it uselessly--and knowing that it was uselessly that he reiterated--and yet helpless in the vast profundity of helplessness that was his.

And that same year did Dr. DeLancey lose yet another friend that was a patient--a patient that was a friend.

It was the violet-eyed widow of Jimmy Blair.

And all night long, from gray dusk until crimson dawn, Dr. DeLancey had sat in the darkened parlor of the warm little house of red brick; he had sat in a rocking chair, and on either old knee he had held a sob-wracked, grief-torn, motherless girl, the one herself almost old enough to be a mother.

And again he had cried.

Some doctors may lose through oft-recurrence visualized their susceptibility to suffering; but Dr. DeLancey was not of them.

And when he stumbled on stiffened legs out of the darkened parlor and into the incongruous mellow radiance of the spring sunshine, his eyes were still wet, and he didn't care who knew it.

[Illustration] CHAPTER TEN.

TWO BOYS AND A DOCTOR.

Young Jack Schuyler and young Blake, a week later, went to see the doctor in his office.

He looked up from his paper.

"Well?"

he said.

Tom Blake cleared his throat.

"We wanted to ask you, Doctor," he began, "if--" "Eh," assisted Jack Schuyler; "that is, we wanted to know--" "--you see, that is--I--" "--yes, we thought--" "--you know, Mrs. Blair--" The doctor rose; he stood between the two broad-shouldered, erect young men, placing a hand on the arm of each.

"It's all right," he assured them.

"Don't you worry."

"But," protested Tom Blake, "we've got so much money, and they--Isn't there some way that you can fix it, doctor?

You know how to do these things; and we're so helpless."

"And," elaborated Jack Schuyler, "they'd never suspect you, you know."

"I tell you it's all fixed," returned the doctor, with testiness that from him was cordiality rampant.

"Jimmy Blair left a very comfortable estate, in trust.

They'll have all they want as long as they live."

He didn't tell them--that is, not then, though later he did--that one of the last acts of John Stuyvesant Schuyler and Thomas Cathcart Blake had been to walk solemnly, side by side, across the street and tell the widow of Jimmy Blair, that, in accordance with the ante-mortem desires of her late husband, they had devoted a certain portion of the fortune that he had left to the establishment of a trust fund that would yield her an annual income of ,000. He didn't tell them, then.

Later he did.

He couldn't help it.

But at that time-- He slapped them both on the back, and sent them from the room.

He stood, on the top step of the flight that led from sidewalk to front door, and watched them swing, broad-shouldered, supple, erect, down the bright Avenue.

"Now why in thunder," he asked of himself, slowly, "didn't I ever get married?"

And then, "Shut up, you old fool," he soliloquized.

And he turned, and, re-entering the house, slammed the door behind him.

[Illustration] CHAPTER ELEVEN.