Astra (2 page)

He looked his approval as they moved swiftly down the aisle and came to the small stateroom in the next car where the sick man had been laid.

He was lying in the narrow berth grasping for breath, the doctor by his side and a nurse preparing something under the doctor’s direction. The sick man looked at Astra with pleading eyes.

“Quick!” he gasped. “Get this!”

The young man who had brought her handed Astra a pencil and pad, and she dropped down on a chair by the bed and began to work swiftly, the young man watching her for an instant, relieved that she seemed to understand her job.

The sick man spoke very slowly, deliberately, his voice sometimes so low that the girl could scarcely hear him.

There were a couple of telegrams on business matters addressed to business firms, putting on record definite arrangements the sick man had completed during his journey. Then there was a briefly worded codicil to his will, concerning certain large properties the man had acquired recently which were to be left to his son by his first wife. This codicil was to be sent to his lawyer at once, observing all the formalities of the law. All this was spoken with the utmost difficulty, gasped slowly, detachedly, as his breath grew faint or his drifting intelligence faded and then flashed back again. It was heartbreaking, and Astra forgot her own perplexities in making sure she caught every syllable the troubled soul uttered.

When the dictation was completed the sick man sank limply into his pillow, relaxed for an instant as if he had reached the end. Then he roused again and feebly pointed at the papers in the girl’s lap.

“Copy! Quick! I—must—sign—”

Astra gathered her papers together and stood up with an understanding look in her eyes.

“Yes of course,” she said in a clear, businesslike voice. “If I only had a typewriter, it would take almost no time at all,” she added.

The young man stood at the door.

“Come right this way. I have a machine ready for you,” he said, and led her down the aisle to another car and into a small compartment where was a typewriter and plenty of paper.

“It will be necessary to have two copies,” said the young man. “Here is carbon paper.”

Astra sat down and went expertly to work, and in a very short time she had a sheaf of neatly typed papers ready.

The young man was back at the door as she finished.

“Fine! That was quick work. I didn’t expect you’d be quite done yet,” he said. “We’ll go right back. The doctor has given him a stimulant, hoping to make those signatures possible. We’ll have to be witnesses, of course.”

The patient lay with bright, restless eyes on the door as they entered, and a relieved look came into his face as he saw them.

The doctor and nurse arranged a bedside table, tilted so that the patient could see what he was writing, and they placed the papers one by one upon it and watched the trembling hand trace feebly the name that had been a power in the business world for many years.

It was very still in the little stateroom. Only the noise of the rushing train could be heard. Astra glanced at the windows, covered thickly now with snow, shutting out the darkness of the outside world, with only now and then a faint, fleeting splash of color—red or yellow or green—as the train flashed through a lighted town.

And now the signatures were finished, the last few strokes evidently a tremendous effort as the lagging heart sought to keep the muscles doing their duty to the end, and then the poor brain fagged as the last stroke was made, and the man slumped back to the pillow, the limp hand dropped to his side, the grasp on the pen relaxed, and the pen snapped away to the floor, its duty done.

The young man recovered the pen. Astra dropped down in her chair where she had sat for dictation and began to get the papers in shape for the witnesses.

The doctor, with his finger on the sick man’s pulse, was giving attention to his patient, the nurse removing the bed table, straightening the covers.

Then the sick man’s eyes opened anxiously, as if there were one more command he must give. His lips were stiff, but he murmured with a wry twist one word. “Witnesses!” He tried to motion toward the papers, but his hand dropped uselessly on the bed. He looked at the doctor pleadingly and the doctor bowed.

“Yes sir! I’ll sign as a witness!” Turning, he stooped over the little table that had been placed beside Astra and wrote his name clearly, hastily, on each paper. The sick man’s glance went to the others, and one by one they all signed their names: Astra, the young man, and the nurse. Then the sick man drew a deep sigh and closed his eyes with finality, as if he felt he had done everything and was content.

The doctor and nurse did their best, but a gray shadow was stealing over the man’s face. He scarcely seemed to be breathing.

Astra, after signing her name as a witness, gathered the papers up carefully, laid them together on the table, and sat there watching that dying face, a little at a loss to know just what was expected of her next. The young man and the doctor had stepped outside in the corridor and were talking in low tones. The nurse was mixing something from a bottle in a glass. Then suddenly the sick man opened his eyes and looked up, and his face was filled with anguish.

“Pray!” he murmured, almost inaudibly.

The nurse was on the alert at once with a spoonful of medicine.

“Pray!” she said snappily. “You want someone should make a prayer? Well, I’ll ask the doctor to get a preacher.”

She stepped to the door and murmured something to the doctor, but the sick man cast an anguished glance toward Astra.

“Can’t
you
—pray?” he gasped. “I can’t—wait!”

His breath was almost gone, and the girl sensed his desperation. Swiftly, she dropped back to the chair again and bent her head, her lips not far from the dying man’s ear, and began to pray in a clear young voice.

“Oh heavenly Father, Thou didst so love the whole world that though all of us were sinners, Thou didst send Thine own dear Son to take our sins upon Himself and die on the cross to pay our penalty, so that all who would believe on Him might be saved. Hear us now as we cry to Thee for this soul in need. Give him faith to believe in what Thou hast done for him. May he rest in Thy strength and know that Thou wilt put Thine arms around him and guide him into the Light. Give him Thy peace in his soul as he trusts in what the precious blood of Jesus has done for him. Make him know that he has nothing to do but trust Thee. We ask it in the name of Jesus our Savior, Amen.”

“Amen!” came a soft murmur from the dying lips.

Then suddenly a loud, disagreeable voice boomed into the solemnity of the little room, where the voice of prayer still lingered.

“Well,
really
! What’s the meaning of all this? George Faber, what are you doing in here, I’d like to know?”

Astra looked up and saw a tall, imposing woman, smartly turned out and groomed to the last hair. Lipstick and rouge and expensive powder combined to give her a lovely baby complexion that somehow only made her look older and very hard. She was looking straight at Astra with cold, hostile eyes.

Yet so sacred had been the scene through which Astra had just passed that she did not at first take in that this hostility was directed toward herself.

The doctor had suddenly arrived, with a warning hand flung up for silence, but the woman paid no attention and boomed on.

“I go into the diner to get my dinner and leave my husband in his seat because he said he didn’t want any dinner! Just stubbornness that he wouldn’t eat! And then I come back and find him
gone
! And when I at last track him down, I find him in bed with a whole mob around him! And this designing young woman—who is she?—whining around and putting over some sort of pious act. Who
is
she?—I demand to know!”

But the last of the question was smothered by the doctor’s hand firmly laid across the woman’s lips as he and the nurse grasped her arms and forced her out of the room into the corridor, closing the door sharply behind her.

After that things were a bit confused. The sick man’s eyes were closed. He looked like death. Had he heard that awful voice maligning him?

Astra stood at one side, the papers with the dictation grasped in her hands, her frightened eyes on the sick man. Was he living yet?

Then the door opened and the young man beckoned her to come out. The woman seemed to have disappeared for the moment.

The young man drew Astra over to an unoccupied section and made her sit down.

“Shall I take these papers for the time being?” he said, and she surrendered them thankfully. He slipped them inside his briefcase.

“Mr. Faber seemed to be anxious that no one else came in on this side. He told me that before I came after you,” he said in explanation of his care.

“Now will you sit here for a few minutes until I can scout around and find out the possibilities? I suppose these telegrams ought to get off at once. There’s a Western Union man on board. Just stay here and I’ll see what can be done. I won’t be long.”

He hurried away, and Astra sat there staring at the great white flakes that were coming down like miniature blankets lapping over each other on the windowpanes. The warm train seemed so protected from the darkness that had come down while she had been busy. There seemed a great quiet sadness all about her as she sat thinking of the little tragedy. She had a strange feeling that God had been in that stateroom while she had been praying for the dying man, and He had heard her prayer. She seemed still to hear the echo of that whispered
“Amen!”
as if it were the heartfelt assent of the man’s passing soul. And it seemed a strange thing that it had been so arranged that
she
should have been the one to answer that cry from a dying man.

She wondered, was he gone yet? It surely had seemed like the end. Her own sorrowful experience when her father died had taught her to know the signs. And it had really seemed to give him relief to leave those messages behind. She was glad she had been able to help.

Then she heard a door open sharply at the extreme other end of the car, and footsteps, silken stirrings, sounded down the corridor. Suddenly there was the smart lady coming stormily down toward her, battle in her eyes.

She sighted Astra almost at once and fixed her cold blue gaze upon her, coming on with evident intention to do her worst.

Now she was upon her, standing in front of her with the attitude of an officer of the law come to bring her to justice.

“Who
are
you?” she demanded, and her voice rose again. “And what were you doing in my husband’s stateroom, you shameless creature, you?”

A
stra looked at the woman with surprise, growing into dawning comprehension, and then a quick glow of interest.

“Oh,” she said pleasantly, “you didn’t understand what happened, did you? I didn’t go in there of my own accord. I was asked to go.”

“Indeed!” said the woman arrogantly. “Who could possibly have asked you to go? Who had a right to do so? Who are you, anyway?”

“Oh,” said Astra with a quiet calm upon her and the hint of a smile through the gravity of her expression, “I am just a stenographer they asked to come and take some dictation for a man who was dying.”

“Nonsense!” said the woman impatiently. “Dying! He’s not dying! He gets these spells. He’ll come out of it. He’s most likely out of it now. And who, may I ask, presumed to take my husband into a stateroom and bring a strange doctor and a strange nurse and stenographer and make such a to-do about it all? Why did anybody
think
he was sick?”

“I really don’t know, madam,” said Astra coldly. “I was asked to come, and I came.”

“Well,
really
! This is
very
mysterious! Who presumed to ask you?"

“The young man who was in there when you came. I don’t know who he is. He came into the other car where I was sitting and called out to know if there was a stenographer there who would come quickly and take some dictation.”

“Well, of all the absurd ideas!” said the woman, snapping her eyes at Astra. “Who is this young man? Some friend of yours?”

“No,” said Astra, and her own voice was somewhat haughty now. “I never saw him before.”

“What is his name?”

“I don’t know, madam. You’ll have to ask him.”

“Well, it shows what kind of girl
you
are, going off with a strange young man to take dictation from a
stranger
! Well, what important dictation did you take? Let me see the papers! I’ll take charge of them now.”

“I haven’t the papers, madam.”

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know. I presume they have been taken care of as your husband directed.”

“Well, what did the papers say?” demanded the woman.

Astra looked at her with wide, surprised eyes.

“Why, that wouldn’t be my business to tell,” she said. “A stenographer is only supposed to do her work and then forget about it.”

“Oh,
really
? And you have the impudence to say that to the wife of the man whose dictation you took?”

Then Astra saw the young man coming toward her, and she looked up with relief.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly to the irate woman. “It was a matter of business, you know, sales he had completed on his trip, I think. I don’t suppose it would interest you. And I have not intended to be impudent. A stenographer is not expected to give attention and remember the matters which she transcribes, she is only a machine while she is at work. At least, that is what I have been taught.”

Then she rose and stood ready as the young man reached her side, and the woman turned and started at the young man, giving Astra opportunity to escape toward the door.

The young man soon followed her.

“I thought,” he said as he reached Astra’s side and opened the door for her, “that perhaps we could go into the diner and get some dinner together. There we could have an opportunity to make a few plans about those papers. That will give us comparative freedom from interruption. I don’t fancy having that woman interfering, do you? She may be his wife, but she has no idea what happened, and from what he told me, I don’t think he wanted her to have. He had evidently seen his son and had an interview with him. Now, you haven’t had your dinner yet, have you? Will you go with me?”