No one but Mrs. Breen knew of her daughter’s errand, and when Grace
came back she alighted from Mr. Libby’s buggy with an expression of
thanks that gave no clew as to the direction or purpose of it. He
touched his hat to her with equal succinctness, and drove away,
including all the ladies on the piazza in a cursory obeisance.
“We must ask _you_, Miss Gleason,” said Mrs. Alger. “Your admiration of
Dr. Breen clothes you with authority and responsibility.”
“I can’t understand it at all,” Miss Gleason confessed. “But I’m sure
there’s nothing in it. He isn’t her equal. She would feel that it
wasn’t right—under the circumstances.”
“But if Mrs. Maynard was well it would be a fair game, you mean,” said
Mrs. Alger.
“No,” returned Miss Gleason, with the greatest air of candor, “I can’t
admit that I meant that.”
“Well,” said the elder lady, “the presumption is against them. Every
young couple seen together must be considered in love till they prove
the contrary.”
“I like it in her,” said Mrs. Frost. “It shows that she is human, after
all. It shows that she is like other girls. It’s a relief.”
“She isn’t like other girls,” contended Miss Gleason darkly.
“I would rather have Mr. Libby’s opinion,” said Mrs. Merritt.
Grace went to Mrs. Maynard’s room, and told her that Dr. Mulbridge was
coming directly after dinner.
“I knew you would do it!” cried Mrs. Maynard, throwing her right arm
round Grace’s neck, while the latter bent over to feel the pulse in her
left. “I knew where you had gone as soon as your mother told me you had
driven off with Walter Libby. I’m so glad that you’ve got somebody to
consult! Your theories are perfectly right and I’m sure that Dr.
Mulbridge will just tell you to keep on as you’ve been doing.”
Grace withdrew from her caress. “Dr. Mulbridge is not coming for a
consultation. He refused to consult with me.”
“Refused to consult? Why, how perfectly ungentlemanly! _Why_ did he
refuse?”
“Because he is an allopathist and I am a homœopathist.”
“Then, what is he coming for, I should like to know!”
“I have given up the case to him,” said Grace wearily.
“Very well, then!” cried Mrs. Maynard, “I won’t be given up. I will
simply die! Not a pill, not a powder, of his will I touch! If he thinks
himself too good to consult with another doctor, and a lady at that,
merely because she doesn’t happen to be allopathist, he can go along! I
never heard of anything so conceited, so disgustingly mean, in my life.
No, Grace! Why, it’s horrid!” She was silent, and then, “Why, of
course,” she added, “if he comes, I shall have to _see_ him. I _look_
like a fright, I suppose.”
“I will do your hair,” said Grace, with indifference to these vows and
protests; and without deigning further explanation or argument she made
the invalid’s toilet for her. If given time, Mrs. Maynard would talk
herself into any necessary frame of mind, and Grace merely supplied the
monosyllabic promptings requisite for her transition from mood to mood.
It was her final resolution that when Dr. Mulbridge did come she should
give him a piece of her mind; and she received him with anxious
submissiveness, and hung upon all his looks and words with quaking and
with an inclination to attribute her unfavorable symptoms to the
treatment of her former physician. She did not spare him certain
apologies for the disorderly appearance of her person and her room.
Grace sat by and watched him with perfectly quiescent observance. The
large, somewhat uncouth man gave evidence to her intelligence that he
was all physician—that he had not chosen his profession from any theory
or motive, however good, but had been as much chosen by it as if he had
been born a Physician. He was incredibly gentle and soft in all his
movements, and perfectly kind, without being at any moment unprofitably
sympathetic. He knew when to listen and when not to listen,—to learn
everything from the quivering bundle of nerves before him without
seeming to have learnt anything alarming; he smiled when it would do
her good to be laughed at, and treated her with such grave respect that
she could not feel herself trifled with, nor remember afterwards any
point of neglect. When he rose and left some medicines, with directions
to Grace for giving them and instructions for contingencies, she
followed him from the room.
“Well?” she said anxiously.
“Mrs. Maynard is threatened with pneumonia. Or, I don’t know why I
should say threatened,” he added; “she _has_ pneumonia.”
“I supposed—I was afraid so,” faltered the girl.
“Yes.” He looked into her eyes with even more seriousness than he
spoke.
“Has she friends here?” he asked.
“No; her husband is in Cheyenne, out on the plains.”
“He ought to know,” said Dr. Mulbridge. “A great deal will depend upon
her nursing—Miss—ah—Dr. Breen.”
“You needn’t call me Dr. Breen,” said Grace. “At present, I am Mrs.
Maynard’s nurse.”
He ignored this as he had ignored every point connected with the
interview of the morning. He repeated the directions he had already
given with still greater distinctness, and, saying that he should come
in the morning, drove away. She went back to Louise: inquisition for
inquisition, it was easier to meet that of her late patient than that
of her mother, and for once the girl spared herself.
“I know he thought I was very bad,” whimpered Mrs. Maynard, for a
beginning. “What is the matter with me?”
“Your cold has taken an acute form; you will have to go to bed.”
“Then I’m going to be down sick! I knew I was! I knew it! And what am I
going to do, off in such a place as this? No one to nurse me, or look
after Bella! I should think you would be satisfied now, Grace, with the
result of your _conscientiousness:_ you were so very sure that Mr.
Libby was wanting to flirt with me that you drove us to our death,
because you thought he felt guilty and was trying to fib out of it.”
“Will you let me help to undress you?” asked Grace gently. “Bella shall
be well taken care of, and I am going to nurse you myself, under Dr.
Mulbridge’s direction. And once for all, Louise, I wish to say that I
hold myself to blame for all”—
“Oh, yes! Much good _that_ does _now!_” Being got into bed, with the
sheet smoothed under her chin, she said, with the effect of drawing a
strictly logical conclusion from the premises, “Well, I should think
George Maynard would want to be with his family!”
Spent with this ordeal, Grace left her at last, and went out on the
piazza, where she found Libby returned. In fact, he had, upon second
thoughts, driven back, and put up his horse at Jocelyn’s, that he might
be of service there in case he were needed. The ladies, with whom he
had been making friends, discreetly left him to Grace, when she
appeared, and she frankly walked apart with him, and asked him if he
could go over to New Leyden, and telegraph to Mr. Maynard.
“Has she asked for him?” he inquired, laughing. “I knew it would come
to that.”
“She has not asked; she has said that she thought he ought to be with
his family,” repeated Grace faithfully.
“Oh, _I_ know how she said it: as if he had gone away wilfully, and
kept away against her wishes and all the claims of honor and duty. It
wouldn’t take her long to get round to that if she thought she was very
sick. Is she so bad?” he inquired, with light scepticism.
“She’s threatened with pneumonia. We can’t tell how bad she may be.”
“Why, of course I’ll telegraph. But I don’t think anything serious
_can_ be the matter with Mrs. Maynard.”
“Dr. Mulbridge said that Mr. Maynard ought to know.”
“Is that _so?_” asked Libby, in quite a different tone. If she
recognized the difference, she was meekly far from resenting it; he,
however, must have wished to repair his blunder. “I think you needn’t
have given up the case to him. I think you’re too conscientious about
it.”
“Please don’t speak of that now,” she interposed.
“Well, I won’t,” he consented. “Can I be of any use here to-night?”
“No, we shall need nothing more. The doctor will be here again in the
morning.”
“Libby did not come in the morning till after the doctor had gone, and
then he explained that he had waited to hear in reply to his telegram,
so that they might tell Mrs. Maynard her husband had started; and he
had only just now heard.
“And has he started?” Grace asked.
“I heard from his partner. Maynard was at the ranch. His partner had
gone for him.”
“Then he will soon be here,” she said.
“He will, if telegraphing can bring him. I sat up half the night with
the operator. She was very obliging when she understood the case.”
“She?” reputed Grace, with a slight frown.
“The operators are nearly all women in the country.”
“Oh!” She looked grave. “Can they trust young girls with such important
duties?”
“They didn’t in this instance,” relied Libby. “She was a pretty old
girl. What made you think she was young?”
“I don’t know. I thought you said she was young.” She blushed, and
seemed about to say more, but she did not.
He waited, and then he said, “You can tell Mrs. Maynard that I
telegraphed on my own responsibility, if you think it’s going to alarm
her.”
“Well,” said Grace, with a helpless sigh.
“You don’t like to tell her that,” he suggested, after a moment, in
which he had watched her.
“How do you know?”
“Oh, I know. And some day I will tell you how—if you will let me.”
It seemed a question; and she did not know what it was that kept
her—silent and breathless and hot in the throat. “I _don’t_ like to do
it,” she said at last. “I hate myself whenever I have to feign
anything. I knew perfectly well that you didn’t say she was young,” she
broke out desperately.
“Say Mrs. Maynard was young?” he asked stupidly.
“No!” she cried. She rose hastily from the bench where she had been
sitting with him. “I must go back to her now.”
He mounted to his buggy, and drove thoughtfully away at a walk.
The ladies, whose excited sympathies for Mrs. Maynard had kept them
from the beach till now, watched him quite out of sight before they
began to talk of Grace.
“I hope Dr. Breen’s new patient will be more tractable,” said Mrs.
Merritt. “It would be a pity if she had to give _him_ up, too, to Dr.
Mulbridge.”
Mrs. Scott failed of the point. “Why, is Mr. Libby sick?”
“Not very,” answered Mrs. Merritt, with a titter of self-applause.
“I should be sorry,” interposed Mrs. Alger authoritatively, “if we had
said anything to influence the poor thing in what she has done.”
“Oh, I don’t think we need distress ourselves about undue influence!”
Mrs. Merritt exclaimed.
Mrs. Alger chose to ignore the suggestion. “She had a very difficult
part; and I think she has acted courageously. I always feel sorry for
girls who attempt anything of that kind. It’s a fearful ordeal.”
“But they say Miss Breen wasn’t obliged to do it for a living,” Mrs.
Scott suggested.
“So much the worse,” said Mrs. Merritt.
“No, so much the better,” returned Mrs. Alger.
Mrs. Merritt, sitting on the edge of the piazza, stooped over with
difficulty and plucked a glass-straw, which she bit as she looked
rebelliously away.
Mrs. Frost had installed herself as favorite since Mrs. Alger had
praised her hair. She now came forward, and, dropping fondly at her
knee, looked up to her for instruction. “Don’t you think that she
showed her sense in giving up at the very beginning, if she found she
wasn’t equal to it?” She gave her head a little movement from side to
side, and put the mass of her back hair more on show.
“Perhaps,” said Mrs. Alger, looking at the favorite not very favorably.
“Oh, _I_ don’t think she’s given up,” Miss Gleason interposed, in her
breathless manner. She waited to be asked why, and then she added, “I
think she’s acting in consultation with Dr. Mulbridge. He may have a
certain influence over her,—I think he has; but I know they are acting
in unison.”
Mrs. Merritt flung her grass-straw away. “Perhaps it is to be Dr.
Mulbridge, after all, and not Mr. Libby.”
“I have thought of that,” Miss Gleason assented candidly. “Yes, I have
thought of that. I have thought of their being constantly thrown
together, in this way. It would not discourage me. She could be quite
as true to her vocation as if she remained single. Truer.”
“Talking of true,” said Mrs. Scott, “always does make me think of blue.
They say that yellow will be worn on everything this winter.”
“Old gold?” asked Mrs. Frost. “Yes, more than ever.”
“Dear!” cried the other lady. “I don’t know what I _shall_ do. It
perfectly kills my hair.”
“Oh, Miss Gleason!” exclaimed the young girl.
“Do you believe in character coming out in color?”
“Yes, certainly. I have always believed that.”
“Well, I’ve got a friend, and she wouldn’t have anything to do with a
girl that wore magenta more than she would fly.”
“I should suppose,” explained Miss Gleason, “that all those aniline
dyes implied something coarse in people.”
“Isn’t it curious,” asked Mrs. Frost, “how red-haired people have come
in fashion? I can recollect, when I was a little girl, that everybody
laughed at red hair. There was one girl at the first school I ever went
to,—the boys used to pretend to burn their fingers at _her_ hair.”
“I think Dr. Breen’s hair is a very pretty shade of brown,” said the
young girl.
Mrs. Merritt rose from the edge of the piazza. “I think that if she
hasn’t given up to him entirely she’s the most submissive consulting
physician I ever saw,” she said, and walked out over the grass towards
the cliff.
The ladies looked after her. “_Is_ Mrs. Merritt more pudgy when she’s
sitting down or when she’s standing up?” asked Mrs. Scott.
Miss Gleason seized her first chance of speaking with Grace alone. “Oh,
_do_ you know how much you are doing for us all?”
“Doing for you, all? How doing?” faltered Grace, whom she had
whisperingly halted in a corner of the hall leading from the
dining-room.
“By acting in unison,—by solving the most perplexing problem in women’s
practising your profession. She passed the edge of her fan over her
lips before letting it fall furled upon her left hand, and looked
luminously into Grace’s eyes.
“I don’t at all know what you mean, Miss Gleason,” said the other.
Miss Gleason kicked out the skirt of her dress, so as to leave herself
perfectly free for the explanation. “Practising in harmony with a
physician of the other sex. I have always felt that there was the great
difficulty,—how to bring that about. I have always felt that the _true_
physician must be _dual_,—have both the woman’s nature and the man’s;
the woman’s tender touch, the man’s firm grasp. You have shown how the
medical education of women can meet this want. The physician can
actually be dual,—be two, in fact. Hereafter, I have no doubt we shall
always call a physician of each sex. But it’s wonderful how you could
ever bring it about, though you can do anything! Hasn’t it worn upon
you?” Miss Gleason darted out her sentences in quick, short breaths,
fixing Grace with her eyes, and at each clause nervously tapping her
chest with her reopened fan.
“If you suppose,” said Grace, “that Dr. Mulbridge and I are acting
professionally in unison, as you call it, you are mistaken. He has
entire charge of the case; I gave it up to him, and I am merely nursing
Mrs. Maynard under his direction.”
“How splendid!” Miss Gleason exclaimed. “Do you know that I admire you
for giving up,—for knowing _when_ to give up? So few women do that!
Isn’t he magnificent?”
“Magnificent?”
“I mean psychically. He is what I should call a strong soul You must
have felt his masterfulness; you must have enjoyed it! Don’t you like
to be dominated?”
“No,” said Grace, “I shouldn’t at all like it.”
“Oh, _I_ do! I like to meet one of those forceful masculine natures
that simply bid you _obey_. It’s delicious. Such a sense of
self-surrender,” Miss Gleason explained. “It isn’t because they are
men,” she added. “I have felt the same influence from some women. I
felt it, in a certain degree, on first meeting _you_.”
“I am very sorry,” said Grace coldly. “I should dislike being
controlled myself, and I should dislike still more to control others.”
“You’re doing it now!” cried Miss Gleason, with delight. “I could not
do a _thing_ to resist your putting me down! Of course you don’t know
that you’re doing it; it’s purely involuntary. And you wouldn’t know
that he was dominating you. And he wouldn’t.”
Very probably Dr. Mulbridge would not have recognized himself in the
character of all-compelling lady’s-novel hero, which Miss Gleason
imagined for him. Life presented itself rather simply to him, as it
does to most men, and he easily dismissed its subtler problems from a
mind preoccupied with active cares. As far as Grace was concerned, she
had certainly roused in him an unusual curiosity; nothing less than her
homœopathy would have made him withdraw his consent to a consultation
with her, and his fear had been that in his refusal she should escape
from his desire to know more about her, her motives, her purposes. He
had accepted without scruple the sacrifice of pride she had made to
him; but he had known how to appreciate her scientific training, which
he found as respectable as that of any clever, young man of their
profession. He praised, in his way, the perfection with which she
interpreted his actions and intentions in regard to the patient. “If
there were such nurses as you, Miss Breen, there would be very little
need of doctors,” he said, with a sort of interogative fashion of
laughing peculiar to him.
“I thought of being a nurse once;” she answered. “Perhaps I may still
be one. The scientific training won’t be lost.”
“Oh, no? It’s a pity that more of them haven’t it. But I suppose they
think nursing is rather too humble an ambition.”
“I don’t think it so,” said Grace briefly.
“Then you didn’t care for medical distinction.”
“No.”
He looked at her quizzically, as if this were much droller than if she
had cared. “I don’t understand why you should have gone into it. You
told me, I think, that it was repugnant to you; and it’s hard work for
a woman, and very uncertain work for anyone. You must have had a
tremendous desire to benefit your race.”
His characterization of her motive was so distasteful that she made no
reply, and left him to his conjectures, in which he did not appear
unhappy. “How do you find Mrs. Maynard to-day?” she asked.
He looked at her with an instant coldness, as if he did not like her
asking, and were hesitating whether to answer. But he said at last,
“She is no better. She will be worse before she is better. You see,” he
added, “that I haven’t been able to arrest the disorder in its first
stage. We must hope for what can be done now, in the second.”
She had gathered from the half jocose ease with which he had listened
to Mrs. Maynard’s account of herself, and to her own report, an
encouragement which now fell to the ground “Yes,” she assented, in her
despair, “that is the only hope.”
He sat beside the table in the hotel parlor, where they found
themselves alone for the moment, and drubbed upon it with an absent
look. “Have you sent for her husband?” he inquired, returning to
himself.
“Yes; Mr. Libby telegraphed the evening we saw you.”
“That’s good,” said Dr. Mulbridge, with comfortable approval; and he
rose to go away.
Grace impulsively detained him. “I won’t ask you whether you consider
Mrs. Maynard’s case a serious one, if you object to my doing so.”
“I don’t know that I object,” he said slowly, with a teasing smile,
such as one might use with a persistent child whom one chose to baffle
in that way.
She disdained to avail herself of the implied permission. “What I
mean—what I wish to tell you is—that I feel myself responsible for her
sickness, and that if she dies, I shall be guilty of her death.”
“Ah?” said Dr. Mulbridge, with more interest, but the same smile. “What
do you mean?”
“She didn’t wish to go that day when she was caught in the storm. But I
insisted; I forced her to go.” She stood panting with the intensity of
the feeling which had impelled her utterance.
“What do you mean by forcing her to go?”
“I don’t know. I—I—persuaded her.”
Dr. Mulbridge smiled, as if he perceived her intention not to tell him
something she wished to tell him. He looked down into his hat, which he
carried in his hand.
“Did you believe the storm was coming?”
“No!”
“And you didn’t make it come?”
“Of course not!”
He looked at her and laughed.
“Oh, you don’t at all understand!” she cried.
“I’m _not_ a doctor of divinity,” he said. “Good morning.”
“Wait, wait!” she implored, “I’m afraid—I don’t know—Perhaps my being
near her is injurious to her; perhaps I ought to let some one else
nurse her. I wished to ask you this”—She stopped breathlessly.
“I don’t think you have done her any harm as yet,” he answered lightly.
“However,” he said, after a moment’s consideration, “why don’t you take
a holiday? Some of the other ladies might look after her a while.”
“Do you really think,” she palpitated, “that I might? Do you think I
ought? I’m afraid I oughtn’t”—
“Not if your devotion is hurtful to her?” he asked. “Send some one else
to her for a while. Any one can take care of her for a few hours.”
“I couldn’t leave her—feeling as I do about her.”
“I don’t know how you feel about her,” said Dr. Mulbridge. “But you
can’t go on at this rate. I shall want your help by and by, and Mrs.
Maynard doesn’t need you now. Don’t go back to her.”
“But if she should get worse while I am away”—
“You think your staying and feeling bad would make her better? Don’t go
back,” he repeated; and he went out to his ugly rawboned horse, and,
mounting his shabby wagon, rattled away. She lingered, indescribably
put to shame by the brutal common sense which she could not impeach,
but which she still felt was no measure of the case. It was true that
she had not told him everything, and she could not complain that he had
mocked her appeal for sympathy if she had trifled with him by a partial
confession. But she indignantly denied to herself that she had wished
to appeal to him for sympathy.
She wandered out on the piazza, which she found empty, and stood gazing
at the sea in a revery of passionate humiliation. She was in that mood,
familiar to us all, when we long to be consoled and even flattered for
having been silly. In a woman this mood is near to tears; at a touch of
kindness the tears come, and momentous questions are decided. What was
perhaps uppermost in the girl’s heart was a detestation of the man to
whom she had seemed a simpleton; her thoughts pursued him, and divined
the contempt with which he must be thinking of her and her pretensions.
She heard steps on the sand, and Libby came round the corner of the
house from the stable.