A LATE VISITOR
These rumors never reached the doctor. No scandalmonger ever dared talk
gossip to him. When he first began to practise among the people of
Warehold, and some garrulous old dame would seek to enrich his visit by
tittle-tattle about her neighbors, she had never tried it a second
time. Doctor John of Barnegat either received the news in silence or
answered it with some pleasantry; even Ann Gossaway held her peace
whenever the doctor had to be called in to prescribe for her
oversensitive throat.
He was aware that Jane had laid herself open to criticism in bringing
home a child about which she had made no explanation, but he never
spoke of it nor allowed anyone to say so to him. He would have been
much happier, of course, if she had given him her confidence in this as
she had in many other matters affecting her life; but he accepted her
silence as part of her whole attitude toward him. Knowing her as he
did, he was convinced that her sole incentive was one of loving
kindness, both for the child and for the poor mother whose sin or whose
poverty she was concealing. In this connection, he remembered how in
one of her letters to Martha she had told of the numberless waifs she
had seen and how her heart ached for them; especially in the hospitals
which she had visited and among the students. He recalled that he
himself had had many similar experiences in his Paris days, in which a
woman like Jane Cobden would have been a veritable angel of mercy.
Mrs. Cavendish's ears were more easily approached by the gossips of
Warehold and vicinity; then, again she was always curious over the
inmates of the Cobden house, and any little scraps of news, reliable or
not, about either Jane or her absent sister were eagerly listened to.
Finding it impossible to restrain herself any longer, she had seized
the opportunity one evening when she and her son were sitting together
in the salon, a rare occurrence for the doctor, and only possible when
his patients were on the mend.
"I'm sorry Jane Cobden was so foolish as to bring home that baby," she
began.
"Why?" said the doctor, without lifting his eyes from the book he was
reading.
"Oh, she lays herself open to criticism. It is, of course, but one of
her eccentricities, but she owes something to her position and birth
and should not invite unnecessary comment."
"Who criticises her?" asked the doctor, his eyes still on the pages.
"Oh, you can't tell; everybody is talking about it. Some of the gossip
is outrageous, some I could not even repeat."
"I have no doubt of it," answered the doctor quietly. "All small places
like Warehold and Barnegat need topics of conversation, and Miss Jane
for the moment is furnishing one of them. They utilize you, dear
mother, and me, and everybody else in the same way. But that is no
reason why we should lend our ears or our tongues to spread and
encourage it."
"I quite agree with you, my son, and I told the person who told me how
foolish and silly it was, but they will talk, no matter what you say to
them."
"What do they say?" asked the doctor, laying down his book and rising
from his chair.
"Oh, all sorts of things. One rumor is that Captain Holt's son, Barton,
the one that quarrelled with his father and who went to sea, could tell
something of the child, if he could be found."
The doctor laughed. "He can be found," he answered. "I saw his father
only last week, and he told me Bart was in Brazil. That is some
thousand of miles from Paris, but a little thing like that in geography
doesn't seem to make much difference to some of our good people. Why do
you listen to such nonsense?" he added as he kissed her tenderly and,
with a pat on her cheek, left the room for his study. His mother's talk
had made but little impression upon him. Gossip of this kind was always
current when waifs like Archie formed the topic; but it hurt nobody, he
said to himself--nobody like Jane.
Sitting under his study lamp looking up some complicated case, his
books about him, Jane's sad face came before him. "Has she not had
trouble enough," he said to himself, "parted from Lucy and with her
unsettled money affairs, without having to face these gnats whose sting
she cannot ward off?" With this came the thought of his own
helplessness to comfort her. He had taken her at her word that night
before she left for Paris, when she had refused to give him her promise
and had told him to wait, and he was still ready to come at her call;
loving her, watching ever her, absorbed in every detail of her daily
life, and eager to grant her slightest wish, and yet he could not but
see that she had, since her return, surrounded herself with a barrier
which he could neither understand nor break down whenever he touched on
their personal relations.
Had he loved her less he would, in justice to himself, have faced all
her opposition and demanded an answer--Yes or No--as to whether she
would yield to his wishes. But his generous nature forbade any such
stand and his reverence for her precluded any such mental attitude.
Lifting his eyes from his books and gazing dreamily into the space
before him, he recalled, with a certain sinking of the heart, a
conversation which had taken place between Jane and himself a few days
after her arrival--an interview which had made a deep impression upon
him. The two, in the absence of Martha--she had left the room for a
moment--were standing beside the crib watching the child's breathing.
Seizing the opportunity, one he had watched for, he had told her how
much he had missed her during the two years, and how much happier his
life was now that he could touch her hand and listen to her voice. She
had evaded his meaning, making answer that his pleasure, was nothing
compared to her own when she thought how safe the baby would be in his
hands; adding quickly that she could never thank him enough for
remaining in Barnegat and not leaving her helpless and without a
"physician." The tone with which she pronounced the word had hurt him.
He thought he detected a slight inflection, as if she were making a
distinction between his skill as an expert and his love as a man, but
he was not sure.
Still gazing into the shadows before him, his unread book in his hand,
he recalled a later occasion when she appeared rather to shrink from
him than to wish to be near him, speaking to him with downcast eyes and
without the frank look in her face which was always his welcome. On
this day she was more unstrung and more desolate than he had ever seen
her. At length, emboldened by his intense desire to help, and putting
aside every obstacle, he had taken her hand and had said with all his
heart in his voice:
"Jane, you once told me you loved me. Is it still true?"
He remembered how at first she had not answered, and how after a moment
she had slowly withdrawn her hand and had replied in a voice almost
inarticulate, so great was her emotion.
"Yes, John, and always will be, but it can never go beyond that--never,
never. Don't ask many more questions. Don't talk to me about it. Not
now, John--not now! Don't hate me! Let us be as we have always
been--please, John! You would not refuse me if you knew."
He had started forward to take her in his arms; to insist that now
every obstacle was removed she should give him at once the lawful right
to protect her, but she had shrunk back, the palms of her hands held
out as barriers, and before he could reason with her Martha had entered
with something for little Archie, and so the interview had come to an
end.
Then, still absorbed in his thoughts, his eyes suddenly brightened and
a certain joy trembled in his heart as he remembered that with all
these misgivings and doubts there were other times--and their sum was
in the ascendency--when she showed the same confidence in his judgement
and the same readiness to take his advice; when the old light would
once more flash in her eyes as she grasped his hand and the old sadness
again shadow her face when his visits came to an end. With this he must
be for a time content.
These and a hundred other thoughts raced through Doctor John's mind as
he sat to-night in his study chair, the lamplight falling on his open
books and thin, delicately modelled hands.
Once he rose from his seat and began pacing his study floor, his hands
behind his back, his mind on Jane, on her curious and incomprehensible
moods, trying to solve them as he walked, trusting and leaning upon him
one day and shrinking from him the next. Baffled for the hundredth time
in this mental search, he dropped again into his chair, and adjusting
the lamp, pulled his books toward him to devote his mind to their
contents. As the light flared up he caught the sound of a step upon the
gravel outside, and then a heavy tread upon the porch. An instant later
his knocker sounded. Doctor Cavendish gave a sigh--he had hoped to have
one night at home--and rose to open the door.
Captain Nat Holt stood outside.
His pea-jacket was buttoned close up under his chin, his hat drawn
tight down over his forehead. His weather-beaten face, as the light
fell upon it, looked cracked and drawn, with dark hollows under the
eyes, which the shadows from the lamplight deepened.
"It's late, I know, doctor," he said in a hoarse, strained voice; "ten
o'clock, maybe, but I got somethin' to talk to ye about," and he strode
into the room. "Alone, are ye?" he continued, as he loosened his coat
and laid his hat on the desk. "Where's the good mother? Home, is she?"
"Yes, she's inside," answered the doctor, pointing to the open door
leading to the salon and grasping the captain's brawny hand in welcome.
"Why? Do you want to see her?"
"No, I don't want to see her; don't want to see nobody but you. She
can't hear, can she? 'Scuse me--I'll close this door."
The doctor looked at him curiously. The captain seemed to be laboring
under a nervous strain, unusual in one so stolid and self-possessed.
The door closed, the captain moved back a cushion, dropped into a
corner of the sofa, and sat looking at the doctor, with legs apart, his
open palms resting on his knees.
"I got bad news, doctor--awful bad news for everybody," as he spoke he
reached into his pocket and produced a letter with a foreign postmark.
"You remember my son Bart, of course, don't ye, who left home some two
years ago?" he went on.
The doctor nodded.
"Well, he's dead."
"Your son Bart dead!" cried the doctor, repeating his name in the
surprise of the announcement. "How do you know?"
"This letter came by to-day's mail. It's from the consul at Rio. Bart
come in to see him dead broke and he helped him out. He'd run away from
the ship and was goin' up into the mines to work, so the consul wrote
me. He was in once after that and got a little money, and then he got
down with yellow fever and they took him to the hospital, and he died
in three days. There ain't no doubt about it. Here's a list of the dead
in the paper; you kin read his name plain as print."
Doctor John reached for the letter and newspaper clipping and turned
them toward the lamp. The envelope was stamped "Rio Janeiro" and the
letter bore the official heading of the consulate.
"That's dreadful, dreadful news, captain," said the doctor in
sympathetic tones. "Poor boy! it's too bad. Perhaps, however, there may
be some mistake, after all. Foreign hospital registers are not always
reliable," added the doctor in a hopeful tone.
"No, it's all true, or Benham wouldn't write me what he has. I've known
him for years. He knows me, too, and he don't go off half-cocked. I
wrote him to look after Bart and sent him some money and give him the
name of the ship, and he watched for her and sent for him all right. I
was pretty nigh crazy that night he left, and handled him, maybe,
rougher'n I ou'ter, but I couldn't help it. There's some things I can't
stand, and what he done was one of 'em. It all comes back to me now,
but I'd do it ag'in." As he spoke the rough, hard sailor leaned forward
and rested his chin on his hand. The news had evidently been a great
shock to him.
The doctor reached over and laid his hand on the captain's knee. "I'm
very, very sorry, captain, for you and for Bart; and the only son you
have, is it not?"
"Yes, and the only child we ever had. That makes it worse. Thank God,
his mother's dead! All this would have broken her heart." For a moment
the two men were silent, then the captain continued in a tone as if he
were talking to himself, his eyes on the lamp:
"But I couldn't have lived with him after that, and I told him so--not
till he acted fair and square, like a man. I hoped he would some day,
but that's over now."
"We're none of us bad all the way through, captain," reasoned the
doctor, "and don't you think of him in that way. He would have come to
himself some day and been a comfort to you. I didn't know him as well
as I might, and only as I met him at Yardley, but he must have had a
great many fine qualities or the Cobdens wouldn't have liked him. Miss
Jane used often to talk to me about him. She always believed in him.
She will be greatly distressed over this news."
"That's what brings me here. I want you to tell her, and not me. I'm
afraid it'll git out and she'll hear it, and then she'll be worse off
than she is now. Maybe it's best to say nothin' 'bout it to nobody and
let it go. There ain't no one but me to grieve for him, and they don't
send no bodies home, not from Rio, nor nowheres along that coast.
Maybe, too, it ain't the time to say it to her. I was up there last
week to see the baby, and she looked thinner and paler than I ever see
her. I didn't know what to do, so I says to myself, 'There's Doctor
John, he's at her house reg'lar and knows the ins and outs of her, and
I'll go and tell him 'bout it and ask his advice.' I'd rather cut my
hand off than hurt her, for if there's an angel on earth she's one. She
shakes so when I mention Bart's name and gits so flustered, that's why
I dar'n't tell her. Now he's dead there won't be nobody to do right by
Archie. I can't; I'm all muzzled up tight. She made me take an oath,
same as she has you, and I ain't goin' to break it any more'n you
would. The little feller'll have to git 'long best way he kin now."
Doctor John bent forward in his chair and looked at the captain
curiously. His words convey no meaning to him. For an instant he
thought that the shock of his son's death had unsettled the man's mind.
"Take an oath! What for?"
"'Bout Archie and herself."
"But I've taken no oath!"
"Well, perhaps it isn't your habit; it ain't some men's. I did."
"What about?"
It was the captain's turn now to look searchingly into his companion's
face. The doctor's back was toward the lamp, throwing his face into
shadow, but the captain could read its expression plainly.
"You mean to tell me, doctor, you don't know what's goin' on up at
Yardley? You do, of course, but you won't say--that's like you doctors!"
"Yes, everything. But what has your son Bart got to do with it?"
"Got to do with it! Ain't Jane Cobden motherin' his child?"
The doctor lunged forward in his seat, his eyes staring straight at the
captain. Had the old sailor struck him in the face he could not have
been more astounded.
"His child!" he cried savagely.
"Certainly! Whose else is it? You knew, didn't ye?"
The doctor settled back in his chair with the movement of an ox felled
by a sudden blow. With the appalling news there rang in his ears the
tones of his mother's voice retailing the gossip of the village. This,
then, was what she could not repeat.
After a moment he raised his head and asked in a low, firm voice:
"Did Bart go to Paris after he left here?"
"No, of course not! Went 'board the Corsair bound for Rio, and has been
there ever since. I told you that before. There weren't no necessity
for her to meet him in Paris."
The doctor sprang from his chair and with eyes biasing and fists
tightly clenched, stood over the captain.
"And you dare to sit there and tell me that Miss Jane Cobden is that
child's mother?"
The captain struggled to his feet, his open hands held up to the doctor
as if to ward off a blow.
"Miss Jane! No, by God! No! Are you crazy? Sit down, sit down, I tell
ye!"
"Who, then? Speak!"
"Lucy! That's what I drove Bart out for. Mort Cobden's daughter--Mort,
mind ye, that was a brother to me since I was a boy! Jane that that
child's mother! Yes, all the mother poor Archie's got! Ask Miss Jane,
she'll tell ye. Tell ye how she sits and eats her heart out to save her
sister that's too scared to come home. I want to cut my tongue out for
tellin' ye, but I thought ye knew. Martha told me you loved her and
that she loved you, and I thought she'd told ye. Jane Cobden crooked!
No more'n the angels are. Now, will you tell her Bart's dead, or shall
I?"
"I will tell her," answered the doctor firmly, "and to-night."