If John Harkless
had been in health, uninjured and prosperous, Tom Meredith could no more
have thrown himself on his knees beside him and called him "old friend"
than he could have danced on the slack-wire.
One day they thought the patient sleeping; the nurse fanned him softly,
and Meredith had stolen in and was sitting by the cot. One of Harkless's
eyes had been freed of the bandage, and, when Tom came in, it was closed;
but, by and by, Meredith became aware that the unbandaged eye had opened
and that it was suffused with a pathetic moisture; yet it twinkled with a
comprehending light, and John knew that it was his old Tom Meredith who
was sitting beside him, with the air of having sat there very often
before. But this bald, middle-aged young man, not without elegance, yet a
prosperous burgher for all that--was _this_ the slim, rollicking broth of
a boy whose thick auburn hair used to make one streak of flame as he spun
around the bases on a home run? Without doubt it was the stupendous fact,
wrought by the alchemy of seven years.
For, though seven years be a mere breath in the memories of the old, it is
a long transfiguration to him whose first youth is passing, and who finds
unsolicited additions accruing to some parts of his being and strange
deprivations in others, and upon whom the unhappy realization begins to be
borne in, that his is no particular case, and that he of all the world is
not to be spared, but, like his forbears, must inevitably wriggle in the
disguising crucible of time.
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