Events approved the wisdom of Mrs. Ewbert's course in so many respects
that she confidently trusted them for the rest. Ewbert picked up
wonderfully at the seaside, and she said to him again and again that it
was not merely those interviews with old Hilbrook which had drained his
vitality, but it was the whole social and religious keeping of the
place. Everybody, she said, had thrown themselves upon his sympathies,
and he was carrying a load that nobody could bear up under. She
addressed these declarations to her lingering consciousness of Ransom
Hilbrook, and confirmed herself, by their repetition, in the belief that
he had not taken her generalizations personally. She now extended these
so as to inculpate the faculty of the university, who ought to have felt
it their duty not to let a man of Ewbert's intellectual quality stagger
on alone among them, with no sign of appreciation or recognition in the
work he was doing, not so much for the Rixonite church as for the whole
community. She took several ladies at the hotel into her confidence on
this point, and upon study of the situation they said it was a shame.
After that she felt more bitter about it, and attributed her husband's
collapse to a concealed sense of the indifference of the university
people, so galling to a sensitive nature.
She suggested this theory to Ewbert, and he denied it with blithe
derision, but she said that he need not tell _her_, and in confirming
herself in it she began to relax her belief that old Ransom Hilbrook had
preyed upon him. She even went so far as to say that the only
intellectual companionship he had ever had in the place was that which
he found in the old man's society. When she discovered, after the fact,
that Ewbert had written to him since they came away, she was not so
severe with him as she might have expected herself to be in view of an
act which, if not quite clandestine, was certainly without her privity.
She would have considered him fitly punished by Hilbrook's failure to
reply, if she had not shared his uneasiness at the old man's silence.
But she did not allow this to affect her good spirits, which were
essential to her husband's comfort as well as her own. She redoubled her
care of him in every sort, and among all the ladies who admired her
devotion to him there was none who enjoyed it as much as herself. There
was none who believed more implicitly that it was owing to her foresight
and oversight that his health mended so rapidly, and that at the end of
the bathing season she was, as she said, taking him home quite another
man. In her perfect satisfaction she suffered him his small joke about
not feeling it quite right to go with her if that were so; and though a
woman of little humor, she even professed to find pleasure in his joke
after she fully understood it.
"All that I ask," she said, as if it followed, "is that you won't spoil
everything by letting old Hilbrook come every night and drain the life
out of you again."
"I won't," he retorted, "if you'll promise to make the university people
come regularly to my sermons."
He treated the notion of Hilbrook's visits lightly; but with his return
to the familiar environment he felt a shrinking from them in an
experience which was like something physical. Yet when he sat down the
first night in his study, with his lamp in its wonted place, it was with
an expectation of old Hilbrook in his usual seat so vivid that its
defeat was more a shock than its fulfilment upon supernatural terms
would have been. In fact, the absence of the old man was spectral; and
though Ewbert employed himself fully the first night in answering an
accumulation of letters that required immediate reply, it was with
nervous starts from time to time, which he could trace to no other
cause. His wife came in and out, with what he knew to be an accusing
eye, as she brought up those arrears of housekeeping which always await
the housewife on the return from any vacation; and he knew that he did
not conceal his guilt from her.
They both ignored the stress which had fallen back upon him, and which
accumulated, as the days of the week went by, until the first Sunday
came.
Ewbert dreaded to look in the direction of Hilbrook's pew, lest he
should find it empty; but the old man was there, and he sat blinking at
the minister, as his custom was, through the sermon, and thoughtfully
passing the tip of his tongue over the inner edge of his lower lip.
Many came up to shake hands with the minister after church, and to tell
him how well he was looking, but Hilbrook was not among them. Some of
the university people who had made a point of being there that morning,
out of a personal regard for Ewbert, were grouped about his wife, in the
church vestibule, where she stood answering their questions about his
health. He glimpsed between the heads and shoulders of this gratifying
group the figure of Hilbrook dropping from grade to grade on the steps
outside, till it ceased to be visible, and he fancied, with a pang, that
the old man had lingered to speak with him, and had then given up and
started home.
The cordial interest of the university people was hardly a compensation
for the disappointment he shared with Hilbrook; but his wife was so
happy in it that he could not say anything to damp her joy. "Now," she
declared, on their way home, "I am perfectly satisfied that they will
keep coming. You never preached so well, Clarence, and if they have any
appreciation at all, they simply won't be able to keep away. I wish you
could have heard all the nice things they said about you. I guess
they've waked up to you, at last, and I do believe that the idea of
losing you has had a great deal to do with it. And _that_ is something
we owe to old Ransom Hilbrook more than to anything else. I saw the poor
old fellow hanging about, and I couldn't help feeling for him. I knew he
wanted to speak with you, and I'm not afraid that he will be a burden
again. It will be such an inspiration, the prospect of having the
university people come every Sunday, now, that you can afford to give a
little of it to him, and I want you to go and see him soon; he evidently
isn't coming till you do."