Of Grave Concern Read Online Free PDF

steer herself, so intent was I on avenging the insult. But the captain promised to put Brown off as soon as practicable, in New Orleans if he could, but by St. Louis at any rate. There not being room for the both of us on board, I stepped off the Pennsylvania five minutes before she left New Orleans, and sent with orders to take another boat to St. Louis. So you see, it was not God’s plan that spared me from the inferno of the Pennsylvania —it was mine.”
    â€œSir,” my mother said, “you must not blame yourself.”
    â€œHenry was asleep, was blown up into the sky, then fell back on the hot boilers, and I suppose that rubbish fell on him, for he is injured internally. He got into the water and swam to shore, and got into the flatboat with the other survivors, with nothing on but his wet shirt, and he lay there, burning in the southern sun and freezing with the wind, till the Kate Frisbee came along. His wounds were not dressed until he arrived here, fifteen hours after the explosion.”
    My mother cooed and patted his shoulder.
    â€œBut there is more,” the man said.
    A week ago, while visiting his sister in St. Louis, he had had a strange dream. In it, he looked upon the body of his brother, dead, in a metal coffin, placed between two chairs. A bouquet of white roses rested on his chest, with a single red rose in the center. The dream was so real that he rushed downstairs, expecting to find Henry’s body.
    â€œIf only I had realized the dream for the prophecy it was!” the cub pilot lamented. He took from his pocket a carte de visite photograph of his brother and passed it to my mother. Henry shared his older brother’s strong jaw and high forehead, and the eyes had the same sad but mischievous quality. His hair was wild, as if he had just stepped out of his front door into a hurricane. The boy’s clothes seemed two sizes too small for him. His outfit featured a vest whose buttons appeared ready to pop, a linen shirt with an irritatingly high collar, and an elaborately knotted silk tie at his throat, as if to keep it all together.
    â€œBut may God bless Memphis, the noblest city on the face of the earth,” the student pilot said as he returned the photograph to his pocket. “You ladies have done well. Yesterday a beautiful girl of fifteen stooped timidly down by the side of our second mate, a handsome and noble-hearted fellow, and handed him a pretty bouquet. The doomed boy’s eyes kindled and swelled with tears. He asked the girl to write her name on a card so that he might remember her by it.”
    â€œHow touching!” my mother said.
    â€œWould it be asking much if your angel affixed her name to a card for Henry?”
    Before my mother could reply, the man took the pencil from his breast pocket and handed it to me. The pencil stank of cigars. Then he gave me a card.
    I wrote my name in a childish hand.
    â€œOphelia,” he read.
    â€œIt means help,” I said.
    â€œThank you, Ophelia Welch. You are too young to know what this means.”
    He placed the card in the hand of his unconscious brother.
    The mud clerk died within the hour.
    Of course he had the metal coffin, resting across two chairs, and the bouquet of white roses with a single red one at its center.
    But I had not seen the last of poor Henry.
    Three nights later, his smiling face appeared in the mirror above my dressing table, undamaged as in the little photograph. But instead of being merely a frozen image, this image was alive. His face was illuminated by an unearthly blue light, his features were animated with mirth, and his hair was buffeted by some unseen gale. The ends of the silk tie danced and fluttered like the tail of a kite.
    â€œO- phel -ia,” he called. “O- phel -ia, I see you!”
    Then he laughed like a fiend.
    I shot out of bed and spent the rest of the night with Tanté Marie, who patted my hair and told me that nothing in the mirror could