Near the verge of a bold promontory stands the hotel, and looks
southeastward over a sweep of sea unbroken to the horizon. Behind it
stretches the vast forest, which after two hundred years has resumed
the sterile coast wrested from it by the first Pilgrims, and has begun
to efface the evidences of the inroad made in recent years by the bold
speculator for whom Jocelyn’s is named. The young birches and spruces
are breast high in the drives and avenues at Jocelyn’s; the low
blackberry vines and the sweet fern cover the carefully-graded
sidewalks, and obscure the divisions of the lots; the children of the
boarders have found squawberries in the public square on the spot where
the band-stand was to have been. The notion of a sea-side resort at
this point was courageously conceived, and to a certain extent it was
generously realized. Except for its remoteness from the railroad, a
drawback which future enterprise might be expected to remedy in some
way, the place has many natural advantages. The broad plateau is cooled
by a breeze from the vast forests behind it, which comes laden with
health and freshness from the young pines; the sea at its feet is
warmed by the Gulf Stream to a temperature delicious for bathing. There
are certainly mosquitoes from the woods; but there are mosquitoes
everywhere, and the report that people have been driven away by them is
manifestly untrue, for whoever comes to Jocelyn’s remains. The beach at
the foot of the bluff is almost a mile at its curve, and it is so
smooth and hard that it glistens like polished marble when newly washed
by the tide. It is true that you reach it from the top by a flight of
eighty steps, but it was intended to have an elevator, like those near
the Whirlpool at Niagara. In the mean time it is easy enough to go
down, and the ladies go down every day, taking their novels or their
needle-work with them. They have various notions of a bath: some
conceive that it is bathing to sit in the edge of the water, and emit
shrieks as the surge sweeps against them; others run boldly in, and
after a moment of poignant hesitation jump up and down half-a-dozen
times, and run out; yet others imagine it better to remain immersed to
the chin for a given space, looking toward the shore with lips tightly
shut and the breath held. But after the bath they are all of one mind;
they lay their shawls on the warm sand, and, spreading out their hair
to dry, they doze in the sun, in such coils and masses as the
unconscious figure lends itself to. When they rise from their beds,
they sit in the shelter of the cliff and knit or sew, while one of them
reads aloud, and another stands watch to announce the coming of the
seals, which frequent a reef near the shore in great numbers. It has
been said at rival points on the coast that the ladies linger there in
despair of ever being able to remount to the hotel. A young man who
clambered along the shore from one of those points reported finding day
after day the same young lady stretched out on the same shawl, drying
the same yellow hair, who had apparently never gone upstairs since the
season began. But the recurrence of this phenomenon in this spot at the
very moment when the young man came by might have been accounted for
upon other theories. Jocelyn’s was so secluded that she could not have
expected any one to find her there twice, and if she had expected this
she would not have permitted it. Probably he saw a different young lady
each time.
Many of the same boarders come year after year, and these tremble at
the suggestion of a change for the better in Jocelyn’s. The landlord
has always believed that Jocelyn’s would come up, some day, when times
got better. He believes that the narrow-gauge railroad from New
Leyden—arrested on paper at the disastrous moment when the fortunes of
Jocelyn’s felt the general crash—will be pushed through yet; and every
summer he promises that next summer they are going to have a
steam-launch running twice a day from Leyden Harbor. But at present his
house is visited once a day by a barge, as the New England coast-folks
call the vehicle in which they convey city boarders to and from the
station, and the old frequenters of the place hope that the station
will never be nearer Jocelyn’s than at present. Some of them are rich
enough to afford a sojourn at more fashionable resorts; but most of
them are not, though they are often people of polite tastes and of
aesthetic employments. They talk with slight of the large
watering-places, and probably they would not like them, though it is
really economy that inspires their passion for Jocelyn’s with most of
them, and they know of the splendid weariness of Newport mostly by
hearsay. New arrivals are not favored, but there are not often new
arrivals at Jocelyn’s. The chief business of the barge is to bring
fresh meat for the table and the gaunt bag which contains the mail; for
in the first flush of the enterprise the place was made a post-office,
and the landlord is postmaster; he has the help of the lady-boarders in
his official duties.
Scattered about among the young birches there are several of those pine
frames known as shells, within easy walk of the hotel, where their
inmates board. They are picturesque interiors, and are on informal
terms with the public as to many domestic details. The lady of the
house, doing her back hair at her dressing-room glass, is divided from
her husband, smoking at the parlor fire-place, only by a partition of
unlathed studding. The arrest of development in these shells is
characteristic of everything about the place. None of the improvements
invented since the hard times began have been added to Jocelyn’s;
lawntennis is still unknown there; but there is a croquet-ground before
the hotel, where the short, tough grass is kept in tolerable order. The
wickets are pretty rusty, and it is usually the children who play; but
toward the close of a certain afternoon a young lady was pushing the
balls about there. She seemed to be going over a game just played, and
trying to trace the cause of her failure. She made bad shots, and
laughed at her blunders. Another young lady drooped languidly on a
bench at the side of the croquet-ground, and followed her movements
with indifference.
“I don’t see how you did it, Louise,” panted the player; “it’s
astonishing how you beat me.”
The lady on the bench made as if to answer, but ended by coughing
hoarsely.
“Oh, dear child!” cried the first, dropping her mallet, and running to
her. “You ought to have put on your shawl!” She lifted the knit shawl
lying beside her on the bench, and laid it across the other’s
shoulders, and drew it close about her neck.
“Oh, don’t!” said the other. “It chokes me to be bundled up so tight.”
She shrugged the shawl down to her shoulders with a pretty petulance.
“If my chest’s protected, that’s all that’s necessary.” But she made no
motion to drape the outline which her neatly-fitted dress displayed,
and she did not move from her place, or look up at her anxious friend.
“Oh, but don’t sit here, Louise,” the latter pleaded, lingering near
her. “I was wrong to let you sit down at all after you had got heated.”
“Well, Grace, I had to,” said she who was called Louise. “I was so
tired out. I’m not going to take more cold. I can always tell when I
am. I’ll put on the shawl in half a minute; or else I’ll go in.”
“I’m sure there’s nothing to keep me out. That’s the worst of these
lonely places: my mind preys upon itself. That’s what Dr. Nixon always
said: he said it was no use in air so long as my mind preyed upon
itself. He said that I ought to divert my mind all I could, and keep it
from preying upon itself; that it was worth all the medicine in the
world.”
“That’s perfectly true.”
“Then you oughtn’t to keep reminding me all the time that I’m sick.
That’s what _starts_ my mind to preying upon itself; and when it gets
going once I can’t stop it. I ought to treat myself just like a well
person; that’s what the doctor _said_.”
The other stood looking at the speaker in frowning perplexity. She was
a serious-faced girl, and now when she frowned her black brows met
sternly above her gray eyes. But she controlled any impulse she had to
severity, and asked gently, “Shall I send Bella to you?”
“Oh, no! I can’t make society out of a child the _whole_ time. I’ll
just sit here till the barge comes in. I suppose it will be as _empty_
as a gourd, as usual.” She added, with a sick and weary negligence, “I
don’t even know where Bella is. She’s run off, somewhere.”
“It’s quite time she should be looked up, for tea. I’ll wander out that
way and look for her.” She indicated the wilderness generally.
“Thanks,” said Louise. She now gratefully drew her shawl up over her
shoulders, and faced about on the bench so as to command an easy view
of the arriving barge. The other met it on her way to the place in the
woods where the children usually played, and found it as empty as her
friend had foreboded. But the driver stopped his horses, and leaned out
of the side of the wagon with a little package in his hand. He read the
superscription, and then glanced consciously at the girl. “You’re Miss
Breen, ain’t you?”
“Yes,” she said, with lady-like sweetness and a sort of business-like
alertness.
“Well,” suggested the driver, “this is for Miss Grace Breen, _M. D._”
“For me, thank you,” said the young lady. “I’m Dr. Breen.” She put out
her hand for the little package from the homœopathic pharmacy in
Boston; and the driver yielded it with a blush that reddened him to his
hair. “Well,” he said slowly, staring at the handsome girl, who did not
visibly share his embarrassment, “they _told_ me you was the _one;_ but
I couldn’t seem to get it through me. I thought it must be the _old_
lady.”
“My mother is _Mrs_. Breen,” the young lady briefly explained, and
walked rapidly away, leaving the driver stuck in the heavy sand of
Sea-Glimpse Avenue.
“Why, _get_ up!” he shouted to his horses. “Goin’ to stay here all
_day?_” He craned his neck round the side of the wagon for a sight of
her. “Well, dumm ’f I don’t wish _I_ was sick! Steps along,” he mused,
watching the swirl and ripple of her skirt, “like—_I_ dunno what.”
With her face turned from him Dr. Breen blushed, too; she was not yet
so used to her quality of physician that she could coldly bear the
confusion to which her being a doctor put men. She laughed a little to
herself at the helplessness of the driver, confronted probably for the
first time with a graduate of the New York homœopathic school; but she
believed that she had reasons for taking herself seriously in every
way, and she had not entered upon this career without definite
purposes. When she was not yet out of her teens, she had an unhappy
love affair, which was always darkly referred to as a disappointment by
people who knew of it at the time. Though the particulars of the case
do not directly concern this story, it may be stated that the recreant
lover afterwards married her dearest girl-friend, whom he had first met
in her company. It was cruel enough, and the hurt went deep; but it
neither crushed nor hardened her. It benumbed her for a time; she sank
out of sight; but when she returned to the knowledge of the world she
showed no mark of the blow except what was thought a strange
eccentricity in a girl such as she had been. The world which had known
her—it was that of an inland New England city—heard of her definitely
after several years as a student of medicine in New York. Those who had
more of her intimacy understood that she had chosen this work with the
intention of giving her life to it, in the spirit in which other women
enter convents, or go out to heathen lands; but probably this
conception had its exaggerations. What was certain was that she was
rich enough to have no need of her profession as a means of support,
and that its study had cost her more than the usual suffering that it
brings to persons of sensitive nerves. Some details were almost
insuperably repugnant; but in schooling herself to them she believed
that she was preparing to encounter anything in the application of her
science.
Her first intention had been to go back to her own town after her
graduation, and begin the practice of her profession among those who
had always known her, and whose scrutiny and criticism would be hardest
to bear, and therefore, as she fancied, the most useful to her in the
formation of character. But afterwards she relinquished her purpose in
favor of a design which she thought would be more useful to others: she
planned going to one of the great factory towns, and beginning practice
there, in company with an older physician, among the children of the
operatives. Pending the completion of this arrangement, which was
waiting upon the decision of the other lady, she had come to Jocelyn’s
with her mother, and with Mrs. Maynard, who had arrived from the West,
aimlessly sick and unfriended, just as they were about leaving home.
There was no resource but to invite her with them, and Dr. Breen was
finding her first patient in this unexpected guest. She did not wholly
regret the accident; this, too, was useful work, though not that she
would have chosen; but her mother, after a fortnight, openly repined,
and could not mention Mrs. Maynard without some rebellious murmur. She
was an old lady, who had once kept a very vigilant conscience for
herself; but after making her life unhappy with it for some threescore
years, she now applied it entirely to the exasperation and condemnation
of others. She especially devoted it to fretting a New England girl’s
naturally morbid sense of duty in her daughter, and keeping it in the
irritation of perpetual self-question. She had never actively opposed
her studying medicine; that ambition had harmonized very well with
certain radical tendencies of her own, and it was at least not
marriage, which she had found tolerable only in its modified form of
widowhood; but at every step after the decisive step was taken she was
beset with misgivings lest Grace was not fully alive to the grave
responsibilities of her office, which she accumulated upon the girl in
proportion as she flung off all responsibilities of her own. She was
doubtless deceived by that show of calm which sometimes deceived Grace
herself, who, in tutoring her soul to bear what it had to bear, mistook
her tense effort for spiritual repose, and scarcely realized through
her tingling nerves the strain she was undergoing. In spite of the
bitter experience of her life, she was still very ardent in her hopes
of usefulness, very scornful of distress or discomfort to herself, and
a little inclined to exact the heroism she was ready to show. She had a
child’s severe morality, and she had hardly learned to understand that
there is much evil in the world that does not characterize the
perpetrators: she held herself as strictly to account for every word
and deed as she held others, and she had an almost passionate desire to
meet the consequence of her errors; till that was felt, an intolerable
doom hung over her. She tried not to be impulsive; that was criminal in
one of her calling; and she struggled for patience with an endeavor
that was largely successful.
As to the effect of her career outside of herself, and of those whom
her skill was to benefit, she tried to think neither arrogantly nor
meanly. She would not entertain the vanity that she was serving what is
called the cause of woman, and she would not assume any duties or
responsibilities toward it. She thought men were as good as women; at
least one man had been no worse than one woman; and it was in no
representative or exemplary character that she had chosen her course.
At the same time that she held these sane opinions, she believed that
she had put away the hopes with the pleasures that might once have
taken her as a young girl. In regard to what had changed the current of
her life, she mentally asserted her mere nullity, her absolute
non-existence. The thought of it no longer rankled, and that interest
could never be hers again. If it had not been so much like affectation,
and so counter to her strong aesthetic instinct, she might have made
her dress somehow significant of her complete abeyance in such matters;
but as it was she only studied simplicity, and as we have seen from the
impression of the barge-driver she did not finally escape distinction
in dress and manner. In fact, she could not have escaped that effect if
she would; and it was one of the indomitable contradictions of her
nature that she would not.
When she came back to the croquet-ground, leading the little girl by
the hand, she found Mrs. Maynard no longer alone and no longer sad. She
was chatting and laughing with a slim young fellow, whose gay blue eyes
looked out of a sunburnt face, and whose straw hat, carried in his
hand, exposed a closely shaven head. He wore a suit of gray flannel,
and Mrs. Maynard explained that he was camping on the beach at
Birkman’s Cove, and had come over in the steamer with her when she
returned from Europe. She introduced him as Mr. Libby, and said, “Oh,
Bella, you dirty little thing!”
Mr. Libby bowed anxiously to Grace, and turned for refuge to the little
girl. “Hello, Bella!” “Hello!” said the child. “Remember me?” The child
put her left hand on that of Grace holding her right, and prettily
pressed her head against the girl’s arm in bashful silence. Grace said
some coldly civil words to the young man: without looking at Mrs.
Maynard, and passed on into the house.
“You don’t mean _that’s_ your doctor?” he scarcely more than whispered.
“Yes, I do,” answered Mrs. Maynard. “Isn’t she too lovely? And she’s
just as _good!_ She used to stand up at school for me, when all the
girls were down on me because I was Western. And when I came East, this
time, I just went right straight to her house. I knew she could tell me
exactly what to do. And that’s the reason I’m here. I shall always
recommend this air to anybody with lung difficulties. It’s the greatest
_thing!_ I’m almost another person. Oh, you needn’t look after _her_,
Mr. Libby! There’s nothing flirtatious about Grace,” said Mrs. Maynard.
The young man recovered himself from his absentminded stare in the
direction Grace had taken, with a frank laugh. “So much the better for
a fellow, I should say!”
Grace handed the little girl over to her nurse, and went to her own
room, where she found her mother waiting to go down to tea.
“Where is Mrs. Maynard?” asked Mrs. Breen.
“Out on the croquet-ground,” answered the daughter.
“I should think it would be damp,” suggested Mrs. Breen.
“She will come in when the tea-bell rings. She wouldn’t come in now, if
I told her.”
“Well,” said the elder lady, “for a person who lets her doctor pay her
board, I think she’s very independent.”
“I wish you wouldn’t speak of that, mother,” said the girl.
“I can’t help it, Grace. It’s ridiculous,—that’s what it is; it’s
ridiculous.”
“I don’t see anything ridiculous in it. A physician need not charge
anything unless he chooses, or she; and if I choose to make Louise my
guest here it’s quite the same as if she were my guest at home.”
“I don’t like you to have such a guest,” said Mrs. Breen. “I don’t see
what claim she has upon your hospitality.”
“She has a double claim upon it,” Grace answered, with a flush. “She is
in sickness and in trouble. I don’t see how she could have a better
claim. Even if she were quite well I should consider the way she had
been treated by her husband sufficient, and I should want to do
everything I could for her.”
“I should want her to behave herself,” said Mrs. Breen dryly.
“How behave herself? What do you mean?” demanded Grace, with guilty
heat.
“You know what I mean, Grace. A woman in her position ought to be more
circumspect than any other woman, if she wants people to believe that
her husband treated her badly.”
“We oughtn’t to blame her for trying to forget her troubles. It’s
essential to her recovery for her to be as cheerful as she can be. I
know that she’s impulsive, and she’s free in her manners with
strangers; but I suppose that’s her Westernism. She’s almost
distracted. She was crying half the night, with her troubles, and kept
Bella and me both awake.”
“Is Bella with her now?”
“No,” Grace admitted. “Jane’s getting her ready to go down with us.
Louise is talking with a gentleman who came over on the steamer with
her; he’s camping on the beach near here. I didn’t wait to hear
particulars.”
When the nurse brought the little girl to their door, Mrs. Breen took
one hand and Grace the other, and they led her down to tea. Mrs.
Maynard was already at table, and told them all about meeting Mr. Libby
abroad.
Until the present time she and Grace had not seen each other since they
were at school together in Southington, where the girl used to hear so
much to the disadvantage of her native section that she would hardly
have owned to it if her accent had not found her out. It would have
been pleasanter to befriend another person, but the little Westerner
suffered a veritable persecution, and that was enough to make Grace her
friend. Shortly after she returned home from school she married, in
that casual and tentative fashion in which so many marriages seem made.
Grace had heard of her as travelling in Europe with her husband, from
whom she was now separated. She reported that he had known Mr. Libby in
his bachelor days, and that Mr. Libby had travelled with them. Mr.
Maynard appeared to have left to Mr. Libby the arrangement of his
wife’s pleasures, the supervision of her shopping, and the direction of
their common journeys and sojourns; and it seemed to have been
indifferent to him whether his friend was smoking and telling stories
with him, or going with his wife to the opera, or upon such excursions
as he had no taste for. She gave the details of the triangular intimacy
with a frank unconsciousness; and after nine o’clock she returned from
a moonlight walk on the beach with Mr. Libby.
Grace sat waiting for her at the little one’s bedside, for Bella had
been afraid to go to sleep alone.
“How good you are!” cried Louise, in a grateful under-tone, as she came
in. She kissed Grace, and choked down a cough with her hand over her
mouth.
“Louise,” said Grace sternly, “this is shameful! You forget that you
are married, and ill, too.”
“Oh, I’m ever so much better, to-night. The air’s just as dry! And you
needn’t mind Mr. Libby. He’s such an _old_ friend! Besides, I’m sure to
gain the case.”
“No matter. Even as a divorced woman, you oughtn’t to go on in this
way.”
“Well, I wouldn’t, with _every_ one. But it’s quite different with Mr.
Libby. And, besides, I have to keep my mind from preying on itself
_some_how.”