THE DOCTOR’S LETTER—DAN REJECTED.
As Mrs. Buzzell was watering her house plants, a few days after the
visit of the doctor’s wife, a letter arrived for her, and her eyes
brightened, seeing the doctor’s handwriting in the superscription. She
was very familiar with this handwriting, not from letters,
indeed—nothing so romantic, but from his manifold medical prescriptions
for her dyspepsia. There was no person in the world she esteemed so
highly as she did Dr. Forest, and receiving a letter from him was a rare
delight; yet she did not open it at once, but kept on tending her
plants, which occupied a large table before the south window of her
sitting-room. She did not open it hastily, probably for the same reason
that has led many of us on receiving several letters, to leave the
specially coveted one until the last, or perhaps until we were quite at
ease and alone. At all events, Mrs. Buzzell waited until the flowers
were all watered, and the stray drops of water fallen on the square of
oiled cloth beneath the table carefully wiped up. Then she sat down, put
on her gold-bowed spectacles, opened her letter, and read:
“MY DEAR MRS. BUZZELL: I have wormed out of my wife this evening the
object and the result of her late visit to you. I can quite understand,
as I told her, why you should have refused her request.
“Now, you two women have danced in pint-pots all your lives, but with
this difference: you, because the tether of your education and
surroundings never permitted you to examine principles and motives of
action outside of a given circumference; she, because the pint-pot fits
her like a glove, and she measures the harmony of the spheres by this
beautiful fit. She has never tried to breathe the broader, freer
atmosphere outside, because her theory is, the pint-pot first and the
universe afterward.
“By the pint-pot you know I mean society. Mrs. Forest sees plainly that
no devotee of conventional morality can stand by a girl, especially one
who is poor and humble in social position, and give her moral support
through disgrace, without being ‘talked about’—that bugbear of little
souls. Fools will say it is countenancing vice. I appeal to you because,
from many sentiments I have heard you utter, I believe you capable of
defying shallow criticism when you know you are right. I know you have
broad and generous impulses, and you are young enough in soul and in
body [this was a Bismarckian stroke of diplomacy, but the honest doctor
never knew it] to obey them. You are the mother of no human child, but
childless women should be the mothers of the world—sad for all its
sorrows, glad for all its joys.
“Susie Dykes has more heart and brain than nine-tenths of the women I
know, and if we treat her right fraternally—as I intend to do even if
every one else abandons her—she will come out all right. She has not
fallen yet; for she respects herself, despite this misfortune. I can say
truly that I take pleasure in keeping this victim’s head above the muddy
swash of conventional virtue that would wash her under.
“Will you be my real friend, and stand by me in this work? There is
nothing like a good woman’s heart where such help is needed.”
The letter was well calculated to effect its purpose. There is nothing
like faith in the justice and generosity of human nature, to call these
qualities into action, even in the narrowest hearts. The doctor’s faith
in Mrs. Buzzell made her feel equal to facing martyrdom; and then she
was very proud of his appealing to her to stand by him when his own wife
failed him; so without delay she put on her old gloves and her antique
bonnet, shut her cat out of the house lest he should worry her canaries,
and marched straight over to Dr. Forest’s, and called for Susie Dykes,
without the slightest mention of the mistress of the family. Susie came
down to meet her with wondering eyes. What could it mean that the staid
and dignified Mrs. Buzzell should so honor her? She soon learned the
object of Mrs. Buzzell’s call, and that very night, having packed all
her worldly goods in two paper boxes and a bundle, she slept under the
roof of her new friend.
The fact of Susie’s condition soon leaked out, and the “muddy swash,” as
the doctor termed it, began to rise threateningly. Clara nobly sustained
her, went every day and heard her lessons, as she had resolved to do,
for having once decided upon the right course, she was indeed her
father’s own girl, and there was no thought of turning back. Susie’s
prompt response to Clara’s kindness, touched her heart, and gradually
the friendship for her _protégée_ grew into a deep and sincere
affection, nourished by the best feelings of both.
In the plants of Mrs. Buzzell’s sitting-room, in her garden, and in the
woods behind her house, there was ample means for botanizing, though at
first it was a hard task for Susie to study. The mental effort required
to distinguish the monocotyledonous and the dicotyledonous in the
specimens she and Clara gathered, seemed a mockery to her over-burdened
soul; but the struggle paid well. In a few weeks she became deeply
interested in all her studies, and her rapid progress astonished her
little circle of friends. Meanwhile, she carefully tended Mrs. Buzzell’s
plants, which after a time began to respond to the knowledge she had
acquired of their nature and different wants, and day by day she took
some new responsibility of household cares from Mrs. Buzzell, who, after
a month, could not have been induced to part with Susie. She took the
whole charge of the wardrobe of the coming waif, and the hard lines
about her mouth softened with the new, strange pleasure in the work that
awakened memories of nearly forty years before, when, as a young wife,
she had once, with loving care, prepared numerous tiny articles for a
baby that never wore them. They had lain ever since, packed away in
camphor, and no one had ever known the secret but her husband, now dead
many years. Many times she had been tempted to give them to this or that
friend, but her generosity could not quite overcome a sense of shame
that women always experience over a useless work of this kind; yet she
dreaded to have them found after her death, and there was a soft spot
somewhere in her old heart, that would not let her destroy them. One
day, therefore, with many misgivings, she unpacked with Susie the
antique, camphor-scented trunk, and told the little history of her early
married years, delighted only that Susie did not laugh at her. The idea
of the serious little Susie laughing at any human disappointment, was
simply absurd. She only said:
“It was too bad, when you were married to one you loved, and the baby
would have been so welcome.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Buzzell, kindly, “we’ll make this baby welcome in
spite of everything. We can’t understand all God’s ways; and who knows
but this may be a trial that will lead you nearer to Him who judges
hearts not as men judge, but as one who made them, and knows all their
secret springs?”
This little experience, which to Mrs. Buzzell seemed a most important
confidence, tended to develop all the dormant softness and tenderness of
her nature; and one day the little, old baby-wardrobe was brought down,
and her own wrinkled hands washed out the odor of camphor and the yellow
of forty years.
* * * * *
As Susie’s fate had been so well provided for, and especially as Miss
Marston’s visit was drawing to its close, Dan again appeared on the
scene. In fact he could no longer keep away from this woman who had
captured him, body and soul. He thought of her all the time, and the
fear that she might not return his love, made his days and nights
wretched. It was a new experience for Dan. Grief did not sit gracefully
upon him at all. It was an enemy whose blows his “science” could not
parry, and it made him furious, without leading him to reflect that he
had caused a thousand-fold keener heart-aches to poor Susie (even apart
from the special wrong he had done her by deserting her at a time when
no man of sensibility ever shows that his heart is growing cold), for we
can never suffer from failing to win love, as from the loss of it when
it has become necessary, not only to our happiness, but even to the
rendering of life tolerable. In his selfishness, Dan thought no
suffering could equal his, and he determined to know his fate before
Miss Marston left Oakdale.
One evening, therefore, he dressed himself with extraordinary care, and
sallied forth in the direction of his father’s house. As he drew near,
he heard Miss Marston’s adorable voice in the parlor, and instead of
ringing at the front door, he went around to the veranda, and waited
until the song ceased. Even then he had not the courage to approach
her—she might come out, he thought, and be pleased by finding him there.
Meanwhile he drank in greedily the sweet half-melodies, half-harmonies,
evoked by her beautiful fingers, as they strayed over the key-board of
the piano without any special aim, for she was evidently alone and
“fancy free.” Pretty soon he recognized a kind of phantasy upon an old
Scotch ballad, and then her voice swelled out in the first two lines of
“Comin’ thro’ the Rye,” and then stopped. Again she commenced:
“Amang the train there is a swain,
I dearly love mysel’;
But what’s his name and where’s his hame,
I dinna choose to tell.”
This verse she sang entire. “Why this special verse?” asked Dan’s heart,
for it was in the state when clinging to straws is perfectly natural. At
this juncture he made bold to enter by the French window, which was
open, and stood beside her. She attempted to rise, but he prevented it,
begging her to keep on playing—he had something to say to her, which
could be fittest said to music.
“So it is coming,” thought Miss Marston. “How shall I stave it off?”
If Dan had only read her thoughts as easily as she read his, he would
not have made the headlong plunge into a declaration of love, as he did,
without a moment’s pause. Miss Marston quickly interrupted him.
“You do me honor, Mr. Forest,” she said, rising and looking him calmly
in the face; “but——”
Dan was half mad. He thought he detected contempt in the way she
pronounced the word “honor.” He thought some one had been “poisoning her
mind” against him—by the truth in his case—and scarcely knowing what he
was saying, he blurted out this fear—thus, by a stroke of poetic
justice, revealing what the prudent Mrs. Forest had taken such infinite
pains to conceal.
“Indeed!” exclaimed Miss Marston, coldly. “I never dreamed that, young
as you are, you could be so old in iniquity. I should much like to be
able to respect you for the sake of your estimable family; but if this
is so, and I see the truth of it in your face, let me give you a word of
advice: I am some years older than you are, and I think I know human
nature well enough to assure you that you will never win the love of any
true woman while basely deserting another, whose happiness”—and she
added in a low, withering tone, as she turned to leave the room—“and
whose honor you have placed in your hands.” The door closed behind her,
and Dan, in speaking of his sensations years after, remarked that you
could have “knocked him down with a feather.”