CHAPTER III.

I NEED not enter into the details of my stay at Low Tor Cottage, even if I were able to reproduce them with correctness. My residence there was, to me, a prolonged nightmare, with all hope of an awakening denied me. Dr. Wygram had so completely surrendered himself to despair as to be incapable of making any effort. It would have been a positive relief to myself had I been able to have considered him insane, and the mystery before me a delusion springing from that cause. But that conclusion was shut out most effectually by my own personal testimony (of which he always eagerly availed himself) as to his son’s identity, and his practically unaltered condition after an interval of so many years. I had every opportunity of assuring myself on this point. Young Wygram, though shy and backward, preferring to mope in solitude, was our companion after a day or two. But he never seemed wholly at ease, would not join in any sustained conversation, and had an apathetic listlessness about him which was positively repellent. It was vain to try to arouse either father or son from the overwhelming depression into which both had apparently sunk. Some melancholy drives we took together in a pony phaeton through the solitudes of West Cornwall did not enliven us much. It is a haunted land at its best, with its rolling moorlands, and its mystic Dosmery Pool, fabled as ebbing and flowing in its silent depths in sympathy with the tides of the distant sea. As day after day slipped away, I began to feel myself as partaking of my friend’s hopelessness. Yet, if I hinted the uselessness of continuing with him, he would become almost frantic. As he pathetically repeated to me, I was his only friend, the only one to whom he could confide his sorrows, so insupportable when borne alone. Gradually he persuaded me, on one point, against my better judgment. It was finally agreed between us that ere I left some steps should be taken on his part to endeavour to obtain a reversal, or part reversal rather, of the conditions under which his son laboured (I use the periphrasis as the plain words to me are unspeakably painful), by something of the same methods by which they had been compassed. The prospect to me was very distasteful, indeed revolting, nor did Dr. Wygram’s laboured explanations convey much information to my non-professional mind. It is useless to detail them here, they would be intelligible only to the expert. But I could not deny him what he asked. I fancy his wish was to secure some witness of his own moral innocency, should any untoward accident happen. I cannot blame him; indeed, I think he would have been justified in taking almost any steps, short of taking his son’s life, in the unparalleled circumstances of the case.

And the time was short. That was another perplexity. The constant state of nervous apprehension which overcame Dr. Wygram whenever his residence in one place lasted any time, pointed, of itself, to the necessity of making haste. Perhaps he magnified this difficulty; I cannot say. But there was something about their retired life which seemed likely to invite gossiping curiosity, in a country district more especially. That the neighbours had already questioned him as to the nature of his son’s _delicacy_ he assured me over and over again. What could they mean? “He has been watched,” the father would say, excitedly. “We have already been here too long. They notice his unaltered appearance since our arrival. A growing lad, such as he appears, would have made some progress in the time, and they notice that he does not--nor ever will,” he would add bitterly, “unless my last efforts should prove successful.” It was idle to try to reason him out of these fears--for all I knew they might be real. It was pitiful to think how long they had possessed him, during many weary years. When I had met himself and his son fifteen years before, they were, even then, travelling as fugitives from place to place to avoid detection; still more harrowing to think that, in the father’s case, from his rapidly aging look and growing feebleness, these wanderings must soon cease. Of his son’s fate, in that overwhelming contingency, I could never trust myself to think. The thought of it often overcame Dr. Wygram himself. He told me once, that on one occasion, when abroad, the terror of this self-same prospect so unmanned him that he had attempted to confide in a brother practitioner, an Englishman, resident, I think, in Milan. “Like most countrymen of his craft abroad,” said my poor friend bitterly, “he proved to be utterly incredulous. I might have known it, before exposing myself to his coarse ridicule. The line of my studies has been so utterly outside the old groove of pill and bolus, lancet and catheter, it is little wonder that the crowd will have none of its results. This professional brother only laughed in my face, rubbed his hands in glee, as at a good joke, asking me if I would not part with my recipe for a consideration, seeing he had some half-dozen youngsters of his own whose growing powers added to the tailor’s bill. English medical men are proverbially obtuse, but for the full development of their sheer obstinacy and mulishness they should be transplanted to the soil which gave birth to transcendentalism.”

It was a breathless autumn evening when, in my presence, Dr. Wygram commenced his second experiment with his son. The dim scent of the shrubberies stole in through the open windows--over which the blinds were drawn. On a couch in the centre of the room lay young Wygram in a deep slumber, super-induced by an opiate which his father had administered, to aid the further stages of the treatment. A brass chafing dish lay upon the floor, containing some smouldering embers; from a tripod upon the table hung a small retort of crimson glass which glowed like a ruddy gem in the flickering light of the spirit lamp underneath.

With arms stripped bare to the elbows, Dr. Wygram bent over his son, watching the depth of unconsciousness in which the latter was immersed. For nearly an hour my friend had not spoken a word. I did not wish to interrupt him, but I saw by his manner at length that the critical moment had arrived. He turned to me at last, and in a broken whisper told me that a few moments longer would decide his success or failure. “We shall now, I trust,” he said, “have insight granted us in regard to a hitherto hidden mystery.”

I do not know whether he ever obtained the insight in question, but I know that it was never granted to me. For, at that moment, loud voices were heard in the corridor. The door was unceremoniously thrown open, and three men entered the room. Their leader, a puffy, red-faced individual, fixed me with his glittering eye from the moment of his coming into the room. “That is the man!” he said, to his subordinates, pointing, at the same time, to me as I stood irresolute.

A sudden panic possessed me that instant. To escape by the door was impossible, as the men stood beside it, but the window behind me was handy. I turned, lifted the blind, and precipitately jumped into the garden a few feet below. I do not believe that I ever ran so fast in my life as I did on that occasion through the mazes of the shrubbery. My one frantic desire was to get away at all hazards from that dreadful dwelling, though from what I fled I could not have told. I only knew that horror, the accumulated horror, of the past weeks, compressed into the moment, possessed me to my very heels. A wretched dog prowling about the garden gave chase to me as I fled, under the impression that I was making off with some portable property belonging to the establishment; but I soon left him far behind, and I do not think that the men joined in the pursuit, beyond the limits of the cottage, if, indeed, they followed me at all. In my terror I never looked behind, but ran through fields, hedges, and ditches till I arrived, breathless and hatless, at the nearest railway station. The officials seemed somewhat surprised at the appearance I presented, but I got a ticket without question, and was soon seated in a railway carriage on my way to London.

* * * * *

These memoranda, written after a long period of nervous prostration, must be published, if for my own exculpation alone. Shortly after their committal to paper, a longing curiosity impelled me to inquire as to the fate of my old friend. I had promised not to desert him, and that promise I had scarcely kept. At all hazards, then, I resolved to go to Cornwall once more, even if by doing so, I should fall into the hands of the authorities, as I doubted not he had done. At all events, my own innocency was beyond question.

On the Paddington platform my apprehensions in this latter respect were redoubled. A young man standing beside me, when I was taking out my ticket, certainly eyed me very narrowly.

“One of the minions of the law,” I said to myself; “the affair has got wind after all.” As I was about to take my seat he came forward and asked if he had the pleasure of addressing Mr. F---- of Blank Street. Resolved to brazen it out to the last, I admitted my identity.

“You are acquainted with Dr. Wygram, I think?” he continued, interrogatively.

I owned that I was. Denial, at this stage, would have been useless.

“I am his son,” he said smilingly.

“His son!” I gasped. Then, after all, Dr. Wygram’s second experiment had succeeded, and he who was before me had been freed from the spell of his youth. Yes, there was no doubt of it! He was now a man! “Is it possible?” I repeated, gazing at him with astonishment.

“I think there is no doubt of it,” he replied coolly. “You will be sorry to learn that my father is far from well,” he resumed. “I have been from home for a long time, but am just going down to see him, in Cornwall.”

“Just going down to see him?” This was mystery upon mystery.

“My dear sir,” I said in despair, “I am very sorry indeed to hear of your father’s illness, but would you kindly answer me one question as distinctly as you can. If you are Dr. Wygram’s son, how is it that you do not remember me?”

“I do now most distinctly,” he replied. “I remember travelling with you and my father, many years ago, when I was going to school in the North.”

Heavens! Then all the years, since then, had been a blank to him!

“Have you no recollection,” I suggested, “of having been with your father since then, a short time ago, in Cornwall?”

“Ah! that is my brother,” he quickly returned. “Yes, _he_ was with my father, when he took ill--been with him too long, in fact, for the good of either. My father, I am sorry to say, has for some time been quite unhinged mentally.”

I should think he has, was my inward comment, for I saw it all in a moment. There were two young Wygrams; both of these I had seen when they were youngsters of the same age. Why had I not thought of this before? Is it not my special weakness that things dawn upon me very slowly? The rest, of course, was Dr. Wygram’s delusion, ultimately necessitating his being placed under the care of his friends.

“My dear sir,” I replied, after a pause, and with some effusion of manner, “I sincerely trust that your father’s distressing illness may be but temporary. On his being able to receive the message, kindly present him with my warmest regards. Meanwhile, one question more before we part, for I am not going by this train; I--I have changed my mind. How many years, may I ask, may there be between your own age and that of your brother?”

“About fourteen or fifteen,” was the reply.

“Quite so; and when you were youngsters of about the same age, say, were you not considered very like one another?”

“Remarkably so,” he answered, laughingly, “as like as two peas.”

G. M. MCCRIE.

XIII

ON THE INDIA FRONTIER: THE DOCTOR’S STORY.

“WANT Berlyng,” he seemed to be saying, though it was difficult to catch the words, for we were almost within range, and the fight was a sharp one. It was the old story of India frontier warfare; too small a force and a foe foolishly underrated.

The man they had just brought in--laying him hurriedly on a bed of pine-needles, in the shade of the conifers where I had halted my little train--poor Charles Noon of the Sikhs, was done for. His right hand was off at the wrist, and the shoulder was almost severed.

I bent my ear to his lips, and heard the words which sounded like “Want Berlyng.”

We had a man called Berlyng in the force--a gunner--who was round at the other side of the fort that was to be taken before night, two miles away at least.

“Do you want Berlyng?” I asked slowly and distinctly. Noon nodded, and his lips moved. I bent my head again till my ear almost touched his lips.

“How long have I?” he was asking.

“Not long, I’m afraid, old chap.”

His lips closed with a queer, distressed look. He was sorry to die. “How long?” he asked again.

“About an hour.”

But I knew it was less. I attended to others, thinking all the while of poor Noon. His home life was little known, but there was some story about an engagement at Poonah the previous warm weather. Noon was rich, and he cared for the girl; but she did not return the feeling. In fact, there was some one else. It appears that the girl’s people were ambitious and poor, and that Noon had promised large settlements. At all events, the engagement was a known affair, and gossips whispered that Noon knew about the some one else and would not give her up. He was, I know, thought badly of by some, especially by the elders.

However, the end of it all lay on a sheet beneath the pines and watched me with such persistence that I was at last forced to go to him.

“Have you sent for Berlyng?” he asked, with a breathlessness which I know too well.

Now, I had not sent for Berlyng, and it requires more nerve than I possess to tell unnecessary lies to a dying man. The necessary ones are quite different, and I shall not think of them when I go to my account.

“Berlyng could not come if I sent for him,” I replied soothingly. “He is two miles away from here, trenching the North Wall, and I have nobody to send. The messenger would have to run the gauntlet of the enemy’s earthworks.”

“I’ll give the man a hundred pounds who does it,” replied Noon, in his breathless whisper. “Berlyng will come sharp enough. He hates me too much.”

He broke off with a laugh which made me feel sick.

I found a wounded water-carrier--a fellow with a stray bullet in his hand--who volunteered to find Berlyng, and then I returned to Noon and told him what I had done. I knew that Berlyng could not come.

He nodded and I think he said, “God bless you.”

“I want to put something right,” he said, after an effort; “I’ve been a blackguard.”

I waited a little, in case Noon wished to repose some confidence in me. Things are so seldom put right that it is wise to facilitate such intentions. But it appeared obvious that what Noon had to say could only be said to Berlyng. They had, it subsequently transpired, not been on speaking terms for some months.

I was turning away when Noon suddenly cried out in his natural voice, “There _is_ Berlyng.”

I turned and saw one of my men, Swerney, carrying in a gunner. It might be Berlyng, for the uniform was that of a captain, but I could not see his face. Noon, however, seemed to recognize him.

I showed Swerney where to lay his man, close to me, alongside Noon, who at that moment required all my attention, for he had fainted.

In a moment Noon recovered, despite the heat, which was tremendous. He lay quite still, looking up at the patches of blue sky between the dark, motionless tops of the pine trees.

His face was livid under the sunburn, and as I wiped the perspiration from his forehead he closed his eyes with the abandon of a child. Some men, I have found, die like children going to sleep. He slowly recovered and I gave him a few drops of brandy. I thought he was dying and decided to let Berlyng wait.

I did not even glance at him as he lay, covered with dust and blackened by the smoke of his beloved nine-pounders, a little to the left of Noon and behind me as I knelt at the latter’s side. After a while his eyes grew brighter and he began to look about him.

He turned his head, painfully, for the muscles of his neck were injured, and caught sight of the gunner’s uniform. “Is that Berlyng?” he asked, excitedly. “Yes.”

He dragged himself up and tried to get nearer to Berlyng. And I helped him. They were close alongside each other. Berlyng was lying on his back, staring up at the blue patches between the pine-trees.

Noon turned on his left elbow and began whispering into the smoke-grimed ear.

“Berlyng,” I heard him say, “I was a blackguard. I am sorry, old man. I played it very low down. It was a dirty trick. It was my money--and her people were anxious for her to marry a rich man. I worked it through her people. I wanted her so badly that I forgot I--was supposed--to be a--gentleman. I found out--that it was you--she cared for. But I couldn’t make up my mind to give her up. I kept her--to her word. And now it’s all up with me--but you’ll pull through and it will all--come right. Give her my--love--old chap. You can now--because I’m done. I’m glad they brought you in--because I’ve been able--to tell you--that it is you she cares for. You--Berlyng, old chap, who used to be a chum of mine. She cares for you--God, you’re in luck! I don’t know whether she’s told you--and I was--a d----d blackguard.”

His jaw suddenly dropped--and he rolled forward with his face against Berlyng’s shoulder.

Berlyng was dead when they brought him in. He had heard nothing. Or perhaps he had heard and understood--everything.

HENRY SETON MERRIMAN.

XIV

DOCTOR GREENFIELD.

DR. GREENFIELD looked round his small study with satisfaction and a touch of pride. In spite of the book-cases filled with treatises on medicines and diseases, and the inevitable patient’s chair, the room still managed to be an attractive one. The book-cases were of oak; the dreaded chair lay claim to be a particularly good specimen of an early Sheraton; and over the chimney-piece, and on all available space of the soft green-colored walls hung good mezzotint prints in dark frames.

The servant put a match to the log-laid fire, for although it was May, there was an evening chill, and a sensation of damp.

The Doctor had dined early, with the expectation of a long drive, so his evening at home was unintentional, and caused by the little piece of pink paper which now lay unheeded at his feet. He stretched himself, felt how tired he was, and how luxurious was this unexpected evening at home. Then he remembered the cause and, with an involuntary movement, stooped and picked up the paper from where it lay. He opened it and read it again, though he had done so several times already.

A telegram so short, but he knew what it had meant to the sender of it; a lifelong message of despair, of shipwrecked hopes and utter loneliness. “Charlie died this evening.” Dr. Greenfield read it out loud quite slowly--and once more it fluttered to the ground, and he sighed. So it was all over; the eight weeks’ watching; the alternate hope and despair; the grim fight with death--and death had triumphed. He saw the girl, the sender of the message, standing as she had done when he told her that her brother must die. He thought of the weeks during which time he had been so much thrown with this girl--Juliet Carson--the days which they had spent together watching by the sick man’s bed, fighting the battle of skill and science with destiny.

And all the time his mind dwelt on it, he knew it did not really touch him--the worst part to him was that his science had failed him. For a moment he let himself believe that the constant facing death, which as a doctor he was bound to confront, had hardened his feelings, made him callous, and taken his sense of pity and sympathy from him; but he was too honest, and he remembered with a true flash of conviction that it had always been so, and memory took him back over many years, and he seemed to hear his nurse saying, “Master George has no heart, he didn’t feel his father’s death a bit.” And it came to him how right she had been, how he had wanted to care, but something wouldn’t let him; he could not cry as his brother did, and he had felt as if he belonged somewhere else. All his later life, too, he had known it. He had no sympathy, no pity, and he knew that others felt the want in him, though often they did not know what it was. He had lived for thirty-five years now, and he had never cared for anyone; and for the first time to-night, as he sat and looked into the fire, he knew that his life had been only half complete, that he lacked what was the best, and that his whole existence had been colourless. Still, as he argued against himself, if he had lacked the best, he had also missed the worst: many of his friends had gone; he had wanted to care, but the power was not there; he had seen piteous sights; he had witnessed heartrending scenes of poverty and despair, but they had all been nothing to him; they had passed by, and he had forgotten.

Somehow the image of Juliet to-night came back to him; the girl in her sorrow and loneliness with no one left to her; and he wondered why his heart was not wrung with pity. Although she did not stir his heart, or his senses, he could see she was beautiful; but for some other man, not for him. A new and painful sensation of loneliness suddenly swept over him, a horrible whiff of middle age, a foretaste of the solitude of old age, which must overtake him, but he could do nothing to help himself, he had no will, no power. He sat on in his deep reverie, with his eyes fixed on the burning logs. Then he got up from his chair and went to the window and looked out on the May evening.

It was half-past eight o’clock, and the chill which comes just after sunset was in the air. He stood looking into the clear blue distance, listening to the nightingales and the hum of the bees. Then suddenly he saw a sight which astonished him--a procession winding its way down the long avenue of limes which faced his window: a curious procession, too--a funeral--it was unlike any he had seen before. It gave him a strange sensation. Preceding it were men and women, chanting as they went.

They paused as they came near to him, the singing ceased, and several made a gesture as if they would ask him to join them; then they drew back as he heard one say, “Ah, not him; he knows no pity, he has no love, he cannot come;” and they passed on, taking up their chant; and for the first time in his life he knew he was an outcast and a pariah. He was hungering and thirsting for someone to help him and pity him.

Behind them came men carrying the body of the dead man, and he bowed as they went by. Once more he looked, and he saw three figures--three white-robed women, walking together. And the one who walked in the midst had the eyes of Juliet Carson, and in her hands she held a large cup. The three paused as they came near to him, and it seemed to him as if a veil fell between the rest of the procession and them, the music got fainter, and he was left alone with these three; something within him told him that they held in that cup the power of pity and love, that they alone could give them to him, and he cried to them to take pity on him. Then Juliet, for it was Juliet, spoke to him; her eyes were troubled, though her face shone with a radiant smile, and her voice came to him as a soft wind, and stilled his despair and restlessness.

“Listen,” she said, “and know what you ask. We are three sisters, Love, Joy, and Sorrow, and if you drink of this cup you can never again be as you were. You would wish, likely, to take only Love and Joy, but as love brings joy, so also it surely brings sorrow, and you cannot take one without the other. Say, will you take Love, and in so doing accept Joy and Sorrow as they come?” and she paused while he made his choice.

But with eager, trembling hands he took the cup she offered him and drank thirstily, and then--his whole being was flooded with hope and delight, and as he handed the cup back to Juliet in her radiant form of love, she bent forward a little and kissed him--a kiss which thrilled his soul, and sent the life-blood rushing through his veins. Then the figures vanished. Once more he heard the faint sound of distant music, and then--and then * * *

The Doctor straightened himself in his chair, and looked round him in a dazed, bewildered manner.

“A dream,” he murmured. “Is it possible? I, too, of all men.”

He looked round him. The May morning was breaking into his room, the birds were singing, the sun was up. So then he had fallen asleep in his chair, and all that seemed so real, so tangible, was nothing but a dream--a dream of possibilities, and an awakening to realities.

As his mind grew clearer, he remembered all that had taken place the night before--ah! that telegram was the reality; and once more he stooped to pick it up. But, as he read it, a new feeling, and yet not a new feeling came to him--the sensation of his dream. It made him giddy, and he went to the window to steady himself, and to feel the air. But in him, and all around him, he was conscious of a change; a rush of almost divine pity and love swept across him. Ah! that, then, was no dream; he was in touch with the love, the sorrow, and pity of the world; he shared them all; he was one of them, he was no longer the pariah, the outcast; and more than that, he too loved, and his love had been alone with her suffering and sorrow all night. Last night he had not cared; to-day the pity of it almost stifled him.

He threw up the window and stepped onto the lawn; the fresh dew was upon everything, and he stretched himself in the rays of the sun, and thanked God that he was alive. He looked long up the avenue, where in his dream he had seen the procession come down, and he shuddered when he thought how they had left him--no, not all--and his heart beat as he thought of Juliet Carson, and how she had come to him at the time of his great want. And the thought of her brought back to him the reality and the present, and, as he listened to the clock striking six, he knew that his restlessness must wait; he who had waited all his life was now impatient for two hours to be over. Ah! had it come to this. He smiled at his own impetuosity, but had not the heart to rebuke himself.

He spent the next two hours wandering up and down his garden, listening to the morning sounds, as the world woke bit by bit to its day’s work. He watched the workmen pass by his gate on their way to take up their daily toil, and he wondered why he had never pitied them--his had been so much more a case of pity. Though worn and tired, and perhaps saddened, they, too, had loved; they had somewhere, sometime, romance in their lives.

As the church clock struck eight he made his way to the stables and ordered his dog-cart. His own voice had a conscious sound in it, and he felt all the world must know he was a changed man. As he drove through the deep lanes, with the honeysuckle, pink may, and wild cherry blossom all in their beauty before him, he felt that there was only life, only beauty in the world, and all the sorrowful and sad side of it had fled away. But as he neared the old manor house, where death triumphed, his beating heart quietened somewhat, and he felt a touch of sorrow come over him.

He was evidently expected, for he was admitted at once into the long low room, into which the sun was pouring. The window was thrown up, and as he paused he felt that the stillness of death was in the house. Then he heard a slight movement and turned. At the open window stood Juliet, the sun’s rays lighting up her white gown, and her brown hair; her eyes had the troubled expression of his dream, but there was no radiance in the sad, weary, little face. In her hands she held great branches of white lilacs, lilies, and roses.

He went to meet her with outstretched hand, and a great pity in his heart spiritualizing his human love.

“I knew,” she said simply; “I knew you would come.” Had she, too, seen the vision, or was it in his face?

And did she bend her head as in his dream?--for his lips found hers, and that kiss drew the bitterness from her sorrow, while it opened up his new life for him, sweeping away all the years he had left behind, and flooding his soul with light and love.

And although they were in the presence of death, did not love triumph?

LADY MABEL HOWARD.

XV

DR. GLADMAN, A SKETCH OF COLONIAL LIFE.

IT WAS Christmas morning in Southern latitudes. The thermometer stood at 80 degrees in the shade, and we had just finished a really splendid run across the Pacific, right away from the Cape, without touching, and we were all delighted to be once more about to stand on terra firma. I had signed articles in London, at a shilling a month, as surgeon, to the good ship “Teneriffe,” the Company naturally considering the said shilling good pay in addition to a free passage for myself, and at a reduced rate for my wife, to Sidney.

We were passing a lighthouse, and could see the smoke rising from the little settlement at King George’s Sound. The houses and harbour itself were hidden by the first of the many headlands that were between us and the narrow opening to the anchorage. There was the usual bustle on deck and tramping to and fro of the sailors, who were getting the anchor clear and the decks in readiness to let go.

My wife and her sister were making certain changes in their dress that they might be ready the moment we dropped anchor to go ashore. I could hear my wife ask her sister Rosie if she could really believe “this everlasting voyage was over?” as I was hurriedly finishing off my letters in the saloon to take ashore. I had just fastened and sealed up a long letter to my friend H. at “Bart’s,” and another to my mother in peaceful Devonshire, and had done the same for some half dozen or more of my wife’s, when I heard the orders, “Hard a-port,” “Ease her,” “Slow,” passed to the wheel and engine room as the pilot’s boat came alongside. It was manned by four rowers in man-o’-war’s-man dress, and a tiny golden-haired boy, who didn’t look more than ten, in the stern holding the tiller ropes in his little brown fist, and keeping his eyes fixed on the pilot’s movements till he was safe on deck. Then he said authoritatively, “Let go the rope; fall astern,” rolling the “r” and giving it “starn” in the approved style.

I ran down the companion-way again, and knocked at our state-room to tell my women-folk to come up and see him--they both are so fond of children. On going in I found my wife standing in the midst of open portmanteaus, fastening on her sister’s white veil or puggery, attired herself in shore-going garments, and with another long red-and-white-striped puggery shading her own neck. My wife insists on considering Australia tropical!

“Do they wear gloves, do you suppose, in this place?” she said, taking a long pair of grey ones off the cabin sofa, with a somewhat scornful emphasis on the “this place” which expressed her private feeling about Australia generally.

“Of course they do; life in Australian towns is the same as life anywhere else,” I said, proud of my information, derived from the blue-books of the Agent-General.

My wife smiled. She has a peculiarly sweet way of smiling sometimes, instead of answering one, which is equivalent to her to having the last word, and is far more than equivalent to me, and very trying, as I have to conjecture what the last word would have been.

We all went on deck. The pilot’s boat was already some distance astern, and we could hardly see the little boy. We found we were steaming slowly through the blue water, past the swelling furze-covered headlands, the one we had just passed being crowned by a white lighthouse, with what looked at the distance a tiny white cottage, with neat palings and outhouses round it.

The pilot was in command on the bridge. We could see his figure against the sky, standing on the narrow strip of a platform, from which the officer of the watch rules his seagirt kingdom with an even more absolute despotism than that of the sultans of the “Arabian Nights.” His broad back, upright figure, and strong hands grasping the rail in front, gave one a sense of security, though the quick clear enunciation of the necessary orders was not quite that of a sailor, or at least did not sound so, after the jolly roar to which we were accustomed in our skipper.

For all that, we soon found ourselves safely anchored well in sight of the tiny jetty of the straggling collection of wooden and corrugated iron buildings that form the town of Albany.

The ship was at once surrounded by a swarm of copper-coloured savages--lads and men, from apparently ten years old to about thirty--more or less nude, who proceeded, one out of each pair in their rough boats, to dive into the clear blue water after the coins the passengers threw in, and which they came up holding in their white teeth, shaking the water out of their close black curls.

We were watching two of these chattering gleaming “bronzes,” as my wife called them, averring that unless you looked upon them as statuary they were really not proper, when the captain came up to us, as we leant over the bulwarks, to introduce the pilot, who stood just behind him with an amused smile at my wife’s last remark.

“Doctor, let me introduce Dr. Gladman, our pilot, to you,” said our skipper. “Mrs. M. and Miss N., this is our parish doctor, health officer, and pilot--Dr. Gladman.”

The pilot bowed, and holding his peaked cap in his left hand stood with his close curling grey hair uncovered in the glowing Australian sunshine, while he shook hands with my wife and her sister. “Welcome to Australia, ladies,” said he, still holding his cap.

“Thank you, doctor,” said my wife. “But are you not afraid to remain uncovered in this dreadful sun?”

“Not for a short moment, madam,” he replied, and added, glancing at her delicate pale face and the more blooming cheeks of her sister, “We naturalised Australians long ago gave up all hope of having your beautiful English complexions,” replaced his cap.

“Naturalised?” echoed Rosie, looking ready to shake hands over again. “Are you really an Englishman, Dr. Gladman? Oh! I am so glad. I was afraid every one would be Australian--Colonial now.”

Dr. Gladman laughed. “A good colonist,” he said, “but not a Colonial. No, it certainly seems a very long time ago, but I did originally come from ‘Home,’ as we say out here. I was born in Buckinghamshire, and bred at Bart’s.”

The magic word Bart’s--my beloved hospital!--completed the charm Dr. Gladman’s fine head, clever face, and quick cheery speech had worked.

Here was a brother in arms, at the first push off! As we made the tour of the ship together, necessary before he could give us our clean bill of health and a soul could leave the ship, I found he had known several of the older men of my time who were youngsters in his. He had qualified fifteen years before I did, but by the time we had reached the cabin to go over the ship’s papers with the captain he seemed an old friend. There is something in the air of strange lands that draws Englishmen together. I had been sent out for my health; so had he, he told me with a jolly laugh, “quite a wreck, they said, ten years ago!” I told him the latest medical news from England, and found he was only a fortnight behind me! and saw his _Medical Journal_ and _Lancet_ as regularly as I did. As we sat down to the saloon table, I asked him how they managed for a pilot, supposing a ship should come in and signal for one, while he was away across the bay, or over on the bush, in his capacity of doctor.

“Oh,” said Dr. Gladman, “it doesn’t often happen. You see the regular liners--the P. and O. and Orient boats--don’t require a pilot, they come in so often. I don’t quite know why you signalled for one, skipper,” he added, turning to the captain, who had ordered sherry to be put on the table, and was sitting with his elbows well squared putting his very black and inky signature to the ship’s papers.

“I’ve never been in here as skipper before. Why, it must be four years since I was here at all, Gladman. I was chief officer on the ‘Regulus,’ don’t you remember, when I last came into the Sound? Let’s see, in 1880 it was.”

“Ay, so you were,” returned the pilot; “but,” he added, turning to me, “one of my boat’s crew has a pilot’s license too, and can take a boat in quite as well as I can. If they don’t care to have him, they have to wait till I get back, if I am out. Once or twice I’ve been run very hard though, doing pilot and doctor at the same time almost.”

“I remember, Gladman, just this very day, eight years ago,” struck in the captain, “you took in the ‘Badger’ for Captain D----. I was his mate then, just before that awful gale of wind when the old jetty was nearly washed to pieces. It was the first time I ever saw you, and you were off then to some good lady--do you remember?”

“Yes, I remember that,” said the pilot, balancing his silver pencil-case on his finger. “I hadn’t my little coxswain with me then, had I, skipper?”

“Hadn’t you? Oh! no--of course you hadn’t”--and the skipper laughed. “He was only born that night, was he? Dear, dear, how time flies! So he is eight years old to-day! Here’s to him!” And the skipper raised his glass, and so did the doctor, saying to me, “It’s the little chap you noticed in my boat--my little coxswain.”

I drank my glass also to the little fellow’s health, and then the captain said:

“Tell the doctor, Gladman, how you came to take him.”

“What is his name?” I said. “I saw a curly-headed little fellow in the stern of your boat, and also that you had four men besides. That is a good large crew, isn’t it, simply to pull you out to a ship and back?”

“It isn’t a man too much, either, doctor, and when you have seen our Breaksea in a storm of wind and rain you’ll agree with me. Besides, that gig is all I have to take me to my patients across the bay, up the harbour to the town. Of course there is a path to the town round the cliffs from the lighthouse, where I live.”

“You saw it as we passed, doctor. Gladman is lighthouse-keeper, among other things,” put in the skipper.

“But,” went on the pilot, smiling at the interpolation, “it is a long way round, and I haven’t time for long ways round. We get all our provisions, too, by the boat, and my wife goes to church and pays her calls in it. She is a first-rate sailor, isn’t she, skipper? And as for that monkey, Jack--my little coxswain--he’s a far better pilot than I am.”

“Is he now?” said the captain. “Tell the doctor how you came to take him,” he said, with a sailor’s love of a good yarn.

“He is not your son, then?” I said, a little surprised; for I had noticed that the child was more carefully dressed than one would expect one of the crew’s lads to be.

“Well, he is, and he isn’t. My wife and I adopted him. We lost our little one--it was a girl though--the day he was born. Yes, it is eight years ago to-day our little one was down with scarlet fever. She was nearly two. There had been an epidemic of it in the town, but I never knew how the child got it, up there miles away, unless, you know, doctor,” he said a little sadly, “I took it up to the cottage myself--I always feared so. I used, before then, to think if I had been to any infectious cases in the town, that after the couple of hours’ row across and round the point I should be safe and not take anything up to the cottage. Anyhow, the little thing had it, and badly; I hadn’t much hope in the morning. My poor little wife--she was one of your Bart’s sisters before I married her--literally fought the disease inch by inch, and we both of course did all that could be done. I had sat up half the night--Christmas Eve--with the little maid. It was one of those bad throat cases, doctor,” said the pilot, a little gruffly, turning to me.

I nodded, and he went on: “About seven, one of the men at the lighthouse came to say a pilot was signalled for by a ship off the head.”

“That was the ‘Badger’--ay. I remember you coming aboard in the cool of the morning, as well as if it was to-day,” said the captain.

“The other fellow was away,” continued the pilot; “so I had a bath and changed all my things, and left the poor wife, who was beginning to lose hope, sitting with the baby on her lap. I hardly thought it would live till I got back. Just as I rounded the headland--or was it a bit farther on, skipper--?”

“Thereabouts,” said the skipper.

“We met a boat from the town, and one of the boatmen called out to know if I was aboard, because I was wanted in Albany. His wife was taken bad.

“You know what that means, doctor!” grinned the skipper.

“I ought to, captain,” I said, hearing as he spoke a smothered murmur from our state-room, from which I guessed that the dead silence which had till then prevailed therein was only another proof of the truth of the saying, that women are curious beings.

Wholly unconscious that he had any other hearers than myself and the captain, the pilot went on:

“We were steaming into the harbour as quick as we could, so I told the man to fall astern, and we towed them behind us. When I got to Mrs. Rogers, I found that she was better, and that I shouldn’t be wanted probably that day at all; but I did not intend to go back home--I thought it best not; but after an hour or two I saw my boat run in alongside the jetty, and one of the fellows come ashore. In a few moments, Rogers brought me a note from my wife begging me to come back if I possibly could; she was frightened about the child.

“I knew I could do nothing, but I couldn’t bear the thought of the wife’s being all alone up there and looking for me--and perhaps, later on, I shouldn’t be able to go--so, as I found when I went up to Rogers’ cottage that everything was put off, and my patient preparing her husband’s tea, I set off home again.

“The day had clouded over, and the hot wind that had blown off the land all day had died down, and there was that dead silence we always have before a black squall of wind and rain comes up from the sea.

“Before we got across the bay, gusts of wind dead in our teeth caught us once or twice and curled the water round her bows; and just as I jumped ashore, the first dash of rain came. As I stepped on to our verandah, a great roaring gust nearly swept me away.

“I went up to the windows, and took down one of the outside shutters my wife had put up to protect the glass, and saw her sitting with the little one in her arms. She was relieved to see me, and beckoned to me to go round and come in. But, you know,” said the pilot, clearing his throat, “I couldn’t go in, going back, as I was, to the good woman in labour over at Albany. It wouldn’t have been safe.”

“No,” I said, “I suppose not;” but I wondered if I should have been so conscientious if it had been I.

“It may have been hard of me, perhaps,” said the pilot, looking straight in front of him; “but I thought it right; and I could do nothing; I knew that when I left in the morning. I opened the window and told the wife how it was. She was very good; she wanted me to come in, of course, if only to kiss the little thing before it died. But I told her I did not think I ought. I couldn’t _do_ anything for the child; it was dying then.”

The good honest fellow stopped a moment, and again I heard a movement, and I thought a stifled sob, from our cabin; but the captain broke in in a rather unnecessarily loud voice:

“You were quite right, doctor. It was very good of you. I couldn’t have done it myself, I should have felt so for the missis.”

“I felt for my wife,” said the pilot, in rather a hard voice; “but I couldn’t have done any good,” he repeated, as if afraid to trust himself to say anything else. Then he went on:

“She sent the girl out with some food for me in the verandah; and we watched the little one, she inside and I out. I couldn’t hear anything in the room, the wind roared and shook the verandah so; but I could see the child was breathing slower. Then my wife put her hand under the wrap to feel its little feet.” He broke off, and then added:

“I didn’t see the end. One of the men came up to say they had signalled for the doctor from the town. So I had to start back. The gig tore through the black seas before the gale. It was a pitch dark night, about eight when I started. I got to Mrs. Rogers just in time. The youngster was born about midnight. The mother did very well, and when I left, about four in the morning, the bay was like a sheet of glass, and the sun rising without a cloud over the cliffs. The jetty had been washed away, all but the stonework, and my men had had to beach our boat right up on the road.

“When I got back, I found the wife on the lookout by the lighthouse. She had heard nothing of us, of course, since I left the night before.”

“That was a hardish day’s work,” said the skipper--”thirty hours of it.

“Well, I was not sorry to get my boots off, and get some sleep, before I started on my round. I’d a longish ride that day to the telegraph construction camp, over the hill there,” said Dr. Gladman, getting up from the table and taking his cap.

“And your little girl--doctor?” said my wife, suddenly appearing at her cabin door, tears on her cheek and a little gasp in her voice.

“It was dead, ma’am,” said the father, and turned to the companion and went on deck.

We saw very little more of Dr. Gladman while we were in Albany. My wife and her sister went up to the lighthouse and called on his wife. They came away charmed with her and the dainty little household she reigned over. My wife was enthusiastic over the trim garden, cool little parlour, and “exquisitely clean kitchen,” and “would you believe it,” she said, “she has only one maid-servant, and that a girl of seventeen!”

“I think,” she said impressively, stopping in our walk up and down the deck, as we were taking our last turn that night after leaving Albany, gliding past the shadowy coast under the wonderful Southern Cross--”I think they are both splendid, those Gladmans.”

A burly figure leaning over the bulwarks, puffing clouds of smoke into the still night air, turned round, and the captain’s voice said:

“That’s what they are, ma’am. That’s the sort of colonist this country wants; a man like Gladman is worth a whole shipload of the ne’er-do-wells they’re so fond of sending out. As for such like!--” he pointed with his elbow, as he replaced his pipe, to a group of dissipated-looking youngsters coming up from the bar, whose determination to drink more than was good for them had been a source of worry to him all the way out--”As for such like,” he said, with a look it would do many intending emigrants good to have seen, “I ask you, doctor, what’s the good of them?”

--_Gentleman’s Magazine._

XVI

DR. WRIGHTSON’S ENEMY.

FOR the last thirty years, Dr. Wrightson had been the sole medical adviser of the little town of Oakhampton, and he was still a hale, hearty, jovial, stout gentleman, of about sixty years of age.

Dr. Wrightson lived in the High Street, in a long, low, white house, which never failed to look as clean and bright as if it had been thoroughly done (apparently fresh from the foundry) announced in large letters to every passer-by that this was the abode of Dr. Wrightson. To the left of the white house stood the surgery, which was marked by a glaring red lamp and several bells, and over this surgery presided a helpless and timid young man named Titmas, the doctor’s only assistant.

Many wondered how it was that Dr. Wrightson did not engage a partner in his business; but that gentleman invariably turned a deaf ear to all hints of this nature. He was strong and well, he said, and able to do his work himself without any help at present. There would be time enough to talk about a partner when he grew to be an old man. The real fact of the matter was, that Dr. Wrightson could not bear to admit “a rival near his throne.” He was fond of his profession, proud of his reputation in it, and very jealous of every other practitioner. A partner would have driven him distracted; and I doubt if he would ever have allowed him to feel a single pulse, or to have sent so much as a black draught out of the dispensary, without his express permission.

Besides this, Dr. Wrightson had another reason for wishing to keep all the practice of Oakhampton in his own hands. The doctor had a daughter--his only child, and the very apple of his eye. To make, or save a fortune for Fanny was the first great object of Dr. Wrightson’s life, his one daily anxiety; and in this task the worthy doctor found an able and willing coadjutor in his sister Penelope, who shared all his hopes and fears, and seconded his endeavours to make a handsome provision for pretty Fanny. A partner would necessarily have been very much in the way of this project. If he did half the work, he would also have divided the profits, and that would by no means have suited Dr. Wrightson’s purposes; and, in short, a partner, or even an assistant above the calibre of the inoffensive Titmas, who had not two ideas in his head, would have caused Dr. Wrightson tortures of jealousy and uneasiness.

Fanny Wrightson had been carefully brought up at a first-class boarding-school; for her mother died when she was a very little child, and Aunt Penny, who then came to take charge of her brother’s establishment, though an excellent housekeeper, was scarcely equal to the responsibility of undertaking the education of her niece. The day she was seventeen, Fanny returned to Oakhampton as a “_finished_” young lady, with a variety of rather useless accomplishments, and a very slender stock of common sense.

Fanny had, moreover, a fine taste for romance, which seemed to be in some danger of fading away from pure inanition at Oakhampton, when an event occurred which startled the whole Wrightson family from their usual equanimity, and raised a storm of conflicting emotions in the heart of pretty Fanny.

“What _do_ you think? what _will_ you say? what _is_ to be done?” exclaimed Miss Wrightson, as she entered her brother’s room in an excited manner one afternoon just before dinner-time.

“Well, Penelope, what’s the matter now? Is the house on fire, or are there burglars in the cellar, or what?” asked Dr. Wrightson, quietly looking up from a medical journal which he was perusing with deep attention.

“No, no, brother! but something quite as bad. That old house in Church Street is taken, and by whom, do you think? By a medical man! There! His name is Peirce--Montague Peirce--and they are coming in at Lady Day.”

“The deuce they are!” cried Dr. Wrightson, throwing down his journal with a bang. “Much good may it do them! I flatter myself the poor man may go back where he came from without having done _me_ much injury. I have not lived in Oakhampton all these years without being able to hold my own against any impertinent upstart in the kingdom; and so you may tell him, if you see him, with my compliments--my most respectful compliments. Ha, ha, ha! a pretty joke, indeed. Poor Mr. Montague Peirce! I am sorry for him. His prospects are not very lively, poor fellow! Eh? Fanny, my dear, what have you got to say about it?”

“I say it’s a horrid, wicked shame,” replied Fanny, throwing her long curls over her shoulders, “and I quite hate this Mr. Montague Peirce already. What business has he to come poking his nose into Oakhampton, of all places? as if anybody would ever think of sending for him when they could get my dear old darling papa to attend them. The idea of such a thing! But never mind, Aunt Penny, perhaps Mr. Peirce will take some of the poor people who can’t pay, off papa’s hands; and then he will have more time to spare for us at home.”

“Bless the child! that’s not a bad idea,” said Dr. Wrightson. “So we’ll let him have some of the _very_ poor people, shall we? Yes, yes! so he shall. Excellent practice for a rising man. Give him confidence and experience, won’t it? We’ll hope, though, the poor fellow has not a large family to support, or else that he has some private means of his own. He won’t live in that house for nothing, I can tell him.”

“The rent alone is sixty pounds a year,” remarked Miss Wrightson; “and the garden is being thoroughly set in order, Mudge tells me. Mudge has been employed to do many little odd jobs about the house, and I met him coming out of it just now. Mudge hears Mr. Peirce is a single man--quite a young man--but has his mother living with him. He was doing well in London, and was reckoned very clever there, so the servants told Mudge; but the air did not suit the old lady, and so they have come to settle in the country. I can’t think whoever can have advised them to come to Oakhampton, of all places.

“Some ignorant busybody who did not know what he was about, you may depend upon it,” said Dr. Wrightson. “Now, let’s go to dinner, Penny.”

“It’s not as if you were ever ill, you know, or unable to attend to your duties,” continued Miss Penelope, as she walked into the dining-room, “or as if, when you did go away for a day or two, you could not get Mr. Halliday, from Littleton, to come and look after your patients. It’s such a ridiculous thing of a young man to come down from London, and try to cut you out at Oakhampton, brother.”

“It merely evinces great folly and presumption on the part of the young man, my dear Penny, and so we’ll say no more about the matter.”

But from that day forward the favourite topic in the Wrightson family was the last enormity committed by Mr. Montague Peirce.

“I saw that fellow’s trap standing at Hornibrook’s door,” Dr. Wrightson would suddenly observe; “that fellow” being the very mildest designation that was ever bestowed to Mr. Peirce.

“Oh, yes! I daresay you did. The man makes free with everybody, I hear,” Miss Wrightson would reply, indignantly. “He goes and pays people long visits, and bores them to death, I’ve no doubt, and then hopes all the town will take it for granted that he is attending them.”

It was very disagreeable for poor Dr. Wrightson, when he drove through the streets in his neat, respectable, blue brougham, to meet this young Peirce dashing past in his light, smart-looking dog-cart, drawn by a big chestnut horse; and it was most unpleasant for the whole family to go to church every Sunday, knowing they were liable to be jostled against “those Peirces” in the aisle.

Miss Penelope declared she could hardly bear to walk down the street, lest she should meet her adversaries; and as for Fanny, she could not think how it happened, but she never went near the windows without seeing the “dreadful man” pass by. It was curious, that, under these painful circumstances Fanny should spend the greater part of her time in looking out of the window. To be sure, Mr. Peirce was as good-looking and pleasant a young man as could be met with on a summer’s day, and the old lady, his mother, was quite a picture in her rich black silks; but the Wrightsons insisted upon considering the Peirces as their mortal enemies, and would not listen to a word in their favour.

The rest of the inhabitants of Oakhampton were naturally less rancorous against the intruders. The Peirces were not likely to injure them in any way. Mr. Priestly, the rector, his wife, and daughters, of course, called on Mrs. Peirce, and pronounced her to be a very lady-like, well-informed, agreeable person. The Pentelows, and the Fanthoms, and the Hornibrooks, and the Goslings, and old Mr. Lillywhite, thought it incumbent upon them to follow the example of the Rector, and it was soon rumoured that the Peirces were not unlikely to prove a great addition to the society of Oakhampton. Young men were scarce articles in that locality, and Mr. Peirce, not having much to do, entered with great zest into the cricket matches, and the croquet parties of the neighbourhood.

Besides, Oakhampton was a place that was improving rapidly. That is to say, a railroad had lately run through the town, and, in consequence, fresh villas, streets, terraces, and squares, were rising up in every direction. Quite a new population had been formed during the last few years, and many of these new comers, who had not known Dr. Wrightson from their cradles upwards, rejoiced in the advent of the new doctor and determined to patronize Mr. Peirce from London at once. There were, indeed, other persons in Oakhampton, old inhabitants who should have known better, but who were so perverse and ill-judging as to prefer the treatment of Mr. Peirce to that of Dr. Wrightson, who was by this disaffected party termed “a twaddling old woman.” Others, again, there were, who had been affronted occasionally, when, on sending for Dr. Wrightson himself, they had been put off with “that stupid creature, Titmas,” who never seemed to know what he was about; and these now gladly employed the rival practitioner. With the best intentions, poor Dr. Wrightson could not possibly make himself ubiquitous, or attend to fifty patients at once. Thus it happened one unlucky day, when Dr. Wrightson had been to pay a visit to his old and faithful ally, Lady Cardozo, who lived about five miles from Oakhampton, that Mrs. Pankhurst’s little girl took the opportunity of swallowing a pin, which stuck in her throat, and frightened the whole Pankhurst family into fits. As the case was one quite beyond the powers of poor Titmas, Mr. Peirce was called in, and extracted the pin with so much promptitude and skill that Mrs. Pankhurst was delighted with him, and asked him to prescribe for her own nervous affections at the same time, and also, to call the next day and see how the child was going on. It is true that Mr. Pankhurst (as in honour bound) called on Dr. Wrightson immediately, and explained to him fully all the circumstances of the case, but that headstrong and unreasonable old gentleman could not be induced to see the thing at all in its proper light. He looked annoyed and huffy, and remarked in his most caustic manner, “that if Mr. and Mrs. Pankhurst were satisfied with the attendance of Mr. Peirce, that was all that could be desired.” Dr. Wrightson had not the slightest wish to interfere, and thought Mr. Pankhurst could not do better than secure the services of the young man altogether. Having been so successful in his treatment of Miss Pankhurst, he would doubtless continue to give advice to the rest of the family. Perhaps when Dr. Wrightson said this, he never expected to be taken at his word; but it did so happen that the very next week the whole of the little Pankhursts (eight in number) were seized, in regular rotation, with the scarlatina, and Mr. Peirce was in regular attendance at Pankhurst Park for the next three months. This was a terrible blow to Dr. Wrightson, for Pankhurst Park was one of the most profitable households in the neighbourhood; and the Pankhursts were rich, influential people, and kept a good deal of company; and of course Mrs. Pankhurst went about in her usual idiotic manner, recommending Mr. Peirce as the most wonderful man of the age, and the only doctor worth consulting in the county.

Still Dr. Wrightson and his sister shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders, and repeated “that fellow would be found out before long.” Now, it so happened that the garden of Dr. Wrightson’s house in High Street stood at right angles with the garden of Mr. Peirce’s house in Church Street, and at a certain point, the walls met. Fanny Wrightson’s bed-room window commanded an excellent view of the Peirce’s garden, and it was a never-failing source of interest to watch the proceedings of the Peirce family. She was anxious to see what “the enemy” did, when he was at home, and she soon contrived to make herself complete mistress of his movements, and became intimately acquainted with his habits and customs. He was very kind and attentive to his mother, that was certain, and apparently he was good to his servants and spoke civilly to them. They looked as if they had a great regard for him; even the fat, lazy, old tabby cat loved him and followed him about, and jumped upon his shoulder whenever she could get the opportunity. Fanny could not help rather taking a fancy to that old cat of the Peirces, and when she got over the wall into the Wrightson’s garden, Fanny was actually guilty of giving her some milk sometimes when her aunt was out.

It was about this time Fanny took violently to the study of Shakspeare. “Romeo and Juliet” was her favourite play. What sweet passages there were in “Romeo and Juliet!” Nothing could be more striking, for instance, than that part where Juliet exclaims--”Oh, Romeo! Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?”

And how affecting were the lines--

“My only love sprung from my only hate, Too early seen unknown; and known too late, Prodigious birth of love it is to me, That I must love a loathed enemy.”

But nothing would induce either Dr. Wrightson or his sister to allow the poor Peirces any quarter. He was an interloper and an adversary of the most aggressive nature. If Mr. Peirce happening to meet Dr. Wrightson in the street, should, in the innocence of his heart, take off his hat in passing, the old gentleman would turn his head the other way and pretend not to see him, or would coldly return the greeting with a gesture of intense disgust.

When Miss Wrightson and Mrs. Peirce met at the house of some mutual acquaintance, as was not unfrequently the case, the spinster would draw herself up, tuck in her chin, and curtsey in her stiffest manner to the widow, and declining all conversation, would sniff alarmingly during the whole period that Mrs. Peirce remained in the room. Neither the doctor nor his sister scrupled to express the utmost solicitude for all Mr. Peirce’s patients. They feared any sick person ran a very poor chance who had Peirce for their medical attendant, and they did not hesitate to say that rather than be left to the mercy of “that inexperienced, conceited young fool,” they would prefer being in the hands of Mr. Titmas himself.

In spite of all they thought, said, and looked, however, Mr. Peirce’s practice increased daily. The farmers and their families flocked to his door on market days, for “the young man from London” had performed some almost miraculous cures, it was stoutly averred. Then many of the tradespeople thought it fair to give “young Peirce” a turn now and then, and his reputation spread to the servants of some great families in the neighbourhood. Old Lady Cardozo’s own maid actually refused to consult Dr. Wrightson about her digestion, and announced boldly “that Mr. Peirce had done such wonders for her cousin, Mrs. Hogsflesh, the butcher’s wife, in a similar case, that rather than not have the benefit of his advice, she would walk all the way into Oakhampton on her own legs, and pay him for it out of her own money.” And so good an effect had Mr. Peirce’s medicine upon the malady of Mrs. Milliken, that the good woman entreated her mistress to try just one bottle of it, for her ladyship suffered sadly from precisely the same symptoms as Mrs. Hogsflesh. The dose, taken surreptitiously and in great fear and trembling by old Lady Cardozo, was most efficacious, and though she was too loyal to her old friend to desert Dr. Wrightson altogether, still Lady Cardozo sent Mrs. Milliken constantly into Oakhampton on secret embassies to Mr. Peirce for further supplies of his very excellent remedy for a weak digestion.

And so the autumn slipped away, and the trees grew bare, and the winds howled, and the damp, chilly fogs of November fell upon the little town of Oakhampton, and the more Fanny saw of her father’s enemy, the less it became in her power to hate him, as she felt a good and dutiful daughter should do. This made her very unhappy at times.

Lectures on scientific subjects were quite an annual institution in Oakhampton during the long winter evenings. Fanny Wrightson had always been a very regular attendant at these lectures, not that she understood what they were about, the least in the world, or that she came home a bit wiser than she went out, but the lectures offered some excuse for a very mild kind of dissipation, and Fanny’s life was a monotonous one. This year Fanny was more devoted than ever to the “pursuit of knowledge under difficulties,” for Mrs. Peirce and her son were sure to be at the Athenæum, and it sometimes happened (Fanny declared she never knew how) that she found herself seated next to the Peirces, and then Mr. Peirce would very good-naturedly explain to her everything that she could not understand, and would make the most abstruse subjects as simple to her as A B C.

Dr. Wrightson never went to lectures. He was too tired of an evening, even if he had no patients to visit, and he was glad to take his “forty winks” in his armchair by the fire. Aunt Penelope was too much afraid of risking a bad cold to stir out after dark, and so Fanny was duly called for every Thursday evening at half-past seven, by her neighbours, the Pentelows, who also left her again at her own door about ten o’clock; and when she returned, Dr. and Miss Wrightson were too sleepy to ask many questions, or to make any stringent inquiries as to Fanny’s adventures. She thought it was not worth while to wake them up and make them uncomfortable by telling them about the Peirces, and I have no doubt that if they gave the matter a moment’s thought, they took it for granted that Fanny invariably sat between her friends, Eliza and Harriet Pentelow.

It chanced, however, one Thursday morning, that Dr. Wrightson descried in a shop window a notice, stating that Montague Peirce, Esq., was to deliver a lecture on chemistry at the Athenæum that evening, and he instantly came home, in great wrath and indignation, to forbid Fanny or any of his household to attend the lecture, as usual, on pain of his heavy displeasure. Not any member of his family, he declared, should “encourage the man to make a Tom-fool of himself by giving lectures.”

In vain Fanny remonstrated and entreated and coaxed her father to let her go, that once. Dr. Wrightson was inexorable, till his pretty little daughter in despair burst into tears, and then Aunt Penny interfered, and assured her father that he had better say no more about it. “Fanny was moped to death at home, and after all, it would be amusing to hear what a mess the young idiot made of his lecturing, and how he would be the laughing-stock of the place, with his absurd conceit and presumption.” So Fanny at length obtained a reluctant consent. It was raining hard when the Pentelows called for her, but Fanny did not care for that. Wrapped in her large waterproof cloak, she tripped along the muddy streets to the Athenæum, feeling very proud and very happy, and firmly convinced that if she had been forced to stay at home her heart must have broken at once. Mrs. Peirce saw her as she entered, and made her a sign to come and sit by her, and the old lady was so good and kind as to confide to Fanny her nervous fears for “Monty,” though, at the same time, she was quite sure his would be the best lecture of the season. And such was soon the opinion of everybody in the room. Mr. Peirce had so fine a voice, so happy a delivery, and such a thorough knowledge of his subject, that the attention of the audience was attracted, even by the first few sentences.

Mrs. Peirce and Fanny were gratified to their hearts’ content by the acclamations of applause which greeted the close of the lecture.

The evening wound up with some amusing experiments with laughing gas by which several school-boys and a shopman or two were thrown into convulsions of laughter. This proved so catching, that the whole room was in an uproar of merriment, and the audience clapped and screamed, and stamped and cheered, till the whole street resounded with the sounds of their mirth. At the very height of this confusion, a rough, dirty-looking man was observed to press hastily through the crowded hall, towards the platform. His eager looks and evident anxiety caught the attention of the lecturer, and he instantly went forward to meet him.

After speaking to the man for a moment, Mr. Peirce’s countenance changed to an expression of the deepest concern and alarm. He whispered a few words to his mother, and immediately left the room.

“What is it? What has happened? Is anybody ill?” inquired Fanny of Mrs. Peirce.

“My poor child,” said the old lady, putting her arm around Fanny’s waist affectionately, “something very terrible has happened. I hardly know how to tell you that your father has met with a sad accident. Can you bear it bravely? They say it is now freezing very hard out of doors, and the streets are slippery. It seems Dr. Wrightson, on his way to see a patient, has fallen down and hurt himself severely. They have sent for Montague. Let us try to slip quietly out at that side door, and we shall be at home as soon as they are.”

It was quite true, that the rain had soon turned to sleet, and the sleet had frozen as it fell, and the streets were a perfect sheet of glass, in which the houses were reflected as in a mirror.

Dr. Wrightson had been sent for to a sick person, and in picking his way cautiously along the pavement, he had been suddenly startled, just as he passed the Athenæum, by the shouts of laughter and applause that issued from its partly-opened doors. In his astonishment and irritation at these unexpected sounds, the doctor made a false step, his foot slipped from under him, and he fell, with his head on the curbstone and his leg doubled under him; and there he lay, stunned and helpless, till some workingmen passing by, ran to his assistance.

Seeing he was perfectly unconscious, the men fancied he was dead, and this was the report that one of them carried to Mr. Peirce.

When Fanny and Mrs. Peirce made their way into the street, they found that it was hardly possible to walk without falling. No horse could keep its footing at all, and people were slipping and sliding about in every direction. It was with considerable difficulty that the two ladies reached Dr. Wrightson’s door in safety, and there they were met by a melancholy cavalcade. The good old Doctor lay on a shutter, borne by half-a-dozen strong men, and was followed by a crowd of sorrowing friends. At the head of the procession walked the Rector and Mr. Peirce.

At the surgery-door appeared Mr. Titmas, frightened at the tramping of so many feet, who, when he learnt what had occurred, speedily lost the little stock of presence of mind he had ever possessed, and collapsed altogether into a state of helpless imbecility.

Miss Wrightson, who was summoned down-stairs by the shrieks of the parlour-maid, instantly fainted dead away, in the front hall, just as the lifeless form of her brother was brought into the house.

Nobody seemed to have any presence of mind but poor little Fanny, who stood there, pale and trembling to be sure, but quite ready to obey Mr. Peirce’s directions, and to make herself useful in every possible way. Under Mrs. Peirce’s superintendence a bed was soon prepared for Dr. Wrightson, in his own study; splints and bandages were procured from the surgery, and Mr. Peirce proceeded to examine the injuries sustained by the poor gentleman.

His head was badly cut, but it was hoped that no great harm was done in that quarter; his right leg, however, had sustained a compound fracture, and he seemed much bruised and shaken by his fall. Mr. Priestly strove to help Mr. Peirce, Mr. Titmas being quite incapable of being of the slightest use to anybody, and Mrs. Peirce proved herself to be a most valuable and experienced nurse. As soon as Miss Wrightson was restored to her senses, she sat crying and rocking herself backwards and forwards, in a corner of the room, declaring that her brother was dying, and that she should not long survive him, while Fanny knelt by her father’s bedside, patiently watching the proceedings of Mr. Peirce and his mother, and waiting upon them in a quiet unobtrusive way, which raised her very much in their opinion.

The first words spoken by Dr. Wrightson were, “Send for Halliday immediately. I don’t know what has happened; but it seems to me, I am ill, and Titmas is no better than a fool. But don’t send for that fellow Peirce, whatever you do. D’ye hear? all of you. I tell you I won’t have the man in my house as long as I am alive to be the master of it.”

“Ahem! my good friend,” began the Rector, gently clearing his throat, “it is not possible to send to Littleton to-night; the roads are quite impassable. You have had the misfortune to slip down yourself, and your leg has been broken. It is now set, and will, we trust, under the blessing of Providence, be ere long restored to use.”

“Nonsense! Don’t tell me,” cried the Doctor, angrily, “Halliday must and shall be sent for. He will come directly he knows I am ill. My leg shall not be set till Halliday comes. Let no one dare to meddle with it.”

“Oh! my dear, dear father,” said Fanny, throwing her arms around him, “do be good and let Mr. Peirce doctor your leg; it will soon be better, if you will only lie still and be patient. For the sake of your poor little Fanny, do let Mr. Peirce stay with you now. Oh! Mr. Peirce, please don’t mind what he says. Don’t let papa send you away. If he should say anything a little rude you won’t listen to him, will you? I think he is so ill he scarcely knows what he says. Dear Mrs. Peirce, pray ask your son to stay here, whatever papa may say against it.”

“Nothing will induce me to leave him, as long as I can be of the slightest use to him, Miss Fanny, you may depend upon that,” said Mr. Peirce, firmly.

In the meantime, Dr. Wrightson tried to move, but fell back with a moan, and shut his eyes again. His face was quite contracted with pain.

“Calm yourself, dear sir,” began Mr. Priestly once more. “Consider that your system has sustained a severe shock. You cannot keep your mind too quiet. Leave everything to us, and try to sleep. Let me entreat you to lie still, and trust yourself to the kind care of my very excellent young friend here, and his good mother. Believe me, you could not possibly be in better hands.”

“My patients! what will become of my patients?” groaned Dr. Wrightson presently. “That fellow will inveigle away every patient I have. If I lose my practice in Oakhampton, I am a ruined man this night. I am too old to go away and begin life afresh elsewhere. You will be left a beggar, my poor child, if I lose my patients here.”

“If you would allow me, Dr. Wrightson, to act as your assistant, till you are able to make some arrangement with your friend Mr. Halliday, I can only say I should be most happy to do so,” said Mr. Peirce. “I would, of course, work strictly under your directions, and follow out your wishes in every respect; and I would take care to make it understood that I was only taking your place for the time being. There! now will you consent to go to sleep with an easy conscience?”

Dr. Wrightson did not answer for some minutes, then suddenly holding out his hand to Mr. Peirce, he exclaimed, with tears in his eyes:

“I am at your mercy, sir; I shall lie here for many a long week to come, and maybe I shall never again be the man I was. There is a fine opening in Oakhampton, sir, for a rising young man now. You had better take advantage of it. I am not able to help myself.”

“Thank you, Dr. Wrightson; then you will let me have my own way,” said Mr. Peirce, quietly; “and you will consider me as your junior partner till you are quite strong and well again. Nay, if you have any scruples about the matter, you shall pay me, just as you do my friend Titmas--there need be no obligations between us. And by the by, to begin with, where were you bound to this evening? I had better just run round there at once, and when I return I shall hope to find you quite comfortable and fast asleep. My mother will remain here to-night; she is a capital nurse.” And the young doctor, feeling amply repaid for his services by a look of intense gratitude from Fanny, retired to get his instructions from Mr. Titmas.

The next day the snow fell fast and lay thick on the ground. All communication between Oakhampton and Littleton was entirely cut off for more than a week. No Mr. Halliday could by any possibility come over to attend to the medical requirements of Oakhampton. Mr. Peirce, however, cheerfully trudged about in his great jack boots, though he was often up to his waist in the snow, and he never failed faithfully to report progress to Dr. Wrightson of all his patients, humoring the old gentleman by invariably asking his advice and opinion, though, perhaps, he did not always follow it very implicitly.

On Christmas Eve, Mr. Halliday, with some difficulty, made his way to the bedside of his old friend, and expressed himself highly delighted with the progress Dr. Wrightson had made. Nothing could have been more judicious, he declared, than Mr. Peirce’s mode of treatment. The leg was going on marvellously well, and though it would naturally be a tedious process at the doctor’s age, still the bones were knitting famously already. Dr. Wrightson was most fortunate at such a moment to fall into such skilful hands. “There was not one man in a dozen who could have made so neat a job of such a case.” So said Mr. Halliday emphatically.

“Ah,” sighed Dr. Wrightson; “it’s all very well, but I’m done for, Halliday. I have had a great shake; I shall never be fit for much work again after this. I never was ill before in my life, and at my age one can’t stand this sort of thing. My poor child here will suffer for it. I ought to have looked out for a partner before this, and have got a good round sum down, for a share in the business. Now it is simply worth nothing at all. That young fellow Peirce has got hold of all my patients. They seem to take a fancy to him, and no partner of mine will have a chance against him. But he’s a clever dog, and knows what he is about; I must say that for him.”

“Then, in the name of goodness, why not make him your partner, Wrightson? It is quite out of the question that I should come over from Littleton to look after your patients, and so I tell you plainly. I could not undertake it. Why not get this young Peirce now, to put his money in with yours, and save you all the hard work? That will be your plan, depend upon it. You will then have Oakhampton entirely in your own hands, and carry all before you.”

“That’s what they all say,” replied Dr. Wrightson; “but the man would not be such a fool as to consent to it, when he can get all my connection away from me for nothing, if he chooses to try. The ladies are all for him; he is popular enough here already. They are tired of me. I am old and worn out, and past my work now, and Peirce is the man to suit them henceforth in Oakhampton. I can see it plainer every day.”

“Oh, papa! dear papa! pray don’t talk in that dreadful way,” cried Fanny, who was in the room; “Mr. Peirce is only anxious to work for you, and be of use to you, till you are better. I assure you he would gladly be your partner, or do anything to make you happy and comfortable. Indeed, and indeed, papa, you may believe me when I tell you this.”

“Bless my heart alive! Fanny, how do you know what Peirce wants? Why, Fanny, child, what’s all this mean, eh? How the girl colours, and how guilty she looks, a little minx! Come, child, tell me what makes you think Peirce would like to be my partner instead of my rival? I should like to know.”

“Here is Mr. Peirce, ask _him_,” replied Fanny, hiding her blushing face behind the red moreen curtains of her father’s bed.

“My object, sir, is not so much to be your partner as your son,” said Mr. Peirce, coming forward boldly. “If I can combine the two relations, I shall indeed esteem myself a fortunate man. Will you let me help you to work for our dear Fanny? I do not think you can be more devoted to her interests than I am. Let me see. Suppose we say a share in your practice would be worth fifteen hundred pounds--I have that sum lying idle at my banker’s at this moment. It shall be paid into your account as soon as you please. Then I am not entirely without private means. My father left me an income of about eight hundred a year. Will you come to terms and give me Fanny’s hand into the bargain?”

“What! so you’ve got possession of her heart safe enough, I’ll warrant me, you young rogue, and I have not a word to say for myself. I’m fairly conquered; you’ve won the day. Fanny, where are you? To go and play such a trick to your poor old bed-ridden father! Eh! are you not ashamed of yourself, miss?”

“No, papa, not a bit!” said Fanny, coming out of her concealment behind the curtain; “and you have nobody but yourself to thank for it, after all; for if you had not abused poor Montague from morning till night, I dare say I should never have thought of him twice, or troubled my head about him in any way. As it was--”

“You never thought of anybody else I may venture to hope, and I am duly grateful to your father for it,” added Mr. Peirce confidently.

“Well, well, well! Have it your own way. I am a poor, broken-down, useless, helpless, old man; but I did not think my own daughter would have gone over to the enemy. When there are traitors in the camp, I’ve nothing for it but surrender at discretion. Make your own terms--give me no quarter--I’ve deserved it all for being a wicked, jealous, uncharitable, ill-natured old brute. You’ve heaped coals of fire enough on my head, Peirce, if that’s any consolation to you.”

“To-morrow is Christmas Day,” said Fanny, gently taking her father’s hand, and putting it into that of her lover. “Now, father dear, promise me you will never have any more enemies as long as you live, which we hope will be very, very long, now you have Montague to take all the hard work off your hands. In Oakhampton, at least, let us always have in future ‘Peace and good-will towards men.’”

HON. ELEANOR EDEN.

XVII

THE COMING OF THE SHIP: THE DOCTOR’S PATIENT.

A selected reading from The Head of a Hundred. Edited by Maud Wilder Goodwin. Dr. Humphrey Huntoon, a young Englishman, in the early days of the colonies comes to this country in pique at the coldness of Elizabeth Romney, his sweetheart, who is above him in social station. The story is filled with charming pictures of colonial life and sentiment. In the opening part of this reading, Huntoon, in a burst of confidence, tells his old friend, the ship-captain, of his disappointment in love. In the second part a new ship comes from England.

’TIS strange what lightness of spirit comes with the laying bare of a sore heart. Verily, a trouble half told is half healed. Here I, who had not been merry for months, found myself now smiling in the dark, as I talked of those pleasant days of old. Then, like a mourner ashamed that he hath forgot his grief, I caught up my melancholy once more.

“Well, well! All that is over and gone. If she loved me in those childish years (and I still think she did), she outgrew the foolishness soon enow. Yet, from time to time, as she grew into maidenhood, she let drop some word, some hint, as tho’ she would say, ‘Perhaps!’ but ere I could pry into the meaning of her words her eyes gathered merriment, like as if they were laughing at the poor fool who allowed himself to be cheated thus.

“Once, ere I went to Oxford, I rode beneath her window. She, leaning out of the casement, did drop a sprig of lad’s-love, which a moment before she had been holding to her lips; then, when I looked up, with my heart in my eyes, she slammed the window to, and a moment later I heard her calling her dog within.”

“Tush, tush, lad! A woman’s ways are like the maze at Hampton Court. If thou lose the clew, thou mayst wander round and round forever and be no nearer coming out. Why didst thou not ask her flat, would she have thee for her husband?”

“Why not, indeed. Ah, therein lies the root of all my bitterness! When I had finished my studies at Oxford and got my degree as a physician and chirurgeon in London, I found myself with a scanty portion of a thousand pounds. Yet had I none the less high hopes of carving my way to fame and fortune, as other men have done from still lower estate. This did I write to Sir William Romney, and in a packet I enclosed a letter to his daughter.

“Therein I told her anew what she knew of old, that I loved her. I asked her not to share the fortunes of a poor adventurer. I did but seek a pledge that she would grant me a year and a day, and a promise that if by that time I had aught of success to lay at her feet, she would look on my suit with favor.”

“It was done like thyself, Humphrey. What answer made she?”

“Answer! Oh, it makes me mad to think on’t! She might have said me nay, and yet I would have gone my way loving her like a knight of old, without hope of reward or return; but to be flouted and baited, and badgered and mocked, when I had offered her that poor thing, my heart--oh, it was ill done!”

The instinct of my body to keep pace with my restless and turbulent soul led me to stride up and down, striving to master the storm within me. When I took my seat again, Captain Chester drew me on to speak further.

“Perhaps,” he said, “the maid was but the mouthpiece of her father. I hear of him everywhere as a hard, cold man.”

“Oh! Ay, ay, ay,” I broke in, “I have said all that over and over to myself, like a madman, since ever I received Sir William’s cool note of dismissal, inclosing the daughter’s mocking lines; but whenever I would soothe my sore heart with the thought that she wrote it not of her own free will, my reason says: ‘’Tis false, and thou knowst it!’ She would brave a thousand fathers if she really loved, and her will was crossed. I know, of course, that her refusal jumped with her father’s wish.”

I was down for a week with that wretched James City fever. By day I shivered, and by night I burned with a consuming heat. Pory said it served me right that I, who had come hither hoping to fatten on the misfortunes of others, should myself fall a victim.

Thus he talked, like himself, and equally like himself he stayed by my bedside day and night, scarcely taking off his clothes, tending me as if I were a baby, and mixing doses of the bark, a sovran remedy, till he saw me well on the road to recovery.

My convalescence he cheered as he had cured my illness. One day (I was quite recovered then) my lively friend came bounding in, full of excitement.

“A ship lieth in the harbor,” cried he, “and she hath brought--what think ye?”

“Sooth, I know not. How should I? And if I did, ‘twere cruel to spoil thy sport by saying so. What is this wondrous cargo?”

“Why, twenty maids, come out with one that is already betrothed to Babcock, the blacksmith!”

“Well, what of it?”

“What of it, man! Why, ‘twould be the making of the colony could we get twenty score in place of one. Ay, I say, ‘twould be the making of this colony. A shipload of good wives were the best cargo England could send us.”

“And thou wouldst choose the handsomest for thyself, by right of thine office, I dare be sworn.”

“Nay, not I. I have ever had too poor luck at play to throw dice with Fate for such heavy stakes.” With this he ran out, laughing.

When he was gone, I stretched my head forth from the window of my lodging. Yonder in the river, a tall ship lay black against the shining water. I could see the sailors in their glazed hats and loose, flapping breeches, casting anchor to the time of their harsh song. Skiffs and canoes were plying busily betwixt the ship and the shore. One curious thing I noted, that, whereas only one went out in each canoe, two came back; and then, as mine ear caught the ringing of the church bells, and mine eyes marked the gallants who had gone of late ill-clad and worse shaven, now tricked out in bands of fine lawn and ruffles at their wrists, a sudden light brake on me, and I realized that all this was because the twenty maids were come, and straightway these bachelors, who till now had been quite content in their single estate, must set their silly hearts on being married.

“Ho! there, Master John!” I shouted, as I caught sight of Pory’s grizzled head and pointed beard under my window. “Read me this riddle: ‘What is that which flies when pursued, and pursues when fled from?’”

“A maid.”

“Verily, thou art a shrewd fellow to have guessed it. Come up, therefore, and tell me all thou knowest which thou mayst do, and yet be gone in five minutes.”

“That my civility may the more brightly shine against the foil of thine uncivil words, I will come, and, to heap coals of fire on thy head, I will tell thee of the scene on shipboard. The choosing of husbands and wives went on as merrily as the choosing of partners for a country-dance. It was a busy market, I can tell thee.”

“A market--how meanest thou?”

“Why, ‘tis thus they manage it, by bargain and sale; and belike ‘tis as good an arrangement as any, since when the husband hath paid down his hundred pound of tobacco for a wife, he is bound to make himself believe he hath a bargain, and the wife, seeing he hath set so high an estimate on her worth, in honor must strive to live up to his valuation.”

“And was every one of the twenty maids married thus?”

“Ay, all but one, and she remained without a partner from choice, which thou wouldst have declared impossible. Many offered for her, though she wore her veil and coverchief close and would not show her features. But she would look at none, and went off at the last to lodge with her friend--one that was taken to wife by Miles Cary. I was somewhat struck with curiosity over the conduct of the one unwed maid, and I searched out her name in the ship’s register, where she is set down as Elizabeth Devon. Now, fare thee well! for my five minutes are over, and if I told thee more, ‘twould be what I know not, and, ergo--lies.”

After my nimble-witted friend was gone his way, I sat for long, looking down into the street and watching the bridal couples as they passed from under Parson Buckle’s blessing to their new homes. All this billing and cooing and setting up of new households made me feel but the more lonely and doleful. So I went not abroad that day, tho’ I was well enow to be out, but sat reading and studying with no other comforter than my pipe. But, to say truth, the pipe is no mean consoler, and there is no friend that doth so adapt himself to thine every mood, so partake, as it were, the very shade and subtlety of thy thought and feeling, as tobacco. Well, as I sat thus, the day wore on to evening. The flame in my pipe was expiring with a final flicker, when a knock sounded at my door.

“Come in!” I called, and Miles Cary entered.

“Why, how now, Cary! Art thou come to complain of thy bride of half-a-dozen hours? Hath she beaten thee over the head with the new broomstick, and thou art ashamed of thy black eye, and come to get it healed by stealth after dark?”

“Nay, ‘tis nowt that,” answered the burly yeoman, as he stood awkwardly twirling his Monmouth cap on the end of his finger.

I saw that my jests were less amusing to him than to me; so putting off my jibing tone, I asked him seriously if aught were ailing in his household.

“Ay, ‘tis the friend of my wife.” He grinned with sheepish pleasure over the last word.

“Is that the unwed maid, Elizabeth Devon, of whom Master Pory spake?”

“Yes; her arm was hurt on the ship in the storm, and methinks it must have been ill-treated, for, in place of mending it grows ever worse; yet have we had a hard task to persuade her to see the leech, and even now am I come without her consent. I fear me she is o’er-headstrong; but my Kate will have nowt said to her save wi’ cap in hand, and she gives more attention to her friend than to her husband.”

“Well, well, that is but natural. Grumble not, Cary; but remember that thy courtship must be done after marriage, and be content to bear awhile with coolness.”

I took up my box as I spake, and we went out into the night together. As we walked through the town, I marvelled much that all should be changed of a sudden. ‘Twas no longer a camp, but a village. For good or evil, the first English homes had been planted here in the heart of the wilderness.

We stopped before Cary’s cottage, and I marked its shining neatness. The stepping-stone in front of the door was polished as smooth as marble, and the floor within, for all it was but of logs rudely smoothed with an axe, was clean and neatly set in order.

As I stepped into the kitchen, which served for hall and parlor and dining-room all in one, I was greeted by the mistress of the house with a deep-bobbing courtesy which brought her short skirt down over her bright stockings, and almost hid the high heels and pointed toes of her wedding slippers.

“Is thy friend badly hurt?” said I.

“Ay, sir, she suffers much, but she bears it ever with so brave a heart and so cheerful a face that none would guess it to look at her.”

“Hast thou bandages and swathing-cloths at hand?”

“Nay, not rightly at hand, but a plenty in the sea-chest, which hath not yet been opened. Wilt thou lend a hand--_Miles_?”

I could but smile to watch the coquetry with which the name was spoken, and to see how a soft tone and glance oiled the wheels of life and made the half-sulky husband her willing slave.

Foreseeing that the uncording of the chest would be a matter of time, I stepped to the door of the nearer chamber (the house boasted but two), and finding it ajar, I bowed my head to its low proportions and entered.

The room had been filled with flowers, in honor of the home-coming of the bride. ‘Tis wonderful to me how thoughtful and tender to women these rough fellows oft be. The window-sash, its panes filled with oiled paper, was swung open and the night wind blew the perfume of wildrose and honeysuckle in my face. I can feel it still. A single candle shed a dim light around and threw a yellow ray on a wooden armchair close to the table.

As I turned me toward this chair, suddenly my heart stopped beating. If the thing had not been so wildly impossible, I could have sworn it was Elizabeth Romney herself sitting there. The maid, whoever she was, had the same delicate curve of ear and throat, the same droop of the eyelid, the very trick of the hand lying open palm upward on the knee.

I brushed my hand across my eyes and looked again. My God!--Incredible!--It could not be!--yet what a likeness!

Then I told myself that I was going mad from dwelling too long on one thought. I must speak and break the spell. As I opened my lips, a sudden searching conviction fell upon me like a lightning flash that this was indeed she, the one woman in the world to me.

I gasped out: “_Elizabeth!_”

The maiden turned, and for the first time caught sight of me standing thus in the doorway. She gave one low cry of “_Thou!_”

After that one word we faced each other in blank silence. The folk in books have ever some pat speech ready for such a moment; but in real life ‘tis not so. How could I speak when my brain was whirling like a millwheel, and my voice choked in my throat? I stood still and looked upon her, and the longer I looked, the harder I found it to believe my eyes were not playing me a trick.

Yet ‘twas but the truth they told me. There she sat--she that had been brought up to be tended and waited upon, and compassed about with luxuries, now sick and suffering, with only a wooden armchair to rest upon, and a cottage roof to shelter her. How, in God’s name, had it come to pass?

Her face was deadly pale, for all she had been three months on the sea; and now, as she gazed at me, she grew even whiter, and swayed as though she would fall in a swoon. But all the while she kept her eyes fixed steadfastly on mine. They were eyes never to be forgotten by one who had seen them once. I have heard folks praise the brilliancy of her glance and the curling length of her eye-lashes; but, to her lover, there lay a subtler charm in the tender trouble of her eye-brows, bending slightly downward toward the inner corner. I noted it now as distinctly as the drowning man counts the bubbles in the water.

I was the first to find my voice, and I hated myself that it sounded hard and stern, when I was mad to fling myself at her feet and entreat her to trust herself to me. But that abominable diffidence of mine, which is so akin to pride, made me seem in her eyes, I doubt not, like a pragmatical schoolmaster chiding a recreant child.

“Elizabeth Romney!--am I dreaming, or is it indeed thou--come on the ship with the maids?”

An angry flush swept over the whiteness of her cheek and rose to meet the hair that curled in childish rings round her little ears.

“Thou art thinking, perhaps, that I, too, like these others, am come three thousand miles in search of a husband?”

I knew not what to say, and so I said nowt.

“Well, believe ‘t if you will!” she flung out, her eyes one blaze of wrath; “but believe not that thou art such a husband as I would seek--not though thou wert the only man on this side of the ocean, and though all the tobacco in Virginia were the price in thine hand.”

“I am not likely to believe that, Mistress Betty,” I answered bitterly. “Yet would I rather believe anything than that this journey is a mad prank of thine without rhyme or reason. Wild and venturesome thou hast ever been, but never unmindful of thy sex or thy station.”

“Which means that now I have shown myself unmindful of both. I thank thee, Humphrey Huntoon; but till I seek thy counsel, do thou keep thy censure!”

I know not what we might have spoken further, for anger was hot in both our hearts; but at that instant Dame Cary and her good man came in, bearing a roll of linen and a whale-oil lamp, which, vile smelling as it was, gave a brighter light than the candle.

As it shone on the maiden’s face, the look of illness and suffering was more plain to be seen; and I cursed myself for a fool that I had forgotten all this time the arm I had been called to tend. I took the linen from Dame Cary’s hand and tore it into strips.

“Will you be good enough to let me see the hurt?” I asked, in a constrained voice. Without a word, she threw back her short cape and showed me the right arm wound round and round with clumsy swathings, which I straightway set to work to unwind. It was well that my calling had trained the fingers to work coolly.

I went near to breaking out into oaths when I laid bare the arm and saw how great a bungler had had charge of the hurt there on the ship. As it was, that which had been so ill done must be undone.

The doing of this cruel kindness went near to break my heart, yet she who suffered bore it without a groan. The free hand grasped the arm of the chair more closely, and the face was set in the look of one who would die ere look or sound of weakness be wrung from her. Only the sharper drawing down of the eyebrow marked the strain and stress of suffering.

At length, after a time which seemed to me longer than any month I have known since, the poor arm was rebound in a pair of splints hastily made from barrel staves. As I swathed it in band over band of linen, I turned to Dame Cary--I dared not trust my voice to address that other. “Your friend,” quoth I, “hath an excellent courage.”

“That hath she!” broke in Miles Cary, who had the true English love of bravery, and who, as he stood by, holding the lamp while I worked, had been greatly stirred by the sight of the maid’s endurance. “Had we but a company of soldiers like her, we had no need of a stockade round about James City.”

“Ay,” put in his wife, “but ye should have seen her on the sea! In that great storm when her arm was broke, she was the only one of us that screamed not, nor wailed, nor wished herself on land; but went about cheering and encouraging all.”

Methought I saw a glance of warning pass from the girl in the chair to the woman in waiting, for she straightway brake off her discourse, and spake quite sharply to her husband, bidding him go before with the light, that we might follow without breaking our necks.

So they went out and I walked behind them stupidly as far as the door. There I found my wits, and, turning back, I stepped close to the armchair.

“The doctor,” quoth I, in a low voice, “craves pardon for the hurt he could not help.”

“The _doctor_,” she replied, also speaking very soft, “is pardoned in advance, for he hath but done his duty. For the friend, ‘tis another matter. I cannot soon forget that he has failed me.”

“Yet he, too, hath but thy good at heart, and that thou wilt some day confess; and so must I leave thee. Good-night, madam!”

I spoke the last words in a louder tone, and, bowing low, I passed out of the chamber.

MAUD WILDER GOODWIN.

XVIII

DR. PENNINGTON’S COUNTRY PRACTICE.

NEXT to her husband and her children there was nothing that Mrs. Graham liked better than worrying herself. To a degree far beyond that attained by any other woman in Marston, she enjoyed “the luxury of woe,” and during the last few days she had been indulging in it without stint. For during those days there had been five burglaries in that town, and the little place, ordinarily no more excited than most summer resorts, had become almost hysterical. First of all the post-office had been robbed, and then, as though that robbery had been merely by way of practice, the thieves on the next night had broken into a private house. Other robberies had followed in quick and defiant succession, and within twenty-four hours the little red brick railroad-station on Orawaupum Street had been broken into, and the money in the safe stolen. Then indeed there was excitement, for, as in all small towns not too remote from large cities, the station was the real centre of town life, and its misfortune was looked on almost as a sacrilege.

Even the summer residents seemed to consider it as such, and when, as was the custom at Marston, the ladies drove down to the station in the late afternoon to meet their husbands on their return from the city, not one but looked at the little red building as though she expected to hear it cry out against the profanation.

The older ladies sat comfortably in their carriages, and, in voices pitched high because they were in the open air, talked volubly of the burglaries. One and all agreed that they would never have expected a burglary in Marston, and Mrs. Graham, by reason of her power of self-worry, speedily obtained a high and commanding position among them as a sort of possible martyr. The younger ladies, at the urgent entreaties of their own or their friends’ inquisitive little brothers, left their carriages and moved in a pretty crowd upon the station. There the boys pointed out the drawers from which the money had been stolen, and the girls examined them from a distance with respectful interest. There, too, they saw the station-master in close conversation with an important-looking person, while a young man seated on the desk in the office swung his legs vigorously and looked bored. He brightened up obviously, however, at the sudden influx of pretty girls, and removed his hat. The other men merely glanced at the intruders and continued their conversation.

When they had seen everything, the young ladies retreated to the platform, from which they carried on an animated conversation with their elders in the carriages, while the bored young man came to the window and looked at them with admiration.

Suddenly all the talk was checked. Then a murmur of respectful admiration ran through the crowd of ladies, and the coachmen sat up straighter and flicked their horses. Even the ubiquitous small boys became silent, as into the station yard whirled an open carriage in which sat a young and very pretty woman. As soon as it had drawn up near the platform, the talk began again, this time all directed at its occupant.

“How do you do to-day, Mrs. Marmaduke?” was the first remark from everybody, with a rising inflection on the second syllable of “to-day;” and when Mrs. Marmaduke had replied that she was very well, there was a chorus of almost incredulous congratulation. Then there was a hush, broken in a moment by Mrs. Graham.

“Have you heard anything of your silver yet?” she began. Without waiting for an answer, she continued, “I wonder how you bear it so well. I’m sure I shouldn’t. I’m dreadfully afraid of burglars, and I know it would kill me to know that they were in the house.”

“But I didn’t know it,” said Mrs. Marmaduke, with superiority. “Not even Mr. Marmaduke knew that they had been there until afterwards.”

“Ah, yes,” returned Mrs. Graham; “but to find out, even afterwards, that the horrid men had been there--ugh!--and had taken all your silver--every bit of it--”

“They left some,” coolly interrupted the heroine. Mrs. Graham pretended not to hear her.

“You should have had a burglar-alarm,” she said, patronizingly. “Mr. Graham is going to have one put in for me.”

“We have a burglar-alarm,” answered Mrs. Marmaduke. “But it was out of order.”

“Oh, how annoying!” chorused all the listeners except Mrs. Graham, who sank back in her seat and signalled for her daughter Clara to come to her.

Just then the train came around the curve below the station, and all the adventurous girls retreated to their carriages. Out from his office ran the old station-master, followed by the important-looking man and by the bored young man. The man who carried the mail-bag to the post-office sauntered up, and for an instant everything was expectation. Then expectation became reality and confusion as the train came to a stop. For a moment there was an outpouring of passengers, then a thinning out of the crowd, and then a sort of stampede of the carriages for the post-office, until, when the train started again, only Mrs. Marmaduke’s and Mrs. Graham’s remained. Mrs. Marmaduke lay back in hers, looking at her husband, as he stood on the platform talking to the bored young man, while Mrs. Graham, after looking carefully around for her husband, sank back without being able to find him. Clara Graham had looked also, and when she could find neither her father nor her brother she began again the conversation interrupted by the arrival of the train.

“There were two burglars, mamma,” she said. “One was rather an old man, they say, while the other was much younger. And of course there must have been a third one to watch--”

“Drive on, George,” interrupted Mrs. Graham; and the coachman had just turned from the platform when the gray-bearded station-master ran out.

“Hi, there! Mrs. Graham!” he shouted, waving a brown envelope, and as the carriage stopped with a jerk, the old man plunged down from the platform and ran to it.

“A telegram from Mr. Graham,” he explained, and, while Mrs. Graham opened it hurriedly, he waited with one hand on the wheel-guard.

“Who were those two men talking with you, Mr. Underhill?” asked Clara Graham, inquisitively.

“Wal, the gentleman wi’ the red beard--him a-standin’ in the doorway noaw,” answered the old man, pointing towards the station, “is the representative o’ th’ _Martson Enterprise_,--Mr. Long his name is. An’ t’other one, him a-talkin’ to Mr. Marm’duke, ‘s ‘porter fur one o’ th’ Noo York papers,--I don’ rightly know’s name.”

“Clara,” said Mrs. Graham,--”There’s no answer, Mr. Underhill. Drive on, George. Clara, your father won’t be home to-night; he and Phil are detained by business. They won’t be home until to-morrow night.”

“Oh, well,” said Clara, cheerfully, “of course we shall miss them, but I think we can get along one night without them.”

“Ordinarily, yes,” her mother answered, promptly. even on her husband. “Ordinarily, most certainly. But there are these awful burglars, and we haven’t a man in the house.”

“There’s George, mamma,” suggested Clara. But George with great promptness, spoke over his shoulder, as old coachmen have a way of doing:

“Please, mem, I’ve got to be ‘ome to-night, because o’ my wife h’end the baby as she h’expects.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Graham, slowly, “George is right; he must be at home. Could your Cousin Will come, do you think, Clara?--No: he’s away, too. There’s Mr. Frisbie; we might ask him to take care of us. No sensible burglars would think of robbing the parsonage.”

“No, I don’t suppose they would,” answered Clara. “But then Mr. Frisbie wouldn’t leave Mrs. Frisbie and the little baby alone. And then suppose the burglars were not sensible--”

“They must be,” said Mrs. Graham, with decision, “or they wouldn’t have broken into the Marmadukes’ house.”

“Oh, mamma,” suggested Clara, “couldn’t we telegraph to somebody to come out to us? We might have a messenger-boy sent out, or two or three, if you wanted.”

“I’ve got a boy, miss,” said George, the coachman. “’E might take care o’ ye, mem, over night.”

But when she found that George’s boy was only nine years old, Mrs. Graham shook her head.

“He’s too young. And I do not want messenger-boys. They would be so slow, and they wear great rubber trousers and always have their hands in their pockets.” This was said very slowly and thoughtfully.

“We might telegraph to some friend in the city, mamma,” suggested Clara. “He could come out on the ten o’clock train, and get here before eleven. I don’t suppose the burglars would come before eleven.”

“Oh, no. They never come before eleven o’clock,” said Mrs. Graham, as decidedly as though she had served an apprenticeship with a burglar and knew all the rules governing his entrance into the best houses. The idea of telegraphing to a friend evidently pleased her. “We might telegraph to--to--”

“We might telegraph to Dr. Pennington,” suggested Clara, with just the suspicion of a blush. “He would be sure to come.”

Her mother did not notice the blush, and was evidently considering the question of telegraphing. Just then the carriage turned in at the Grahams’ gate.

“We must telegraph,” said Mrs. Graham, nodding her head with great decision. “Yes, we must telegraph, and to Dr. Pennington.”

It was later than usual that evening when Dr. John Pennington dropped into the little French restaurant near his office, to which his bachelorhood doomed him, and, as almost every one else had gone, he was forced to eat a solitary meal. As he looked carelessly through an evening paper which he had taken up to pass the time, he happened to notice the following bit of news:

“The village of Marston is very much excited over several burglaries committed there recently. The residence of E. L. Marmaduke, a wealthy merchant of New York City, was entered on Tuesday night, and a large quantity of jewelry and silver stolen. Last night, after visiting several houses with little success, the burglars broke into the railroad-station. Many commutation tickets had been renewed the day before, and the burglars secured nearly two hundred dollars in money. There are supposed to be three men in the gang. No clue to them has yet been found.”

“I wonder,” thought the doctor, as he slowly sipped his coffee, “I wonder if they have been to the Grahams’ yet. If they have, I’ll wager a large amount--I’d go as high as my last year’s professional income--that Mrs. Graham is now in a state of violent hysterics. If they haven’t, she has at least sufficient material to keep her in a state of worry for about one year.” He finished his coffee. “I believe I’ll run out to Marston to-morrow,” he continued, thoughtfully; “that is, if I’m not too much occupied.” (Pennington religiously made this reservation, though since he had become a doctor he had never been too much occupied.) “I haven’t been there for a long time, and the burglaries will give me a good excuse for leaving my patients.”

Having made this determination, he dismissed the matter from his mind, and, finishing his coffee, sat in silence till he had smoked his cigar. Then he went home to take up his usual task of waiting for patients. When he reached his rooms, he found Mrs. Graham’s telegram on his table. It was as enigmatical as women’s communications generally are, and was worded thus:

“Will you kindly take ten-o’clock train and spend night with us? Will explain on arrival.”

“Spend the night? Will explain on arrival? What on earth can the woman mean?” cried the doctor. “Can any of the family be sick, I wonder? If so, why should she send for me, when there must be other doctors near by? No: that can’t be the reason.” But, as he could think of no other explanation, he accepted this one as the most plausible, and decided to take his case of medicines with him to Marston. Looking at his watch, he saw that he could barely catch the train, and hastily began to pack his handbag. Then, telling his landlady that he would be back in the morning, he called a cab, and reached the station with five minutes to spare.

A night ride in an accommodation train is not exciting, and Pennington’s trip to Marston was monotonous enough. He did not dare to read by the villainous light, and so he devoted his time to speculating on Mrs. Graham’s telegram. He stepped from the train at Marston, however, without having come to any definite conclusion on the subject.

“I think, sir,” said an elderly coachman, stepping up to the young doctor and touching his hat, “I think you must be the gentl’n h’expected at the Grahams’. Will you step this way, sir? I ‘ave the buggy ‘ere. These burglaries are h’awful, ain’t they, sir?” he began, as he touched up the little mare.

“Burglaries?” said Pennington. “Oh, yes, I did read about some burglaries up here--”

“Yes, sir,” said the man, “an’ Mrs. Graham is just scared out o’ her senses, sir, an’ when she got the telegram from Mr. Graham, sir,--come up, Jess,--sayin’ that neither he nor Mr. Phil ‘ud be up to-night, she sent for you ‘t once. Ye see, sir,” he continued, waxing confidential, “I’m out o’ the runnin’, on account o’ the visitor h’expected at my ‘ouse to-night.”

For the first time it dawned upon the doctor that it was not for his professional services that he was wanted, but more heroic ones, and he wished that he had left his case of medicines at home. Old George, however, gave him little time for thought, but entertained him with accounts, partly real, partly fictitious, of the daring and ferocity of the burglars who infested the village, until the doctor began to wish that Mrs. Graham had been able to secure any other protector than himself.

As the carriage rolled up to the house, the door opened, and Mrs. Graham, evidently on the watch, rushed out.

“Oh, Dr. Pennington!” she cried, excitedly. “You can’t tell how glad I am to see you! I _hope_ you don’t think it presuming in me to send for you?”

“Not at all,” began Pennington, getting out of the carriage; but Mrs. Graham noticed his medicine-case, and interrupted him.

“You’ve brought your pistols,” she exclaimed. “How splendid of you to think of them!”

“Do not for one instant think that you presumed in sending for me,” said Pennington, as he ran lightly up the steps and took Mrs. Graham’s outstretched hand. “You know, Mrs. Graham, that it can only be a pleasure to me to be of any service to you or Miss Clara.”

“It is very good of you, I’m sure, and I shall never forget it; but now come right into the library. Clara will be delighted to see an old friend who has come in time of need. It was she who suggested sending for you,” added Mrs. Graham, and Pennington blushed with pleasure. “It’s very strange,” went on the lady, “that Clara isn’t half so worried about the burglars as I am, when it generally takes so much to worry me. Clara, here is Dr. Pennington, pistols and all; wasn’t it good of him to come?” she concluded, as she entered the library. Clara came forward to greet Pennington, blushing slightly, and looking so charming that he felt he would be glad to have the burglars come, that he might have the pleasure of defending her.

“I have just told Mrs. Graham, Miss Clara,” said Pennington, “that the goodness is all on her side. You can’t realize how pleasant it is to see you again. As for my pistols,” he added, carefully laying down his medicine-case, “it overwhelms me with mortification to confess that I have left the key of my case behind.”

“Perhaps it is best that you did,” said Mrs. Graham, while Clara laughed.

“Don’t worry about that, Dr. Pennington,” she said, tapping the case lightly. “Wait a moment, and I will bring something that will do as well as the pistols you have here.” And she ran from the room. When she returned, Mrs. Graham was insisting that Pennington should take something to eat.

“Here is a weapon,” cried Clara, gaily, holding up an old-fashioned muzzle-loading horse-pistol. She handed it to Pennington, who colored as he took it. “I think that will frighten the burglars,” she panted, looking at Pennington and laughing.

“Clara,” said Mrs. Graham, “I wouldn’t have that thing fired off in the house for the world. Your father fired it off once at a cat, and the noise it made gave me a nervous shock I didn’t get over for a week. Besides, it brought in all the neighbors,--and some of them were very common people,--who thought we had had a dynamite explosion here.”

“But this ancient fire-arm has no hammer,” said Pennington, after examining it. “A pistol without a hammer, Mrs. Graham, is like a man without a head,--comparatively useless.”

“My ignorance of such things,” said Mrs. Graham, with a shudder, “is something stupendous, and I hope you won’t laugh at me when I ask what the hammer of a pistol is?”

“Let me show you, mamma,” cried Clara, jumping up and taking the pistol from Pennington’s hands.

“Be careful, Clara, be careful,” cried Mrs. Graham, evidently alarmed at its proximity. “Are you quite sure that it won’t go off by itself?”

“Quite sure,” answered the doctor. But Mrs. Graham’s fears could not be allayed until Pennington had placed the pistol on the bookcase. She gave a sigh of relief.

“I am sure that we shall not need a pistol,” said Pennington, “for burglars never come where they are expected.”

“Perhaps that is so,” answered Mrs. Graham. “I know that I am awfully timid about them. But, doctor--could you--would you--do you mind sleeping on this lounge to-night?”

“Not in the least,” cried Pennington. “Why, Mrs. Graham, it looks extremely comfortable.”

“It is very comfortable,” said Clara, giving it a little pat by way of enforcing her remark. “It is quite out of the ordinary run of lounges. I often take naps on it myself.”

“That settles it,” cried Pennington. “Now not even wild horses could drag me to a bed of ease.”

“I am very grateful to you,” said Mrs. Graham, who did not look upon the matter as a trifling sacrifice for the doctor to make. “I think we can make you comfortable, however.”

“Of course you can, Mrs. Graham; and then just think of the fame that awaits me if the burglars do come. Why, the papers will be full of me. ‘Dr. Pennington defends two helpless ladies from desperate burglars. His only weapon a horse-pistol without a hammer,’ and so on.”

“I don’t see how you can joke about such horrid men; the very thought of them makes me shudder. But we mustn’t keep you up all night, doctor. It is long after eleven. Clara, take my hand; you couldn’t persuade me to go up the stairs by myself. Doctor, would you mind standing in the hall till we get to our rooms--”

“Like the White Knight and Alice,” laughed Clara. “You remember he asked Alice to wait till he was out of sight, because her presence would cheer him--”

“Clara, you saucy girl!” cried her mother. “Doctor, I will send Bridget down to make up a bed on the lounge. Good night,” she called again, as she reached her room.

“Don’t treat the poor burglars too cruelly, Dr. Pennington,” cried Clara, looking over the baluster, and then with a laugh she vanished.

“I wonder what she meant by that,” thought Pennington, as he went back to the library. In a minute Bridget appeared with sheets and blankets, and in a short time had made up a bed on the broad lounge. Then she departed and Pennington was left alone.

“Suppose the burglars should come,” he thought, as he prepared to turn in. “But it’s not likely they will. At any rate, I mustn’t let my imagination run away with me; so here goes.” And with that he turned out the gas and settled himself on the lounge, where, in spite of discomforts present and burglars to be, he was soon fast asleep.

He had been asleep, it seemed to him, for hours, when he suddenly sat up, wide awake in an instant. Had he dreamed that he had heard footsteps at the back of the house, or was there really some one moving about? Pennington listened with every nerve strained to its utmost tension. There it goes again! He was sure he heard a noise. It came from the dining-room--and it sounded like the rattling of silver.

“They’re here,” he muttered, and drew a long breath. “What in thunder am I to do? Ah! I’ll get that old pistol and use the poker as a hammer; the old thing has a cap on it.” Crawling softly from the lounge, he groped his way towards the fireplace. The room was as dark as a pocket, and before he had finished his uncertain journey he struck his foot smartly against the coal-scuttle. It rattled. He made a dive to stop it from falling, and in so doing upset it. It fell with a crash loud enough, it seemed to him, to wake the Seven Sleepers.

Despite the pain of his stubbed foot, Pennington did not hug his injured member with the affection usually displayed on such occasions but ground his teeth and listened intently for any sign from the burglars that they had heard him.

A moment of suspense; then he assured himself that they had heard nothing, and, securing pistol and poker, started for the library door. He reached it safely, and, opening it noiselessly, looked out into the hall. A narrow streak of light from the partly-opened dining-room door showed him where to steer, and, grasping the poker firmly in his right hand and the pistol in his left, he tiptoed across the hall. The rattling of silver in the dining-room continued, and almost drowned the nearer and solemn tick of an old eight-day clock, whose brass and iron nerves the doctor envied.

Creeping cautiously to the door, he looked through the crack. The light was turned half on in the dining-room. At the farther end of the room, with his back turned towards him, was an old man, who seemed to be taking silver from the drawers of the sideboard and putting it into a basket at his side.

“The old villain!” thought Pennington. “How cool he is! I wonder where the other two fellows are. Somewhere at hand, I suppose.”

Suddenly the burglar turned half around, as though he were about to leave the room. Pennington shrank back.

“I can’t shoot the fellow in cold blood,” he said to himself. Just then his hand touched the knob of a door which he knew opened into a large closet. An idea struck him. He opened the door very quietly, and then, picking up the rug from the hall floor, was ready to carry out his plan.

The burglar was nearing the door. “Come up as soon as you can,” he said, and as a muffled voice from somewhere answered, “All right,” he opened the door and stepped into the hall.

With a bound Pennington threw the heavy rug over the man’s head, deftly twisting it so that he could make no sound to warn his comrades. But the doctor had not thought of the basket of silver which the man carried, and it fell to the floor with a crash. There was a quick movement in the direction from which the answering voice had come, and a scream from upstairs. Pennington fairly hurled his prisoner into the closet and locked the door; then he stood a moment uncertain whether to run upstairs to the aid of Mrs. Graham and Clara or search for the other burglar. Suddenly he heard a step behind him. Before he could turn he received a blow on the side of his head. He fell to the floor, where he lay half stunned. Then his hands were tied behind him, and he felt himself picked up by his assailant and held a moment uncertainly in mid air.

“Put him in here, Fred,” said a voice, and, to his horror, Pennington heard the key turn in the lock, and the next instant he was thrown into the closet with as little ceremony as he had himself used towards the burglar. Then the door was locked.

A sudden cough from the burglar made Pennington’s hair stand on end, and he shivered when he heard the man, sputtering and coughing, feeling audibly for what Pennington knew was his revolver. He was as brave as most men, and at once determined not to lie still at the mercy of a desperate ruffian. Very cautiously he tried to pull his hands out of the bonds that held them. To his joy, he found that the hastily-tied knots would give way at a little straining.

Meanwhile, upstairs, Mrs. Graham and Clara had gone to bed together for additional safety. Clara did not tell her mother, but to herself confessed that she had every confidence in Dr. Pennington, and so went calmly to sleep. Mrs. Graham was less confident than her daughter, and her sleep was light and broken. The consequence was that the fall of the silver basket woke her up instantly. She gave a scream.

“Clara!” she cried, shaking her daughter. “Clara, the burglars are here!”

“Where?” demanded Clara, sitting bolt upright, and looking in bewilderment out from the mist of her long brown hair.

“Down stairs,” said Mrs. Graham, in a hoarse whisper. “Help me, Clara, and scream.” With that she set the example by uttering a shriek that rang through the house, waking the servants in their rooms. Clara sprang from the bed, and, scarcely knowing what she did, began piling all the movable furniture in front of the door, while her mother uttered scream after scream with the regularity of a piece of clock-work.

There was a step in the hall, then another.

“There are two of them!” gasped Mrs. Graham, in an interval of screaming. The door was opened slightly. “Push up the bedstead, Clara!” and the two women pushed the heavy piece of furniture against the door. The movement was so sudden that the door closed upon the intruder’s fingers. There was a howl of pain.

“Scream!” commanded Mrs. Graham, as Clara caught her by the arm. The girl did not at once obey.

“Oh, mother,” she cried, “what do you suppose they’ve done to John--I mean Dr. Pennington?”

“Let me in,” cried a voice in the hall. “Let me in.” The two women screamed again. The door was pushed open and a man’s head and shoulder thrust in. In desperation, Mrs. Graham picked up the water-pitcher. Rushing towards the man, she threw it at him. It struck the wall and broke, near enough to him to drench him.

“Hold on, I say!” he cried. “Mother, what are you doing? Are you hurt? Have those scoundrels hurt you?”

“Phil!” cried Mrs. Graham and Clara at once. “Phil! Why, what are you doing here? How did you come?” And they rushed upon him, dragging him through the narrow opening and embracing him rapturously.

“What are you doing here?” asked Mrs. Graham again, as she released him. He could not answer at once, but after Clara had let him go, he answered,--

“Well, father at first forgot all about the burglars. We were at the library, working away like beaver lawyers, when he suddenly thought of ‘em. He jumped up and said we must come right home, because you’d be scared out of your wits.” Here he kissed his mother again. “So we bundled up the papers, and, as we were too late for the ten o’clock train, we came up on the other road, and walked across. We brought Fred with us, too.”

“Fred Austin?” asked Mrs. Graham. Phil nodded, and went on:

“Father was sure you’d be awake, but you didn’t seem to be, so we looked around, and pretty soon got in through the front window, which was open.” Mrs. Graham looked frightened. “Then we felt sure there was something to pay, especially when we saw the silver basket and the silver scattered around on the table and sideboard, and the safe open, so father picked up the silver, while Fred and I ran into the kitchen.” Mrs. Graham had gasped when she heard of their discovery, and stood listening with almost tragic intentness.

“We found no one there, but we heard a crash in the hall and ran back. Fred came through the door into the pantry, while I came by the dining-room. First thing I knew I heard somebody fall in the hall, and then Fred called me. He’d found a big fellow standing by the door, evidently waiting for me, and he’d hit him pretty hard on the head. Then we tied his hands with a handkerchief and threw him into the closet.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Graham, looking relieved, while Clara drew a long breath, “that was good. Where is your father. Bring them both here.”

“Isn’t father here?” asked Phil. “Why, he came upstairs first--has that scoundrel touched him, I wonder?” And Phil darted out of the room and down-stairs.

“Then there was some one in the house,” said Mrs. Graham, “for Phil said that Fred had to strike some one.”

“Mamma,” said Clara, tremulously, seizing her mother’s arm, “Fred hit Dr. Pennington!” And she looked at her mother with wide-open eyes of alarm. Mrs. Graham went into the hall, her daughter following her.

“Be still!” commanded Mrs. Graham, opening the door into the servants’ hall. “Girls, I’m ashamed of you! Bridget, Eliza! Be still at once!” Her voice had its effect, and the house became quiet again.

Meantime the two prisoners in the closet had not been idle. Pennington at first lay where he had been thrown, noiselessly trying to slip his hands through his bonds. The burglar had evidently rid himself of the rug, and Pennington could hear him groping his way about the closet, now and again colliding with unknown obstacles. He was nearing the prostrate doctor, who redoubled his efforts to free himself. Suddenly the burglar’s foot struck smartly against Pennington’s head. The man stopped and drew back; then he pushed his foot forward again till it once more touched the doctor. Pennington, who had not quite freed himself when the burglar first collided with him, jerked his hands out of their fastenings, and, springing to his feet, aimed a blow in the direction in which he thought the burglar stood. He missed his aim in the darkness and bruised his knuckles against the wall.

“Whew!” he cried, jumping with pain. Just then he got a blow from the burglar on his shoulder. He turned on him, but caught his foot on the rug and fell at full length. He sprang up in an instant, however, picking up the rug as he did so, and stood prepared to defend himself as long as possible.

“Have you found your father?” asked Mrs. Graham, leaning over the baluster and looking into the darkness of the lower hall.

“Not yet, Mrs. Graham,” answered a voice.

“Why don’t you light the gas, Fred?” asked Mrs. Graham, impatiently. There was a scratching of a match, and in an instant the hall was lighted. Just then Phil Graham came from the dining-room.

“I can’t find father,” he said anxiously.

Clara came timidly half-way down the stairs.

“Fred,” she asked, “what sort--who was it you struck?”

“A tall man, standing here. He was waiting for us to come out of the dining-room; but I came up behind and hit him--so,” answered Fred Austin, with some pride.

“Lucky he did, too,” said Phil. “The fellow had this,” he added, holding up a pistol. Then, in a tone of astonishment, he cried, “Hello! it’s father’s old horse-pistol!”

Clara flew down the stairs to her brother, her long hair streaming behind her. “It wasn’t a burglar!” she cried. “It wasn’t a burglar! Why did you strike him?” turning fiercely upon Fred Austin, and then bursting into tears of terror.

Mrs. Graham followed her down. “He wasn’t a burglar,” she explained to the perplexed young men. “It was Dr. Pennington. He came down here to protect us while you were away. He must have heard you and taken you for burglars, and you took him for one, and--”

“Pennington!” echoed Phil, while Fred looked at Clara, with admiration and contrition, the former real, the latter half feigned. “I put Pennington, if it was he, into the closet,” he added, stepping towards the place. Clara was before him, however.

The sound of voices in the hall had already attracted the attention of the two prisoners. The burglar groaned as he heard them, and his groan was fatal to him, for it indicated that he was in the middle of the closet. Instantly the doctor turned and threw the rug in the direction of the sound. His aim was good, and in a moment he had the burglar’s head again enveloped. His hands were free, however, and he grappled with Pennington so vigorously that he had much ado to defend himself. Suddenly he gave the burglar a strong shove from him. At that moment the door was flung open.

“John,” cried Clara. The burglar fell through the door into the hall. For an instant there was silence. Then the burglar began to kick violently and to shout.

“It’s father!” cried Phil Graham, as he made a dive for the half-smothered man and set him on his feet. Mr. Graham looked around wildly for an instant as he got rid of the rug.

“There’s a burglar in there!” he cried. “Shut the door. Quick, shut the door!” And he threw himself against it, refusing to move until Fred Austin had locked it. “Whew!” he gasped. “The scoundrel! Have you locked it Fred?--Tried to garrote me--whew!” And he wiped his face and looked around on his astonished family.

“Why, how did you get in there, father?” asked Phil, while Mrs. Graham led her husband to a chair. Clara stood still near the door.

“I was going up stairs with the silver basket, which the burglar had left on the sideboard--”

“No,” interrupted his wife, penitently: “I told Eliza I would put the silver in the safe myself, and I was doing it when Dr. Pennington came. I ran out to meet him, and forgot all about the silver. I don’t believe there was any burglar at all.”

“Yes, there was,” said Mr. Graham, sturdily. “As I was coming out of the dining-room, a fellow threw this rug over me, and then threw me, rug and all, into the closet. Presently he came in after me, I suppose to remove the only witness against him. He was choking me when you opened the door, and I broke away from him.” And Mr. Graham pointed to the closet door.

“Why, that’s where we put Pennington,” cried Austin and Phil Graham. Clara darted to the door and opened it wide.

“John!” she cried again. “Come out, come out.” And, in obedience to her call, John Pennington came out.

“Where’s that burglar?” he asked.

“There were three of them,” answered Mrs. Graham, promptly. “We have got them all.” Pennington looked around bewildered. He recognized Phil Graham, and then saw Mr. Graham sitting in the hall chair, the rug at his feet. His face fell.

“This was the burglar you captured,” said Mrs. Graham; and Mr. Graham nodded.

“Who hit me, then?” demanded Pennington, rubbing his head. Fred Austin seemed bashful about answering, and Phil spoke up:

“We took you for a burglar and captured you, just as you had captured father.”

“Then there were no burglars?” asked Pennington, doubtfully.

“No, there were no burglars,” answered Mrs. Graham.

“Well,” said Pennington, as he rubbed his head again, “I suppose it’s all right, but it’s rather hard on a well-meaning fellow--” And he smiled rather weakly.

“It’s all right,” said Clara, unconsciously laying her hand on his arm.

“My dear,” said Mr. Graham to his wife some time later, as they were in their room together, “my dear, didn’t Clara call the doctor John?”

“I didn’t think you noticed it,” answered Mrs. Graham.

“I did, though,” said Mr. Graham. “It seems to me, though there were no burglars to take our silver, that Pennington has taken our little woman’s heart.”

“Fair exchange is no robbery,” remarked Mrs. Graham; and her husband looked at her, and nodded several times as though something pleased him.

BUTLER MUNROE.

XIX

THE DOCTOR: AN OLD VIRGINIA FOX HUNTER.

NOW the doctor was a Southerner of the old school. Nor was he merely a North Carolinan, a Tennesseean, a Kentuckian or a Georgian--not any, thank you! No; our friend was a Virginian--a real, “old-fashioned, blue-blooded, whole-souled, open-handed Virginian.” And this he was by virtue of eight or nine generations of forebears who had fought, physicked, speechified, fox-hunted, raised negroes and tobacco, in that immortal commonwealth. No day passed but the doctor, in his simple fashion, unconsciously thanked God that he was a Virginian. For did not virtue, valor, honor, gallantry, select the Old Dominion in the days of the Stuarts as their special depot, from whence, in modified streams, these qualities might be diffused over the less fortunate portions of the Western world? To the unsophisticated Englishman, to the ignorant Frenchman or German, an American is an American. If he is not rampantly modern, sensationally progressive, and furiously material, he is nothing at all. But the doctor would scarcely ever speak or think of himself as an American, except in the same sense as an Englishman would call himself a European. The doctor was every moment of the day, and every day in the year, a Virginian above everything; and as I have already said, he felt thereby that a responsibility and a glory above that of other mortals had been conferred upon him by the accident of his birth. I may add, moreover, that he was unquestionably non-progressive, that he was decidedly not modern, while to this day he is so reactionary that the sound of a railway irritates him; and finally, that he was, and I feel sure still is, eminently picturesque.

The doctor was about sixty-five at the time of which I write (not so very many years ago). He had never set foot outside Virginia, and never wanted to. That a country, however, or climate, or people, or scenery, existed that could be mentioned in the same breath with the old Cavalier colony, never for one moment was accounted within the bounds of possibility by that good and simple soul.

And yet, paradoxical as it may seem, the doctor was proud of his descent from pure English stock. “None of Scotch or Irish, or Scotch-Irish for me. No, I thank you, sir.” “My folks,” he was fond of relating, “were real English stock, who came over way back in early colonial days, and settled on the York River. They were kin to the nobility.” Whatever may have been the accuracy of this last claim, the doctor’s patronymic in Virginia genealogy was above reproach, and would have secured him an _éntree_ (had he owned a dress coat, and had he felt a hankering after Eastern cities) into those small exclusive coteries in transatlantic society that still recognize birth as superior to wealth and even intellect. I should not like it to be supposed that my dear doctor, of whom I am excessively fond, was given to blustering about either his State or his descent. Your fire-eating, blowing, swaggering Southerner belongs either to a lower social grade, to the more frontier States of the South, or, to a greater degree perhaps than either, to the fertile imagination of Yankee editors and dime novelists. The doctor was a Virginian. His thoughts and his habits, which were peculiar and original, were simply those of Virginians of his class and generation somewhat strongly emphasized. He was just and unassuming, kindly and homely. There was about him a delightful, old-fashioned, if somewhat ponderous suavity of manner, that the rest of the Anglo-Saxon race have long, long outgrown. Even to hear a married female who was not black addressed as otherwise than “Madam” positively pained him. As for the children, the doctor had a separate greeting for every one of them, let his host’s quiver be ever so full. Ay, and generally something more than that; for the doctor’s capacious pockets were known by the little ones to be almost as inexhaustible in the way of chincapins, hickory-nuts and candy, as his well-worn saddle-bags were of less inviting condiments.

The doctor’s belief in his country (and by his country of course I mean Virginia) was the religion in which he was born. He would never have dreamt of intruding it on you. International comparisons he could not make, for he had never been out of the State. I feel perfectly sure, however, if the doctor had travelled over every corner of the earth, that his faith was of that fundamental description which was proof against mere sights and sounds. He would have returned to the shade of his ancestral porch, temporarily staggered, perhaps, but still unconvinced that any land or any people could compare with old Virginia.

The average American in London is a spectacle which has in it nothing inharmonious; on the contrary, in these days it is sometimes hard to distinguish him from the native. To picture the doctor in London, however, requires an effort of imagination from which the intellect shrinks. Of one thing I am sure, and that is, he would be very miserable. He would call in vain for glasses of cold water like that from the limpid spring under the poplar tree at home, of which the doctor consumes about a horse-troughful a day. He would hang over the apple-stalls, and groan over the deficiencies of a country that could do no better than that. He would get up two hours before the servants, and prowl about disconsolate and hungry till breakfast. What an apology, too, for a breakfast it would be without an “Old Virginia hot-beat biscuit!” In his despair of getting a “julep” he might take a whiskey punch before his early dinner. But here, again, how could the emblazoned wine-card, with its, for him, meaningless contents, supply the want of that big pitcher of foaming buttermilk for which his simple palate craves? The pomp and wealth, the glitter and glare of a great capital, would be simply distasteful to our patriarch. In his own land he and his have been for all time aristocrats--after their own fashion, it is true, but still aristocrats. They have been strongly inclined to regard themselves as the salt of the earth--and perhaps they are; a good sturdy British foible this, intensified by isolation and the mutual admiration atmosphere which isolation creates. At any rate, gold lace and liveries and coronets are not indispensable adjuncts of honor and breeding. The doctor, however--if we can imagine him gazing on the stream of carriages rolling past Hyde Park corner on a summer evening--would be sensible, for the first time in his life, to a feeling somewhat akin to insignificance creeping over him. He would hate and despise himself for it, but still it would make him uncomfortable, and he would want to get away home. A depressing suspicion would come over our good friend that the haughty squires and dames knew no more of Virginia’s history, or of Pages and Randolphs, and Pendletons and Byrds, than they knew of the obscure Elijahs and Hirams and Aarons that tilled the stony fields of New England. I fear, moreover, that the suspicion would be too well founded. As a Cumberland squire in the eighteenth century might have been disillusioned by a visit to the the capital, so to a much greater degree would our good Virginian friend have in all probability suffered by a similar transportation. Once home again, however, I can safely affirm of the doctor, that these uncomfortable sensations would have vanished in no time. Once more in his cane-bottomed rocking-chair on the shady porch; once more within sight of the blue mountains, the red fallows, and the yellow pine-sprinkled sedgefields of his native land, he would quickly recover from the temporary shocks that had irritated him. The sublime faith in “the grand old Commonwealth” would return, and he would thank God more fervently than ever he was a son of Virginia; not because of her present or her future--for he considered the Virginia he belonged to died with slavery--but on account of her people and her past. The doctor, happily, had been spared all these trials and his faith remained pure and unimpaired. The only capital he had ever visited was the charming little city of Richmond, where every third man or woman he met was his cousin; where most of society call one another by their Christian names, dine in the middle of the day, and sit out on chairs in the street after supper. Richmond is delightful, and so are its people; but its atmosphere would tend to confirm, not to shake, the doctor’s homely faith.

Perhaps the Southern States was the only part of the world where the practice of medicine has ever been looked upon as an honorable adjunct to the possession of considerable landed estates and an aristocratic name. As in England there were squire-parsons, so in Virginia there were squire-doctors, men of considerable property (as things go there) both in land and slaves, regularly practising in their own neighborhood. The slaves that constituted the bulk of their wealth have gone, but the lands and the practice remain--for those who still survive and are able to sit upon a horse.

The doctor is one of these survivals--and may he long flourish! He had only a moderate property--two farms--of which we shall speak anon. But then he was a Patton; and as everybody south of the Potomac knows, the Pattons are one of the first families in the State--none of your modern and self-dubbed F. F. V.’s are they, but real old colonial people, whose names are written on almost every page of their country’s history. Besides this, Judge Patton, the doctor’s father, was one of the greatest jurists south of Washington--”in the world,” Virginians said; but as a compromise we will admit he was one of the first in America, and quite distinguished enough to reflect a social halo over his immediate descendants, supposing even they had not been Pattons.

The original Patton mansion was burnt down in 1840. Nothing was left but the office in the yard, where in those days our friend the doctor pursued his youthful medical investigations and entertained his bachelor friends. The judge was a busy man, and much absent. He was always “laying out to build him a new house;” but death “laid him out” while the scheme was still in embryo. The doctor, who, as only son, became proprietor, had his hands too full, what with negroes, and farming, and physicking, and fox-hunting, to carry it out till the war was upon him, and with its results put an end, as he thought at the time, to everything which makes life sweet.

It must not, however, be supposed that the doctor and his father had gone houseless or camped out since 1840. Not at all. From the old brick office, whose isolation had saved it from that memorable conflagration, there had grown--I use the word advisedly, as applicable to Virginia architecture--there had grown a rambling structure, whose design, rather than whose actual weight of years, gave it an appearance venerable enough to command the respect and admiration of summer tourists from New York and Philadelphia. It was not often such apparitions passed that way, and when they did, it was generally in pursuit of filthy lucre suppositiously concealed in the fields or the forests. Nor are mining prospectors as a rule sentimental, but sometimes they are in America. When such _rarae aves_ came by the doctor’s front gate, they would almost always pull up and gaze through it with that admiration and respect that Northerners are inclined to pay to anything in their own country that recalls the past.

“Oh, isn’t that too quaint for anything!” the ladies who sometimes accompanied them never failed to remark. “That’s a real old ramshackle Virginia house, by thunder! and a pretty heavy old fossil inside it, you bet!” said the more observant of the gentlemen.

The doctor would have gloried in such criticism had he heard it. He hated Yankees; he hated your new-fangled houses; he hated railroads; he hated towns; he hated breech-loading guns; sights and sounds and things that he was not familiar with at five-and-twenty he would have none of when he was between sixty and seventy.

The doctor’s house was unconventional, to be sure, while weather and neglect of paint or whitewash had given it an air of antiquity to which it had no real claim. It lay a hundred yards back from the road, and appeared to consist of four or five small houses of varying dimensions, and occupying relationships toward one another of a most uncertain kind. Two of these leaned heavily together, like convivial old gentlemen “seeing one another home.” The rest lay at respectful distances from each other, connected only by open verandahs, through which the summer breeze blew freshly, and lovingly fanned the annuals that spread and twined themselves along the eaves. Almost every style of Virginia rural architecture found places in this homely conglomeration of edifices, which even “old man Jake,” the negro, who has for twenty years looked after the doctor’s horses and stolen his corn, described as “mighty shacklin’, and lookin’ like as if they’d bin throwed down all in a muss.”

It was, however, a real old characteristic Virginia house of its kind. There were squared chestnut logs, black with rain and sun, against which the venetian shutters of the windows banged and thumped in gusty spring days as against walls of adamant. These same logs were got out of the woods and squared, the doctor would tell you, in days “when men had plenty of time and plenty of force (_i. e._, slaves) to do those things properly.” Then there were walls of pine weather-boarding, erected at a period when, the same authority would inform you, “people began to saw and season their lumber five or ten years before they started to build.” There were roofs of wooden shingles slanting and sloping in every direction--black, rotting, and moss-grown here, white and garish there, where penetrating rains had forced the slow and reluctant hand of repair. Dormer-windows glared out at you, patched as to their shattered panes with local newspapers of remote date, and speaking of stuffy attics behind, where hornets, yellow-jackets and “mud-daubers” careered about in summer-time over the apple-strewn floors. Then there was the old brick office--relic of a distant past; of a period when the Virginia planters, though surrounded by the finest clay, were so absorbed in tobacco that they sent to England for their bricks. It is probable, however, that these particular bricks were produced upon the spot. At any rate, their comparative antiquity and presumably mellow tone have been ruthlessly effaced, for this is the only part of the doctor’s mansion that he has selected for a coat of whitewash. It is used for professional purposes, and is known by the doctor’s patients as the “sujjery.” I know it is hopeless to try, by a bald description of timber and bricks and mortar, to give any idea of how the doctor’s rambling homestead appealed to the sense of the picturesque, and to the affections of those of us who were familiar with it and with its inmate. No doubt, however, the latter had something to do with this. Nor should the surroundings be forgotten. The stately oaks that towered high above the quaint low buildings, and covered with leaves and dèbris the greater portion of that domestic enclosure which in those parts was known as the yard. The straggling, branching acacias that grew close to the house, and spread their tall arms above the roof, littering it in autumn with showers of small, curly leaves, and choking the wooden gutters (for the doctor considered tin piping as a modern heresy) with fragmentary twigs. The fresh, green turf that had matted and spread for one hundred and fifty years around this house and the more stately one that preceded it. The aged box-trees that had once, no doubt, in prim Dutch rows lined some well-tended gravel path, but now cropped up here and there upon the turf, like beings that had outlived their time and generation. The clustering honeysuckles, bending their old and rickety frames to the ground. The silver aspens before the door, whose light leaves shivered above your head in the most breathless August days. The slender mimosa, through whose beautiful and fragile greenery the first humming-birds of early June shyly fluttered; and the long row of straw hives against the rickety fence, where hereditary swarms of bees--let well alone--made more honey than the doctor and all his neighbors could consume.

Yes! These objects are, and all and many more are, twined around my heart, but the doctor’s front gate occupies no such position at all. It was all very well for the people who stopped in the road and looked through its bars at the fine old oaks, the green lawn beyond, and the quaint, straggling structure, and then drove on their way. For those, however, whose duty or pleasure compelled them to penetrate that barrier, it was entirely another matter. It was a home-made gate--a real “old Virginia” gate--put up at the close of the war as a protest, it would almost seem, against Yankee notions of hurry. To look at the tremendous portal, you would have supposed that the doctor was the most defiant recluse, instead of the most hospitable of men. It was, however, a typical Virginia gate strongly emphasized, just as the doctor was a typical Virginia gentleman strongly emphasized. I couldn’t speak accurately as to its dimensions, but I have often had to jump for life as it fell, and from the way in which it hit the ground, I should say that it must have weighed nearly a thousand pounds. Its weight would have been of no importance whatever to anyone but the doctor and the posts which supported it, had it been properly hung with two hinges and a latch. No doubt it had commenced life with these advantages; but during all the years I struggled with it, there was no latch, and only a bottom hook-hinge. It was kept in its place by two ponderous fence rails being leaned up against it. The most elementary mathematician will at once arrive at the result which ensued on the removal of these rails (a herculean task in itself) and the opening of the gate, unless extraordinary skill was exercised. It was really a performance beyond a single man; so most visitors, unless they were “riding for the doctor”--in the most serious business sense--holloaed for assistance, or rode about till some of the hands came up to the rescue. It must not be supposed that the doctor’s establishment, though strongly typical in a sense, resembled to any extent the real old Virginia mansion. The Pattons, it will be remembered, had been burnt out, and the present pile had been originally intended only as a makeshift; but it was such a makeshift as would perhaps be seen nowhere out of Virginia. Of the more substantial family mansions there were plenty crowning the hills in the doctor’s neighborhood. Square blocks of brick, some many-windowed and green-shuttered, with huge Grecian porticoes supported by rows of white fluted pillars stretching along their face. Great big wooden barns, others with acres of roof and rows of dormer-windows, and crazy, crumbling porches, and stacks of red brick chimneys clambering up outside the white walls at the gable ends, or anywhere else where they came handy for that matter. There were plenty of these within range of the doctor’s house and the limits of his practice, and to the proprietor of every one the doctor was related. The stages of this relationship varied from the unquestioned affinity of cousins and nephews, to that which is described in Virginia by the comprehensive and farreaching appellative of “kin.” To be kin of the Pattons, moreover, was in itself a desirable thing in Virginian eyes. Though the doctor lived in such an unpretentious residence, and worked day in and day out as a country practitioner, there were people in the neighborhood holding their heads pretty high, who were always pleased to remember that their father’s first cousin had married the doctor’s mother’s brother.

With all the doctor’s quaint ideas and strong prejudices, I have said that he was a thorough gentleman. He was of the kind meant for use, and not for show. Good Heavens! What would your dashing British Æsculapius, in his brougham or well-appointed dog-cart, have said to my old friend’s appearance when setting out for a long winter day’s work? I can see him now, riding in at the gate on some wild January day, bringing hope in his kindly face, and good conservative, time-honored drugs in his well-worn saddle-bags. A woollen scarf is drawn round his head, and on the top of it is crammed an ancient wide-awake. A long black cloak, fastened round his throat with a clasp, and lined with red flannel, falls over the saddle behind. His legs, good soul, are thickly encased in coils of wheat straw, wound tightly round them from his ankles upwards. In his hand, by way of a whip, he carries a bushy switch plucked from the nearest tree, and upon one heel a rusty spur that did duty at Bull’s Run.

Now do not suppose that the doctor on such occasions was regarded as a scarecrow, or that his neighbors looked upon him as eccentric or even careless of attire; on the contrary, this was a good old Virginia costume. The doctor’s appearance as above described was not the desperate expedient of a frontier and transitory condition--not at all. It was a survival of two hundred years of a peculiar civilization; a civilization that had been wont to look inside the plantation fence for almost every necessary; a patriarchal dispensation whose simplicity was to a great extent the outcome of exclusiveness; a social organization wherein each man’s place was so absolutely fixed, that personal apparel was a matter of almost no moment, and personal display, such as engages the well-to-do of other countries in mischievous rivalry, was hardly known.

The general shabbiness of Virginia was not the temporary shabbiness of a pioneering generation--that condition everybody can understand--but the picturesque and almost defiant tatterdemalionism of quite an old and thoroughly self-satisfied community, unstimulated by contact with the outer world. It was a mellow, time-honored kind of shabbiness of which Virginians are almost proud, regarding it as a sort of mute protest, though an extreme one, against those modern innovations which their souls abhorred. The doctor had been a widower since the first year of the war. In accordance with local custom, he had buried his wife in the orchard. A simple marble shaft in that homely quarter spoke of her virtues and her worth to the colts and calves that bit the sweet May grass around her tomb, and to the inquiring swine that crunched the rotting apples as they fell in autumn from the untended trees. Neither had the doctor been blessed with sons or daughters. Who would he “’ar (heir as a verb) his place to” was a common subject of discussion among the negroes on the property. The doctor’s profession, no doubt, was his first care; but his heart was with his farms and his fox-hounds. The doctor had practised over, or, as we used to say there, “ridden” the south side of the country for nearly forty years. He had studied medicine with the intention only of saving the doctor’s bill in his father’s household of eighty negroes. He had soon, however, dropped into a regular practice, and for the last five-and-twenty years, at any rate, no birth or death within a radius of ten miles would have been considered a well-conducted one without his good offices. The doctor’s income, upon the well-thumbed scroll of hieroglyphics that he called his books, was nearly three thousand dollars a year. He collected probably about fifteen hundred. A considerable portion, too, of this fifteen hundred was received in kind payments, not conveniently convertible, such as bacon, Indian corn, hams, wheat flour, woollen yarns, sucking pigs, home-made brooms, eggs, butter, bricks, sweet-potato slips, sawn plank, tobacco-plants, shingles, chickens, baskets, sausage-meat, sole-leather, young fruit trees, rawhides, hoe-handles, old iron. To utilize these various commodities, it would have been necessary for the doctor to have had a farm, even supposing he had not already been the fortunate proprietor of two. Indeed, a farm to a Southern doctor is not only necessary as a receptacle for the agricultural curiosities that are forced upon him in lieu of payment, but for the actual labor of those many dusky patients who can give no other return for physic and attendance received. You could see a bevy of these Ethiopians almost any day upon the doctor’s farm, wandering aimlessly about with hoes or brier-blades, chattering and cackling and doing everything but work.

The doctor might have been called a successful physician. He had no rivals. There were two inferior performers in the district, it is true, who were by way of following the healing art--small farmers, who were reported to have studied medicine in their youth. One of these, however, had not credit sufficient to purchase drugs, and the other was generally drunk. So it was only their near relations, when not dangerously indisposed, who patronized them--or some patient of the doctor’s now and again, perhaps, who took a fancy the latter was too “aristocratic,” till he got badly sick, and returned with alacrity to his allegiance. There is no doubt, I fear, but that the doctor practised on the lines of thirty years ago. Tory to the backbone in every other department of life, it was hardly to be expected that he should have panted for light and leading in that branch of learning in which he had no rival within reach. Papers or magazines connected with the healing science I never remember to have seen inside the Patton homestead; and yet, after a great deal of experience of the good old man’s professional care, I have a sort of feeling that I would as soon place my life in his hands as in the hands of Sir Omicron Pi!

What time the doctor had to spare from physicking, I have said he devoted to farming and to fox-hunting. I should like to follow him for a bit on his long professional rounds, and listen to his cheery talk in homestead and cabin; to help him fill his long pipe, which he draws out of his top-boot when the patient has settled down to sleep or quiet; to hear him once again chat about tobacco and wheat, politics and foxes. I should like, too, to say something of the doctor’s farming--heaven save the mark--on his two properties; the one “’ard” him by his father, and the other one, the quarter place near by, that “cum to him with his wife, ole Cunnel Pendleton’s daughter.”

I must only pause to remark, however, that the doctor farmed, as he did everything else, in the good old Virginia fashion--or in what is now irreverently known as the “rip and tar (tear) principle.” He didn’t care anything about acres or estimates; and as for farm books, his professional accounts pestered him quite enough. Of rotations, he neither knew nor wanted to know anything. His great idea was to plough and sow as much land as he could scuffle over with all the labor he could scrape together. Of manuring, clovering, or fertilizing, he took little account. If he “pitched” a big crop only, he was a proud and happy man. When each recurring harvest brought results more insignificant than the last, a temporary disgust with the whole business used to seize on my old friend, and he would swear that the wheat crops had been of no account since the war; that tobacco had gone to the devil, and that he’d quit fooling with a plantation for good and all. In the eyes of those who knew him, however, such tirades meant absolutely nothing. A Virginian of his description could no more have helped farming than he could have altered any other of the immutable laws of nature. A younger generation, and many indeed of the older one, have learned wisdom and prudence in the management of land since the abolition of slavery. The doctor, however, and the few left like him, will be land-killers of the genial good old sort till they lie under the once generous sod they have so ruthlessly treated.

The doctor’s first care was of necessity his patients; but there is no doubt, I think, that his real affections were divided between his farm and his fox-hounds. That he did his duty by the former was amply testified to by the popularity he enjoyed. That he signally failed in the treatment of his lands was quite as evident. For while he healed the sores and the wounds of his patients, the sores, the wounds, the storm-rent gullies, the bare galls in his hillsides, grew worse and worse. The maize-stalks grew thinner, the tobacco lighter, the wheat-yield poorer, year by year. One has heard of famous painters, who perversely fancied themselves rather as musicians--of established authors who yearned rather to be praised as artists. So the doctor, who certainly had no local rival in his own profession, seemed to covet fame rather as the champion and exponent of a happily departing school of Southern agriculturists. In this case, the income derived from the profession just sufficed to make good the losses on the farm. So, though the doctor, in spite of his household expenses being almost _nil_, could never by any chance lay his hand on a five-dollar bill, he managed to keep upon the whole pretty free from debt. With a scattered practice, and an agricultural hobby extending over one thousand acres, including woods and old fields “turned out” to recover, it may be a matter of surprise that our old friend had leisure for a third indulgence, especially one like fox-hunting, which is connected in the British mind with such a large consumption of time. Nevertheless, the doctor, like most of his compeers, was passionately fond of the chase, and in spite of the war and altered times, had kept hounds round him almost without a break since he was a boy. It will be seen, however, that fox-hunting, as understood and followed by the doctor, was by no means incompatible with his more serious avocations.

Now, if the fashion in which the doctor pursued the wily fox was not orthodox from a Leicestershire point of view, it was for all that none the less, perhaps indeed so much the more, genuine. Around New York and Philadelphia, it is true, the sport is pursued by fashionable bankers, brokers, and lawyers in a style the most approved. All the bravery and the glitter, ay, and much of the horsemanship of the British hunting-field, is there. But, like polo and coaching, it is there as a mere exotic, transplanted but yesterday, to the amazement and occasionally indignation of the Long Island rustics and the delight of the society papers. Everything is there--hounds, huntsmen, whips, red coats, tops, splendidly mounted hard-riding ladies and gentlemen, sherry-flasks, sandwich-boxes, etc., etc.,--everything, in short, but the fox. So far, however, as I can learn, such an omission is of no great importance under the modern conception of hunting. That wouldn’t be the doctor’s way of thinking at all, though; for I must here remark, that that worthy sportsman’s love of hunting is entirely on hereditary principles and of native growth. Fox-hunting for two centuries has been the natural pastime of the Virginia gentry. They imported the chase of the fox and its customs from the mother country at a period when such things were conducted in a very different style from what they are now.

The hunting of the fox, as carried on in England early in the last century, let us say, offered, I take it, a very different spectacle from that seen in the elaborate and gorgeous cavalcades and the rushing fleet-footed hounds that race to-day over the trim, well-trained turf of the shires. No foxes were killed in those days in twenty-five minutes, I’ll warrant. Men started their fox at daybreak and pottered along, absorbed in the performance of their slow hounds, over the rushy, soppy, heathy country, from wood to wood, for hours and hours. They were lucky then, no doubt, if Reynard succumbed in time to admit of their punctual appearance at that tremendous three o’clock orgie, which the poet Thomson has so graphically laid before us.

Amid the glitter, the show, the dash, the swagger of modern fox-hunting, Englishmen who are not masters of hounds or huntsmen are apt to lose sight of the original ends and aims, the craft, and the science of the sport. It seems to me that fox-hunting nowadays, with the vast mass of its devotees, is simply steeplechasing over an unknown course. This is unquestionably a manly and a fine amusement, and far be it from me to breathe a word against it. I only wish to anticipate the sneers of your sporting stock-broker if he were to catch sight of the doctor and his hounds upon a hunting morning.

With the average Nimrod of modern days, I venture then to assert that fox-hunting is only a modified form of steeplechasing. With the Virginian, who is simply a survival of other days, it is nothing of the kind. The doctor knew nothing of bullfinches or double ditches, of post and rails or five-barred gates, in a sporting sense; but what he did not know about a fox was not worth knowing at all. As for his hounds, he could tell the note of each at a distance when the music of a whole pack was scarcely audible to the ordinary ear.

As far as I remember, the doctor used generally to keep about five couple of hounds. It is needless to say he always swore they were the “best stock of fox-dogs in the State.” Jim Pendleton, his cousin across the hill, and Judge Massey, on the north side of the county, who also kept hounds, were quite prepared to take an affidavit of the same kind with regard to their own respective packs. The doctor’s hounds lived as members of the family. A kind of effort was spasmodically made to keep them from appropriating the parlor, and so long as the weather was mild, they were fairly content to lie in the front porch, or in one of the many passages which let the air circulate freely through the Patton homestead.

If the weather was cold, however, and the doctor had a fire in the parlor, the older and more knowing dogs seldom failed eventually to gain a lodgment. By persistently coming in at one door, and when kicked out by the long-suffering M. F. H., slowly going round the house and slyly entering at the other, they invariably conquered in the long run, and established themselves on the warm bricks of the hearth before the great white-oak logs which blazed on the bright brass and irons.

Of course it was not often that the doctor and his hounds were all at home together on a winter’s day. If the latter were not hunting with him, they were out upon their own account, for, be it noted, they were absolutely their own masters, as is the way with Virginia fox-hounds. If the doctor chose to accompany them and do a great deal of tooting and some hallooing, I have no doubt a certain amount of satisfaction animated the breasts of the pack. But it made no difference whatever to the sporting arrangements they had planned among themselves, or to their general programme. Whatever happened, they were bound to have their hunt. As the doctor’s pride and joy was not in his own performance in the pigskin--for he never attempted any--but in the achievements of his dogs, this want of discipline and respect was no drawback whatever to his satisfaction.

I have said the doctor could combine his favorite sport with the exercise of his profession. That is to say, if he were going out in any likely direction, he would manage to keep his hounds around him till he had despatched his lamplight breakfast, and they would all start together. The pack, moreover, was easily increased, for the doctor had only to step around to the back porch, which looked across the valley to Cousin Jim Pendleton’s place, and to blow lustily on his tremendous cow-horn.

A very little of this music was sufficient to bring the greater part of the rival pack scrambling in a half-guilty way over the garden fence. After a little growling and snarling and snapping, the strangers would settle down among the doctor’s hounds as if they had been raised on the place.

See the doctor attired for the chase emerging with his hounds from that awful front gate of his, which is being held up and open by the combined efforts of two stalwart negroes. It is a mild and soft February morning, at about the hour when the sun would be seen mounting over the leafless woodlands to the east of the house, if it were not for the dark banks of clouds chasing one another in continuous succession from the southwest. The doctor is not quite such a scarecrow to-day. The weather is mild, and he has left the coils of straw behind, having his stout legs encased in grey homespun overalls, which he calls leggings. The long Bull’s Run spur is on his left heel. The black cloak with the red lining is on his back. The slouch hat upon his head, and spectacles upon his nose. A high standup collar of antique build and a black stock give the finishing touch to a picture whose “old-timiness,” as the Americans say, would have thrown a Boston novelist into convulsions of ecstasy.

The doctor this morning is combining business with pleasure. He has to visit the widow Gubbins, who fell down the cornhouse steps the week before, and broke her leg. But he has had word sent to him that there is a red fox in the pine wood behind the parsonage, hard by the Gubbins domicile. I need not say the saddle-bags and the medicine bottles are there; but, besides these, there is a great big cow-horn which the doctor carries slung round him, and blows long blasts upon as he goes “titupping” down the muddy lane. These blasts are rather with a view of personal solace than for any definite aims. The doctor loves the horn for its associations, and goes toot-tooting down the soft red road, and waking the echoes of the woods and fields solely for his own personal benefit and refreshment. Hector and Rambler, Fairfax and Dainty, and the rest--little wiry, lean fellows of about two-and-twenty inches--hop over the big mudholes, or creep around the dry fence corners waiting for the first bit of unfenced woodland to trot over and commence the day’s operations.

The doctor, however, is determined, if possible, to keep them in hand till they reach the haunt of that aforesaid red fox which is said to be lurking in the parson’s wood. He hopes to be able to exercise authority sufficient to keep these independent dogs of his from getting on the trail of a ringing, skulking grey fox in the first ivy thicket or open bit of forest they come to. It is no manner of use, however. The rutty, soppy road, soon after it leaves the doctor’s estate, straggles unfenced through half a mile of mazy woodland. Though it is a historic turnpike of old coaching fame--a road the memory of whose once bustling gaiety well-nigh brings tears to the eyes of the old inhabitants--it is scarcely visible to the rare wagoner or horseman in these degenerate times, from the wealth of autumn leaves that hide its rugged face. Into the wood plunge the eager and undisciplined hounds, the dry leaves crackling and rustling under their joyous feet as they scamper and race amid the tall oak and poplar trunks, and one by one disappear beyond the very limited horizon. The doctor toots and toots till not only the forest but the hills and valleys beyond echo to the appeals of the familiar cow-horn. Mighty little, however, care the dogs for such tooting. They look upon it as a harmless sign of encouragement, a pleasant accompaniment to the preliminaries until the more serious work begins. Nor do they care in the least when the doctor drops his horn and begins to halloo and shout and storm--not they. He might as well shout and storm at the wind. The doctor gets very mad. He doesn’t swear--Virginians of his class and kind very seldom do--but he uses all the forms of violent exhortation that his conscience admits of, and that belongs to the local vernacular. He calls the whole pack “grand scoundrels and villains.” In a voice grown husky with exertion, he inquires of their fast-fading forms if they know “what in thunder he feeds them for?” He roars out to little Blazer, the only one left within good speaking distance that he’ll “whale the life out of him;” whereupon little Blazer disappears after the rest. So he finally confides to the sorrel mare, which is ambling along under him at the regulation five-mile-an-hour gait of the Southern roadster, that these dogs of Cousin Jeems’ (the doctor says “Jeems,” not because he doesn’t know any better, but because it is a good old Virginia way of pronouncing the name) are the hardest-headed lot of fox-dogs south of the Potomac River.

But hark! There is a boom from the pine wood, the deep green of whose fringe can be seen far away through the naked stems and leafless branches of the oaks. The doctor pulls up; he “concludes he’ll wait awhile and see what it amounts to, any way.” The scoundrels are probably fooling after a rabbit, or, at the best, have struck the trail of a grey fox (the most common native breed, that won’t face the open or run straight). The doctor draws rein at the edge of the wood, where the straggling forest road once more becomes a highway, fenced in from fields of young wheat, pasture and red fallow. He thinks the widow Gubbins can wait a bit, and that old red fox at the parson’s can lay over for another day.

“That’s old Powhatan, cert’n and sure; and that’s a fox of some sort, I’ll sw’ar,” remarks our old friend to the sorrel mare, which pricks up her ears as another deep note comes echoing from the valley below.

It is late in February; and though February in Virginia is practically the same dead, colorless, leafless, budless, harsh winter month it is with us, yet there are sometimes days before it closes that seem to breathe of a yet distant spring with more witching treachery than the greatest effort that period can make in our more methodical clime. And this is one of them. The soft and balmy air is laden, it is true, with no scent of blossoms or opening buds. The odor of smouldering heaps of burning brush and weeds, or of tardily burnt tobacco-plant beds, is all that as yet scents the breeze. But after a month of frost and rain and snow and clouds, the breath is the breath of spring, and the glow of the sun, now bursting through the clouds, seems no longer the sickly glare of winter. The soft Virginia landscape, swelling in gentle waves of forest, field, and fallow to the great mountains that lie piled up far away against the western sky, is naked still and bare, save for the splashes of green pine woods here and there upon the land. But there is a light in the sky and a feel in the air that seems almost to chide the earth for its slow response. The blood courses quicker through the veins of even easy-going Virginia farmers at the thoughts of seeding-time. The negro’s head comes up from under his shoulders and his hands from his pockets, where they have each respectively spent most of the winter, and the air becomes laden with those peculiar dirges that mark the Ethiopian’s contentment of mind at the prospect of warm weather and of his limbs once more becoming “souple.” The soft breeze begins to coat the tops of the damp furrows with a thin, powdery crust that in a few days’ time will be converted into that March dust so universally beloved of farmers. The young wheat, smitten and scorched and beaten almost out of recognition, lifts its head once again and spreads a carpet of tender green to the sun. The early lambs, beginning to think that after all they were not sent into the world to shiver behind strawstacks, frisk and gambol in the fields. The blacksmiths’ shops at the cross roads and the courthouse villages are thronged with colored laborers and tenants, whose masters, now seeding-time is upon them, have suddenly remembered that every plow in the place is out of fix, and not a harrow has its full complement of teeth. The light breezes from the southwest moans softly in the pines; but among the deciduous trees not a withered shred of foliage is left for it to stir, and the silence is complete. The freshly awakened sunlight streams softly down between the leafless branches and the rugged trunks of oak and chestnut, hickory and poplar, and plays upon the golden carpet of wasted leaves that hides the earth beneath them.

The doctor, as he stands at the edge of the forest, would ordinarily upon such a day be deep in agricultural reveries of a most sanguine nature. But he is now waiting for one more note of evidence that there is a prospect of what he would call “a chase”--hesitating as to the widow Gubbins.

Suddenly there is a great commotion in the wooded valley beneath, and in a few seconds you might be in Leicestershire spinny, so busy and joyful are the little pack with their tongues. “That’s a fox, any way,” says the doctor to the sorrel mare, “and, likely as not, a red.” Two small farmers, jogging down the road, pull up their horses and yell with the peculiar shrill scream that is traditionally as much a part of Virginia fox-hunting as the familiar cries of the British hunting-field are with us. The doctor, though his voice is not what it was thirty years ago, catches the infection, and standing up in his wooden, leather-capped stirrups, halloos at his hounds in what he would call “real old Virginia fashion.”

“By G--d! it’s a red,” says one of the small farmers, who had perched himself on the top of the fence, so as to look down over the sloping tree-tops on to the opposite hill.

“The dogs are out of the wood, and are streakin’ it up the broom-sedge field yonder--dawg my skin if they ain’t!”

This is too much for the doctor.

“Pull down the fence, gentlemen, for God’s sake! and we’ll push on up to the old Matthews graveyard on top of the hill. We shall see right smart of the chase from there. I know that old fox; he’ll go straight to the pines on Squire Harrison’s quarter place.”

The four or five top rails are tossed off the snake fence; but the doctor can’t wait for the remaining six. The long spur is applied to the flank of the sorrel mare, the apple switch to her shoulder. Amid a crashing and scattering of rotten chestnut-rails, the doctor, cloak, and spectacles, saddle-bags, pills, medicine-bottles, and overalls, lands safely in the corn-stalk field upon the other side. The two farmers follow through the fearful breach he has made, and they may soon all be heard upon the opposite hill cheering and yelling to the hounds, which by this time are well out of reach of such encouraging sounds. Neither the country, nor the horse, nor the doctor is adapted for riding to hounds; nor, as I have before intimated, has the latter any idea of doing so. The good man wants to hear as much as possible--of the chase; but when he neither sees nor hears a great deal--which, when a strong red fox goes straight away, is generally the case--he will still take much delight in collecting the details from other sources.

If his hounds eventually kill their fox half-way across the county, friends and neighbors, who became accidental witnesses of various stages of the chase, and each of whom did their share of hallooing and cheering, will send round word to the “old doctor,” or “call by” the next time they pass his house, and cheer his heart with praises of his dogs. The doctor will probably have bandaged Mrs. Gubbins’s leg, and be half-way home by the time the death-scene takes place, in some laurel thicket possibly miles and miles away from the corner where we left our friend bursting through the fence. Not more than half a dozen, probably, of the fourteen or fifteen hounds with which the doctor started, will assist at the finish. Two or three of the puppies will have dropped out early in the day, and come home hunting rabbits all the way. Three or four more are perhaps just over distemper, and will fall in their tracks, to come limping and crawling home at noon. Rambler and Fairfax, however, having assisted at the finish, and being perhaps the most knowing old dogs of the lot, will have trotted round to old Colonel Peyton’s close by. They are mighty hungry--for Virginia hounds won’t touch foxes’ flesh--and they succeed in slipping into the log kitchen in the yard, while Melindy, the cook, is outside collecting chips, and abstracting from the top of the stove an entire ham. The said ham was just prepared for the colonel’s supper; but in fox-hunting all is forgiven. So after a little burst of wrath he reckons they are the old doctor’s clogs, shuts them up in the granary, and gives them a cake of corn-bread apiece. The following day is Saturday, and the colonel’s son, home from school for a holiday, thinks it an opportunity for a rabbit-hunt in the pines behind the house not to be missed. So Rambler and Fairfax are introduced to the proposed scene of action in the morning. After condescending to an hour of this amusement, they hold a canine consultation, and start for home, where they finally arrive about sundown, to be made much of by the doctor, who has already heard of the finish from a negro who was splitting rails close by.

The doctor’s satisfaction is quite as great as if he had cut down a whole Leicestershire field in the fastest thing of the season. His heart warms towards those undersized, harsh-coated, slab-sided little friends of his as he stands watching the negro woman breaking up their supper of hot corn-bread with buttermilk as a treat, on the back porch. They have all come in by this time, and scuffle and growl and snap around the board as the food is thrown to them.

The knowing ones take advantage of such an evening as this to assert, with more than usual assurance, their right of entry to the house. The doctor has had his supper, and hopes that no ominous shout from the darkness will, for this night at any rate, call him to some distant sick-bed. He has drawn up his one-armed rocking-chair to the parlor fire, and by the kerosene lamp is poring over the last oration on free trade by that grand old Virginia gentleman and senator, Mr. Jefferson Randolph Beverly Page. Conscious, as it were, that some extra indulgence is deserved on this night, the dogs begin to crawl in. One by one, beginning with the oldest and wiliest and ending with the timidest puppy, they steal into the room and become grouped in the order of their audacity from the glowing bricks of the hearth outward to the door.

Nor to-night has the doctor kicks or cuffs or anathemas for the very worst of them.

The great oak logs blaze and crackle and roar in the wide chimney, and the light of the flames flickers over the quaint, low-ceilinged room with its whitewashed walls, black wainscotting, and homely decorations; over the antlers on the door, that recall some early exploit of the doctor’s in West Virginia wilds; over the odds and ends of old silver on the sideboard, that have been saved from the wreck of the Patton grandeur; over the big oil-painting of the famous jurist, and the dimmer, smokier visages of less distinguished but remoter ancestors, who believed in the divine right of kings and knew nothing of republics and universal suffrage. Here, however, surrounded by his dogs, we must take leave of the doctor. There are few like him left now in Virginia, and fewer still who have clung to the good and bad of a departed era with the same uncompromising tenacity as our old friend. They were a fine race--deny it who will--these old Virginia squires; provincial and prejudiced perhaps, but full of originality and manly independence. Their ideas, it is true, are not those of the latter half of the nineteenth century, but the men themselves are passing rapidly away, and their ideas with them. Those who have known them can only regret that a strong, picturesque, and admirable type of Anglo-Saxon has disappeared forever from the ranks of our great family, unpainted by a single master-hand of contemporary date.

A. G. BRADLEY.

XX

THE DOCTOR’S FRONT YARD.

IT ALL began with the tap of a gavel--an imposing white gavel adorned with a yellow bow and resounding like the crack of doom. Behind it, under a nodding purple ostrich feather, sat Mrs. Bunker; before it the eight awe-struck members of the Village Improvement Society; enveloping us all in its cold, judicial atmosphere was room No. 10 of the new town building, maintained as a meeting place in order to give dignity to our association, and its rent representing just so many entertainments and strawberry-festivals per annum.

Mrs. Bunker is the “progressive woman” of West Hedgeworth. She lives in that large, white house with the terraces and box borders and a fountain, just where you turn into Main street. She goes to Boston twice each season to get clothes and ideas upon which she feeds our little social circle through the medium of clubs and afternoon teas. The clothes are remarkable, the ideas equally up to date; we look upon her with reverence and obey her slightest mandate.

I believe I am the only one who now and then rebels inwardly. Why, for example, I should have been considered eligible for the V. I. S., a girl of twenty-three, with not the slightest pretensions to domestic talent or judgment, except that I have had to take care of father and the boys for the last few years, I couldn’t see,--nor could any one else; but Mrs. Bunker had ordained that I should go into it, and I had no choice.

“You are a very clever girl, Irene,” she explained severely, as if this were a situation to be deprecated, but could be atoned for by penance of some sort, “and it would be extremely unfortunate for you to have no outlet for your talents. People should take up the work that best suits them.”

I withdrew all objections, of course. If Mrs. Bunker pronounces one clever, no matter how wretched one may be under the verdict, there is never any appeal from it. But as the progressive woman is always ready to shoulder the responsibility of her friends’ cleverness, I haven’t found mine a very great burden. So far as the duties of membership in the Village Improvement Society are concerned, they only consist in doing as one is bid. The gavel roused me from a study of bonnets. Mrs. Suter, the wife of our good druggist, and Mrs. Pitman, the postmaster’s lady, always faithfully advertise the village milliner in familiar black-lace-covered frames, the one adorned with aggressive bunches of buttercups, the other trailed over by a hairy-leaved poppy. Mrs. Cope, the Episcopal clergyman’s wife, has the parish down upon her for appearing in unmistakable French headgear, simple, but beyond imitation; it does not justify her in their eyes that the hats come from a rich relative, and the poor soul is credited with proud and haughty aspirations, of which she is as innocent as a babe. Miss Maria Withers’ strong point is not fashion; so the little parched, limp, black bonnet which she has found satisfactory for eight years, still perches above her gray curls. I was absorbed in working out a series of arguments on the effect of dress upon character, when the white gavel descended and the Society came to order with a start.

We are nothing if not parliamentary. The latest manual lies at Mrs. Bunker’s right hand. Miss Scrapson, of the academy, makes an excellent secretary, and her minutes are comprehensive. Miss Withers, as treasurer, is somewhat rambling and uncertain. Her reports are subject to pauses, silent mental calculations and ejaculations of “Dear me,--no, that wasn’t it--just wait a minute,” and excursions into a little black bag which she carries, after missing items on stray scraps of paper. Mrs. Bunker bears this with self-control, as Miss Maria has valuable qualities. Miss Scrapson and Mrs. Cope play into her hands most cleverly in a discussion over a motion or a point of order. We manage to have a little unfinished business on the carpet, usually, to give style to the meeting, and altogether maintain an air of importance which is quite remarkable for a small village club. But on this particular day, a May morning, I saw in our president’s eye that there was something new and exciting to be taken up.

“Ladies,” she announced at last, “our spring campaign is opening with opportunities of no mean order. The village of West Hedgeworth is menaced with a disgrace which so far outdoes in horror even the peanut shells on the post-office floor and the loose papers on the common that words almost fail me as I mention it. Give me your close attention, please.”

Ever since the meeting when Mrs. Bunker took Mrs. Pitman to task for the condition of her ash barrels, we have been subject to a weak-kneed and guilty sensation when she gives us an introduction of this sort.

“You probably know,” she continued in more colloquial style, “the small house with pointed gables and a piazza, fronting the common next the old Benjamin place. You are aware how neatly it has always been kept by former occupants. That house is just rented by a doctor who has come here with his wife, I am told, from New York. They moved in a week ago, and in that short space of time,--_one week_, ladies,--they have made the premises a blot upon the scutcheon of our lovely village. Their packing-cases were unloaded on the piazza in a high wind, and bits of paper, excelsior and what not are scattered from end to end of the yard; boxes, planks, tin cans and other refuse are piled at one side; the whole appearance of the establishment is enough to make one _of us_,”--impressively--”avert her head in passing it. And still the scandal goes on, unabated, from day to day. It is a moment for immediate action, a moment to be seized by patriotic and public-spirited women, and the disturbers of our peace of mind made to feel the necessity of taking immediate steps towards reform. I lay the case before you, ladies, for suggestions as to prompt aggression.”

There was a suitable pause. Then Miss Withers’ gentle voice piped up. “This is really a dreadful state of things,” she began mildly. “I hadn’t noticed it myself, I suppose because”--

“Hadn’t noticed it!” ejaculated the president, in tones of thunder.

“I was going to say,” fluttered Miss Maria hurriedly, “because I haven’t passed there in two weeks. If I had, no doubt I should have been very much annoyed about it.”

“_Annoyed!_” exclaimed Mrs. Bunker again, savagely. “Annoyance is altogether too personal a term. It arouses all _my_ loyalty to the society; that’s the way it impresses _me_.”

Of course this brought forth many protestations of the same sentiment from the rest of us. Then Mrs. Pitman ventured to ask if Mrs. Bunker didn’t think it would be well to send a committee to the doctor and ask him to “clear up a little.”

“The chair has no thoughts, Mrs. Pitman,” answered that body loftily. “I await a motion.”

I always second everybody else’s motion, but have never made one yet, in the meetings. Miss Scrapson, however, came to the fore, and it was presently decided that the president should appoint a committee to visit the doctor and his lady and reprove them.

“If that is really the pleasure of the Association,” said Mrs. Bunker, with a wave of her purple ostrich plume, “I will appoint Miss Allison” (that is my name), “a committee of one to call at the doctor’s house for this purpose. As you are one of the young ladies of the place, Irene, it would be in the way of your social duty at any rate. You can mingle business with pleasure.”

“Yes,--but Mrs. Bunker, I never _could_ mingle things! Don’t ask me to go,” I implored. “I’m sure I shall make a failure of it. I don’t want to offend them, you know,--they may be nice people.”

“_Nice people!_” Mrs. Bunker compressed her lips into that peculiar stiff smile which means scorn, and closed her eyes slowly with her head tilted back.

“They certainly must be lax,” murmured Miss Scrapson,--”very lax.” Nobody, however, came to my rescue. I was evidently doomed to be the unhappy instrument of the Society’s revenge. I gave in and took my instructions as meekly as I could.

“The wife has an extremely youthful and inexperienced air,” said my mentor, “and undoubtedly needs a little judicious instruction. It will alarm her less to be confronted by a person of her own age. Our work is largely educational, you know, so do not antagonize her. Simply say to her something of this kind in gentle but firm tones: ‘My dear madam, do you not appreciate the beauty of this peaceful little village, and will you not bear your part henceforward in the maintenance of its order and symmetry?’ Such a method of speech would be better than to alarm her. And yet don’t fail to impress upon her that disorder simply _cannot be_.”

I acquiesced, with a slightly strangling sound, which the president did not notice, fortunately. It resulted from physical distress of a kind which is sometimes on these occasions, beyond control. It was with me yet, in a milder form, as I ascended the doctor’s steps that afternoon, card-case in hand, which last appendage seemed the most despicable mockery.

The house was a neat, smart little affair in its way, inartistic, but not aggressively ugly, and well arranged for professional purposes. The sign, _Dr. M. H. Richmond_, was tacked up beside the door. There certainly were evidences of an upheaval, however, in plain sight. The front yard was, as Mrs. Bunker had described it, littered with papers and excelsior, the piazza floor as bad. At the side of the house was a pile of tin cans, boxes, broken china and other unsightly abominations. Somehow one could not help feeling that a woman’s eye and touch were wanting, and I found myself stiffening against the wife who could allow such a state of affairs to go on. My primmest expression was ready, as the door flew open, swung hospitably wide by a big young man with a short brown beard and gray eyes. The moment I saw him it occurred to me to wonder what he would take me for--patient, caller, or perhaps an agent! Horrible thought, that last,--I found a certain timidity threatening my assurance.

“Might I,” I began, putting myself into the latter category at once by my mode of address, “might I see the lady of the house, please?”

“Walk in, won’t you?” said the doctor affably, ushering me into what happened to be his office. Ah,--one knew now a little better where one was. Whatever its exterior shortcomings, this must be the home of thoroughly cultivated people. Their furniture was solid, their pictures were fine, and their few decorations faultless.

As to their books, filling all available space, no library critic could find the selection wanting in true literary discrimination. I felt the courage of my mission diminishing as I slid into a leather covered arm chair opposite the easy, amused looking doctor.

“I’m so very sorry,” he observed, “that she isn’t at home. She went away by the early train this morning; but perhaps you could leave a message with me if it’s a matter of importance.”

There was a short but awkward pause. No help for it,--I might as well make the plunge. The more Bunkerish I could be, the better, if any stern message was to be sent to the wife by this good-natured personage.

“I wanted to see Mrs. Richmond,” I explained stiffly, “on a little matter of business connected with the work of the Village Improvement Society. It was reported at our last meeting that the condition of your front yard is very bad.”

“My front yard! I see.” The doctor looked quizzical but serene, and glanced out over his shoulder to the lawn.

“Our Association,” I continued bravely, “aims to incite the pride of householders in the appearance of the village as well as in their own homes; and your place here is conspicuous, facing the common as it does. We thought that might not have occurred to you.”

“It really hadn’t,” smiled my host. “This is very kind of you, however. Do I understand that your Society orders me, through you, to clear up the yard? In that case, do they provide cleaners and so forth,--or will they perhaps come and take charge of it themselves?”

“Not at all,” I exclaimed angrily. “You are expected to attend to it.”

“What should you do,” he inquired suavely, “if I left it in disorder? I ask from curiosity, naturally, as I should never have the temerity to defy so august a body. Would the law be obliged to take its course?”

“You are probably aware that we have no law whatever behind us,” I said with all the dignity I could assume, “though the selectmen are very good about backing us up in flagrant cases. But I should imagine a doctor just settling in a town would be sufficiently alive to his own interests to see the propriety of making a good impression by the appearance of his house and grounds.”

“Ah!” He nodded slowly, smiling in a way which maddened me. “Now I see. This is a special kindness on your part. How grateful I am to you. Your suggestion may really result in my winning the hearts of the West Hedgeworth people; and I shall begin at once. The propriety of making a good impression by the appearance of my house and grounds!--it is a noble sentiment. My colored boy who is my only servant, shall attend to the matter, and the Village Improvement Society shall see a change indeed. Are there any other little touches,--extra touches, you know,--that occur to you?”

I glanced at the big, low table with its littering of attractive books and magazines, a great ivory club of a paper knife lying across an uncut review. I was as much at home among those things as he. Why had I been forced into the attitude of an impertinent village miss, to be laughed over with his wife again in the way he was laughing now? The idea was distressing; but I had no defence.

“I think you are quite capable of arranging your own yard,” I said curtly. “You will very soon find out what the village people like. All that our Association requires is cleanliness and good order;”--with which I moved towards the door, murmuring a regret that I had not seen Mrs. Richmond.

“This is so good of you”--and now the doctor actually showed a shade of embarrassment himself,--”that I am really overwhelmed with shame to be obliged to disappoint you about my wife. It would be so pleasant for her to know you ladies and to”--he coughed slightly--”to come under your helpful influence. But the fact is, she isn’t--she doesn’t--there never has--in short, there isn’t any Mrs. Richmond. My sister came with me to help me settle things. She is a college girl somewhat younger than I and with no experience whatever. I hope you will be willing to welcome her when she comes back in July,--that is, of course, if we are tidy enough to be recognized by the villagers.” Still the blandest expression about his mouth, but a twinkle in the gray eyes which made me grind my teeth. And he had calmly sat there, letting me call on _him_!

I attempted to “sweep” across the piazza with dignity, but only swept up little bits of excelsior on the hem of my gown. But I did make him feel the arrows of a dignified wrath, I think;--not that he evinced any such sensation at the time. To Mrs. Bunker, who had asked for a prompt report, I flew. She took the affair with unsympathetic calmness.

“You did your duty, Irene,” was her gracious commendation, “and it was not your fault that the girl--who certainly was there, for I _saw_ her--should be his sister and not his wife. You said precisely the right thing, and I trust he will profit by it and earn the respect of the village. I am glad he is a young man of taste.”

He got on, whether possessed of taste or not. It annoyed me to see the way he made friends with everybody who crossed his path, man, woman or child. They were rather slow to consult him professionally; but Doctor Bell, the old physician who had all the practice round here, lives at Hedgeworth Centre, three miles away, so when Miss Phœbe Withers, Miss Maria’s older sister, had an attack of heart failure one day, they sent for Doctor Richmond, and took a tremendous fancy to him. I kept out of his way; to my mind he was the most thoroughly disagreeable man I ever met.

The front yard, meanwhile, had been cleared up. Nick, the black imp who drove, cooked and gardened for the doctor, was known to be mysteriously occupied behind the house for hours at a time, after the rubbish was removed. Mrs. Benjamin saw it all from her back windows, and reported it at the sewing society. He spent hours pottering among paint-cans, starting seeds and what not; and shortly after, the front fence appeared painted grass green, the gate picked out with white cross-bars, and the lamp-post similarly decorated, bearing a brand-new reflector. Then clam-shell borders to the gravel-walk cropped out, and two round clam-edged beds of geraniums stared from the lawn, while a “rockery” of red and blue boulders, with ferns, reared itself where the piles of tin cans had been.

“Do you like _that_ sort of thing, I want to know?” I inquired wrathfully of Mrs. Bunker at our next Village Improvement meeting.

“Well, it looks perfectly neat,” she answered, “and it is in the style of most of the best kept yards here. I can’t say that _I_ should not prefer quieter colors; but he is a young man yet, you know.”

I was silenced. What right had I, any way, to feel as if there were a sort of practical joke on me, personally, in all this? The day after, a new ornament appeared;--a pair of andirons, painted scarlet, and a hollowed out log across them filled with yellow nasturtiums. Mrs. Pitman pointed it out to me delightedly.

“Just like a real fire!” she said. “Do you see, Irene? The doctor is quite a landscape gardener, isn’t he?” I made no reply.

Another decoration was set forth next, on the opposite side of the yard;--this time a crane, also of scarlet hue, and a swinging pot, with money-wort bubbling in it and dribbling down the sides. By ill luck I was passing at the moment when Nick put it there, turning round with a grin for the approval of his master, who stood in the window.

“Very good, indeed, Nick,” I heard the doctor call out. “You’re a regular Village Improvement Society in yourself, boy.” I wondered if it were possible, by Delsartian methods, to throw scorn into the expression of one’s back. The attempt ended weakly in one of those little conscious adjustments of drapery to which one resorts involuntarily at such junctures. Somehow I felt that those gray eyes were upon me. I had occasionally caught the expression of them before, always with the inevitable twinkle, when we met in public.

He grew into the habit of dropping in at the Bunkers’, to my disgust, as it spoiled my own intimacy there. Mr. B., a shadowy figure in the background of the family stage, had been cured, or imagined he had, of rheumatism by the new physician, and took a great fancy to him. Emily, the daughter, who is so fearfully quiet that most people never make any attempt to rouse her, was actually known to chat with him quite naturally and easily; and our beloved president submitted to cruel thrusts from him with a good grace.

“Mrs. Bunker,” he said one evening as we were all sitting on the piazza in a June twilight, “you’ve never told me yet how you liked the arrangement of my front yard. Have you seen the new garden seat I had put out this week? It’s one of the latest fads in outdoor decoration, made of the head-board and frame of an antique bedstead--a very choice thing. I got the idea from a farmhouse up on the north road.”

“I haven’t noticed it,” she answered somewhat cautiously, “but I observe, doctor, that you have an idea of falling in with the taste of the people.”

“My dear madam,” he clasped his hand round one knee and looked off dreamily into space,--”a doctor just settling down in a town should be sufficiently alive to his own interests to see the propriety of making a good impression by the appearance of his house and grounds.”

How dared he mock me to my very face in this fashion? I was thankful for the little back gate leading out of the Bunkers’ grounds, by which I could get a short cut home, leaving my good-byes with Emily Bunker. When we met accidentally at the post-office next morning, I turned my back on him to stamp some letters, and never looked up till he was gone, after telling Alice Cobb, one of the village belles, who stood there, that he was going away in the afternoon to his sister’s Commencement and would bring her back with him.

The week seemed very peaceful, and I enjoyed going about without the dread of further shafts of ridicule. I was always planning some way to give his impertinence a decided snub, but never found the chance. The afternoon of his return, I was sitting with my work in Mrs. Benjamin’s parlor as the buggy drove up, Nick having been left to walk home from the station. When he helped the sister out,--a manifestly high bred, charming little blonde,--I couldn’t help watching for the effect upon her of those painted monstrosities. She wouldn’t tolerate them a moment, I felt sure. But oh, stab after stab! She gave one glance at them and turned to her brother with an expression of such utter merriment that I knew at once the thing was a joke already understood between the two. I decided that Amy Richmond would _not_ become a friend of mine. Yet curiously enough she actually sought me out, at an academy reception the next night. Emily Bunker introduced her, and she began at once: “I’ve been so anxious to meet you, Miss Allison. Morris tells me so much about you, and he’s sure we shall be congenial.”

I stiffened. Another back-handed thrust, probably, lay underneath this.

“He thinks I shall learn an immense amount from you, too,” she pursued,--”don’t you Morris?”--to the doctor, who was unexpectedly standing behind me.

“I’ve told my sister,” he answered, “that she must persuade you to give her some hints about household matters. She hasn’t had even as much experience yet as Nick and I.”

I tried to be very ungracious, as dark suspicions flew through my mind; but Miss Richmond looked absolutely guileless, and furthermore she wouldn’t let me alone; there was no use trying to avoid her. And it _did_ seem good to have a friend of her sort. The West Hedgeworth girls are bright and pretty, and some of them intellectual, but we had all been village comrades too long to get up much enthusiasm over one another’s society. Doctor Richmond’s brotherly devotion caused him to lend his sister the buggy and spirited little horse for her own use now and then, besides the drives she took with him; so we two enjoyed long excursions through the country roads, steeped in July sunshine and finding our mutual interest deeper with every day. Once I went to tea with them, and on that occasion the doctor seemed quite like other people, except just as I was leaving under the escort of my younger brother, which I had purposely arranged, the temptation to give me a parting thrust was too strong for him, and he remarked as we descended the front steps: “Miss Allison, I am so glad to have had you get a glimpse of our clam-shells in the moonlight.”

Amy went off to the seashore a day or two later, and I felt really sorry for him, but it was much the easiest way to avoid him altogether, and I never asked him to come to our house, nor crossed his path if I could help it. As for the nasturtiums and geraniums, scorching on his lawn in the midsummer heat, I wanted no sight of them. By and by I went away myself, and came back in September to a taste of the unpleasantnesses of life. My two brothers left home, one to a business position in Boston, the other to college. Father, meanwhile, who for eight years since mother’s death had been lost in melancholy and required my constant offices as consoler, divulged the fact that a buxom widow in Hedgeworth Centre had succeeded in resurrecting his buried affections; an individual as utterly unlike--well, there was a sting about it all that made things look pretty black for awhile, and since they desired the engagement “kept quiet,” I locked up my woes and could only wonder now and then whether anybody felt any sympathy, while parrying the usual village questions about father’s frequent drives to the Centre. The Bunkers went abroad for the winter, thank Heaven!--and the V. I. S. was suspended for the time being. Mercifully I had a chance to do something for somebody else. Aunt Abby, my mother’s sister, who had lived alone with her servants in a big house fronting the common, a rather morose and unmanageable old maiden lady, was breaking down. My other aunt, who lives in California, could not come east at once, so I was the only member of the family to nurse her, and with father and the boys provided for I had time to go to her whenever she needed me.

Dr. Bell fell ill and Dr. Richmond was called. His appearance in the sick-room seemed likely to destroy the only comfort I had there; but, strange to say, I laid down my weapons before three visits were over. His management of her was absolutely perfect; thoughtful, gentle, cheery, and so patient with her whims and imaginings, poor old soul, that his coming grew to be the one bright spot in her life, and I fancied she would give herself up to complete invalidism for the sake of them. But he looked grave one day over her, and informed me she must have a nurse.

“Do you think me incapable?” I asked rather sharply.

“No, but you couldn’t hold out to do all there is to be done. Your aunt is going to be worse, Miss Allison, and I doubt if we can pull her through. You’ll want somebody for night work.”

Mrs. Smith, the village nurse, is the dreariest of her kind, and brings an atmosphere of melancholy with her. My services were needed as cheerer-up from this time on, for poor Aunt Abby grew visibly weaker, and finally one stormy night the end seemed near, so I did not go home. Dr. Richmond came in about nine o’clock and found me in the cold, lofty parlor with its straight backed furniture and grim family portraits.

“See here,” he remarked as he returned from the sick-room, “mightn’t you be a little more comfortable somehow? You can’t sit up all night on the edge of a slippery sofa like that. Why don’t you doze, and let the nurse call if she wants you?”

I had unconsciously taken the attitude of my childhood’s years, when sent to call on Aunt Abby and charged not to let my feet touch the furniture, my hands crossed in my lap, and spine rigid. But I couldn’t have slept at any rate, I told him, and should manage all right.

He opened the front door to depart, then came back. A West Indian tornado was tearing at the house and lashing the trees with howls of fury, the chimneys moaning and blinds rattling. He looked at me irresolutely, I sitting motionless. What did a mere storm matter,--a tumult of nature which would be over by morning? _He_ might object to it, with nothing worse to worry about; it made no difference to me.

“I must be on hand every hour, anyway,” he said slowly, “to watch your aunt’s pulse. Neither you nor the nurse would understand it. If you don’t mind, I’ll stay here, instead of coming back and forth across the common in such a gale as this. And meanwhile let me show you a better way to rest.”

Poor Aunt Abby! It was fortunate that she could not see her plush sofa moved around cornerwise and its end filled with pillows, nor the logs which the doctor brought from the cellar piled across her beautifully polished, unused andirons. Had I any business to sink back luxuriously and enjoy the sparkle and warmth of a fire, with that unconscious figure in the next room? I sprang up again and tiptoed in to ask the nurse if I might not take her place.

“No,” said Mrs. Smith dolorously but firmly, “you ain’t experienced enough to watch out her last hours. Miss Abby’s been good to me in ways I sha’n’t say nothin’ about, and I’m a-goin’ to see her through. All I want you for is to call if I need you, and so long as I ain’t all alone I shall stay up till the last.”

I crept back, feeling incompetent and useless, and with some of the diminished nerve which results from the nearness and certainty of death--that hour we are never ready for.

“Lie against the cushions, please,” commanded the doctor quietly. “Now I’m going to be here and watch every symptom. You won’t have to keep anything on your mind,--and your aunt may rally, remember, perhaps even return to consciousness again. Just put the responsibility entirely on Mrs. Smith and me, and try to rest as much as you can.”

There was no resisting this; he should not see, however, that my eyes grew moist under the unwonted sensation of being looked out for. I turned my head away to pull my forces together, but he had gone back to Aunt Abby’s bedside. When he came out, in about five minutes, he told me that all was going well, and then sitting down began to speak of everyday matters. Before very long a better footing was established between us than ever before, and for a couple of hours we talked, only interrupted by visits to the sick-room. I forgot my secret smart at having been ridiculed, in hearing Morris Richmond tell delightful bits of his own experiences and life interest. Not being enough of a woman of the world to resist the delicate flattery which such a recital implies, I didn’t suspect him either of adroitness enough to use his autobiography for that purpose. But about twelve o’clock he looked at his watch, then at me, and frowned.

“You’re horribly tired,” he said, “and I’ve no business to keep you up when it isn’t necessary. Please go upstairs to bed, and sleep till four o’clock. I shall be here till then, and there will be absolutely nothing for you to do. If your aunt is improving, you needn’t be called till seven, for you can take Mrs. Smith’s place to-morrow, and Mrs. Benjamin will come over to help you if you need her.”

Evidently he himself was tired of talking so long. I didn’t give him credit for any especially disinterested motives in sending me off, but went with some resentment, since he so plainly wished me to go. I didn’t sleep, however. The mirror on the wall of the barren guest room moved from some hidden draught or jar, the old willow whipped its twigs against the window panes, and I lay watching them with a strange tumult in my heart, a whirlwind of whys and conjectures, a creeping nervousness as to the outcome of the next few hours, a lonely dread of the after months when Aunt Abby should be gone and my home life changed,--and yet, through it all, an odd new satisfaction which I tried to push away, and a tendency to go over word for word the talk of that evening and the looks on Morris Richmond’s face. There was a faint dawn in the room before I knew it, and then it occurred to me that the doctor ought to have a little breakfast after his long vigil. The servants were asleep, but the kitchen fire had been left “in,” and I knew where everything was kept. I freshened myself up and stole down the back stairs to cook coffee and eggs and hot toast. In the midst of it the door opened behind me, and I started guiltily.

“What are you doing _now_?” he demanded.

“How did you know?” I faltered.

“The smell of that coffee going all through the house is enough to wake anybody. So this is the way you obey orders! Miss West is better, and I am just going. You might perfectly well have slept on.”

“But I couldn’t,” I insisted, “and you will stay and drink the coffee now that I have cooked it.”

He consented if I would have some too, and we ate our impromptu meal in the dark dining-room, warming up over it and chatting most familiarly. It was growing light when the doctor took his hat in the hall.

“Thank you for being so good to me,” he said. “I appreciate it. Now please don’t overdo. I sha’n’t be in again probably until noon, unless you send for me;”--and he opened the door, where we both stood looking out. We were just opposite his house. The storm was abating, but the havoc it had made was visible everywhere. A big elm had been uprooted on the common, and lay prone, with hundreds of scattered twigs about it. And the doctor’s front yard? Alas! Mrs. Benjamin’s old buttonwood tree, which had been dying all summer, was crashed over, burying in its prostrate branches the crane, the andirons, the gay beds and all. Nature itself had swept away the last barriers now, I reflected triumphantly, to what might be a good satisfactory friendship. Better days were coming. But--

“Whew!” said my companion lightly. “Look over there. Dear me--I must hurry home and set Nick at work. It will take us a whole week to get square with the Village Improvement Society!”

Aunt Abby lived nearly a month longer. Her sister came on from California and took charge in the sick-room with an energy which left very little for others to do. After the funeral she went away again. The property had been left to her, the house to me, with just enough income to live, economically, in it. Father and his affianced bride were well satisfied with this arrangement, and made preparations to be married at Thanksgiving, at which time I was to move into my new abode. I felt it to be following indeed in Aunt Abby’s footsteps, and could see myself in imagination going on year after year with my one servant, growing older and grimmer, brooding over past days, finally slipping out of life without a friend in the world. It was rather a new thing for me to take this morbid view, but one always finds a fresh idea interesting, and I hugged it for a time with all the vehemence of my nature. The doctor I had seen now and then, and we had managed to remain pretty well on our new basis of easy and even confidential acquaintanceship. But I could not forget the old grudge; he would not keep up that spirit of mockery which cropped out so often unless he regarded me still as a village nonenity. Yet why need I care?

One November afternoon I started out to walk off the blues. It was gray and windy, but with occasional gleams of sunshine,--a good day for a hilltop. I went by the Bunkers’ shut up mansion, waved to Miss Maria at her little corner sitting-room window, shook my head to resist Mrs. Benjamin’s beckoning hand as I passed her door, and glanced at the doctor’s yard. It was in order again indeed. The mutilated crane and andirons had been removed, and the beds emptied and raked over; but a new horror had been perpetrated in the shape of two brilliant globular lawn-reflectors on pedestals, one blue-gray, the other yellow, which gave a miniature distorted panorama of all passing objects and showed me a waddling image of myself, with flattened, wrathful countenance. It was the last straw, and I walked fiercely away, resolved that if my future dwelling must be opposite this man’s, its front blinds should be lowered forever.

As that walk registered just about the lowest point my mental and spiritual barometer has ever reached, I can hardly forget it. I climbed over Hart’s hill, and from its summit looked off westward over level fields, bounded by a horizon of tossing gray clouds and slits of pale, yellow light. The old graveyard lay to the right, smooth bare maple boughs tossed above me. The road ran straight ahead, and I stood undecided whether to go on down or not. If it had been in a story, I reflected bitterly, the man I hated yet longed to see would appear then and there; in real life such things never happen at the right juncture. I should simply go back, give father his tea, and see him depart as usual for the evening, then sit alone.

But, after all, this is a story, or I shouldn’t be telling it. A buggy turned out of the farm-yard half way down the hill, and came toward me. I knew the horse and occupant, and turned my feet resolutely homeward, with a confusion in my brain which I thought was anger. A rapid trot sounded behind me, and then the doctor’s “Whoa!” I did not look up till I heard him say: “Miss Allison, would you please let me drive you home?”

“I came out for a walk,” I answered.

“Yes, but you’ve had the walk. And besides that, you are more by yourself nowadays than is good for you.” What business was it of his?--”Then, best of all, I have a letter from Amy to read you.”

“Oh, I don’t suppose it matters,” said I, climbing wearily in beside him, “only please have the goodness _not_ to drive me past your house. The prospect of looking at it morning, noon and night hereafter is bad enough since this latest infliction.”

“Infliction! do you really think so?” he asked, with the old merriment in his voice. “But I had to put something there, you know, to brighten it up a little. You certainly would have me sufficiently alive to my own interests as a physician, wouldn’t you, to see the propriety--”

“Stop!” I burst out, my cheeks one flame and the hot tears of tired-out nerves and pent-up anger springing to my eyes. “Be kind enough to understand that for your interests as a physician I don’t care one straw!”

The Doctor turned and laid his hand gently on mine, looking down at me with a smile which levelled all my fortifications.

“Of course you don’t,” he said. “But as a man--you surely must have seen by this time how badly I need a wife! Won’t you come home and take command of my front yard?”

RUTH HUNTINGTON SESSIONS.

XXI

A GENTLE MANIAC.

A STUDY IN LOVE AND INSANITY.

CHARACTERS.

MR. VALDINGAM. HENRY VAN HYDE, M. D. SUSAN VALDINGAM. ROSE. RICHARD, a servant.

TIME: Present.

PLACE: Mr. Valdingam’s country place near New York.

SCENE: _Library in Mr. Valdingam’s house. At the right of the stage, there is a large window opening upon a veranda and garden; moonlight effect. At the left there is an exit to other parts of the house._

MR. VALDINGAM (_who is pacing the room restlessly_): Dr. Van Hyde is extremely inconsiderate--extremely inconsiderate. He promised to be here at six-thirty sharp. A physician should keep his word at all hazards. (_He goes to his desk at right and rings a bell._)

(_Enter_ RICHARD _from_ LEFT.)

RICHARD: You rang, sir?

MR. VALDINGAM (_testily_): When does the next train leave for New York?

RICHARD: In a half hour, sir.

MR. VALDINGAM: Good. If Dr. Van Hyde does not arrive within that time, you will take the train and fetch him. Do you understand?

RICHARD: Yes, sir.

MR. VALDINGAM: Meanwhile, tell my sister that I want to speak with her. (_Exit_ RICHARD, L.) Now I’ll surprise that excellent woman; excellent, that is to say, if she possessed an ounce of brains. If _she_ could have her way, Rose would soon be in a lunatic asylum.

(_Enter_ SUSAN, L.)

SUSAN (_curtly_): You have something to say to me?

MR. VALDINGAM (_sharply_): Get ready a supper for two--for _two_--do you hear?

SUSAN: For two?

MR. VALDINGAM: And you can serve it in this room.

SUSAN: You are expecting a friend?

MR. VALDINGAM: Yes, a friend; or, rather a physician--a physician ... for Rose.

SUSAN (_aside_): The same old delusion (_To_ MR. VALDINGAM.) But, brother, Rose is quite well.

MR. VALDINGAM: Well! You say _well_!... It’s none of your business, however. Do as I bid.

SUSAN (_aside_): It’s useless to argue with him. (_To_ MR. VALDINGAM.) When do you expect your--friend?

MR. VALDINGAM: By the train that was due several minutes ago. Late, as usual.

(_Enter_ RICHARD, L.)

RICHARD: The doctor has just arrived, sir.

MR. VALDINGAM: Good. Bring the lamps, and then show the doctor in.

SUSAN (_aside_): That doctor may be useful, after all.

(_Exeunt_ RICHARD _and_ SUSAN.)

MR. VALDINGAM (_exultingly_): Ha! I’ve gained my point, in spite of them. Rose shall be saved.

(_Enter_, L., RICHARD, _with two lighted lamps. After placing them, he retires, leaving_ DR. VAN HYDE _in the background_.)

DR. VAN HYDE: This is Mr. Valdingam?

MR. VALDINGAM: And this Dr. Van Hyde? How delighted I am to meet you at last! But it is disgraceful that you should have been so long delayed. I shall see to it that the officers of the road are severely censured.

DR. VAN HYDE: Pray do not worry over such a trifle.

MR. VALDINGAM: That is very nicely said, sir.... As I informed you by letter, the case which you are about to treat is a very serious one--a very complicated one. It may even baffle you.... But before I add anything, permit me to see my sister for an instant. She is preparing a little supper for us, and, if you don’t object, we shall eat it here, _tête-à-tête_.

DR. VAN HYDE: With the greatest pleasure, Mr. Valdingam.

MR. VALDINGAM: Then kindly make yourself at home. The house is yours while you are in it. (_Exit_ MR. VALDINGAM, L.)

DR. VAN HYDE (_throwing himself into an easychair_): A comfortable place, certainly. That fellow, Valdingam, however, is an odd chap. Restless and excitable, I take it; but very agreeable, otherwise. I wonder what sort of a little creature the patient is, by the way. A stupid thing, I suppose.... (_After a moment of reflection_.) Strange!--I wonder if I am losing my own mind. For three days I’ve been in a state which is positively abnormal. I am haunted by a face, and I can’t rid my memory of it. And what a face! Who could forget it after having once looked upon it? I am in love with it. I am still more in love with its owner. That smile, like a glimpse of paradise! That mouth, like a dissected strawberry! That blush, like the stolen red of a rose! Oh, shall I ever see her again?

(_Enter_ MR. VALDINGAM, L.)

MR. VALDINGAM: You must be hungry, Dr. Van Hyde, and I fear that I can offer you little to appease a healthy appetite--a bowl of broth, a tender bit of broiled chicken, and some of the finest Burgundy in the world to wash it down. We homely folk of the country stick to the ancient fashions, you know,--a noonday lunch, and all that.

DR. VAN HYDE: I like your ancient fashions, as you call them, Mr. Valdingam. (_Enter_ RICHARD, _who sets a small table for two and serves supper_.)

MR. VALDINGAM: Then let us sit down without ceremony.

DR. VAN HYDE: Your Burgundy is indeed delicious, Mr. Valdingam.

MR. VALDINGAM: I flatter myself that it is. It dissolves the cobwebs from one’s brains, so to speak. It is the elixir of happiness; and alas! I am not a happy man, Dr. Van Hyde.... (_To_ RICHARD.) Leave us alone, Richard. (_Exit_ RICHARD.)

DR. VAN HYDE: Perhaps you exaggerate your misfortunes, my dear sir.

MR. VALDINGAM: Far from it--far from it.... Imagine a father, a doting father, like myself, whose only child is on the verge of insanity.

DR. VAN HYDE: It is a pitiful case, truly.

MR. VALDINGAM: It is pitiful, and it is strange; strange because my daughter Rose is, to all outward appearances, as sane as you or I.

DR. VAN HYDE: But there are symptoms--

MR. VALDINGAM: Symptoms which my keen sight discovered long ago. (_Mysteriously._) My daughter is morally irresponsible in her social relations with men.

DR. VAN HYDE: You astonish me!

MR. VALDINGAM: Prepare yourself for still greater astonishment. Accustomed though you are to dealings with the insane, I venture to say that Rose will deceive you at first as she has deceived others.... However, you are now on your guard. If you will permit me to do so, I will indicate to you the line of inquiry which you may adopt in your preliminary examination of my daughter.

(_As this conversation progresses the door at_ L. _is opened slightly, and_ SUSAN _is seen to be listening. Later she closes the door softly and disappears._)

DR. VAN HYDE: With pleasure, sir.

MR. VALDINGAM: Here is the point, then. My daughter appears to fall in love with every young man that strikes her fancy.

DR. VAN HYDE: Really--

MR. VALDINGAM: She may even fall in love with you.

DR. VAN HYDE: Extraordinary!

MR. VALDINGAM: Your course, therefore, will be to draw from her some decisive manifestation of this abnormal amativeness. You will not be slow to discover how deep-rooted the disease is.... By the way, would you object to meeting my daughter this evening? I shall not allow you to return to New York to-night, you know.

DR. VAN HYDE: I am wholly at your service.

MR. VALDINGAM (_ringing for_ RICHARD): So much the better. (_Enter_ RICHARD, _who removes the dining table_.) Now, if you will join me in a cigar and a stroll in the garden, we can talk more at our ease on this painful subject. (_They light their cigars and pass out into the garden. Enter from_ L. _at the same time_ SUSAN, _followed by_ ROSE.)

SUSAN: Well, what do you think of that?

ROSE (_laughingly_): I am very sorry for poor Dr. Van Hyde. Suppose I should be attacked with a tender passion for him, after all.

SUSAN: Don’t be ridiculous, Rose. Between you and me, however, it seems to me that this mad-doctor here, who is said to be so very clever, might be turned to some good purpose. I begin to think that your father needs looking after.

ROSE: Oh, papa is harmless. At any rate, wait awhile. At present, you must remember, I am Dr. Van Hyde’s patient.

SUSAN: Nonsense!

ROSE: I intend that he shall practise on me, certainly, especially if, as you assert, he is young and handsome. Or, let us say, I will experiment on him.

SUSAN: You are out of your senses.

ROSE: Not a bit. Has not Dr. Van Hyde come all the way up here to see _me_, to examine _me_? Shall I disappoint this luminary of the medical profession?... Never!... Now, Aunt Susan, you must let me have my own way this time. No harm shall come of it, I promise you. And who knows? Perhaps I may be able to give Dr. Van Hyde points for his next clinic.

SUSAN: Well, do as you please. But I fear the worst. More than one sane creature has been clapped into a lunatic asylum by some fool of a doctor.

ROSE: Tell me something more about this Dr. Van Hyde.

SUSAN: I’ve told you all I know ... young, handsome, and, I doubt not, a gentleman; very pleasant mannered, so far as I could see.

ROSE (_musingly_): Young, handsome, pleasant mannered. Not the traditional doctor, evidently; just such a doctor as I might naturally fall in love with.

SUSAN: Rose, you amaze me!

ROSE: But I am not going to fall in love with him.... (_After a pause, and mischievously._) Indeed, I have some one else in my thought at this moment.

SUSAN: What do you mean?

ROSE: Don’t blame me if I am a little human. Have you never met a man, Aunt Susan, who pleased you as no other man had ever pleased you before?

SUSAN: Perhaps I have; but it was mighty long ago.

ROSE: Call me foolish if you will; I, too, have met such a man.

SUSAN: You! Where?

ROSE: You won’t be cross if I confide in you? Besides, it’s not likely that I shall meet my Romeo again?--for he was a Romeo, Aunt Susan.

SUSAN: There are no Romeos nowadays.

ROSE: Oh, yes, there are--in trousers. Now, let me tell you my experience with him. It was not a bit romantic. Last Monday, as you remember, I was shopping in New York. To-day is Friday. (_With mock gravity._) An eternity from then till now.... Well, as I was rushing through a quiet side street, in haste to catch a car, suddenly I slipped and fell. My parasol went in one direction, my fan in another, my purse in still another, and three parcels I was carrying in three others. To make matters worse, I had sprained my ankle slightly, and was ready to cry with pain and mortification. Imagine the situation, Aunt Susan. There I sat in a heap on the pavement, surrounded by my possessions.

SUSAN (_grimly_): I hope you didn’t sit there long?

ROSE: How unsympathetic you are!... No, I did not sit there long. For a second I was paralyzed. Afterward, as I prepared to rise with proper dignity, I heard a man’s voice--a particularly agreeable man’s voice--close at my side. It said: “Permit me to assist you, madam.” Before I could reply, the owner of the voice lifted me to my feet. Oh, he did his part gallantly! I was, of course, too confused to thank him at once. But he did not stop for thanks. He simply picked up my purse, my parasol, and my parcels, and after placing them in my hands, and inquiring very gently whether I was hurt, lifted his hat courteously and passed on. Only for a single--a single instant, Aunt Susan, our eyes met.

SUSAN: What then, pray?

ROSE: Nothing. I limped to the car. That’s all.

SUSAN: And this stranger is your Romeo! Rose, you are a goose. Put him out of your head.

ROSE: How can I put him out when he persists in staying in? There, now you have my story.

SUSAN (_starting at the sound of footsteps_): Hush! I think your father and the doctor are coming back.

(_Susan busies herself with one of the lamps at_ L., _and Rose takes up a book and pretends to read. Her face is turned away from the_ RIGHT _entrance. Enter_ MR. VALDINGAM _and_ DR. VAN HYDE.)

MR. VALDINGAM: Doctor, I rely upon you now with the utmost confidence. What a knowledge is yours! How vast, how intricate a subject is this of insanity! I marvel that you should have learned so much in so few years. I’ll wager that you have not passed your thirty-fifth birthday.

DR. VAN HYDE: You have made a nearly correct guess, Mr. Mr Valdingam. I am in my thirty-sixth year. But I have enjoyed unusual experience.

(_At the sound of_ DR. VAN HYDE’S _voice, Rose half-rises, then hides her face with her book_.)

ROSE (_aside_): Good gracious! I have heard that voice before. (_She glances over the edge of the book toward the two men._) It is he. (_She slips out of her chair, and joins Susan. The backs of the two women are turned to the men, who are conversing sotto voce._) Aunt Susan!

SUSAN (_starting_): What’s the matter?

ROSE: It is he.

SUSAN: He? Who’s he?

ROSE: The same.

SUSAN: Who’s the same?

ROSE: The doctor.

SUSAN: What of the doctor?

ROSE: The doctor is--Romeo!

SUSAN (_dropping the book which_ ROSE _had passed to her_): Lord!

(_At the sound of the book falling_, MR. VALDINGAM _turns and perceives the two women. Then he catches_ DR. VAN HYDE _by the arm_.)

MR. VALDINGAM (_to the doctor_): She is here. Prepare yourself.

DR. VAN HYDE (_glancing at the backs of the women_): Your daughter?

MR. VALDINGAM: Yes, my daughter. A splendid opportunity for you, doctor. I will see to it that you are left alone with her. Talk to her. Watch her closely. Discover all you can. But first, I will introduce you to her. (_He goes over to_ L., _while_ DR. VAN HYDE _stays quietly at_ R. _He approaches his daughter._) Rose!

ROSE (_turning toward_ MR. VALDINGAM): Yes, papa.

MR. VALDINGAM: May I introduce to you a dear, a very old friend of mine.

ROSE (_aside_): A very old friend! (_To_ MR. VALDINGAM.) Certainly, papa.

(_She advances toward center of stage._ SUSAN _glares at_ MR. VALDINGAM, _but does not come forward_.)

MR. VALDINGAM (_to_ DR. VAN HYDE): Doctor!

DR. VAN HYDE (_advancing toward Rose_): At your service, Mr. Valdingam.

MR. VALDINGAM: May I introduce--

(_At this instant_, DR. VAN HYDE _obtains a full view of_ ROSE, _who regards him demurely. He stumbles back in amazement._)

DR. VAN HYDE: This--this--is your daughter?

MR. VALDINGAM: You appear surprised? (_Aside._) I knew it. I knew it.

DR. VAN HYDE: Not surprised--but--

MR. VALDINGAM: I understand thoroughly. (_Aside to the doctor._) Didn’t I tell you so? (_To_ ROSE.) Rose, this is my friend, Dr. Van Hyde. For certain reasons, my child, he is anxious to have a little chat with you.

ROSE (_innocently_): With me, papa?

MR. VALDINGAM: That is to say.... Well, no matter, I will explain later. (_Turning to_ SUSAN.) Susan! (SUSAN _advances toward center very stiffly_.) Dr. Van Hyde, this is my sister, Miss Valdingam.

(DR. VAN HYDE _bows to_ SUSAN _in an embarrassed manner_.)

SUSAN: Glad to know you, sir.

(_She retires to_ L., _accompanied by_ ROSE. MR. VALDINGAM _rejoins_ DR. VAN HYDE _at_ R.)

MR. VALDINGAM (_to_ DR. VAN HYDE): Did I not manage that skilfully?

DR. VAN HYDE (_dryly_): Most skilfully.

MR. VALDINGAM: The rest is simple enough. Remain where you are, and I will retire with Susan. Then you will have the field to yourself. Do you agree with me?

DR. VAN HYDE: Perfectly.

(MR. VALDINGAM _goes over to_ L., _consults in an undertone with_ SUSAN, _and then exeunt_ MR. VALDINGAM _and_ SUSAN _at_ L. DR. VAN HYDE _and_ ROSE _are thus left alone. Their backs are turned to each other._)

ROSE (_aside_): He recognized me.

DR. VAN HYDE (_aside_): I wonder if she recognized me.

ROSE (_aside_): What shall I do--play the mad woman?

DR. VAN HYDE (_aside_): This, then, is the end of my dream. I have fallen in love with a lunatic.

ROSE (_aside_): I suppose, to carry out papa’s wishes, that I ought to make love to him.

DR. VAN HYDE (_aside_): How did she come to be alone in the city last Monday? She must have escaped somehow. She is guarded with too little caution.

ROSE (_aside_): Why doesn’t he speak?

DR. VAN HYDE (_aside_): She is more enchanting than ever. How can so sweet a creature be condemned to such misery? (_He turns and confronts_ ROSE.) Miss Valdingam!

ROSE (_without moving_): Yes?

DR. VAN HYDE (_more softly_): Miss Valdingam!

ROSE (_turning slowly, and half looking at him_): Dr. Van Hyde!

DR. VAN HYDE: Will you not sit down?

ROSE: Thank you, I will. (_She seats herself at_ L.)

DR. VAN HYDE (_still standing, and speaking gravely_): Now--

ROSE (_carelessly_): Oh, you may as well take a chair yourself.

DR. VAN HYDE (_seating himself at_ L.): With your permission.

ROSE: Well?

DR. VAN HYDE: I was saying--

ROSE: Were you? I didn’t hear it.

DR. VAN HYDE: I was, rather, about to say--

ROSE (_laughing_): This is very odd, is it not?

DR. VAN HYDE: What, may I ask, is odd?

ROSE: This _tête-à-tête_.

DR. VAN HYDE: Professionally speaking--

ROSE: As a rule, you know, it takes two old friends to make a _tête-à-tête_. Now, it must be admitted that we are not old friends, are we?

DR. VAN HYDE: I trust that we shall be very good friends soon.

ROSE: Oh, my father has recommended you, and I may accept you on that basis. Are you from New York?

DR. VAN HYDE: Yes.

ROSE: And you are a physician?

DR. VAN HYDE: I practice a little.

ROSE: I suppose papa is to be one of your patients. He has not been strong. How is he, doctor?

DR. VAN HYDE (_aside_): She is very insistent.

ROSE: Why don’t you answer me? Is there some serious complication?

DR. VAN HYDE (_hurriedly_): Nothing serious, I assure you.... In fact, I have had no conversation with Mr. Valdingam about his health.

ROSE: Then what about?... Oh, I forgot. You are very old friends.

DR. VAN HYDE: Very old friends. (_Aside._) There is a strange gleam in her eyes. Poor thing! Poor thing!

ROSE: It is singular that he had never spoken of you before to-night.... (_After a pause of reflection._) Do you know, I feel that you called to see _me_, as well as papa. Am I right?

DR. VAN HYDE: Partly right, Miss Valdingam.... And I am _very_ glad to have met you at last. I have heard so much about you.

ROSE: Still, you had never _seen_ me until this evening?

DR. VAN HYDE (_taken by surprise_): Oh, I had.... (_Aside._) What a silly business I am making of this! She looks so perfectly sane and charming that I am tempted to forget my mission. (_To_ ROSE.) It seemed to me almost, I mean, that I had met you--I don’t know where.

ROSE (_aside_): This is delicious. I must punish him. (_Advancing toward him with an air of anger._) Sir, I perceive that you wish to mislead me. Your presence here has a professional object. Do not deny it.

DR. VAN HYDE: I--I--do not deny it.

ROSE (_tragically_): Connected with myself?

DR. VAN HYDE (_aside_): Suspicious of a stranger! Restless under medical observation! These are symptoms!... I must try to divert her thoughts.

ROSE: I repeat, sir--connected with myself?

DR. VAN HYDE: Pray, Miss Valdingam, do not excite yourself.

ROSE: Conceal nothing! I am wretched, annoyed, persecuted. I am under a wicked surveillance. Do you imagine that I’m blind? I understand their plot. (_Pointing to door at_ L.) And you, too, are in the plot. But I shall prove to you--at once, _at once_--that I am as rational as they, as you. (_In a quieter tone._) Now, have you any questions to ask me?

DR. VAN HYDE (_somewhat confused_): Do not take the matter so seriously, Miss Valdingam. Even a rational person--not excepting myself--may have theories, hallucinations, dreams--

ROSE (_wildly_): Dreams! I have astonishing dreams, doctor. They come to me when I am awake, when I _seem_ to be awake. Strange noises then rattle in my brain, and I grow dizzy. In any other person, these dreams might be _ideas_.... At other times, the world of my fancy is crowded with men, myriads of men.

DR. VAN HYDE (_aside_): Her father was not mistaken.

ROSE: Yes, young men; graceful men; men who flatter and adore me!... Totally unlike the men I see when I escape to New York.

DR. VAN HYDE: Ah, she escapes!

ROSE: Then, too, I have visions of matrimony. I feel a wild desire to propose to every man I meet. Have you ever proposed, doctor?

DR. VAN HYDE: Never.

ROSE: Why don’t you? You can not have lacked opportunity.

DR. VAN HYDE: I fear that I have.

ROSE: You are young, rich, good-looking, and successful.

DR. VAN HYDE (_aside_): Heavens!

ROSE: You should marry.

DR. VAN HYDE: I have not the time--

ROSE: There is no time like the present.... We are alone.

DR. VAN HYDE (_nervously_): Alone?

ROSE: Yes; papa and Aunt Susan were discreet enough to retire. Do not be afraid.

DR. VAN HYDE: Afraid of what?

ROSE: Of proposing to me. If you are, I will propose to you.

DR. VAN HYDE (_aside_): I must humor her. But it is distressing to do so. (_To_ ROSE.) You would marry me?

ROSE: Oh, yes!

DR. VAN HYDE: You like me well enough for that?

ROSE: I liked you at first sight.

DR. VAN HYDE: But you have barely an acquaintance with me.

ROSE: So much the better. If my acquaintance with you were more intimate, I might not be willing to marry you.

DR. VAN HYDE: You can’t love me, however; and what is marriage without love?

ROSE: Why can’t I love you?

DR. VAN HYDE: Love, my dear child, love is the tenderest passion of our nature. It is the flower of life. It is the affinity of souls. It is--

ROSE (_passionately_): It is--it is.

DR. VAN HYDE (_aside_): If I could only believe that she might learn to love me--that she had not loved forty other men--that she was not a monster in the guise of a siren! Yet I will do my duty, cruel as it is to me. (_To_ ROSE.) But your father?

ROSE: Papa has never objected to my loving anybody.

DR. VAN HYDE: Then you have loved somebody else?

ROSE: Yes, indeed. Eighteen.

DR. VAN HYDE: Eighteen!

ROSE: Eighteen lost opportunities. You are the nineteenth. If you refuse to take me, I shall have to look out for my twentieth. Perhaps you can introduce me to one of your friends.

DR. VAN HYDE: Suppose--suppose--I consent to marry you; that is to say, suppose you consent to marry me. How can I be sure that you won’t fall in love with your twentieth--as you call him--to-morrow.

ROSE: You can’t be sure. Love has wings like a bird. Its natural action is flight. How can one help loving?

DR. VAN HYDE (_tenderly_): I should not wish to share your love with another man.

ROSE: I don’t understand you.

DR. VAN HYDE (_aside_): This is the most remarkable case in my experience. The girl is clean daft on one subject. And yet, somehow, I am half inclined to take her at her word. I might succeed in curing her of her mania; I might transform her, create a new woman in this unhappy spirit; I can not abandon her to a wretched fate. (_To_ ROSE.) You say you do not understand me?

ROSE: I can’t understand why I should not be allowed to love whomever I please.

DR. VAN HYDE: The law declares that you must love but one husband.

ROSE: As I could only have one husband at a time, I might still love some one who was not my husband.

DR. VAN HYDE (_crossing to_ R. _and seating himself next to_ ROSE): Don’t you think you could love one man, whose devotion to you would be tireless, whose life would be your life, whose thought would be always for your welfare and happiness; don’t you think you could love this man, and this man alone?

ROSE (_moving away from him_): I never thought of that.

DR. VAN HYDE (_moving toward her again_): Try, try, my dear child, to see things with my eyes.

ROSE: I have a pair of my own, thank you.

_Dr. Van Hyde_ (_losing himself in his passion_): Listen to me. I _do_ love you, and I want you to love me--but not as you love other men. I am anxious to be your friend, your very best friend. I want you to look to me as you would look to no one else. I want--

ROSE (_changing her manner and laughing_): You play your part admirably, Dr. Van Hyde.

DR. VAN HYDE (_in astonishment_): Play my part!

ROSE: You have just asked me to love you?

DR. VAN HYDE: Yes.

ROSE: To accept you as my very best friend?

DR. VAN HYDE: Yes.

ROSE: Then I wish to tell you, sir, that you have been trifling with me. Your love-making is purely professional. It is a kind of medicine.

DR. VAN HYDE (_aside_): This is a hopeless case.

ROSE: Furthermore, I have convicted you of falsehood. You never met my father until to-night. You did meet _me_ last Monday afternoon, in New York, at 2:25 p. m.

DR. VAN HYDE: Miss Valdingam!

ROSE (_courtesying to him_): Permit me to thank you, dear doctor, for your kindness in picking up my parcels, my parasol, my purse, and myself. I did not have a chance to thank you while you were performing that unpleasant duty.

DR. VAN HYDE: Then you remember?

ROSE: How could I forget so fascinating an adventure, although, to be sure, we crazy women are apt to have defective memories.

DR. VAN HYDE (_aside_): Have I been a fool? (_To_ ROSE.) I may as well confess that, when I saw you for the first time here to-night, I recognized you. But I did not suppose that you recognized me.

ROSE: Which proves that you are not so wise a doctor as you ought to be.

DR. VAN HYDE: Really, Miss Valdingam--

ROSE: Really, Dr. Van Hyde--

DR. VAN HYDE: I--I do not know what to say.

ROSE: I repeat--you have played your part admirably.

DR. VAN HYDE: How can you accuse me of playing a part?

ROSE: Sweet duplicity! Did you not come here to minister to my mind’s disease?

DR. VAN HYDE: To meet you--to learn to know you.

ROSE: Of course. Meanwhile, by way of illustrating my mania, you made love to me.

DR. VAN HYDE: That is--

ROSE: That is--you played a part. And you were so successful that, a few minutes ago, you thought I had fallen in love with you.

DR. VAN HYDE: You embarrass me, Miss Valdingam.

ROSE: A doctor should never be embarrassed. He should keep a cool head. His nerves should be steady; his hand determined. Now, let us be entirely frank. You wanted to diagnose me--to analyze me--perhaps to hypnotize me. Have I been a good subject?

DR. VAN HYDE (_awkwardly_): An admirable subject.

ROSE: And, honestly, what do you think of my mania now?

DR. VAN HYDE (_still more bewildered_): It is a very gentle mania.

ROSE: A very gentle mania? Nothing worse than that?

DR. VAN HYDE: Nothing worse; I am convinced.

ROSE: You reassure me. But let me tell you, in return, that I have reason to be grateful to you, Dr. Van Hyde. It may be that I am matrimonially mad. Many persons are. Nearly all girls are. But at least I feel certain that I shall never be confined in an asylum. You would not let them send me to an asylum, would you?

DR. VAN HYDE: No! No!

ROSE: Then we can afford to be good friends.

DR. VAN HYDE: The best of friends.

ROSE: We need not talk of love again?

DR. VAN HYDE (_hesitatingly_): No.

ROSE: Because, you see, though you are a man, you are also my doctor; and a patient could not fall in love with her doctor, could she?

DR. VAN HYDE: Well, it’s not usual.

ROSE: Then, let me ask you a question. Do you think my malady--it is a terrible malady, I suppose--can be cured?

DR. VAN HYDE: I am sure it can be.

ROSE: Ah! you give me hope.

DR. VAN HYDE: But you must follow my instructions carefully. These I will explain to you later. In the first place, however, you should try to exercise a certain amount of will power. When you meet a person--that is, a man--

ROSE: I should hate and despise him.

DR. VAN HYDE: Oh, not so bad as that. You should avoid him.

ROSE: Avoid him, I see.

DR. VAN HYDE: Then you could hardly fall in love with him.

ROSE: Nor marry him.

DR. VAN HYDE: Of course you need amusement.

ROSE: Of course.

DR. VAN HYDE: Get as much of it as you can.

ROSE (_aside_): I’m getting it.

DR. VAN HYDE: Meanwhile, I will have a talk with your father.

ROSE: Papa will do anything for me.

DR. VAN HYDE: Then we have little to fear.... Now (_he turns to upper_ L.) I know you must be tired. This long talk has fatigued you. I will call Mr. Valdingam. (_He is about to open the door._)

ROSE (_suddenly_): One moment, please.

DR. VAN HYDE (_turning to her_): Yes?

ROSE: Pardon me, I am not in the least fatigued. I have--something more to say.

DR. VAN HYDE: Indeed?

ROSE: Before you see papa again.... Please sit down. (_He seats himself at_ R. _She stands leaning against table at_ L.) We have had quite an important little chat, after all, have we not?

DR. VAN HYDE (_gravely_): I think it has been important.

ROSE: For me?

DR. VAN HYDE: For you, I hope.

ROSE: And during this conversation, have I had--any lucid intervals?

DR. VAN HYDE: Well, candidly, and though I am what is called a specialist in brain diseases, I should regard your mind as perfectly normal and healthy, except--

ROSE: Except on the subject of matrimony.

DR. VAN HYDE: Ye-s.

ROSE: Now, suppose I should assure you that I am not in the least bit insane. Would that be characteristic of insanity?

DR. VAN HYDE: Few persons with a mania suspect their affliction.

ROSE: I understand. But suppose--suppose--you had been deceived?

DR. VAN HYDE (_jumping to his feet_): Is it possible?

ROSE: Physicians are deceived sometimes, are they not?

DR. VAN HYDE (_seating himself_): They are only human.

ROSE (_slyly_): And you are _very_ human.

DR. VAN HYDE (_confusedly_): I confess it--to-night.

ROSE: That is why, then, you have been so easily deceived--to-night?

DR. VAN HYDE (_jumping to his feet again_): You mean?--

ROSE: That you have actually been deceived. I have no mania--not even a mania to wed all the young men I meet. (_Laughing merrily._) But, of course, you won’t believe me. My denial is only a symptom of my dementia.

DR. VAN HYDE: What can I think? Your father told me--

ROSE: Yes, poor papa told you a great many things. You took it for granted that what he said was said with reason.

DR. VAN HYDE (_moving toward her eagerly_): And I have been--

ROSE: As patient as a saint with the mad-cap teasing of a foolish girl, and gently considerate of an old man’s whims.

DR. VAN HYDE (_joyfully_): Can it be true? Oh, Miss Valdingam, I begin to look upon myself as the most ridiculous as well as the happiest of men.

ROSE: But I could not resist teasing you. And still, in spite of this confession, I have _one_ mania--only one.

DR. VAN HYDE: A gentle mania?

ROSE: Very gentle, as you have said. It is love--

DR. VAN HYDE (_advancing_): Love!

ROSE (_mischievously_): For my father.

DR. VAN HYDE (_disappointedly_): Oh!

ROSE: He is a good, kind father. Since my mother’s death I have been his closest companion. Oh, doctor, I am so happy that you have come to our house. It is my father who needs your help, your sympathy. You will give both, I know.

DR. VAN HYDE: It is your father, then--

ROSE: Who is partially insane. He has been in this condition for years. His chief delusion is that I am insane.

DR. VAN HYDE: What a fool I have been!

ROSE: Do not blame yourself. Have I not done what I could to convince you that papa had told you the truth.... Can you forgive me?

DR. VAN HYDE: Forgive _you_! Can you forgive _me_?

ROSE: Let us forgive each other, then. (_Walking to the window at_ R. _and looking out._)

DR. VAN HYDE (_following her_): Miss Valdingam--I--

ROSE (_turning and regarding him archly_): Be careful, sir! Perhaps you are even now mistaken. Remember how cunning we maniacs are!

DR. VAN HYDE (_aside_): I am more than ever in love with her. How beautiful she is. Sane or insane, it would be a blessing to possess her. (_To_ ROSE, _nervously_.) Miss Valdingam, may I ask you a question?

ROSE (_gently_): Yes.

DR. VAN HYDE: You remember that when--when--I thought you were not quite--

ROSE: Balanced.

DR. VAN HYDE: I had the hardihood--well--to speak to you of love.

ROSE: Certainly. You spoke professionally.

DR. VAN HYDE: I did _not_ speak professionally.

ROSE (_looking out of the window_): Oh, indeed?

DR. VAN HYDE: I spoke with sincerity--from my heart.

ROSE (_with mock dignity_): Sir!

DR. VAN HYDE: I must tell you the truth. Since that day--

ROSE (_smiling_): Monday at 2:25 p. m.

DR. VAN HYDE: Don’t laugh at me. I was in earnest a few moments ago--I am in earnest now.... I love you!

ROSE (_with agitation_): You love me!

DR. VAN HYDE: With all my soul. (_He seizes her hand and kisses it._)

ROSE (_drawing her hand away quickly_): Hush! Some one is coming.

MR. VALDINGAM (_from behind the door_): Can we come in, doctor?

ROSE (_in a whisper to the doctor_): Pretend that you do not know the truth, that you are able to cure me.

DR. VAN HYDE (_in a whisper_): That I have taken the case?

ROSE: Yes.

DR. VAN HYDE: For life?

ROSE: We shall see. But speak to him.

DR. VAN HYDE (_turning to_ L.): Is that you, Mr. Valdingam? Please come in. (_Enter_ MR. VALDINGAM _and_ SUSAN.)

MR. VALDINGAM (_eagerly and secretly, to_ DR. VAN HYDE): Well?

DR. VAN HYDE (_gravely_): I am glad to be able to assure you, Mr. Valdingam, that my preliminary examination of your daughter has been entirely satisfactory.

MR. VALDINGAM: Sir, I am overwhelmed with delight.

DR. VAN HYDE: While your daughter is, without doubt, suffering from certain delusions--

MR. VALDINGAM (_turning to_ SUSAN): Do you hear that, sister?

DR. VAN HYDE: Her trouble is not far enough advanced to occasion anxiety.

MR. VALDINGAM: Heaven be praised!

DR. VAN HYDE: In fact, I promise you that within one month her mind will be as clear and vigorous as your own.

MR. VALDINGAM (_grasping the doctor’s hands_): Sir, I regard you as our benefactor.

DR. VAN HYDE: But you must be very patient and kind; and, with your permission, I will take charge of her. My plan is to visit her, here at your house, twice, or perhaps three or four times a week. You will notice an improvement in her condition very soon.

MR. VALDINGAM: Have your way, doctor. So long as my child is saved to me, that is everything. (_Turning to_ ROSE.) Rose, my pet, I hear that the doctor and you have become fast friends already. (ROSE _joins them at_ L. C., _and_ MR. VALDINGAM _kisses and fondles her_.)

ROSE: Oh, yes, papa, Dr. Van Hyde and I are now very good friends.

MR. VALDINGAM: That’s right--that’s right. Put your trust in him, my child. He has your interest at heart.

(MR. VALDINGAM _turns gleefully to_ SUSAN, _and the two converse_.)

DR. VAN HYDE (_to_ ROSE): You hear? He places you in my care.

ROSE: I share his confidence.

DR. VAN HYDE: And--may I not hope to be--your nineteenth?

ROSE: There has not yet been--a first.

DR. VAN HYDE: Shall we unite then in a study of agreeable possibilities?

ROSE (_archly_): Won’t you walk with me in the garden? See how bright and beautiful the night is!... Come. Perhaps I may find you--_a rose_.

(ROSE _and_ DR. VAN HYDE _exeunt at_ L. _as the curtain falls._)

GEORGE EDGAR MONTGOMERY.

* * * * * *

Transcriber’s note:

--Obvious errors were corrected.