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When a young poet is in love, or fancies himself in love, inspiration is usually to be found wherever sought, but even at that age and to one in that condition solitude is a marked aid in the search. There were two or three spots which had become Albert Speranza's favorites.
And this time, just as on the day when the other fateful telegram came, Laban Keeler was the first of the office regulars to learn its contents. Ben Kelley himself brought this message, just as he had brought that telling of Albert Speranza's death. And the usually stolid Ben was greatly excited. He strode straight from the door to the bookkeeper's desk.
I should have written sooner, but have been engaged with matters pertaining to Mr. Speranza's estate and personal debts. The latter seem to be large " "I'LL bet you!" observed Captain Zelotes, sententiously, interrupting his wife's reading by pointing to this sentence with a big forefinger. "'And the estate's affairs much tangled," went on Olive, reading aloud.
Its face was red, but no redder than Mr. Speranza's at that moment. "Fool rube!" he snorted, disgustedly. "Excuse me, but you've dropped your cigarette," observed the young lady. Albert savagely slammed down the window and turned away. The dropped cigarette stump lay where it had fallen, smudging and smelling. His caller looked at it and then at him. "I'd pick it up, if I were you," she said.
But if I wasn't wrong then this is . . . Oh, I don't know, I don't know!" And not only in South Harniss were there changes of heart. In New York City and at Greenwich where Mrs. Fosdick was more than ever busy with war work, there were changes. When the newspaper accounts of young Speranza's heroic death were first published the lady paid little attention to them.
I had set up the southern of the two closed-lotus pillars, and the platform-top was already looking as lovely as heaven, with its alternate two-foot squares of pellucid gold and pellucid jet, when I noticed one morning that the Speranza's bottom was really now too foul, and the whim took me then and there to leave all, and clean her as far as I could.
No 'lilies and languors' about that, eh?" The Sunday editor nodded approval. "Great stuff!" he exclaimed. "Let me have that dispatch, will you, when you've finished. I've just discovered that this young Speranza's father was Speranza, the opera baritone. You remember him? And his mother was the daughter of a Cape Cod sea captain. How's that? Spain, Cape Cod, opera, poetry and the Croix de Guerre.
A posse of Dublin Metropolitan police superintended by the Chief Commissioner in person maintained order in the vast throng for whom the York street brass and reed band whiled away the intervening time by admirably rendering on their blackdraped instruments the matchless melody endeared to us from the cradle by Speranza's plaintive muse.
Sergeant Speranza's body is still missing, but is thought to be buried beneath the ruins of the cottage. These ruins were subsequently blown into further chaos by a high explosive shell. Then followed more expressions of regret and sympathy and confirmation of the report concerning citation and the war cross. Captain Lote read the letter at first alone in his private office.
It told of Albert's promotion to the rank of sergeant, "a promotion which, had the boy been spared, would, I am sure, have been the forerunner of others." It told of that last fight, the struggle for the village, of Sergeant Speranza's coolness and daring and of his rush back into the throat of death to save a wounded comrade.