I had found in Mr. Abel. It surprised me
that he, suckled on the literature of Spain, and a reader of only ten or
twelve years of English literature, possessed a knowledge of our modern
poetry as intimate as my own, and a love of it equally great. This
feeling brought us together and made us two--the nervous olive-skinned
Hispano-American of the tropics and the phlegmatic blue-eyed Saxon of
the cold north--one in spirit and more than brothers. Many were the
daylight hours we spent together and "tired the sun with talking"; many,
past counting, the precious evenings in that restful house of his where
I was an almost daily guest. I had not looked for such happiness; nor,
he often said, had he. A result of this intimacy was that the vague idea
concerning his hidden past, that some unusual experience had profoundly
affected him and perhaps changed the whole course of his life, did not
diminish, but, on the contrary, became accentuated, and was often in
my mind. The change in him was almost painful to witness whenever our
wandering talk touched on the subject of the aborigines, and of the
knowledge he had acquired of their character and languages when
living or travelling among them; all that made his conversation most
engaging--the lively, curious mind, the wit, the gaiety of spirit
tinged with a tender melancholy--appeared to fade out of it; even the
expression of his face would change, becoming hard and set, and he would
deal you out facts in a dry mechanical way as if reading them in a book.
It grieved me to note this, but I dropped no hint of such a feeling, and
would never have spoken about it but for a quarrel which came at last to
make the one brief solitary break in that close friendship of years.
I got into a bad state of health, and Abel was not only much concerned
about it, but annoyed, as if I had not treated him well by being ill,
and he would even say that I could get well if I wished to. I did not
take this seriously, but one morning, when calling to see me at the
office, he attacked me in a way that made me downright angry with him.
He told me that indolence and the use of stimulants was the cause of
my bad health. He spoke in a mocking way, with a presence of not quite
meaning it, but the feeling could not be wholly disguised. Stung by his
reproaches, I blurted out that he had no right to talk to me, even
in fun, in such a way. Yes, he said, getting serious, he had the best
right--that of our friendship. He