scourge of the Ohio lowlands, had come to him on the day before for
quinine. The doctor had given it to him in solution, the only form in
which it was then known to country practitioners. Quinine was a costly
medicine in those days, under the heavy tax which was removed long
afterwards through the most earnest and even impassioned efforts of a
Kentucky statesman, who, in a memorable speech, eloquently implored
Congress to keep, if it would, its tax on silks and laces and precious
stones but--for humanity's sake--to allow his constituency to have all
the free quinine that they wanted.
"I gave this chap a big bottle of quinine," the doctor said. "He paid a
stiff price for it, too, and I saw him put it in his saddle-bags with
great care. Nevertheless, he managed somehow to crack the bottle, and,
when only a part of the way home he found that it was leaking. He
couldn't think of losing the quinine,--it had cost too much,--and he
saved it by drinking that whole bottleful at a gulp. Well, he certainly
had the benefit of it, none of it was wasted; but I feel a little tired
from being up most of the night and having had pretty brisk work to keep
him alive. What fools these mortals be;" the doctor yawned, as he struck
his pipe musingly on the porch railing, thus ranging his thoughts while
clearing his pipe of ashes. "And here's this other hard job, that's
quite as unnecessary, on hand for to-day, and no more to be shirked or
put off than the other was. Well, come along," he said, reluctantly
laying down his pipe, the sole luxury that he allowed himself. "We may
as well be going; ''twere well it were done quickly,'" he quoted again,
for this rugged country doctor knew his Shakespeare as a man may know a
book when he reads only one.
They went down the porch steps, talking of indifferent matters, pausing
a moment at the gate, long enough for Lynn to speak a few words in
return for the greeting which the doctor's wife gave him from the
window. The Watson house was near by,--only a few paces down the big
road,--and they were almost immediately standing before its open door.
There the doctor halted with the look of one who musters his forces
after having set his thoughts in order. He drew himself up and threw
back his shoulders as if settling to a firm purpose with a new
determination, and he finally buttoned his coat. That poor old shabby
coat! Ah! that dear old coat! So eloquent in its faded shabbiness of the
many fierce storms and the many merciless suns which had beaten upon his
tireless ministrations to suffering humanity! And the buttoning of the
doctor's old coat was always as the girding of a warrior's armor for
battle.
The young man standing beside him on the steps gave him a careless side
glance. He did not understand the meaning of what he saw, and he merely
smiled at its apparent absurdity. A moment later he followed the doctor
into the house, all unafraid, as youth often enters upon the most
appalling of the mysteries of living.
It was Anne who met them and gave them an impassive good-morning, and
silently led them into the room in which her husband was sitting. The
sick man, propped up in his usual seat by the window, looked round when
they came in, and murmured some indistinct greeting. But his miserable,
restless eyes went back almost at once to their ceaseless quest of the
deserted big road, stretching dully toward the dim, distant horizon.
"How are you to-day, Tom?" asked the doctor, perfunctorily, and then he
continued without waiting for a reply to his inquiry, "We are not going
to let you mope like this, old boy. I've been trying to think of
something to help you--to fill the time. It's after a man gets out of
bed that the worst tug comes--while he is still tied to the house and
yet not actually ill. We mustn't let him mope, must we, Anne?" he said.
He turned to the silent, motionless woman who sat by without so much as
the natural feminine rustle of garments.
Anne looked at him through the white light of her clear eyes, but she
did not speak. She had been well called a "still-tongued woman."
The doctor, glancing away, went on uneasily, yet determinedly:--
"But I am not sure what Tom would like. I don't think he cares for
backgammon or checkers or dominoes or any of those milk-and-water games.
You don't know anything about chess, do you, Tom?" he asked.
The stricken man made no reply; he could utter but few words and those
only with indistinctness and difficulty. He did not even turn his head;
the turning of it ever so slowly was hard and caused him great pain.
"I scarcely think chess would be the thing anyway--it's too heavy and
requires too much thinking to be good for an invalid. You must have
something light and amusing. That's the sort of game we must give you to
keep you from moping."
The doctor spoke to the husband, but his eyes were on the wife and
regarding her anxiously, though his lips were smiling.
There was no responsive smile on Anne's pale face. It was quite still
and grave as it always was, but a thin cloud of alarm seemed suddenly
rising in her clear gaze, as white smoke floats over the crystalline sky
of a winter's day. But yet she said not a word.
The doctor also fell unexpectedly silent, with his eyes fixed sternly on
the back of the sick man's chair and a frown gathering between his
shaggy, grizzled brows, as it always gathered when he was sorely
perplexed. He was only an old-fashioned country doctor--merely a good
man first and scientist afterwards. So that he now sat speechless,
casting about in his troubled thoughts for the gentlest words wherewith
he must wound the quiet, pale-faced woman, whose very lack of
comprehension appealed to his great heart as all helplessness did. He
saw, as only doctors can see, how frail was the body holding this
strenuous spirit. As he thus sat silent, gathering courage, the utter
stillness of the room grew tense. The young man, sitting on the other
side of the chamber, silent and ill at ease, moved uneasily, keeping his
eyes on the floor. The soft, monotonous murmur of the bees in the
honeysuckle over the window sounded unnaturally loud and shrill.
At last the doctor spoke distinctly and firmly, but without looking at
Anne:--
"There is only one thing to do. We must find a partner for Tom--Mr.
Gordon here has kindly offered--and we must give him a real good, lively
game of cards."
It was out now, and he was glad and sorry at the same time.
Anne gave a startled cry, inarticulate, like the terror of a dumb
creature. She recoiled as if a black pit had opened at her feet.
"Tom's need is very great. He is very, very weak," the doctor urged, in
the space of the recoil.
Anne instantly flew to her husband as the mother bird flies to the
fallen fledgling, and laid her little trembling hands on his broken
shoulders, as the mother bird spreads her weak wings between
helplessness and danger.
"I will take care of him," she said, speaking out of that tender,
protecting maternal instinct which is the divine part of every good
woman's love for her husband.
"I can see no other way," the doctor urged gently, not knowing what else
to say.
"There must be some other way! Surely our Father never forces us to
commit sin. Surely in His mercy He gives us a choice;" Anne panted, like
a frightened wild creature at bay.
Yet she faced the two men steadily over her husband's powerless head,
her clear eyes clouded darkly now, and her set face as white and as
inscrutable as the cold mask of death.
"I can only say again what I have said before," the doctor repeated
weakly, glancing at Anne and quickly looking away.
"The way will mercifully be opened unto me. A light will be shown as a
lamp to my feet."
Anne's murmured words were barely to be heard, yet they bore,
nevertheless, to the three men who listened, the full strength of her
faith, firm as the Rock of Ages.
The doctor arose hurriedly and went out into the passage, and stood for
a while in the doorway, looking at the quiet big road, at the peace of
the green earth, and at the sunlight flooding the blue heavens. When he
turned back his sunken eyes were wet and he could not meet Anne's gaze
nor the sick man's, which was also turned upon him with all its dumb,
restless, desperate misery--with all its terrible voiceless clamor for
relief.
"I don't know what to do," he said, trying to speak lightly, but sighing
in spite of himself and spreading out his hands. "I suppose we'll have
to give it up, Tom, old fellow. Well, maybe Anne knows best after all.
These wives of ours usually do know better what is good for us than we
know ourselves. A good wife is always more to be depended upon than
medicine when a man's pulling through a tedious convalescence. You don't
need any more medicine. I am coming, though, every day, if I can--just
as a neighbor, to see how you are getting along."
He turned away from the sick man. He could not look at him without being
compelled to renew the struggle with Anne; that infinitely cruel, that
ineffably piteous struggle which wrung his own heart, and which would be
useless in the end. He took one of Anne's cold little hands in his warm
large clasp, thinking how small and weak it was to hold so firmly to its
mistaken ideals, how much more firm than his own, which was not strong
enough to hold to an unmistakable duty. And then he and Lynn Gordon went
away, as best they could go, both feeling as the conscientious and the
impressionable must always feel after having, however unwillingly,
stirred the depths of the deep, still pool of another's life.
Out of the house, and out of hearing, the doctor became, however, once
more himself in a measure. He smote his powerful thigh with his strong
hand, and upbraided himself aloud for most disgraceful moral cowardice.
He convicted himself, almost in a shout, of having deserted Tom
Watson--poor devil--and of having virtually run away, like the veriest
coward, simply because he knew that, in a moment more, he would have
been crying like any child. And all on account of the silly fanaticism
of a woman with a mind no wider than a cambric needle--sheer
foolishness, morbid sentimentality--and much more of the same tenor,
while Lynn Gordon laughed at him a little nervously.
"But, foolish or wise, she believes what she does believe. By the
eternal, I'd like to hear any man doubt it! Why, young sir, that little
slim, unbending splinter of a woman is the stuff that they threw to the
beasts in old Rome!"
* * * * *
There was no consciousness of heroism in Anne's own sadly humble
thoughts. When the doctor and the young man were gone, she bent down
silently and kissed her husband with tender timidity, as if begging his
forgiveness for what she could not help. Kneeling by his side, as she
often knelt in her unwearying service, she strove to look into his
averted face, and to meet and to hold his miserable eyes with her own
clear gaze, from which the clouds were fast drifting away. The white
light behind her strange eyes had sunk low under the shock, and had died
out in the stress of terror; but it was gradually beginning to rise and
shine again through the crystal windows of her soul. Her husband did not
look at her; he seemed not to hear what she said; he was staring after
the two men who were walking away down the big road, his look straining
to follow them as a chained animal strains its fetters toward
companionship. Anne saw nothing of this; she was not a bright woman, and
entirely without imagination. She saw only that he did not notice her,
that she was far from his thoughts. And she was used to being
over-looked by her husband, and accustomed to being forgotten by him.
She arose and went quietly across the room, and brought a footstool, and
sat down upon it by his side, laying her head on the arm of his chair,
with her hands folded on her lap.
She was not weeping,--she had never been a crying woman,--and in truth
she was not more unhappy at this moment than she had been for years. She
was, indeed, even less unhappy, now that the shock was well over and the
danger safely passed. A feeling of peace was in truth already hovering
in her breast, though very timidly, as a frightened dove comes slowly
back to its nest. This spirit of peace had begun to brood in Anne's
lonely heart soon after her husband's hurt, although Anne herself was
scarcely aware of the fact. Through the endless months of his greatest
suffering she had been not only upheld, but comforted, by the growing
belief--changing little by little to exaltation--that the torture was
but a fiery furnace intended for the purification of her husband's soul
and her own--for she, too, suffered with every pang which wrenched his
shattered body. It was a terrible faith, and yet it was the faith of the
martyrs; and Anne held not back from sealing it, as they sealed it, with
life itself,--ay! even unto the dear life of her husband, which was
infinitely dearer to her than her own. For she loved him as none save a
nature such as hers can love; with an intense, narrow, almost fierce and
wholly terrible concentration. It was a love which had almost entirely
excluded every one else; not only every other man, but her father and
mother and sisters and brothers, all had been shut out from her inmost
heart, from her earliest youth till this latest moment when she sat
unnoticed by her husband's side. He had never loved her with the best
love that he was capable of giving. Love is perhaps never quite equal,
certainly it never seems equal, in any marriage. The one always loves
more, or less, than the other. And then, in circumscribed lives, such as
Anne's and Tom's were, both men and women choose the one whom they
prefer from among the few whom they chance to know; they cannot choose
from a large number which might possibly have induced a different
selection. But the width of the world would not have altered Anne's
choice. And a love like hers changes no more with time than it is
influenced by environment; it is too little of the flesh, and too much
of the spirit to age, or to wither, or to grow cold. Even her husband's
neglect had made no difference through all the unhappy years of her
married life; even his disregard of religion did not lessen or alter her
love, although it put her and her husband farther apart than they might
otherwise have been, and came nearer than all else to breaking her
heart. She could bear the loss of happiness in her daily life; she could
bear to be deprived of her husband's society day after day and night
after night, by interests and associations in which she had no
part,--living was but waiting, anyway, to Anne. But she could not bear
the thought of the Long Time without the beloved. To Anne, as much as to
any mediaeval saint in any rock-ribbed cell, the longest, happiest
earthly life measured nothing against a glorious eternity. Her husband
was handsome, spirited, high-hearted, masterful, compelling, and kind,
too, in his careless way; another woman might have been happy and proud
to be his wife; but Anne's heart had ached from first to last for the
one thing of which she never spoke, and for which she was always
praying.
Then came the accident, striking down the strong man at the height of
his powers, as the lightning blasts the mighty oak in full leaf. Stunned
at first, Anne, rallying, felt the blow as a manifestation of offended
Power. A mind like hers works in strangely tortuous ways. But after a
while she began to see in this awful affliction a means of grace thus
given when all else had failed; and it was then that the wan ghost of
happiness began to visit Anne's desolate breast. The world had been
violently wrenched away from her husband's grasp, which otherwise would,
most likely, never have loosed; it might perhaps now come to
pass--through mercy cloaked in cruelty--that his thoughts would turn
heavenward. So poor Anne thought, and thus it was that when, to all
outward seeming, the husband's hopeless convalescence was the last
settling down of darkest despair, in reality a shining rainbow of hope
first began to span the wife's long-clouded content.
Was it then possible for Anne to listen for a moment to this incredible,
monstrous, destroying thing which the doctor had urged? Could she by
listening endanger this late-coming chance for the salvation of her
husband's soul in consenting to the sinful relief of his bodily need?
The thought of yielding never crossed her mind, nor the shade of a
shadow of doubt that she was right. It was to her simply a question of
her conscience standing firm against her love. Anne--fortunate in this,
however unfortunate in all other respects--always saw the way before
her, open, and straight, and very, very narrow. To her clear sight a
sharp, distinct line ever divided right from wrong; on this side
everything was snow-white, on that side everything was jet-black. There
were no myriad middle shades of gray to bewilder Anne's crystal gaze.
Living were less hard for some of us--some, too, as conscientious as
Anne--if all could see, or even think they see, as clearly through the
whitish, grayish, blackish mists, so that they also might be able
unerringly to tell where the pure white ends and the real black begins.
XII
MISS JUDY'S LITTLE WAYS
When the doctor's deep voice roared out what he thought of any man who
failed in his duty for fear of offending anybody's prejudices, Miss
Judy, who was busy among the shrubbery in her yard, overheard him, and
was quite frightened by the severity of his tone, though she did not
catch the words. She knew him to be the mildest of absent-minded men,
and she accordingly fluttered around the house, wondering what could be
the matter.
She had been engaged in tying up a rose bush which grew at the side of
the door, and which was too heavy laden with its sweet burden of blush
roses. She was holding a big bunch in her hand as she hurried toward the
gate, blushing when she saw the gentlemen, till her delicate face was as
pink as the freshest among her roses. The doctor brightened and smiled,
as everybody brightened and smiled at the sight of Miss Judy. He opened
the gate before she reached it, knowing that she would never tempt ill
luck by shaking hands over it. When they had shaken hands, he presented
Lynn Gordon, whom she had not met, and who stood a little apart,
thinking what a pretty old lady she was.
"Miss Judy," said the doctor, before she had time to ask what had
happened, "what do you think of playing poker?"
"Mercy--me!" exclaimed Miss Judy, opening her blue eyes very wide in
blank amazement. And then, catching her breath, she became mildly
scandalized.
"Well--really, doctor!" she began, blushing more vividly, making her
little mouth smaller than usual, "primping" it, as she would have said,
and bridling with the daintiest little air of prudery, which she never
would have dreamt of putting on for the doctor alone, but which seemed
to her to be the proper manner before a strange young gentleman--and one
from Boston too. "I have never been required to think anything of any
gambling game! Such matters were left entirely to gentlemen; they were
not mentioned before ladies in my day."
"Bless your little heart!" exclaimed the doctor. "If I've said a word
that you don't like, I'm ready to go right down on my knees in the
dust--here and now--in the middle of the big road."
Miss Judy smiled, shaking her little head till the thin curls behind her
pretty ears were more like silver mist than ever. In gentle confusion
she began dividing the bunch of blush roses into halves, giving one to
the doctor and the other to Lynn. She had known his father, she said
shyly to the young man, and his mother also, although not so well, since
the latter had not been brought up in Oldfield as his father was.
"But, Miss Judy, I want to talk to you seriously about card-playing,"
the doctor persisted. "You see you have got us all into the selfish
habit of bringing every one of our burdens to lay them on your little
shoulders. Unselfishness like yours does harm; it breeds selfishness in
others."
Miss Judy protested that she had not the least idea of what he was
talking about; but she saw that he was in earnest, and she straightway
forgot all her quaint airs, and listened with deepest interest and
tenderest sympathy to his story of his perplexity over the hopeless case
of Tom Watson, and over the unbending attitude of Anne.
"The passion for gaming is just as strong in that poor fellow as it ever
was. I had suspected it before, but I wasn't sure until to-day," the
doctor went on, looking across the way at the sick man's window. "I
disapprove of gambling as much as any one, but I can't for the life of
me see any harm that could possibly come now to that poor unfortunate,
from any sort of a game--if anybody can possibly stand it to play with
him."
Miss Judy looked puzzled and a little alarmed. "Were you--do you wish
_me_ to play with him?" she faltered, rather shocked, yet wondering if
she could learn, and quite ready to try.
The doctor was too deeply absorbed--too seriously troubled--to smile as
he usually did at Miss Judy's sweet absurdities, appreciating them
almost as much as he valued her heart of gold. In truth he hardly heard
what she said.
"Maybe you can make Anne see how different things are now," he went on
musingly, and somewhat hesitatingly, as though the possibility had
suddenly occurred to him. "Women understand one another," he added,
uttering a fallacy accepted by many a sensible man and rejected by every
sensible woman.
The fair old face on the other side of the gate grew grave in its
perplexity. Quick to decide for herself in any matter of principle, Miss
Judy was slow to decide for any one else. She did not consider herself
wise, and it was hard, she thought, for the wisest to put herself in
another's place, and no one--so she believed--could judge justly without
so doing. She knew Anne's prejudice, that had been well known always to
all the Oldfield people; but she had never ventured to form an opinion
as to whether Anne had ever been justified in taking such a stand, which
appeared strange to Miss Judy even in the beginning, and stranger now in
Tom's extremity. She had merely wondered, as everybody had; but it was
always harder for Miss Judy than for almost any one else to understand
how there ever could be any actual conflict between love and faith,
which were always and inseparably one and the same to her.
"I am not sure," she faltered, with a flutter of timidity, and blushing
again. "Anne is such a good woman--so much better and wiser than I
am--and so very reserved. I should hardly dare approach her, even if I
were sure of being in the right. And I am far from being sure. Suppose
we consult sister Sophia?" she said suddenly and with her pretty face
lighting at the happy thought. "You know, doctor, that her judgment is
much sounder, much more practical, than mine. She sometimes has very
valuable ideas--when I don't at all know what to do."
Miss Judy turned to the young man with a soft little air and a touch of
gentle pride that charmed him: "I am speaking, sir, of my sister, Miss
Sophia Bramwell."