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Updated: May 17, 2025
Simply because Nature made me cowardly, and meant me, therefore, to bear cowardice bravely. I never moved. A second time came the knock, but no more nerve of sound in it than at the first. A hand touched the knob after that, and turning it gently, the door was carefully pushed open, and a figure, looking very much like Mr. Axtell, only the long, dark hair fell over his face, came noiselessly in.
Off it shot, at the rate of one hundred miles a second, but the travellers were as comfortable as in a Pullman car. They had plenty to eat and drink, they manufactured their own air and water, and they slept when they so desired. But Axtell, the crazy machinist, had hidden himself aboard, and, in mid-air, he tried to wreck the projectile.
"'Yes, Abraham, I am an Axtell, and I shall prove my right to the name, come what will'; and without waiting to hear more, I glided into the darkness up-stairs. "For a long time I heard mother and Abraham talking together; it seemed as if they would never cease. At last, mother sent up to know if I was not coming to take my tea. I had forgotten its absence till then. I went down.
We two watched the other two in yonder church-yard, until the pile of earth grew so high that it half-concealed them. Two or three times the man seemed to offer to take the spade from Mr. Axtell, but he kept it and worked away. At last the excavation grew so deep that one must needs go down into it to make it deeper. Would Mr. Axtell go? We watched to see.
I warmed it before the fire, and began to think that Aaron was right, this House of Axtell was stealing away my proper self, or, at least, this hand of mine had been unlawfully employed, through occasion of them. As the warmth of burning coals revivified my hand, I saw something in the fire, a face, the very one these live fingers had just been tracing in yonder church-yard.
"There is another entrance to the tower than by the door, Miss Axtell." Slowly the lady dropped back to the pillows whence she had arisen from the disturbing dream. She did not move again for many minutes; then it was a few low-spoken words that summoned me to her side. "I know there is another entrance to the tower," she said; "but I did not think that any one else knew of it. Who told you?"
Dear Miss Axtell, sitting there, in my father's house, only last March, with a holy joy stealing up, in spite of her endeavor to hide it from my eyes even, and suffusing her white face with warm, rosy tints, dear Miss Axtell, I hoped your day-dawn drawing near.
I heard footsteps all that night upon deck. They sounded like those that came and stood beside me hours before. Day was scarcely breaking when we came to land in New York. I waited for the carriage to come from home. Mr. Axtell, was it he who came, with whitened hair, to ask for Miss Percival, to know if he could offer her any service? What a night of agony he must have lived through!
Jeffy reported the "hospital man" as "behaving just like other people." Jeffy evidently regretted, with all the intensity of his Ethiopian nature, the subsiding of the delirium. Not long after our arrival home, father went, with Mr. Axtell, into his own room, where, with closed doors, the two remained through half the morning.
Your sister is a charming nurse." A long quiet ensued; in it came the memory of Dr. Eaton's interest in the young girl's face. "Is Mr. Axtell an artist?" I asked, after the silence. "Mr. Axtell is a church-sexton," was the response. "Cannot he be both sexton and artist?" "How can he?"
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