"Oh," said Ewbert, apologetically, and he did not know quite what to do;
he had an aimless wish for his wife, as if she would have known what to
do. In her absence he decided to shut the door against the hens, who
were returning adventurously to the threshold, and then he asked, "Is
there something I can do for you? Make a fire for you to get up by"--
"I ha'n't got any call to get up," said Hilbrook; and, after giving
Ewbert time to make the best of this declaration, he asked abruptly,
"What was that you said about my wantin' to be alive enough to know I
was dead?"
"The consciousness of unconsciousness?"
"Ah!" the old man assented, as with satisfaction in having got the
notion right; and then he added, with a certain defiance: "There ain't
anything _in_ that. I got to thinking it over, when you was gone, and
the whole thing went to pieces. That idea don't prove anything at all,
and all that we worked out of it had to go with it."
"Well," the minister returned, with an assumption of cosiness in his
tone which he did not feel, and feigning to make himself easy in the
hard kitchen chair which he pulled up to the door of Hilbrook's room,
"let's see if we can't put that notion together again."
"_You_ can, if you want to," said the old man, dryly "I got no interest
in it any more; 'twa'n't nothing but a metaphysical toy, anyway." He
turned his head apathetically on the pillow, and no longer faced his
visitor, who found it impossible in the conditions of tacit dismissal to
philosophize further.
"I was sorry," Ewbert began, "not to be able to speak with you after
church, the other day. There were so many people"--
"That's all right," said Hilbrook unresentfully. "I hadn't anything to
say, in particular."
"But _I_ had," the minister persisted. "I thought a great deal about you
when I was away, and I went over our talks in my own mind a great many
times. The more I thought about them, the more I believed that we had
felt our way to some important truth in the matter. I don't say final
truth, for I don't suppose that we shall ever reach that in this life."
"Very likely," Hilbrook returned, with his face to the wall. "I don't
see as it makes any difference; or if it does, I don't care for it."
Something occurred to Ewbert which seemed to him of more immediate
usefulness than the psychological question. "Couldn't I get you
something to eat, Mr. Hilbrook? If you haven't had any breakfast to-day,
you must be hungry."
"Yes, I'm hungry," the old man assented, "but I don't want to eat
anything."
Ewbert had risen hopefully in making his suggestion, but now his heart
sank. Here, it seemed to him, a physician rather than a philosopher was
needed, and at the sound of wheels on the wagon track to the door his
imagination leaped to the miracle of the doctor's providential advent.
He hurried to the threshold and met the fish-man, who was about to
announce himself with the handle of his whip on the clapboarding. He
grasped the situation from the minister's brief statement, and confessed
that he had expected to find the old gentleman _dead_ in his bed some
day, and he volunteered to send some of the women folks from the farm up
the road. When these came, concentrated in the person of the farmer's
bustling wife, who had a fire kindled in the stove and the kettle on
before Ewbert could get away, he went for the doctor, and returned with
him to find her in possession of everything in the house except the
owner's interest. Her usefulness had been arrested by an invisible but
impassable barrier, though she had passed and re-passed the threshold of
Hilbrook's chamber with tea and milk toast. He said simply that he saw
no object in eating; and he had not been sufficiently interested to turn
his head and look at her in speaking to her.
With the doctor's science he was as indifferent as with the farm-wife's
service. He submitted to have his pulse felt, and he could not help
being prescribed for, but he would have no agency in taking his
medicine. He said, as he had said to Mrs. Stephson about eating, that he
saw no object in it.
The doctor retorted, with the temper of a man not used to having his
will crossed, that he had better take it, if he had any object in
living, and Hilbrook answered that he had none. In his absolute apathy
he did not even ask to be let alone.
"You see," the baffled doctor fumed in the conference that he had with
Ewbert apart, "he doesn't really need any medicine. There's nothing the
matter with him, and I only wanted to give him something to put an edge
to his appetite. He's got cranky living here alone; but there _is_ such
a thing as starving to death, and that's the only thing Hilbrook's in
danger of. If you're going to stay with him--he oughtn't to be left
alone"--
"I can come up, yes, certainly, after supper," said Ewbert, and he
fortified himself inwardly for the question this would raise with his
wife.
"Then you must try to interest him in something. Get him to talking, and
then let Mrs. Stephson come in with a good bowl of broth, and I guess we
may trust Nature to do the rest."