The Miracle Man by Frank L. Packard

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She sprang out and turned to Sam.

"Sam," she directed hurriedly, "you go back to the Congress Hotel and
get Mr. Madison. Mr. Madison is a friend of Mr. Thornton's, you know. Go
about it quietly--you needn't let any one know what you came for. You
can tell Mr. Madison what the trouble is--and tell him that I sent you,
and that I am here. Do you understand?"

"Yas'um, mum," said Sam impressively. "Just you done leab all that to
me, missy."

Across the track on the siding, the private car was dimly lighted, the
window curtains down. Helena crossed the track and mounted the steps. As
she reached the platform, Miss Harvey, who had evidently heard her
coming, opened the door and drew her quietly inside.

A glance at the nurse's face brought a sudden chill to Helena's heart.
Miss Harvey, capable, controlled, grave, smiled at her a little sadly.

"I sent for you, Miss Vail," she said in a low tone, "because Mrs.
Thornton has been asking for you incessantly ever since the attack came
on three-quarters of an hour ago."

"You mean," said Helena, "that--that there is--"

"No hope," the nurse completed. "I am afraid there is none--it is her
heart. The condition has been aggravated by her activity during the last
few days since she has been able to walk--though I have done everything
within my power to keep her quiet." Miss Harvey laid her hand on
Helena's arm. "There is one thing, Miss Vail, I feel that I must say to
you, in justice both to you and to myself, before you see her. Whatever
my personal ideas may be of what has taken place here, my professional
duty as a nurse demanded that I send for a doctor at once, and I want
you to know that is what I did, though I have not been successful in
getting one. There is no doctor here, so I telegraphed; but the doctor
at Barton's Mills is away."

"Yes," said Helena mechanically.

"I just wanted you to understand," said Miss Harvey. "Will you come and
see Mrs. Thornton now?"

"Does she know," whispered Helena, as she followed the nurse down the
corridor of the car, "does she know that--how ill she is?"

"Yes," Miss Harvey answered simply. She stopped before a compartment
door, opened it softly, and, stepping aside, motioned Helena to enter.

A little cry rose to Helena's lips that she choked back somehow, and a
mist for a moment blinded her eyes--then she was kneeling beside the
brass bed, and was holding in both her own the hand that was stretched
out to her.

"Helena--dear--I am so glad you came," said Mrs. Thornton faintly. "I--I
am not going to get better, and there are some things I want to say to
you."

"Oh, but you are," returned Helena quickly, smiling bravely now. "You
mustn't say that."

Mrs. Thornton shook her head.

"Dear," she said, "I know. And I know that what I have to say I must
say quickly." Her voice seemed to grow suddenly stronger with a great
earnestness. "Listen, dear. This must not make any difference to this
wonderful work that has just begun here. I was cured of my hip
disease--perfectly cured--no one can deny that--this is my own fault, I
have overdone it--I would not listen to reason--to do what I have done
in the last few days, when for a year and a half I had never moved a
step, was more than my heart could stand. I should have been more
quiet--but I was so glad, so happy--and I wanted to tell everybody--I
wanted all the world to know, so that others could find the joy that I
had found."

She paused--and Helena sought for words that, somehow, would not come.

The nurse was bending over the bed on the other side, and Mrs. Thornton
turned her head toward Miss Harvey now. She smiled gently, as though to
rob her words of any possible hurt.

"Nurse, I want--to be alone with Miss Vail for just a moment."

Miss Harvey, doubtful, hesitated.

"Only for a moment," pleaded Mrs. Thornton. "You can stay just outside
the door."

Reluctantly, Miss Harvey complied, and left the room.

Mrs. Thornton pressed Helena's hand tightly.

"Listen, dear--this must not make any difference. It--it is the one
thing that will make me happy now--to know that. I--I have written a
little note to Robert about it, to be given to him. Oh, if I could only
have lived to help--I should have tried so hard to be worthy to have a
part in it. Not like you, dear, with your sweetness and nobleness, for
God seems to have singled you out for this--but just to have had a
little part. How wonderful it would have been, bringing peace and health
and gladness where only sorrow and misery was before, and--and--"

Mrs. Thornton's eyes closed, and she lay for a moment quiet.

A blackness seemed to settle upon Helena--and how cold it was! She
shivered. Her dark eyes, wide, tearless now, stared, startled, dazed, at
the white face on the pillow crowned with its mass of golden hair. Her
sweetness! Her nobleness! Helena's lips half parted and her breath came
in quick, fierce, little gasps--it seemed as though she had been struck
a blow that she could not quite understand because somehow it had numbed
her senses--only there was a hurt that curiously, strangely seemed to
mock as it stabbed with pain.

"There is Robert"--Mrs. Thornton spoke again--"I am sure he will do as I
have asked him to do about this, but--you can have a great deal of
influence with him. It--it perhaps may seem a strange thing to say, but
I pray that you two may be brought very close to each other. Robert
needs a good, true woman so much in his life--and I--we--we--my
illness--we have never had a home in its truest sense. Yes, it is
strange for me perhaps to talk like this--but it is in my heart. I would
like to think of you both engaged in this wonderful work together."

Again, through exhaustion, Mrs. Thornton stopped--and Helena, from
gazing at the other's pallid countenance in a sort of involuntary,
frightened fascination, dropped her head suddenly upon the bed-spread
and hid her face.

Mrs. Thornton's hand found Helena's head and rested upon it.

"I would like to see Robert happy," she murmured, after a little
silence. "Riches do not make happiness--they are so sad and empty a
thing when the heart is empty. I know he would be happy with you--he has
spoken so much of you lately--perhaps--perhaps--"

Mrs. Thornton's voice was very faint--the words reached Helena plainly
enough as words, but they seemed to reach her consciousness in an
unreal, unnatural, blunted way, coma-like--pregnant of significance, yet
with the significance itself elusive, evading her.

"A good woman," whispered Mrs. Thornton, "I have tried to be a good
woman--but--but my life, our wealth, our position has made it so
artificial. You have never known these things, dear--and so you are just
as God made you--good woman, so pure, so wonderful in your freshness and
your innocence. Robert's life has been so barren--so barren. I would
like to know that--that it will not always be so. Oh, if it could only
be that you and he should carry on this great, glad work together--and
love should come into his life--and yours--and sunshine--promise me,
dear, that--"

The voice died away. Helena, with head still buried, waited for Mrs.
Thornton to speak again. It seemed she waited for a great length of
time--and yet there was no such thing as time. It seemed as though she
were transported to a place of great and intense blackness where it was
miserably cold and chill, and she stood alone and lost, and strove to
find her way--and there was no way--only blackness everywhere,
immeasurable. She lifted her head suddenly, desperately, to shake the
unreality from her--and her eyes fell upon the gentle face, peaceful,
smiling, calm, and so _still_--and a startled, frightened cry rang from
her lips.

There was the quick, hurried rush of some one coming into the room, and
the nurse brushed by her and bent instantly over the bed--after that,
quite soon after that it seemed, and yet it might have been quite a
little while, she found herself outside in the corridor and the nurse
was speaking to her.

"Sam is still out there," said Miss Harvey gently. "I told him to keep
the team. You cannot help me, and I want you to go home, dear. And will
you ask Sam to go for Mr. Madison at the hotel on the way back--I do not
know who else I can call upon for advice."

"I've sent for him already," said Helena numbly.

"Have you, dear?" Miss Harvey said. "That was very thoughtful of
you--I'm sure he'll be here presently then. And now, dear, it is much
better that you should go."

There were no tears in Helena's eyes as she stepped down from the car
vestibule to the tracks--only a drawn misery in her face. That was Doc
over there, pacing up and down on the platform in the darkness--wasn't
it weird the way his cigar glowed bright and then went out and then
glowed bright again--like a gigantic firefly!

She was across the tracks before he saw her, then, hurrying forward, he
helped her to the platform.

"Well?" he asked quickly.

Helena did not answer.

Madison took the cigar from his lips, leaned forward, and peered into
Helena's face--then drew back with a low whistle.

"Dead?" he said.

Helena nodded.

"Miss Harvey wants to see you," she said.

"Say," said Madison slowly, "first crack out of the box this looks bad,
don't it? If this gets around here without a muffler on it, it might
make the railroad companies hang fire with those circulars for excursion
rates to Needley--what?"

"I--I think I hate you!" Helena cried out suddenly, passionately.
"She's--she's dead--and that's all you think about!"

Madison stared at Helena for a moment calmly.

"Now, look here, Helena," said he quietly, "don't get excited. Of
course I'm sorry--I'm not a brute and I've got feelings--but I can't
afford to lose my head. Something's got to be done, and done quick. We
don't want this headlined in every paper in the United States to-morrow
morning--Thornton wouldn't want it either. You say Miss Harvey wants to
see me? Well, that'll help some--she'll probably do as she's told,
and--"

Madison paused abruptly, gazed abstractedly at the private car across
the tracks on the siding, and pulled at his cigar.

Helena watched him in silence--a little bitterly. That quick, clever,
cunning brain of his was at work again--scheming--scheming--always
scheming--and Naida Thornton was dead.

"I'll tell you," said Madison, speaking again as abruptly as he had
stopped. "It's simple enough. There's a westbound train due in an hour
or so--we'll couple the private car onto that and send it right along to
Chicago. What the authorities don't know won't hurt them. There's no
reason for anybody except Thornton to know what's happened till she gets
there--I'll wire him. The main thing is that the car won't be here in
the morning, and that'll take a little of the intimate touch of Needley
off. It might well have happened on her way home--journey too much for
her--left too soon--see? Thornton'll see it in the right light because
he's got fifty thousand dollars worth of faith in what's going on
here--get that? He won't want to harm the 'cause.' There'll be some
publicity of course, we can't help that--but it won't hurt much--and
Thornton can gag a whole lot of it--he'd want to anyway for his own
sake. Now then, kid, there's Sam over there--you pile into the wagon and
go home, while I get busy--and don't you say a word about this, even to
the Flopper."

And so Helena drove back to the Patriarch's cottage that night, a little
silent figure in the back seat of the wagon--and her hands were locked
tightly together in her lap--and to her, as she drove over the peaceful,
moonlit road, and under the still, arched branches of the trees in the
wood that hid the starlight, came again and again the words of one who
had gone, who perhaps knew better now--"you are as God made you."

--XVI--

A FLY IN THE OINTMENT

The days passed. And with the days, morning, noon and night, they came
by almost every train, the sick and suffering, the lame, the paralytics
and the maimed--a steady influx by twos and threes and fours--from north
over the Canadian boundary line, from the far west, and from the
southernmost tip of the Florida coast. No longer on the company's
schedule was Needley a flag station--it was a regular stop, and its
passenger traffic returns were benign and pleasing things in the
auditor's office. And it was an accustomed sight now, many times a
day--what had once been a strange, rare spectacle--that slow procession
wending its way from the station to the town, some carried, some limping
upon crutches, all snatching at hope of life and health and happiness
again. Needley, perforce, had become a vast boarding house, as it
were--there were few homes indeed that did not harbor their quota of
those who sought the "cure."

But there were others too who came--who were not sick--who had not
faith--who came to laugh and peer and peek. Pleasure yachts dropped
their anchors in the cove around the headland from the Patriarch's
cottage--and their dingeys brought women decked out _de rigeur_ in middy
blouses and sailor collars, and nattily attired gentlemen whose only
claim to seamanship was the clothes, or rather, the costumes that they
wore.

They came laughing, supercilious, tolerant, contemptuous, pitying the
inanity of those they held less strongly-minded than themselves who
should be taken in by so apparent, glaring and monstrous a fake. They
came because it was the rage, the thing to do, quite the thing to do,
quite a necessary part of the summer's itinerary. But that they, should
they have been sick, would ever have dreamed of coming there was too
perfectly ridiculous an idea for words. How strange a thing is the human
animal!

They came in their rather cruel, merciless gaiety--and they left sobered
and impressed; the ladies holding their embroidered parasols at a less
jaunty angle; the men with lightened pockets, their names enrolled in
the contribution book in that quiet, simple room, whose door was open,
whose cash-box was unguarded, where none asked them to either enter or
withdraw. They came and found no air of charlatanism such as they had
looked for--only a peaceful, unostentatious, patient air of sincerity
that left them remorseful and abashed. They came and went, a source of
revenue not counted on or thought of before by Madison; but a source
that swelled the coffers, brimming fuller day by day, to overflowing.

In three weeks from the night of Mrs. Thornton's death, which had had at
least no visible effect on Needley, Needley was metamorphosed--with a
spontaneity, so to speak, that astounded even Madison himself--into
something that approximated very closely in reality the word-picture he
had drawn of it that night in the Roost. Madison looked upon his work
and saw that it was pleasing beyond his dreams. Money was pouring in--no
single breath of suspicion came to disquiet him. Even the cures were
working satisfactorily--even Pale Face Harry, who had become great
friends with the farmer at whose house he boarded, and who now spent
most of his time in the fields, was showing an improvement--Pale Face
Harry coughed less. The Flopper was as happy as a lark--and Mamie
Rodgers blushed now at mention of the name of Coogan. Helena, demure,
adored by all who saw her, went daily about her housework in the
cottage, and waited upon the Patriarch with gentle tenderness; while the
Patriarch, docile, full of supreme trust and confidence in every one,
radiant in Helena's companionship, was as putty in their hands. And so
Madison looked upon his work and saw no flaw--but with the days he grew
ill at ease.

"It's too easy," he told himself. "I guess that's it--it's too easy. The
whole show runs itself. Why, there's nothing to do but count the cash!"

And yet in his heart he knew that wasn't it--it was Helena. Helena was
beginning to trouble him a little. She was playing the game all
right--playing it to the limit--and making a hit at every performance.
Her name was on every tongue, and men and women alike spoke of her
sweetness, her goodness, her loveliness. Well, that was all right,
Helena was a star no matter where you put her--but something was the
matter. Helena wasn't the Helena of a month ago back in little old New
York. He hadn't managed to get a dozen words with her since that night
on the station platform, without taking chances and gaining admission to
the cottage through the Flopper's window after dark--and then she had
held him at arm's length.

"The matter with me?" she had said. "There isn't anything the matter
with me--is there? I'm--I'm playing the game."

It certainly couldn't be grief over Mrs. Thornton's death--she had begun
to act that way before Mrs. Thornton died--that night when she came home
with Thornton, and he and the Flopper were behind the trellis. Thornton!
Had Thornton anything to do with it, after all? No--Madison had laughed
at it then, and he had much more reason to laugh at it now. Thornton was
still in Chicago, and hadn't been back to Needley.

For three weeks this sort of thing occupied a considerably larger share
of Madison's thoughts than he was wont to allow even the most vexing
problems to disturb his usually imperturbable and complacent self--and
then one afternoon, he smiled a little grimly, and, leaving the hotel,
started along the road toward the Patriarch's cottage.

"What Helena needs is--a jolt!" said Madison to himself. "I guess her
trouble is one of those everlasting feminine kinks that all women since
Adam's wife have patted themselves on the back over, because they think
it's a dark veil of mystery that is beyond the acumen of brute man to
understand. That's what the novelists write pages about--wade right in
up to the armpits in it--feminine psychology--great! And the women smile
commiseratingly at the novelist--the idea of a man even pretending to
understand them--kind of a blooming merry-go-round and everybody happy!
Feminine psychology! I guess a little masculine kick-up is about the
right dope! What the deuce have I been standing for it for? I don't have
to--I don't have to go around making sheep's-eyes at her--what? She
wants grabbing up and being rushed right off her feet _a la_ Roost,
and--hello, Mr. Marvin, how are you to-day!"--he had halted beside a
middle-aged man who was sitting on the grass at the roadside.

"Better, Mr. Madison, better," returned the man, heartily. "Really very
much better."

"Fine!" said Madison.

"We all saw the Patriarch to-day--God bless him!" said Marvin. "We've
been waiting out there two days, you know--that woman with the bad back
got up off her stretcher."

"Splendid!" exclaimed Madison enthusiastically. "And the glorious thing
about it is that there's no reason why everybody can't be cured if
they'll only come here in the right spirit."

"That's so!" agreed Marvin. "None are so blind as those who won't
see--they're in utter blackness compared with the physical blindness of
that grand and marvelous man. I'm going home myself in another
week--better than ever I was in my life. It was stomach with me, you
know--doctors said there wasn't any chance except to operate, and that
an operation was too slim a chance to be worth risking it." He got up
and laughed, carefree, joyous. "God-given place down here, isn't it?
Clean--that's it. Clean air, clean-souled people, clean everything you
see or do or hear. Say, it kind of opens your eyes to real living,
doesn't it--it's the luxuries and the worries and the pace and the
damn-fooleries that kill. Well, I'm going along back now to get some of
Mrs. Perkins' cream--clean, rich cream--and homemade bread and
butter--imagine me with an appetite and able to eat!"

He laughed again--and Madison joined him in the laugh, slapping him a
cordial good-by on the shoulder.

Madison started on once more--but now his progress was slow, frequently
interrupted, for he stopped a score of times to chat and exchange a few
words with those whom he passed on the road. There were cheery faces
everywhere--even those of the sufferers who straggled out along the
road coming back from the Patriarch's cottage. It was a cheery
afternoon, warm and balmy and bright--everything was cheery. The
farmers, their vocations for the moment changed, waved their whips at
him and shouted friendly pleasantries as they drove by with those who
were unable to make the trip from the Patriarch's unaided.

Madison began to experience a strange, exhilarating sense of uplift upon
him, a sort of rather commendatory and gratified feeling with himself.
Marvin had hit it pretty nearly right with his "clean-wholesomeness"
idea--it kind of made one feel good to be a part of it. Madison, for the
time being, relegated Helena and his immediate mission to a secondary
place in his thoughts.

Young girls, young men, middle-aged men, elderly women, all ages of both
sexes he passed as he went along; some alone, some in couples, some in
little groups, some on crutches, some in wheel-chairs, some walking
without extraneous aid--he had turned into the woods now, and he could
see them strewn out all along the wagon track under the cool,
interlacing branches overhead.

Now he stepped aside to let a wagon pass him, and answered the farmer's
call and the smile of the occupants in kind; now some one stopped to
tell him again the story of the afternoon--there had been cures that day
and the Patriarch had come amongst them. Some laughed, some sang a
little, softly, to themselves--all smiled--all spoke in glad, hopeful
words, clean words--there seemed no base thought in any mind, only that
cleanness, that wholesomeness that had so appealed to Marvin--that
somehow Madison found he was taking a delight in responding to, and,
because it afforded him whimsical pleasure, chose to pretend that he was
quite a genuine exponent of it himself.

He reached the end of the wagon track, and paused involuntarily on the
edge of the Patriarch's lawn as he came out from the trees. Like low,
lulling music came the distant, mellowed noise of waters, the breaking
surf. And the cottage was a bower of green now, clothed in ivy and
vine--upon the trellises the early roses were budding--fragrance of
growing things blended with the salt, invigorating breeze from the
ocean. And upon the lawn, flanked with its sturdy maples, all in leaf,
that toned the sunshine in soft-falling shadows, stood, or sat, or
reclined on cots, the supplicants who still tarried though the Patriarch
had gone. And now one came reverently out of the cottage door from that
room that was never closed; now another went in--and still another.

Madison smiled suddenly, broadly, with immense satisfaction and
contentment--and then his eyes fixed quite as suddenly on the
single-seated buggy that was coming toward him on the driveway across
the lawn. That was Mamie Rodgers driving--and that was Helena beside
her.

Madison recalled instantly the object of his visit--and instantly he
whistled a rather surprised little whistle under his breath. How
alluringly Helena's brown hair coiled in wavy wealth upon her head;
there wasn't any need of rouge for color in the oval face; the dark eyes
were soft and deep and glorious; and she sat there in a little white
muslin frock as dainty as a medallion from a master's brush.

"Say," said Madison to himself, "say, I never quite got it before. Say,
she's--she's lovely--and that's my Helena. It's no wonder
Thornton stared at her that day we touched him for the fifty,
and"--suddenly--"damn Thornton!"

But the buggy was beside him now, and he lifted his hat as Mamie Rodgers
pulled up the horse.

"Good afternoon, Miss Rodgers," he said. "Good afternoon, Miss Vail--how
is the Patriarch to-day?"

"He is very well, thank you," Helena answered--and being custodian of
the whip brushed a fly off the horse's flank.

"I was just coming out to pay you a little visit," remarked Madison,
trying to catch her eye.

"Oh, I'm _so_ sorry!" said Helena sweetly, still busy with the fly.
"Mamie is going to take me for a drive--and afterwards we are going to
her house for tea."

"Oh!" said Madison, a little blankly.

Helena smiled at him, nodded, and touched the horse with the whip--and
then she leaned suddenly out toward him, as the buggy started forward.

"Oh, Mr. Madison," she called, "I forgot to tell you! I had a letter
from Mr. Thornton to-day--and he's coming back to-morrow."

--XVII--

IN WHICH HELENA TAKES A RIDE

The wind kissed Helena's face, bringing dainty color to her cheeks,
tossing truant wisps of hair this way and that, as the car swept onward.
But she sat strangely silent now beside Thornton at the steering wheel.

It seemed to her that she was living, not her own life, not life as she
had known and looked upon it in the years before, but living, as it
were, in a strange, suspended state that was neither real nor unreal, as
in a dream that led her, now through cool, deep forests, beside clear,
sparkling streams where all was a great peace and the soul was at rest,
serene, untroubled, now into desolate places where misery had its birth
and shame was, where there was fear, and the mind stood staggered and
appalled and lost and knew not how to guide her that she might flee from
it all.

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