Americans -- England -- Fiction; Children of the rich -- Fiction; Marriage -- Fiction; Sisters -- Fiction
G. Selden, awakening to consciousness two days later, lay and stared
at the chintz covering of the top of his four-post bed through a few
minutes of vacant amazement. It was a four-post bed he was lying on,
wasn't it? And his leg was bandaged and felt unmovable. The last thing
he remembered was going down an incline in a tree-bordered avenue. There
was nothing more. He had been all right then. Was this a four-post bed
or was it not? Yes, it was. And was it part of the furnishings of a
swell bedroom--the kind of bedroom he had never been in before? Tip top,
in fact? He stared and tried to recall things--but could not, and in his
bewilderment exclaimed aloud.
“Well,” he said, “if this ain't the limit! You may search ME!”
A respectable person in a white apron came to him from the other side of
the room. It was Buttle's wife, who had been hastily called in.
“Sh--sh,” she said soothingly. “Don't you worry. Nobody ain't goin' to
search you. Nobody ain't. There! Sh, sh, sh,” rather as if he were a
baby. Beginning to be conscious of a curious sense of weakness, Selden
lay and stared at her in a helplessness which might have been considered
pathetic. Perhaps he had got “bats in his belfry,” and there was no use
in talking.
At that moment, however, the door opened and a young lady entered.
She was “a looker,” G. Selden's weakness did not interfere with his
perceiving. “A looker, by gee!” She was dressed, as if for going out,
in softly tinted, exquisite things, and a large, strange hydrangea blue
flower under the brim of her hat rested on soft and full black hair. The
black hair gave him a clue. It was hair like that he had seen as Reuben
S. Vanderpoel's daughter rode by when he stood at the park gates at
Mount Dunstan. “Bats in his belfry,” of course.
“How is he?” she said to the nurse.
“He's been seeming comfortable all day, miss,” the woman answered, “but
he's light-headed yet. He opened his eyes quite sensible looking a bit
ago, but he spoke queer. He said something was the limit, and that we
might search him.”
Betty approached the bedside to look at him, and meeting the disturbed
inquiry in his uplifted eyes, laughed, because, seeing that he was not
delirious, she thought she understood. She had not lived in New York
without hearing its argot, and she realised that the exclamation which
had appeared delirium to Mrs. Buttle had probably indicated that the
unexplainableness of the situation in which G. Selden found himself
struck him as reaching the limit of probability, and that the most
extended search of his person would fail to reveal any clue to
satisfactory explanation.
She bent over him, with her laugh still shining in her eyes.
“I hope you feel better. Can you tell me?” she said.
His voice was not strong, but his answer was that of a young man who
knew what he was saying.
“If I'm not off my head, ma'am, I'm quite comfortable, thank you,” he
replied.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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