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I heard worse and worse accounts of my dear brother's bodily state, but I had one comfort. One of the servants secretly handed Tryphena this little note addressed to me, in feeble straggling characters: 'Do what they may to me my will does not consent. Pray for me. If word were taken to the K. E. W. and R. It was some comfort that I should have that to prove what my brother was to the last.
'To be sure, the widow squared her chin and glanced at Doctor Unonius defiantly 'and what should the doctor be doing here except attending on the sick? And where should my poor maid Tryphena be lying at this moment but upstairs and in bed with the colic?
But we could see that her real reason wuz to be with the child faithful creeter she wuz, though queer, queer as they make. And to see the little creature's white snow and rose face resting lovingly and confidingly aginst the black cheeks, you knew that Aunt Tryphena had good in her.
Cousin Tryphena bore herself like a martyr at the stake, watching, with dry eyes, the departure of her one certificate to dear gentility and receiving with proud indifference the crisp bills of a denomination most of us had never seen before. "You won't need all that just to go down to the city," I remonstrated.
All that time I was in untold misery, and poor nurse Tryphena was worse than I was, and only now and then was heard groaning out that she was a dead woman, and begging me to tell some one to throw her over board. But it was that voyage which gave me my husband.
Cousin Tryphena started off on her crack-brained expedition, the very next morning, on the six-thirty train. I happened to be looking out sleepily and saw her trudging wearily past our house in the bleak gray of our mountain dawn, the inadequate little, yellow flame of her old fashioned lantern like a glowworm at her side. It seemed somehow symbolical of something, I did not know what.
I stopped a moment before the cobbler's open door, watched him briskly sewing a broken halter and telling a folk-tale to some children by his knee. When he finished, I said with some acerbity, "Well, Jombatiste, I hope you're satisfied with what you've done to poor old Miss Tryphena ... spoiling the rest of her life for her!"
On learning that her sister was at Antioch, Tryphena urged her husband to attack the place. He accordingly advanced with a strong detachment of the army, and besieged and took the city. Cleopatra would, of course, have fallen into his hands as a captive; but, to escape this fate, she fled to a temple for refuge. A temple was considered, in those days, an inviolable sanctuary.
She had, in fact, been sent upstairs at the sound of wheels, and from behind a curtain had recognised Doctor Unonius as he examined the paper by the light of his gig-lamp. 'Tryphena, here's Doctor Unonius, and he brings word we're to be robbed and murdered in our beds. 'The Lord preserve us! said Tryphena.
Cousin Tryphena sat rigid, her tatting fallen to the floor, her breath coming with difficulty. It is impossible for the average modern mind, calloused by promiscuous reading, to conceive the effect upon her primitive organism of this attack from the printed page. She not only did not dream that these stories might not be true, they seemed as real to her as though she had seen the people.
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