During her convalescence Mrs. Maynard had the time and inclination to
give Grace some good advice. She said that she had thought a great deal
about it throughout her sickness, and she had come to the conclusion
that Grace was throwing away her life.
“You’re not fit to be a doctor, Grace,” she said. “You’re too nervous,
and you’re too conscientious. It isn’t merely your want of experience.
No matter how much experience you had, if you saw a case going wrong in
your hands, you’d want to call in some one else to set it right. Do you
suppose Dr. Mulbridge would have given me up to another doctor because
he was afraid he couldn’t cure me? No, indeed! He’d have let me die
first, and I shouldn’t have blamed him. Of course I know what pressure
I brought to bear upon you, but you had no business to mind me. You
oughtn’t to have minded my talk any more than the buzzing of a
mosquito, and no real doctor would. If he wants to be a success, he
must be hard-hearted; as hard-hearted as”—she paused for a comparison,
and failing any other added—“as all possessed.” To the like
large-minded and impartial effect, she, ran on at great length. “No,
Grace,” she concluded, “what you want to do is to get married. You
would be a good wife, and you would be a good mother. The only trouble
is that I don’t know any man worthy of you, or half worthy. No, I
don’t!”
Now that her recovery was assured, Mrs. Maynard was very forgiving and
sweet and kind with every one. The ladies who came in to talk with her
said that she was a changed creature; she gave them all the best
advice, and she had absolutely no shame whatever for the inconsistency
involved by her reconciliation with her husband. She rather flaunted
the happiness of her reunion in the face of the public, and she
vouchsafed an explanation to no one. There had never been anything
definite in her charges against him, even to Grace, and her tacit
withdrawal of them succeeded perfectly well. The ladies, after some
cynical tittering, forgot them, and rejoiced in the spectacle of
conjugal harmony afforded them: women are generous creatures, and there
is hardly any offence which they are not willing another woman should
forgive her husband, when once they have said that they do not see how
she could ever forgive him.
Mrs. Maynard’s silence seemed insufficient to none but Mrs. Breen and
her own husband. The former vigorously denounced its want of logic to
Grace as all but criminal, though she had no objection to Mr. Maynard.
He, in fact, treated her with a filial respect which went far to efface
her preconceptions; and he did what he could to retrieve himself from
the disgrace of a separation in Grace’s eyes. Perhaps he thought that
the late situation was known to her alone, when he casually suggested,
one day, that Mrs. Maynard was peculiar.
“Yes,” said Grace mercifully; “but she has been out of health so long.
That makes a great difference. She’s going to be better now.”
“Oh, it’s going to come out all right in the end,” he said, with his
unbuoyant hopefulness, “and I reckon I’ve got to help it along. Why, I
suppose every man’s a trial at times, doctor?”
“I dare say. I know that every woman is,” said the girl.
“Is that so? Well, may be you’re partly right. But you don’t suppose
but what a man generally begins it, do you? There was Adam, you know.
He didn’t pull the apple; but he fell off into that sleep, and woke up
with one of his ribs dislocated, and that’s what _really_ commenced the
trouble. If it hadn’t been for Adam, there wouldn’t have been any
woman, you know; and you couldn’t blame her for what happened after she
got going?” There was no gleam of insinuation in his melancholy eye,
and Grace listened without quite knowing what to make of it all. “And
then I suppose he wasn’t punctual at meals, and stood round talking
politics at night, when he ought to have been at home with his family?”
“Who?” asked Grace.
“Adam,” replied Mr. Maynard lifelessly. “Well, they got along pretty
well outside,” he continued. “Some of the children didn’t turn out just
what you might have expected; but raising children is mighty uncertain
business. Yes, _they_ got along.” He ended his parable with a sort of
weary sigh, as if oppressed by experience. Grace looked at his slovenly
figure, his smoky complexion, and the shaggy outline made by his
untrimmed hair and beard, and she wondered how Louise could marry him;
but she liked him, and she was willing to accept for all reason the
cause of unhappiness at which he further hinted. “You see, doctor, an
incompatibility is a pretty hard thing to manage. You can’t forgive it
like a real grievance. You have to try other things, and find out that
there are worse things, and then you come back to it and stand it.
We’re talking Wyoming and cattle range, now, and Mrs. Maynard is all
for the new deal; it’s going to make us healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Well, I suppose the air _will_ be good for her, out there. You doctors
are sending lots of your patients our way, now.” The gravity with which
he always assumed that Grace was a physician in full and regular
practice would have had its edge of satire, coming from another; but
from him, if it was ironical, it was also caressing, and she did not
resent it. “I’ve had some talk with your colleague, here, Dr.
Mulbridge, and he seems to think it will be the best thing for her. I
suppose you agree with him?”
“Oh, yes,” said Grace, “his opinion would be of great value. It
wouldn’t be at all essential that I should agree with him:”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Maynard. “I reckon he thinks a
good deal of your agreeing with him. I’ve been talking with him about
settling out our way. We’ve got a magnificent country, and there’s
bound to be plenty of sickness there, sooner or later. Why, doctor, it
would be a good opening for _you!_ It’s just the place for you. You’re
off here in a corner, in New England, and you haven’t got any sort of
scope; but at Cheyenne you’d have the whole field to yourself; there
isn’t another lady doctor in Cheyenne. Now, you come out with us. Bring
your mother with you, and grow up with the country. Your mother would
like it. There’s enough moral obliquity in Cheyenne to keep her
conscience in a state of healthful activity all the time. Yes, you’d
get along out there.”
Grace laughed, and shook her head. It was part of the joke which life
seemed to be with Mr. Maynard that the inhabitants of New England were
all eager to escape from their native section, and that they ought to
be pitied and abetted in this desire. As soon as his wife’s
convalescence released him from constant attendance upon her, he began
an inspection of the region from the compassionate point of view; the
small, frugal husbandry appealed to his commiseration, and he professed
to have found the use of canvas caps upon the haycocks intolerably
pathetic. “Why, I’m told,” he said, “that they have to blanket the
apple-trees while the fruit is setting; and they kill off our Colorado
bugs by turning them loose, one at a time, on the potato-patches: the
bug starves to death in forty-eight hours. But you’ve got plenty of
schoolhouses, doctor; it does beat all, about the schoolhouses. And
it’s an awful pity that there are no children to go to school in them.
Why, of course the people go West as fast as they can, but they ought
to be helped; the Government ought to do something. They’re good
people; make first-rate citizens when you get them waked up, out there.
But they ought all to be got away, and let somebody run New England as
a summer resort. It’s pretty, and it’s cool and pleasant, and the
fishing is excellent; milk, eggs, and all kinds of berries and
historical associations on the premises; and it could be made very
attractive three months of the year; but my goodness! you oughtn’t to
ask anybody to _live_ here. You come out with us, doctor, and see that
country, and you’ll know what I mean.”
His boasts were always uttered with a wan, lack-lustre irony, as if he
were burlesquing the conventional Western brag and enjoying the
mystifications of his listener, whose feeble sense of humor often
failed to seize his intention, and to whom any depreciation of New
England was naturally unintelligible. She had not come to her final
liking for him without a season of serious misgiving, but after that
she rested in peace upon what every one knowing him felt to be his
essential neighborliness. Her wonder had then come to be how he could
marry Louise, when they sat together on the seaward piazza, and he
poured out his easy talk, unwearied and unwearying, while, with one
long, lank leg crossed upon the other, he swung his unblacked,
thin-soled boot to and fro.
“Well, he was this kind of a fellow: When we were in Switzerland, he
was always climbing some mountain or other. They couldn’t have hired me
to climb one of their mountains if they’d given me all their scenery,
and thrown their goitres in. I used to tell him that the side of a
house was good enough for me. But nothing but the tallest mountains
would do _him;_ and one day when he was up there on the comb of the
roof somewhere, tied with a rope round his waist to the guide and a
Frenchman, the guide’s foot slipped, and he commenced going down. The
Frenchman was just going to cut the rope and let the guide play it
alone; but he knocked the knife out of his hand with his long-handled
axe, and when the jerk came he was on the other side of the comb, where
he could brace himself, and brought them both up standing. Well, he’s
got muscles like bunches of steel wire. Didn’t he ever tell you about
it?”
“No,” said Grace sadly.
“Well, somebody ought to expose Libby. I don’t suppose I should ever
have known about it myself, if I hadn’t happened to see the guide’s
friends and relations crying over him next day as if he was the guide’s
funeral. Hello! There’s the doctor.” He unlimbered his lank legs, and
rose with an effect of opening his person like a pocket-knife. “As I
understand it, this is an unprofessional visit, and the doctor is here
among us as a guest. I don’t know exactly what to do under the
circumstances, whether we ought to talk about Mrs. Maynard’s health or
the opera; but I reckon if we show our good intentions it will come out
all right in the end.”
He went forward to meet the doctor, who came up to shake hands with
Grace, and then followed him in-doors to see Mrs. Maynard. Grace
remained in her place, and she was still sitting there when Dr.
Mulbridge returned without him. He came directly to her, and said, “I
want to speak with you, Miss Breen. Can I see you alone?”
“Is—is Mrs. Maynard worse?” she asked, rising in a little trepidation.
“No; it has nothing to do with her. She’s practically well now; I can
remand the case to you. I wish to see you—about yourself.” She
hesitated at this peculiar summons, but some pressure was upon her to
obey Dr. Mulbridge, as there was upon most people where he wished to
obey him. “I want to talk with you,” he added, “about what you are
going to do,—about your future. Will you come?”
“Oh, yes,” she answered; and she suffered him to lead the way down from
the piazza, and out upon one of the sandy avenues toward the woods, in
which it presently lost itself. “But there will be very little to talk
about,” she continued, as they moved away, “if you confine yourself to
my future. I have none.”
“I don’t see how you’ve got rid of it,” he rejoined. “You’ve got a
future as much as you have a past, and there’s this advantage,—that you
can do something with your future.”
“Do you think so?” she asked, with a little bitterness. “That hasn’t
been my experience.”
“It’s been mine,” he said, “and you can make it yours. Come, I want to
talk with you about your future, because I have been thinking very
seriously about my own. I want to ask your advice and to give you mine.
I’ll commence by asking yours. What do you think of me as a physician?
I know you are able to judge.”
She was flattered, in spite of herself. There were long arrears of cool
indifference to her own claims in that direction, which she might very
well have resented; but she did not. There was that flattery in his
question which the junior in any vocation feels in the appeal of his
senior; and there was the flattery which any woman feels in a man’s
recourse to her judgment. Still, she contrived to parry it with a
little thrust. “I don’t suppose the opinion of a mere homœopathist can
be of any value to a regular practitioner.”
He laughed. “You have been a regular practitioner yourself for the last
three weeks. What do you think of my management of the case?”
“I have never abandoned my principles,” she began.
“Oh, I know all about that? What do you think of me as a doctor?” he
persisted.
“Of course I admire you. Why do you ask me that?”
“Because I wished to know. And because I wished to ask you something
else. You have been brought up in a city, and I have always lived here
in the country, except the two years I was out with the army. Do you
think I should succeed if I pulled up here, and settled in Boston?”
“I have not lived in Boston,” she answered. “My opinion wouldn’t be
worth much on that point.”
“Yes, it would. You know city people, and what they are. I have seen a
good deal of them in my practice at the hotels about here, and some of
the ladies—when they happened to feel more comfortable—have advised me
to come to Boston.” His derision seemed to throw contempt on all her
sex; but he turned to her, and asked again earnestly, “What do you
think? Some of the profession know me there. When I left the school,
some of the faculty urged me to try my chance in the city.”
She waited a moment before she answered. “You know that I must respect
your skill, and I believe that you could succeed anywhere. I judge your
fitness by my own deficiency. The first time I saw you with Mrs.
Maynard, I saw that you had everything that I hadn’t. I saw that I was
a failure, and why, and that it would be foolish for me to keep up the
struggle.”
“Do you mean that you have given it up?” he demanded, with a triumph in
which there was no sympathy.
“It has given me up. I never liked it,—I told you that before,—and I
never took it up from any ambitious motive. It seemed a shame for me to
be of no use in the world; and I hoped that I might do something in a
way that seemed natural for women. And I don’t give up because I’m
unfit as a woman. I might be a man, and still be impulsive and timid
and nervous, and everything that I thought I was not.”
“Yes, you might be all that, and be a man; but you’d be an exceptional
man, and I don’t think you’re an exceptional woman. If you’ve failed,
it isn’t your temperament that’s to blame.”
“I think it is. The wrong is somewhere in me individually. I know it
is.”
Dr. Mulbridge, walking beside her, with his hands clasped behind him,
threw up his head and laughed. “Well, have it your own way, Miss Breen.
Only I don’t agree with you. Why should you wish to spare your sex at
your own expense? But that’s the way with some ladies, I’ve noticed.
They approve of what women attempt because women attempt it, and they
believe the attempt reflects honor on them. It’s tremendous to think
what men could accomplish for their sex, if they only hung together as
women do. But they can’t. They haven’t the generosity.”
“I think you don’t understand me,” said Grace, with a severity that
amused him. “I wished to regard myself, in taking up this profession,
entirely as I believed a man would have regarded himself.”
“And were you able to do it?”
“No,” she unintentionally replied to this unexpected question.
“Haw, haw, haw!” laughed Dr. Mulbridge at her helpless candor. “And are
you sure that you give it up as a man would?”
“I don’t know how you mean,” she said, vexed and bewildered.
“Do you do it fairly and squarely because you believe that you’re a
failure, or because you partly feel that you haven’t been fairly dealt
with?”
“I believe that if Mrs. Maynard had had the same confidence in me that
she would have had in any man I should not have failed. But every woman
physician has a double disadvantage that I hadn’t the strength to
overcome,—her own inexperience and the distrust of other women.”
“Well, whose fault is that?”
“Not the men’s. It is the men alone who give women any chance. They are
kind and generous and liberal-minded. I have no blame for them, and I
have no patience with women who want to treat them as the enemies of
women’s advancement. Women can’t move a step forwards without their
sufferance and help. Dr. Mulbridge,” she cried, “I wish to apologize
for the hasty and silly words I used to you the day I came to ask you
to consult with me. I ought to have been grateful to you for consenting
at first, and when you took back your consent I ought to have
considered your position. You were entirely right. We had no common
ground to meet on, and I behaved like a petulant, foolish, vulgar
girl!”
“No, no,” he protested, laughing in recollection of the scene. “You
were all right, and I was in a fix; and if your own fears hadn’t come
to the rescue, I don’t know how I should have got out of it. It would
have been disgraceful, wouldn’t it, to refuse a lady’s request. You
don’t know how near I was to giving way. I can tell you, now that it’s
all over. I had never seen a lady of our profession before,” he added
hastily, “and my curiosity was up. I always had my doubts about the
thoroughness of women’s study, and I should have liked to see where
your training failed. I must say I found it very good,—I’ve told you
that. You wouldn’t fail individually: you would fail because you are a
woman.”
“I don’t believe that,” said Grace.
“Well, then, because your patients are women. It’s all one. What will
you do?”
“I shall not do anything. I shall give it all up.”
“But what shall you do then?”
“I—don’t know.”
“What are you going to be? A fashionable woman? Or are you going to
Europe, and settle down there with the other American failures? I’ve
heard about them,—in Rome and Florence and Paris. Are you going to
throw away the study you’ve put into this profession? You took it up
because you wanted to do good. Don’t you want to do good any more? Has
the human race turned out unworthy?”
She cowered at this arraignment, in which she could not separate the
mocking from the justice. “What do you advise me to do? Do you think I
could ever succeed?”
“You could never succeed alone.”
“Yes, I know that; I felt that from the first. But I have planned to
unite with a woman physician older than myself.”
“And double your deficiency. Sit down here,” he said; “I wish to talk
business.” They had entered the border of the woods encompassing
Jocelyn’s, and he painted to a stump, beside which lay the fallen tree.
She obeyed mechanically, and he remained standing near her, with one
foot lifted to the log; he leaned forward over her, and seemed to seize
a physical advantage in the posture. “From your own point of view, you
would have no right to give up your undertaking if there was a chance
of success in it. You would have no more right to give up than a woman
who had gone out as a missionary.”
“I don’t pretend to compare myself with such a woman; but I should have
no more right to give up,” she answered, helpless against the logic of
her fate, which he had somehow divined.
“Well, then, listen to me. I can give you this chance. Are you
satisfied that with my advice you could have succeeded in Mrs.
Maynard’s case?”
“Yes, I think so. But what”—
“I think so, too. Don’t rise!”
His will overcame the impulse that had betrayed itself, and she sank
back to her seat. “I offer you my advice from this time forward; I
offer you my help.”
“That is very good of you,” she murmured; “and I appreciate your
generosity more than I can say. I know the prejudice you must have had
to overcome in regard to women physicians before you could bring
yourself to do this; and I know how you must have despised me for
failing in my attempt, and giving myself up to my feeble temperament.
But”—
“Oh, we won’t speak of all that,” he interrupted. “Of course I felt the
prejudice against women entering the profession which we all feel; it
was ridiculous and disgusting to me till I saw you. I won’t urge you
from any personal motive to accept my offer. But I know that if you do
you can realize all your hopes of usefulness; and I ask you to consider
that certainly. But you know the only way it could be done.”
She looked him in the eyes, with dismay in her growing intelligence.
“What—what do you mean?”
“I mean that I ask you to let me help you carry out your plan of life,
and to save all you have done, and all you have hoped, from waste—as
your husband. Think”—
She struggled to her feet as if he were opposing a palpable resistance,
so strongly she felt the pressure of his will. “It can’t be, Dr.
Mulbridge. Oh, it can’t, indeed! Let us go back; I wish to go back!”
But he had planted himself in her way, and blocked her advance, unless
she chose to make it a flight.
“I expected this,” he said, with a smile, as if her wild trepidation
interested him as an anticipated symptom. “The whole idea is new and
startling to you. But I know you won’t dismiss it abruptly, and I won’t
be discouraged.”
“Yes, yes, you must! I will not think of it! I can’t! I do dismiss it
at once. Let me go!”
“Then you really choose to be like the rest,—a thing of hysterical
impulses, without conscience or reason! I supposed the weakest woman
would be equal to an offer of marriage. And you had dreamt of being a
physician and useful!”
“I tell you,” she cried, half quelled by his derision, “that I have
found out that I am not fit for it,—that I am a failure and a disgrace;
and you had no right to expect me to be anything else.”
“You are no failure, and I had a right to expect anything of you after
the endurance and the discretion you have shown in the last three
weeks. Without your help I should have failed myself. You owe it to
other women to go on.”
“They must take care of themselves,” she said. “If my weakness throws
shame on them, they must bear it. I thank you for what you say. I
believe you mean it. But if I was of any use to you I didn’t know it.”
“It was probably inspiration, then,” he interrupted coolly. “Come, this
isn’t a thing to be frightened at. You’re not obliged to do what I say.
But I think you ought to hear me out. I haven’t spoken without serious
thought, and I didn’t suppose you would reject me without a reason.”
“Reason?” she repeated. “There is no reason in it.”
“There ought to be. There is, on my side. I have all kinds of reasons
for asking you to be my wife: I believe that I can make you happy in
the fulfilment of your plans; I admire you and respect you more than
any other woman I ever saw; and I love you.”
“I don’t love you, and that is reason enough.”
“Yes, between boys and girls. But between men and women it isn’t
enough. Do you dislike me?”
“No.”
“Am I repulsive in any way?”
“No, no!”
“I know that I am not very young and that I am not very good-looking.”
“It isn’t that at all.”
“Of course I know that such things weigh with women, and that personal
traits and habits are important in an affair like this. I am slovenly
and indifferent about my dress; but it’s only because I have lived
where every sort of spirit and ambition was useless. I don’t know about
city ways, but I could pick up all of them that were worth while. I
spoke of going to Boston; but I would go anywhere else with you, east
or west, that you chose, and I know that I should succeed. I haven’t
done what I might have done with myself, because I’ve never had an
object in life. I’ve always lived in the one little place, and I’ve
never been out of it except when I was in the army. I’ve always liked
my profession; but nothing has seemed worth while. You were a
revelation to me; you have put ambition and hope into me. I never saw
any woman before that I would have turned my hand to have. They always
seemed to me fit to be the companions of fools, or the playthings of
men. But of all the simpletons, the women who were trying to do
something for woman, as they called it, trying to exemplify and
illustrate a cause, were the silliest that I came across. I never
happened to have met a woman doctor before you came to me; but I had
imagined them, and I couldn’t believe in you when I saw you. You were
not supersensitive, you were not presumptuous, and you gave up, not
because you distrusted yourself, but because your patient distrusted
you. That was right: I should have done the same thing myself. Under my
direction, you have shown yourself faithful, docile, patient,
intelligent beyond anything I have seen. I have watched you, and I
know; and I know what your peculiar trials have been from that woman.
You have taught me a lesson,—I’m not ashamed to say it; and you’ve
given me a motive. I was wrong to ask you to marry me so that you might
carry out your plans: that was no way to appeal to _you_. What I meant
was that I might make your plans my own, and that we might carry them
out together. I don’t care for making money; I have always been poor,
and I had always expected to be so; and I am not afraid of hard work.
There isn’t any self-sacrifice you’ve dreamed of that I wouldn’t gladly
and proudly share with you. You can’t do anything by yourself, but we
could do anything together. If you have any scruple about giving up
your theory of medicine, you needn’t do it; and the State Medical
Association may go to the devil. I’ve said my say. What do you say?”
She looked all round, as if seeking escape from a mesh suddenly flung
about her, and then she looked imploringly up at him. “I have nothing
to say,” she whispered huskily. “I can’t answer you.”
“Well, that’s all I ask,” he said, moving a few steps, away, and
suffering her to rise. “Don’t answer me now. Take time,—all the time
you want, all the time there is.”
“No,” she said, rising, and gathering some strength from the sense of
being on foot again. “I don’t mean that. I mean that I don’t—I can’t
consent.”
“You don’t believe in me? You don’t think I would do it?”
“I don’t believe in myself. I have no right to doubt you. I know that I
ought to honor you for what you propose.”
“I don’t think it calls for any great honor. Of course I shouldn’t
propose it to every lady physician.” He smiled with entire serenity and
self-possession. “Tell me one thing: was there ever a time when you
would have consented?” She did not answer. “Then you will consent yet?”
“No. Don’t deceive yourself. I shall never consent.”
“I’ll leave that to the logic of your own conscience. You will do what
seems your duty.”
“You mustn’t trust to my conscience. I fling it away! I won’t have
anything to do with it. I’ve been tortured enough by it. There is no
sense or justice in it!”
He laughed easily at her vehemence. “I’ll trust your conscience. But I
won’t stay to worry you now. I’m coming again day after to-morrow, and
I’m not afraid of what you will say then.”
He turned and left her, tearing his way through the sweet-fern and low
blackberry vines, with long strides, a shape of uncouth force. After he
was out of sight, she followed, scared and trembling at herself, as if
she had blasphemed.