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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of 'Doc.' Gordon, by Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: 'Doc.' Gordon
+
+Author: Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
+
+Illustrator: Frank T. Merrill
+
+Release Date: April 24, 2005 [EBook #15695]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 'DOC.' GORDON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Josephine Paolucci, Joshua
+Hutchinson and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Doctor Gordon * * * had not even taken off his overcoat,
+which was white with snow. Page 104.]
+
+
+
+
+"Doc." Gordon
+
+By
+
+MARY E. WILKINS-FREEMAN
+
+
+Author of
+
+"_The Debtor," "A Humble Romance," "The Heart's Highway," "Pembroke,"
+Etc._
+
+
+Illustrated in Water-Colors by FRANK T. MERRILL
+
+Copyright, 1906, by Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
+
+H.L. MOORE
+SPECIAL EDITION,
+For Sale exclusively by us in Rahway, N.J.
+
+
+NEW YORK AND LONDON
+THE AUTHORS AND NEWSPAPERS ASSOCIATION
+1906
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1906, BY
+MARY E. WILKINS-FREEMAN.
+
+_Entered at Stationers' Hall.
+All rights reserved_.
+
+Composition and Electrotyping by
+J.J. Little & Co.
+Printed and bound by
+Manhattan Press, New York.
+
+[Illustration: (FACSIMILE PAGE OF MANUSCRIPT FROM DOC. GORDON)]
+
+
+
+
+"DOC." GORDON
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+It was very early in the morning, it was scarcely dawn, when the young
+man started upon a walk of twenty-five miles to reach Alton, where he
+was to be assistant to the one physician in the place, Doctor Thomas
+Gordon, or as he was familiarly called, "Doc." Gordon. The young man's
+name was James Elliot. He had just graduated, and this was to be his
+first experience in the practice of his profession of medicine. He was
+in his twenties. He was small, but from the springiness of his gait and
+the erectness of his head he gave an impression of height. He was very
+good-looking, with clearly-cut features, and dark eyes, in which shone,
+like black diamonds, sparks of mischief. They were honest eyes, too. The
+young fellow was still sowing his wild oats, but more with his hands
+than with his soul. He was walking because of a great amount of restless
+energy; he fairly revelled in stretching his legs over the country road
+in the keen morning air. The train service between Gresham, his home
+place, and Alton was very bad, necessitating two changes and waits of
+hours, and he had fretted at the prospect. When a young man is about to
+begin his career, he does not wish to sit hours in dingy little railroad
+stations on his way toward it. It was much easier, and pleasanter, to
+walk, almost run to it, as he was doing now. His only baggage was his
+little medicine-case; his trunk had gone by train the day before. He was
+very well dressed, his clothes had the cut of a city tailor. He was
+almost dandified. His father was well-to-do: a successful peach-grower
+on a wholesale scale. His great farm was sprayed over every spring with
+delicate rosy garlands of peach blossoms, and in the autumn the trees
+were heavy with the almond-scented fruit. He had made a fortune, and
+aside from that had achieved a certain local distinction. He was then
+mayor of Gresham, which had a city government. James was very proud of
+his father and fond of him. Indeed, he had reason to be. His father had
+done everything in his power for him, given him a good education, and
+supplied him liberally with money. James had always had a sense of
+plenty of money, which had kept him from undue love of it. He was now
+beginning the practice of his profession, in a small way, it is true,
+but that he recognized as expedient. "You had better get acclimated,
+become accustomed to your profession in a small place, before you launch
+out in a city," his father had said, and the son had acquiesced. It was
+the natural wing-trying process before large flights were attempted, and
+the course commended itself to his reason. James, as well as his father,
+had good reasoning power. He whistled to himself as he walked along. He
+was very happy. He had a sensation as of one who has his goal in sight.
+He thought of his father, his mother, and his two younger sisters, but
+with no distress at absenting himself from them, although he lived in
+accord with his family. Twenty-five miles to his joyous youth seemed but
+as a step across the road. He had no sense of separation. "What is
+twenty-five miles?" he had said laughingly to his mother, when she had
+kissed him good-by. He had no conception of her state of mind with
+regard to the break in the home circle. He who was the breaker did not
+even see the break. Therefore he walked along, conscious of an immense
+joy in his own soul, and wholly unconscious of anything except joy in
+the souls of those whom he had left behind. It was a glorious morning, a
+white morning. The ground was covered with white frost, the trees, the
+house-roofs, the very air, were all white. In the west a transparent
+moon was slowly sinking; the east deepened with red and violet tints.
+Then came the sun, upheaving above the horizon like a ship of glory, and
+all the whiteness burned, and glowed, and radiated jewel-lights. James
+looked about with the delight of a discoverer. It might have been his
+first morning. He begun to meet men going to their work, swinging tin
+dinner-pails. Even these humble pails became glorified, they gave back
+the sunlight like burnished silver. He smelled the odors of breakfast
+upon the men's clothes. He held up his head high with a sort of
+good-humored arrogance as he passed. He would have fought to the death
+for any one of these men, but he knew himself, quite innocently, upon
+superior heights of education, and trained thought, and ambition. He met
+a man swinging a pail; he was coughing: a wretched, long rattle of a
+cough. James stopped him, opened his little medicine-case, and produced
+some pellets.
+
+"Here, take one of these every hour until the cough is relieved, my
+friend," said he.
+
+The man stared, swallowed a pellet, stared again, in an odd, suspicious,
+surly fashion, muttered something unintelligible and passed on.
+
+There were three villages between Gresham and Alton: Red Hill,
+Stanbridge, and Westover. James stopped in Red Hill at a quick-lunch
+wagon, which was drawn up on the principal street under the lee of the
+town hall, went in, ordered and ate with relish some hot frankfurters,
+and drank some coffee. He had eaten a plentiful breakfast before
+starting, but the keen air had created his appetite anew. Beside him at
+the counter sat a young workingman, also eating frankfurters and
+drinking coffee. Now and then he gave a sidelong and supercilious glance
+at James's fine clothes. James caught one of the glances, and laughed
+good-naturedly.
+
+"These quick-lunch wagons are a mighty good idea," said he.
+
+The man grunted and took a swallow of coffee.
+
+"Where do you work?" asked James.
+
+"None of your d---- business!" retorted the other man unexpectedly.
+"Where do you work yourself?"
+
+James stared at him, then he burst into a roar. For a second the man's
+surly mouth did not budge, then the corners twitched a little.
+
+"What in thunder are you mad about?" inquired James. "I am going to work
+for Doctor Gordon in Alton, and I don't care a d---- where you work."
+James spoke with the most perfect good nature, still laughing.
+
+Then the man's face relaxed into a broad grin. "Didn't know but you were
+puttin' on lugs," said he. "I am about tired of all those damned
+benefactors comin' along and arskin' of a man whot's none of their
+business, when a man knows all the time they don't care nothin' about
+it, and then makin' a man take somethin' he don't want, so as to get
+their names in the papers." The man sniffed a sniff of fury, then his
+handsome blue eyes smiled pleasantly, even with mischievous confidence
+into James's, and he swallowed more coffee.
+
+"I am no benefactor, you can bet your life on that," said James. "I
+don't mean to give you anything you want or don't want."
+
+"Didn't know but you was one of that kind," returned the man.
+
+"Why?"
+
+The man eyed James's clothes expressively.
+
+"Oh, you mean my clothes," said James. "Well, this suit and overcoat are
+pretty fair, but if I were a benefactor I should be wearing seedy
+clothes, and have my wallet stuffed with bills for other folks."
+
+"You bet you wouldn't," said the other man. "That ain't the way
+benefactors go to work. What be you goin' to do at Doc Gordon's?"
+
+"Drive," replied James laconically.
+
+"Guess you can't take care of hosses in no sech togs as them."
+
+"I've got some others. I'm going to learn to doctor a little, too, if I
+can."
+
+The man surveyed him, then he burst into a great laugh. "Well," said he,
+"when I git the measles I'll call you in."
+
+"All right," said James, "I won't charge you a red cent. I'll doctor you
+and all your children and your wife for nothing."
+
+"Guess you won't need to charge nothin' for the wife and kids, seein' as
+I ain't got none," said the man. "Ketch me saddled up with a woman an'
+kids, if I know what I'm about. Them's for the benefactors. I live in a
+little shanty I rigged up myself out of two packin' boxes. I've got 'em
+on a man's medder here. He let me squat for nothin'. I git my meals
+here, an' I work on the railroad, an' I've got a soft snap, with nobody
+to butt in. Here, Mame, give us another cup of coffee. Mame's the girl I
+want, if I could hev one. Ain't you, Mame?"
+
+The girl, who was a blonde, with an exaggerated pompadour fastened with
+aggressive celluloid pins, smiled pertly. "Reckon I h'ain't no more use
+for men than you hev for women," said she, as she poured the coffee. All
+that could be seen of her behind the counter was her head, and her waist
+clad in a red blouse, pinned so high to her skirt in the rear that it
+almost touched her shoulder blades. The blouse was finished at the neck
+with a nice little turn-over collar fastened with a brooch set with
+imitation diamonds and sapphires.
+
+"Now, Mame, you know," said the man with assumed pathos, "that it is
+only because I'm a poor devil that I don't go kerflop the minute I set
+eyes on you. But you wouldn't like to live in boxes, would you? Would
+you now?"
+
+"Not till my time comes, and not in boxes, then, less I'm in a railroad
+accident," replied the girl, with ghastly jocularity.
+
+"She's got another feller, or _you_ might git her if you've got a stiddy
+job," the man said, winking at James with familiarity.
+
+"Just my luck," said James. He looked at the girl, and thought her
+pretty and pathetic, with a vulgar, almost tragic, prettiness and
+pathos. She was anaemic and painfully thin. Her blouse was puffed out
+over her flat chest. She looked worn out with the miserable little
+tediums of life, with constant stepping over ant-hills of stupidity and
+petty hopelessness. Her work was not, comparatively speaking, arduous,
+but the serving of hot coffee and frankfurters to workingmen was not
+progressive, and she looked as if her principal diet was the left-overs
+of the stock in trade. She seemed to exhale an odor of musty sandwiches
+and sausages and muddy coffee.
+
+The man swallowed his second cup in fierce gulps. He glanced at his
+Ingersoll watch. "Gee whiz!" said he. "It's time I was off! Good-by,
+Mame."
+
+The girl turned her head with a toss, and did not reply. "Good-by,"
+James said.
+
+The man grinned. "Good-by, Doc," he said. "I'll call you when I git the
+measles. You're a good feller. If you'd been a benefactor I'd run you
+out."
+
+The man clattered down the steps of the gaudily painted little
+structure. The girl whom he had called Mame turned and looked at James
+with a sort of innocent boldness. "He's a queer feller," she observed.
+
+"He seems to be."
+
+"He is, you bet. Livin' in a house he's built out of boxes when he makes
+big money. He's on strike every little while. I wouldn't look at him.
+Don't know what he's drivin' at half the time. Reckon he's--" She
+touched her head significantly.
+
+"Lots of folks are," said James affably.
+
+"That's so." She stared reflectively at James. "I'm keepin' this quick
+lunch 'cause my father's sick," said she. "I see a lot of human nature
+in here."
+
+"I suppose you do."
+
+"You bet. Every kind gits in here first and last, tramps up to swells
+who think they're doin' somethin' awful funny to git frankfurters and
+coffee in here. They must be hard driv."
+
+"I suppose they are sometimes."
+
+Mame's eyes, surveying James, suddenly grew sharp. "You ain't one?" she
+asked accusingly.
+
+"You bet not."
+
+Mame's grew soft. "I knew you were all right," said she. "Sometimes they
+say things to me that their fine lady friends would bounce 'em for, but
+I knew the minute I saw you that you wasn't that kind if you be dressed
+up like a gent. Reckon you've been makin' big money in your last place."
+
+"Considerable," admitted James. He felt like a villain, but he had not
+the heart to accuse himself of being a gentleman before this pathetic
+girl.
+
+Mame leaned suddenly over the counter, and her blonde crest nearly
+touched his forehead. "Say," said she, in a whisper.
+
+"What?" whispered James back.
+
+"What he said ain't true. There ain't a mite of truth in it."
+
+"What he said," repeated James vaguely.
+
+Mame pouted. "How awful thick-headed you be," said she. "What he said
+about my havin' a feller." She blushed rosily, and her eyes fell.
+
+James felt his own face suffused. He pulled out his pocket-book, and
+rose abruptly. "I'm sorry," he said with stupidity.
+
+The rosy flush died away from the girl's face. "Nobody asked you to be
+sorry," said she. "I could have any one of a dozen I know if I jest held
+out my little finger."
+
+"Of course, you could," James said. He felt apologetic, although he did
+not know exactly why. He fumbled over the change, and at last made it
+right with a quarter extra for the girl.
+
+"It's a quarter too much," said she.
+
+"Keep it, please."
+
+She hesitated. She was frowning under her great blonde roll, her mouth
+looked hurt.
+
+"What a fuss about a quarter," said James, with a laugh. "Keep it.
+That's a good girl."
+
+Mame took a dingy handkerchief out of the bosom of her blouse, untied a
+corner, and James heard a jingle of coins meeting. Then she laughed.
+"You're an awful fraud," said she.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"You can't cheat me, if you did Bill Slattery."
+
+"I think I don't know what you mean."
+
+"You're a gent."
+
+The girl's thin, coarse laughter rang out after James as he descended
+the steps of the quick-lunch wagon. She opened the door directly after
+he had closed it, and stood on the top step with the cold wind agitating
+her fair hair. "Say," she called after him.
+
+James turned as he walked away. "What is it?"
+
+"Nothin', only I was foolin' you, and so was Bill. I've got a feller,
+and Bill's him."
+
+"I'll make you a present when you're married," James called back with a
+laugh.
+
+"It's to come off next summer," cried the girl.
+
+"I won't forget," answered James. He knew the girl lied; that she was
+not about to marry the workingman. He said to himself, as he strode on
+refreshed with his coarse fare, that girls were extraordinary: first
+they were bold to positive indecency, then modest to the borders of
+insanity.
+
+James walked on. He reached Stanbridge about noon. Then he was hungry
+again. There was a good hotel there, and he made a substantial meal. He
+had a smoke and a rest of half an hour, then he resumed his walk. He
+soon passed the outskirts of Stanbridge, which was a small, old city,
+then he was in the country. The houses were sparsely set well back from
+the road. He met nobody, except an occasional countryman driving a
+wood-laden team. Presently the road lay between stately groves of oaks,
+although now and then they stood on one side only of the highway. Nearly
+all the oaks bore a shag of dried leaves about their trunks, like mossy
+beards of old men, only the shag was a bright russet instead of white.
+The ground under the oaks was like cloth-of-gold under the sun, the
+fallen leaves yet retained so much color. James heard a sharp croak,
+then a crow flew with wide flaps of dark wings across the road and
+perched on an oak bough. It cocked its head, and watched him wisely.
+James whistled at it, but it did not stir. It remained with its head
+cocked in that attitude of uncanny wisdom.
+
+Suddenly James saw before him the figure of a girl, moving swiftly. She
+must have come out of the wood. She went as freely as a woodland thing,
+although she was conventionally dressed in a tailor suit of brown. Her
+hat, too, was brown, and a brown feather curled over the brim. She
+walked fast, with evidently as much enjoyment of the motion as James
+himself. They both walked like winged things.
+
+Suddenly James had a queer experience. One sense became transposed into
+another, as one changes the key in music. He heard absolutely nothing,
+but it was as if he saw a noise. He saw a man standing on the right
+between him and the girl. The man had not made the slightest sound, he
+was sure. James had good ears, but sound and not sight was what betrayed
+him, or rather sound transposed into sight. He stood as motionless as a
+tree himself. James knew that he had been looking at the girl. Now she
+was looking at him. James felt a long shudder creep over him. He had
+never been afraid of anything except fear. Now he was afraid of fear,
+and there was something about the man which awakened this terror, yet it
+was inexplicable. He was a middle-aged man, and distinctly handsome. He
+was something above the medium height, and very well dressed. He wore a
+fur-lined coat which looked opulent. He had gray hair and a black
+mustache. There was nothing menacing in his face. He was, indeed,
+smiling a curious retrospective smile, as if at his own thoughts.
+Although his eyes regarded James attentively, this smiling mouth seemed
+entirely oblivious of him. The man gave an odd impression, as of two
+personalities: the one observant, with an animal-like observance for his
+own weal or woe, the other observant with intelligence. It was possibly
+this impression of a dual personality which gave James his quick sense
+of horror. He walked on, feeling his very muscles shrink. Just before
+James reached the man he emerged easily, with not the slightest
+appearance of stealth, from the wood, and walked on before him with a
+rapid, swinging stride. There were then three persons upon the road: the
+girl in brown, the strange man in the fur-lined coat, and James Elliot.
+James quickened his pace, but the other man kept ahead of him, and
+reached the girl. He stopped and James broke into a run. He saw the man
+place a hand upon the girl's shoulder, and make a motion as if to turn
+her face toward his. James came up with a shout, and the man disappeared
+abruptly, with a quick backward glance at James, into the wood.
+
+The girl looked at James, and her little face under her brown plumed hat
+was very white. "Oh," she gasped, as if she had always known him, "I am
+so glad you are here! He frightened me terribly."
+
+She tried to smile at James, although her poor little mouth was
+quivering. "Who was he?" she asked.
+
+[Illustration: "You don't think he will come back?" Page 21.]
+
+"I don't know."
+
+A sudden suspicion flashed into her eyes. "He wasn't with you?"
+
+"No. I saw him on the edge of the woods back there, and I didn't like
+his looks. When he started to follow you I hurried to catch up."
+
+"Oh, thank you," said the girl fervently. "Do forgive me for asking if
+you were with him. I knew you were not the minute I saw you. I did not
+turn my face, although he tried to make me. I don't know why, but I do
+know he was something terrible and wicked." The girl said this last with
+a shudder. She caught hold of James's arm innocently, as a frightened
+child might have done. "You don't think he will come back?"
+
+"No, and if he does I will take care of you."
+
+"He may be--armed."
+
+Suddenly the girl reeled. "Don't let me faint away. I won't faint away,"
+she said in an angry voice. James saw that she was actually biting her
+lips to overcome the faintness.
+
+"If you will sit down on that rock for a moment," said James, "I have
+something in my medicine-case which will revive you. I am a doctor."
+
+"I shall faint away if I sit down and give up to it, if I swallow your
+whole case," said the girl weakly. "I know myself. Let me hold your arm
+and walk, and don't make me talk, then I can get over it." She was
+biting her lips almost to bleeding.
+
+James walked on as he was bidden, with the slender little brown-clad
+figure clinging to him. He realized that he had fallen in with a girl
+who had a will which was possibly superior to anything in his
+medicine-case when it came to overcoming fright.
+
+They walked on until they came in sight of a farm-house, when the girl
+spoke again, and James saw that the color was returning to her face. "I
+am all right now," said she, and withdrew her hand from his arm. She
+gave her head an angry, whimsical shake. "I am ashamed of myself," said
+she, "but I was horribly frightened, and sometimes I do faint. I can
+generally get the better of myself, but sometimes I can't. It always
+makes me so angry. I do hope you don't think I am such an awful coward,
+because I am not."
+
+"I think most girls whom I have known would have made much more fuss
+than you did," said James. "You never screamed."
+
+"I never did scream in my life," said the girl. "I don't think I could.
+I don't know how. I think if I did scream, I should certainly faint."
+
+James stopped and opened his medicine-case. "I think you had better take
+just a swallow of brandy," said he.
+
+The girl thrust back the bottle which he offered her with high disdain.
+"Brandy," said she, "just because I have been frightened a little! I
+should be ashamed of myself if I did such a thing. I am ashamed now for
+almost fainting away, but I should never forgive myself if I took brandy
+because of it. If I haven't nerve enough to keep straight without
+brandy, I should be a pretty poor specimen of a girl." She looked at him
+indignantly, and James saw what he had not seen before (he had been so
+engrossed with the strangeness of the situation), that she was a
+beautiful girl with a singular type of beauty. She was very small, but
+she gave the impression of intense springiness and wiriness. Although
+she was thin, no one could have called her delicate. She looked as much
+alive as a flame, with nerves on the surface from head to heel. Her eyes
+were blue, not large, but full of light, her hair, which tossed around
+her face in a soft fluff, was ash-blonde. Brown was the last color,
+theoretically, which she should have worn, but it suited her. The ash
+and brown, the two neutral tints, served to bring out the blue fire of
+her eyes and the intense red of her lips. However, her beauty lay not so
+much in her regular features as in the wonderful flame-like quality
+which animated them, and which they assumed when she spoke or listened.
+In repose, her face was as neutral as a rock or dead leaf. It was
+neither beautiful nor otherwise. When it was animated, it was as if the
+rock gave out silver lights of mica and rosy crystal under strong light,
+and as if the dead leaf leapt into flame. James thought her much
+prettier than any of his sisters or their friends, but he was led quite
+unknowingly into this opinion, because of his own position as her
+protector. That made him realize his own male gorgeousness and strength,
+and he really saw the girl with such complacency instead of himself.
+
+They walked along, and all at once he stopped short. Something occurred
+to him, which, strange to say, had not occurred before. He was not in
+the least cowardly. He was brave almost to foolhardiness. All at once
+it occurred to him that he ought to follow the man.
+
+"Good Lord!" said he and stopped.
+
+"What is the matter?" asked the girl.
+
+"Why, I must follow that man. He is a suspicious character. He ought not
+to be left at large."
+
+"I suppose you don't care if you leave me alone," said the girl
+accusingly.
+
+James stared at her doubtfully. There was that view of the situation.
+
+"I am going to see my friend Annie Lipton, who lives in Westover. There
+is half a mile of lonely road before I get there. That man, for all I
+know, may be keeping sight of us in the woods over there. While you are
+going back to chase him, he may come up with me. Well, run along if you
+want to. I am not afraid." But the girl's lips quivered, and she paled
+again.
+
+James glanced at the stretch of road ahead. There was not a house in
+sight. Woods were on one side, on the other was a rolling expanse of
+meadowland covered with dried last year's grass, like coarse
+oakum-colored hair.
+
+"I think I had better keep on with you," James said.
+
+"You can do exactly as you choose," the girl replied defiantly, but
+tremulously. "I am not in the least dependent upon men to escort me. I
+wander miles around by myself. This is the first time I have seemed to
+be in the slightest danger. I dare say there was no danger this time,
+only he came up behind like a cat, and--"
+
+"He didn't say anything?"
+
+"No, he didn't speak. He only tried to make me turn my head, so he could
+see my face, and directly it seemed to me that I must die rather than
+let him. He was trying to make me turn my head. I think maybe he was an
+insane man."
+
+"I will go on with you," said James.
+
+They walked on for the half mile of which the girl had spoken. A sudden
+shyness seemed to have come over both of them. Then they began to come
+in sight of houses. "I am not afraid now," said the girl, "but I do
+think you are very foolish if you go back alone and try to hunt that
+man. Ten chances to one he is armed, and you haven't a thing to defend
+yourself with, except that medicine-case."
+
+"I have my fists," replied James indignantly.
+
+"Fists don't count much against a revolver."
+
+"Well, I am going to try," said James with emphasis.
+
+"Good-by, then. You are treating me shamefully, though."
+
+James stared at her in amazement. She was actually weeping, tears were
+rolling over her cheeks.
+
+"What do you mean?" said he. "Don't feel so badly."
+
+"You can't be very quick-witted not to see. If you should meet that man,
+and get killed, I should really be the one who killed you and not the
+man."
+
+"Why, no, you would not."
+
+The girl stamped her foot. "Yes, I should, too," said she, half-sobbing.
+"You would not have been killed except for me. You know you would not."
+
+She spoke as if she actually saw the young man dead before her, and was
+indignant because of it, and he burst into a peal of laughter.
+
+"Laugh if you want to," said she. "It does not seem to me any laughing
+matter to go and get yourself killed by me, and my having that on my
+mind my whole life. I think I should go mad." Her voice shook, an
+expression of horror came into her blue eyes.
+
+James laughed again. "Very well, then," he said, "to oblige you I won't
+get killed."
+
+He, in fact, began to consider that the day was waning, and what a
+wild-goose chase it would probably be for him to attempt to follow the
+man. So again they walked on until they reached the main street of
+Westover.
+
+Westover was a small village, rather smaller than Gresham. They passed
+three gin-mills, a church, and a grocery store. Then the girl stopped at
+the corner of a side street. "My friend lives on this street," said she.
+"Thank you very much. I don't know what I should have done if you had
+not come. Good-by!" She went so quickly that James was not at all sure
+that she heard his answering good-by. He thought again how very handsome
+she was. Then he began to wonder where she lived, and how she would get
+home from her friend's house, if the friend had a brother who would
+escort her. He wondered who her friends were to let a girl like that
+wander around alone in a State which had not the best reputation for
+safety. He entertained the idea of waiting about until she left her
+friend's house, then he considered the possible brother, and that the
+girl herself might resent it, and he kept on. The western sky was
+putting on wonderful tints of cowslip and rose deepening into violet. He
+began considering his own future again, relegating the girl to the
+background. He must be nearing Alton, he thought. After a three-mile
+stretch of farming country, he saw houses again. Lights were gleaming
+out in the windows. He heard wheels, and the regular trot of a horse
+behind him, then a mud-bespattered buggy passed him, a shabby buggy, but
+a strongly built one. The team of horses was going at a good clip. James
+stood on one side, but the team and buggy had no sooner passed than he
+heard a whoa! and a man's face peered around the buggy wing, not at
+James, but at his medicine-case. James could just discern the face,
+bearded and shadowy in the gathering gloom. Then a voice came. It
+shouted, one word, the expressive patois of the countryside, that word
+which may be at once a question and a salute, may express almost any
+emotion. "Halloo!" said the voice.
+
+This halloo involved a question, or so James understood it. He quickened
+his pace, and came alongside the buggy. The face, more distinct now,
+surveyed him, its owner leaning out over the side of the buggy. "Who are
+you? Where are you bound?"
+
+James answered the latter question. "I am going to Alton."
+
+"To Doctor Gordon's?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then you are Doctor Elliot?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Get in."
+
+James climbed into the buggy. The other man took up the reins, and the
+horse resumed his quick trot.
+
+"You didn't come by train?" remarked the man.
+
+"No. You are Doctor Gordon, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes, I am. Why the devil did you walk?"
+
+"To save my money," replied James, laughing. He realized nothing to be
+ashamed of in his reply.
+
+"But I thought your father was well-to-do."
+
+"Yes, he is, but we don't ride when it costs money and we can walk. I
+knew if I got to Alton by night, it would be soon enough. I like to
+walk." James said that last rather defiantly. He began to realize a
+certain amazement on the other man's part which might amount to an
+imputation upon his father. "I have plenty of money in my pocket," he
+added, "but I wanted the walk."
+
+Doctor Gordon laughed. "Oh, well, a walk of twenty-five miles is nothing
+to a young fellow like you, of course," he said. "I can understand that
+you may like to stretch your legs. But you'll have to drive if you are
+ever going to get anywhere when you begin practice with me."
+
+"I suppose you have calls for miles around?"
+
+"Rather." Doctor Gordon sighed. "It's a dog's life. I suppose you
+haven't got that through your head yet?"
+
+"I think it is a glorious profession," returned James, with his haughty
+young enthusiasm.
+
+"I wasn't talking about the profession," said the doctor; "I was talking
+of the man who has to grind his way through it. It's a dog's life.
+Neither your body nor your soul are your own. Oh, well, maybe you'll
+like it."
+
+"You seem to," remarked James rather pugnaciously.
+
+"I? What can I do, young man, but stick to it whether I like it or not?
+What would they do? Yes, I suppose I am fool enough to like a dog's
+life, or rather to be unwilling to leave it. No money could induce me
+anyhow. I suppose you know there is not much money in it?"
+
+James said that he had not supposed a fortune was to be made in a
+country practice.
+
+"The last bill any of them will pay is the doctor's," said Doctor
+Gordon. Then he added with a laugh, "especially when the doctor is
+myself. They have to pay a specialist from New York, but I wait until
+they are underground, and the relatives, I find, stick faster to the
+monetary remains than the bark to a tree. If I hadn't a little private
+fortune, and my--sister a little of her own, I expect we should starve."
+
+James noticed with a little surprise the doctor's hesitation before he
+spoke of his sister. It seemed then that he was not married. Somehow,
+James had thought of him as married as a matter of course.
+
+Doctor Gordon hastened to explain, as if divining the other's attitude.
+"I dare say you don't know anything about my family relations," said he.
+"My widowed sister, Mrs. Ewing, keeps house for me. I live with her and
+her daughter. I think you will like them both, and I think they will
+like you, though I'll be hanged if I have grasped anything of you so far
+but your medicine-case and your voice. Your voice is all right. You give
+yourself away by it, and I always like that."
+
+James straightened himself a little. There was something bantering in
+the other's tone. It made him feel young, and he resented being made to
+feel young. He himself at that time felt older than he ever would feel
+again. He realized that he was not being properly estimated. "If," said
+he, with some heat, "a patient can make out anything by my voice as to
+what I think, I miss my guess."
+
+"I dare say not," said Doctor Gordon, and his own voice was as if he put
+the matter aside.
+
+He spoke to the horse, whose trot quickened, and they went on in
+silence.
+
+At last James began to feel rather ashamed of himself. He unstiffened.
+"I had quite an exciting and curious experience after I left
+Stanbridge," said he.
+
+"Did you?" said the other in an absent voice.
+
+James went on to relate the matter in detail. His companion turned an
+intent face upon him as he proceeded. "How far back was it?" he asked,
+and his tone was noticeably agitated.
+
+"Just after I left the last house in Stanbridge. We went on together to
+Westover. She mentioned something about going to see a friend there. I
+think Lipton was the name, and she left me suddenly."
+
+"What was the girl like?"
+
+"Small and slight, and very pretty."
+
+"Dressed in brown?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"How did the man look?" Doctor Gordon's voice fairly alarmed the young
+man.
+
+"I hardly can say. I saw him distinctly, but only for a second. The
+impression he gave me was of a middle-aged man, although he looked
+young."
+
+"Good-looking?"
+
+"My God, no!" said James, as the man's face seemed to loom up before him
+again. "He looked like the devil."
+
+"A man may look like the devil, and yet be distinctly handsome."
+
+"Well, I suppose he was; but give me the homeliest face on earth rather
+than a face like that man's, if I must needs have anything to do with
+him." The young fellow's voice broke. He was very young. He caught the
+other man by his rough coat sleeve. "See here, Doctor Gordon," said he,
+"my profession is to save life. That is the main end of it but, but--I
+don't honestly know what I should think right, if I were asked to save
+_that_ man's life."
+
+"Was he well dressed?"
+
+"More than well dressed, richly, a fur-lined coat--"
+
+"Tall?"
+
+"Yes, above the medium, but he stooped a little, like a cat, sort of
+stretched to the ground like an animal, when he hurried along after the
+girl in front of me."
+
+Doctor Gordon struck the horse with his whip, and he broke into a
+gallop. "We are almost home," said he. "I shall have to leave you with
+slight ceremony. I have to go out again immediately."
+
+Doctor Gordon had hardly finished speaking before they drew up in front
+of a white house on the left of the road. "Get out," he said
+peremptorily to James. The front door opened, and a parallelogram of
+lighted interior became visible. In this expanse of light stood a tall
+woman's figure. "Clara, this is the new doctor," called out Doctor
+Gordon. "Take him in and take care of him."
+
+"Have you got to go away again?" said the woman's voice. It was sweet
+and rich, but had a curious sad quality in it.
+
+"Yes, I must. I shall not be gone long. Don't wait supper."
+
+"Aren't you going to change the horse?"
+
+"Can't stop. Go right in, Elliot. Clara, look after him."
+
+James Elliot found himself in the house, confronting the most beautiful
+woman he had ever seen, as the rapid trot of the doctor's horse receded
+in vistas of sound.
+
+James almost gasped. He had never seen such a woman. He had seen pretty
+girls. Now he suddenly realized that a girl was not a woman, and no more
+to be compared with her than an uncut gem with one whose facets take the
+utmost light.
+
+The boy stood staring at this wonderful woman. She extended her hand to
+him, but he did not see it. She said some gracious words of greeting to
+him, but he did not hear them. She might have been the Venus de Milo for
+all he heard or realized of sentient life in her. He was rapt in
+contemplation of herself, so rapt that he was oblivious of her. She
+smiled. She was accustomed to having men, especially very young men,
+take such an attitude on first seeing her. She did not wait any longer,
+but herself took the young man's hand, and drew him gently into the
+room, and spoke so insistently that she compelled him to leave her and
+attend. "I suppose you are Doctor Gordon's assistant?" she said.
+
+James relapsed into the tricks of his childhood. "Yes, ma'am," he
+replied. Then he blushed furiously, but the woman seemed to notice
+neither the provincial term nor his confusion. He found himself somehow,
+he did not know how, divested of his overcoat, and the vision had
+disappeared, having left some words about dinner ringing in his ears,
+and he was sitting before a hearth-fire in a large leather easy-chair.
+Then he looked about the room in much the same dazed fashion in which he
+had contemplated the woman. He had never seen a room like it. He was
+used to conventionality, albeit richness, and a degree even of luxury.
+Here were absolute unconventionality, richness, and luxury of a kind
+utterly strange to him. The room was very large and long, extending
+nearly the whole length of the house. There were many windows with
+Eastern rugs instead of curtains. There were Eastern things hung on the
+walls which gave out dull gleams of gold and silver and topaz and
+turquoise. There were a great many books on low shelves. There were
+bronzes, jars, and squat idols. There were a few pieces of Chinese ivory
+work. There were many skins of lions, bears, and tigers on the floor,
+besides a great Persian rug which gleamed like a blurred jewel. Besides
+the firelight there was only one great bronze lamp to illuminate the
+room. This lamp had a red shade, which cast a soft, fiery glow over
+everything. There were not many pictures. The rich Eastern stuffs, and
+even a skin or two of tawny hue, covered most of the wall-spaces above
+the book-cases, giving backgrounds of color to bronzes and ivory
+carvings, but there was one picture at the farther end of the room which
+attracted James's notice. All that he could distinguish from where he
+sat was a splash of splendid red.
+
+He gazed, and his curiosity grew. Finally he rose, traversed the room,
+and came close to the picture. It was a portrait of the woman who had
+met him at the door. The red was the red of a splendid robe of velvet.
+The portrait was evidently the work of no mean artist. The texture of
+the velvet was something wonderful, so were the flesh tones; but James
+missed something in the face. The portrait had been painted, he knew
+instinctively, before some great change had come into the woman's heart,
+which had given her another aspect of beauty.
+
+James turned away. Then he noticed something else which seemed rather
+odd about the room. All the windows were furnished with heavy wooden
+shutters, and, early as it was, hardly dark, all were closed, and
+fastened securely. James somehow got an impression of secrecy, that it
+was considered necessary that no glimpse of the interior should be
+obtained from without after the lamp was lit. They sat often carelessly
+at his own home of an evening with the shades up, and all the interior
+of the room plainly visible from the road. An utter lack of secrecy was
+in James's own character. He scowled a little, as he returned to his
+seat by the fire. He was too confused to think clearly, but he was
+conscious of a certain homesickness for the wonted things of his life,
+when the door opened and the woman reentered.
+
+James rose, and she spoke in her sweet voice. It was rather lower
+pitched than the voices of most women, and had a resonant quality. "Your
+room is quite ready, Doctor Elliot," said she. "Your trunk is there. If
+you would like to go there before dinner, I will pilot you. We have but
+one maid, and she is preparing the dinner, which will be ready as soon
+as you are. I hope Doctor Gordon and Clemency will have returned by that
+time, too."
+
+By Clemency James understood that she meant her daughter, of whom Doctor
+Gordon had spoken. He wondered at the unusual name, as he followed his
+hostess. His room was on the same floor as the living-room. She threw
+open a door at the other side of the hall, and James saw an exceedingly
+comfortable apartment with a hearth-fire, with book-shelves, and a
+couch-bed covered with a rug, and a desk. "I thought you would prefer
+this room," said the woman. "There are others on the second floor, but
+this has the advantage of your being able to use it as a sitting-room,
+and you may like to have your friends, whom I trust you will find in
+Alton, come in from time to time. You will please make yourself quite
+at home."
+
+James had not yet fairly comprehended the beauty of the woman. He was
+still too dazzled. Had he gone away at that time, he could not for the
+life of him have described her, but he did glance, as a woman might have
+done, at her gown. It was of a soft heavy red silk, trimmed with lace,
+and was cut out in a small square at the throat. This glimpse of firm
+white throat made James wonder as to evening costume for himself. At
+home he never dreamed of such a thing, but here it might be different.
+His hostess divined his thoughts. She smiled at him as if he were a
+child. "No," said she, "you do not need to dress for dinner. Doctor
+Gordon never does when we are by ourselves."
+
+Then she went away, closing the door softly after her.
+
+James noticed that over the windows of this room were only ordinary
+shades, and curtains of some soft red stuff. There were no shutters. He
+looked about him. He was charmed with his room, and it did away to a
+great extent with his feeling of homesickness. It was not unlike what
+his room at college had been. It was more like all rooms. He had no
+feeling of the secrecy which the great living-room gave him, and which
+irritated him. He brushed his clothes and his hair, and washed his hands
+and face. While he was doing so he heard wheels and a horse's fast trot.
+He guessed immediately that the doctor had returned. He therefore, as
+soon as he had completed the slight changes in his toilet, started to
+return to the living-room. Crossing the hall he met Doctor Gordon, who
+seized him by the shoulder, and whispered in his ear, "Not a word before
+Mrs. Ewing about what happened this afternoon."
+
+James nodded. "More mystery," thought he with asperity.
+
+"You have not spoken of it to her already, I hope," said Doctor Gordon
+with quick anxiety.
+
+"No, I have not. I have scarcely seen her."
+
+"Well, not a word, I beg of you. She is very nervous."
+
+The doctor had been removing his overcoat and hat. When he had hung them
+on some stag's horn in the hall, he went with James into the
+living-room.
+
+There, beside the fire, sat the girl in brown whom James had met that
+afternoon on the road.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+She looked up when he entered, and there was in her young girl face the
+very slightest shade of recognition. She could not help it, for Clemency
+was candor itself. Then she bowed very formally, and shook hands
+sedately when Doctor Gordon introduced James as Doctor Elliot, his new
+assistant, and carried off her part very well. James was not so
+successful. He colored and was somewhat confused, but nobody appeared to
+notice it. Clemency went on relating how glad she was that Uncle Tom met
+her as she was coming home from Annie Lipton's. "I am never afraid,"
+said she, and her little face betrayed the lie, "but I was tired, and
+besides I was beginning to be cold, for I went out without my fur."
+
+"You should not have gone without it. It grows so cold when the sun goes
+down," said Mrs. Ewing. Then a chime of Japanese bells was heard which
+announced dinner.
+
+"Doctor Elliot will be glad of dinner," said Doctor Gordon. "He has
+walked all the way from Gresham."
+
+Clemency looked at him with approval, and tried to look as if she had
+never seen him walking in her life. "That is a good walk," said she.
+"Twenty-five miles it must be. If more men walked instead of working
+poor horses all the time, it would be better for them."
+
+"That is a hint for your Uncle Tom," said Gordon laughingly.
+
+
+"I never hint," said Clemency. "It is just a plain statement. Men are
+walking animals. They could travel as well as horses in the course of
+time if they only put their minds to it."
+
+"Well, your old uncle's bones must be saved, even at the expense of the
+horse's," said Doctor Gordon.
+
+"Bones are improved by use," said Clemency severely, as she took her
+seat at the dinner-table. They all laughed. The girl herself relaxed her
+pretty face with a whimsical smile. It was quite evident that Clemency
+was the spoiled and petted darling of the house, and that she traded
+innocently upon the fact. The young doctor, although his first
+impression of the elder woman was still upon him, yet realized the
+charm of the young girl. The older woman was, as it were, crowned with
+an aureole of perfection, but the young girl was crowned with
+possibilities which dazzled with mystery. She looked prettier, now that
+her outer garments were removed, and her thick crown of ash-blonde hair
+was revealed. The lamp lit her eyes into bluer flame. She was a darling
+of a young girl, and more a darling because she had the sweetest
+confidence in everybody thinking her one.
+
+However, James Elliot, sitting in the well-appointed dining-room, which
+was more like a city house than a little New Jersey dwelling, did not
+for a second retreat from his first impression of Mrs. Ewing. Behind the
+coffee-urn sat the woman with whom he had not fallen in love, that was
+too poor a term to use. He had become a worshipper. He felt himself,
+body and soul, prostrate before the Divinity of Womanhood itself. He
+realized the grandeur of the abstract in the individual. What was any
+spoiled, sweet young girl to that? And Mrs. Ewing was, in truth, a
+wonderful creature. She was a large woman with a great quantity of
+blue-black hair, which had the ripples one sees in antique statues. Her
+eyes, black at first glance, were in reality dark blue. Her face gave
+one a never-ending surprise. James had not known that a woman could be
+so beautiful. Vague comparisons with the Greek Helen, or Cleopatra, came
+into his head. Now and then he stole a glance at her. He dared not
+often. She did not talk much, but he was rather pleased with that fact,
+although her voice was so sweet and gracious. Speech in a creature like
+that was not an essential. It might even be an excrescence upon a
+perfection. It did not occur to the dazed mind of her worshipper that
+Mrs. Ewing might have very simple and ordinary reasons for not
+talking--that she might be tired or ill, or preoccupied. But after a
+number of those stolen glances, James discovered with a great pang, as
+if one should see for the first time that the arms of the Venus were
+really gone, when his fancy had supplied them, that the woman did not
+look well. In spite of her beauty, there was ill-health evident in her
+face. James was a mere tyro in his profession as yet, but certain
+infallible signs were there which he could not mistake. They were the
+signs of suffering, possibly of very great suffering. She ate very
+little, James noticed, although she made a pretense of eating as much
+as any one. James saw that Doctor Gordon also noticed it. When the maid
+was taking away Mrs. Ewing's plate, he spoke with a gruffness which
+astonished the young man. "For Heaven's sake, why don't you eat your
+dinner, Clara?" said he. "Emma, replace Mrs. Ewing's plate. Now, Clara,
+eat your dinner." To James's utter astonishment, Mrs. Ewing obeyed like
+a child. She ate every morsel, although she could not restrain her
+expression of loathing. When the salad and dessert were brought on she
+ate them also.
+
+Doctor Gordon watched her with what seemed, to the young man, positive
+brutality. His mouth under his heavy beard quivered perceptibly whenever
+he looked at his sister eating, his forehead became corrugated, and his
+deep-set eyes sparkled. James was heartily glad when dinner was over,
+and, at Doctor Gordon's request, he followed him into his office.
+
+Doctor Gordon's office was a small room at the back of the house. It had
+an outer door communicating with a path which led to the stable. Two
+sides of the room were lined with medical books, and two with bottles
+containing diverse colored mixtures. A hanging lamp was over the center
+of a long table in the middle of the room. Around it dangled prisms,
+which cast rainbow colors over everything. The first thing which struck
+one on entering the room was the extraordinary color scheme: the dull
+gleams of the books, the medicine bottles which had lights like jewels,
+and over all the flickers of prismatic hues. The long table was covered
+with corks, empty bottles, books, a medicine-case, and newspapers,
+besides a mighty inkstand and writing materials. There were also a box
+of cigars, a great leather tobacco pouch, and, interspersed among all, a
+multitude of pipes. The doctor drew a chair beside this chaotic table
+lit with rainbow lights, and invited James to sit down. "Sit down a
+moment," he said. "Will you have a pipe or a cigar?"
+
+"Cigar, please," replied James. The doctor pushed the box toward him.
+James realized immediately a ten-cent cigar at the least when he began
+to smoke. Doctor Gordon filled a pipe mechanically. His face still wore
+the gloomy, almost fierce, expression which it had assumed at table. He
+was a handsome man in a rough, sketchy fashion. His face was blurred
+with a gray grizzle of beard. He wore his hair rather long, and he had
+a fashion of running his fingers through it, which made it look like a
+thick brush. He dressed rather carelessly, still like a gentleman. His
+clothes were slouchy, and needed brushing, but his linen was immaculate.
+
+Doctor Gordon smoked in silence, which his young assistant was too shy
+to break. The elder man finished his pipe, then he rose with an
+impatient gesture and shook himself like a great shaggy dog. "Come,
+young man," said he, "we don't want to spend the evening like this. Get
+your hat and coat."
+
+James obeyed, and the two men left the office by the outer door which
+opened on the stable. As they came around by the front of the house
+Clemency stood in the doorway.
+
+"Are you going out, you and Doctor Elliot, Uncle Tom?" she called.
+
+"Yes, dear; why?"
+
+"Patients?"
+
+"No; we are going down to Georgie K.'s. Tell your mother to go to bed at
+once."
+
+When the two men were out in the street, walking briskly in the keen
+frosty air, James ventured a question. "Mrs. Ewing is not well, is she?"
+he said. He fairly started at the way in which his question was
+received. Doctor Gordon turned upon him even fiercely.
+
+"She is perfectly well, perfectly well," he replied.
+
+"She does not look--" began James.
+
+"When you are as old as I am you can venture to diagnose on a woman's
+looks," said Gordon. "Clara is perfectly well."
+
+James said no more. They walked on in silence under a pale sky. Above a
+low mountain range on their right was a faint light which indicated the
+coming of the moon. The ground was frozen in hard ridges. James walked
+behind the doctor on the narrow blue stone walk which served as
+sidewalk.
+
+"This town has made no provision whatever for courting couples," said
+Doctor Gordon suddenly, and to James's astonishment his whole manner and
+voice had changed. It was far from gloomy. It was jocular even.
+
+James laughed. "Yes, it would be difficult for two to walk arm in arm,
+however loving," he returned.
+
+"Just so," said the doctor, "and the funny part of it is that this
+narrow sidewalk was intentional."
+
+"Not for such a purpose?"
+
+"Exactly so. It was given to the town by a rich spinster who died about
+twenty years ago. It was given in her will on condition that it should
+not be more than two feet wide."
+
+"For that reason?"
+
+"Just that reason. She had been jilted in her youth, and her heart had
+been wrung by the sight of her rival passing her very window where she
+sat watching for her lover, arm in arm with him. It was in summer, and
+the dirt sidewalk was dry. She made up her mind, then and there, that
+that sort of thing should be prevented."
+
+They had just reached a handsome old house standing close to the narrow
+sidewalk. In fact, its windows opened directly upon it.
+
+"This is the house," the doctor said in corroboration. James laughed,
+but he wondered within himself if he were being told fish tales. Doctor
+Gordon made him feel so very young that he resented it. He resented it
+the more when he realized the new glow of adoration in his heart for
+that older woman whom they had left behind. He began wondering about
+her: how much older she was. He said to himself that he did not care if
+she were old enough to be his mother, his grandmother even, there was no
+one in the whole world like her.
+
+Then they came to the hotel, the Evarts House. It was rather
+pretentious, well built, with great columns in front supporting double
+verandas. It was also well lighted. It was evidently far above the usual
+order of a road house. Doctor Gordon entered, with James at his heels.
+They went into the great low room at the right of the door, which was
+the bar-room. Behind the bar stood an enormous man, yellow haired and
+yellow bearded, dispensing drinks. The whole low interior was dim with
+tobacco smoke, and scented with various liquors and spices. There was on
+one side a great fireplace, in which stood earthen pitchers, in which
+cider was being mulled with red-hot pokers, eager vinous faces watching.
+Nobody was intoxicated, but there was a general hum of hilarity and
+gusto of life about the place, an animal enjoyment of good cheer and
+jollity. It was in truth not respectable to get entirely drunk in Alton.
+It was genteel to become "set up," exhilarated, but the real gutter form
+of inebriety was frowned upon to a much greater extent than in many
+places where there was less license.
+
+"Hullo!" sang out Doctor Gordon as he entered. Immediately a grin of
+comradeship overspread the pink face of the yellow-haired giant behind
+the bar. "Hullo!" he responded. "Just step into the other room, and I'll
+be there right away."
+
+James followed Doctor Gordon into what was evidently the state parlor of
+the hotel. There was haircloth furniture, and a mahogany table, with
+various stains of conviviality upon its polished surface. There was a
+fire on the hearth, and on the mantel stood some gilded vases and a
+glass case of wax-flowers, also a stuffed canary under a glass shade,
+pathetic on his little twig. Doctor Gordon pointed to the flowers and
+the canary. "Poor old man lost his wife, when he had been married two
+years," he said. "She and the baby both died. That was before I came
+here. Damned if I wouldn't have pulled them through. That was her bird,
+and she made those fool flowers, poor little thing. I suppose if the
+hotel were to take fire Georgie K. would go for them before all the cash
+in the till."
+
+"He hasn't married again?"
+
+"Married again! It's my belief he'd shoot the man that mentioned it."
+
+Then Georgie K. entered, his rosy face distended with a smile of the
+most intense hospitality, and before Doctor Gordon had a chance to
+introduce James, he said, "What'll you take, gentlemen?"
+
+"This is my new assistant, from Gresham, Doctor Elliot," said Gordon.
+Georgie K. made a bow, and scraped his foot at the same time with a
+curiously boyish gesture. "What'll you take?" he asked again. That was
+evidently his formula of hospitality, which must never be delayed.
+
+"Apple-jack," responded Doctor Gordon promptly. "You had better take
+apple-jack too, young man. Georgie K. has gin that beats the record, and
+peach brandy, but when it comes to his apple-jack--it's worth the whole
+State of New Jersey."
+
+"All right," answered James.
+
+Soon he found himself seated at the stained old mahogany table with the
+two men, and between two glasses, a bottle, and a pitcher of hot water.
+Doctor Gordon dealt a pack of dirty cards while the hotel keeper poured
+the apple-jack. James could not help staring at the elder doctor with
+more and more amazement. He seemed to assimilate perfectly with his
+surroundings. The tormented expression had gone from his face. He was
+simply convivial, and of the same sort as Georgie K. He no longer
+looked even a gentleman. He had become of the soil, the New Jersey soil.
+As they drank and played, he told stories, and roared with laughter at
+them. The stories also belonged to the soil, they were folk lore, wild,
+coarse, but full of humanity. Although Doctor Gordon drank freely of the
+rich mellow liquor, it did not apparently affect him. His cheeks above
+his gray furze of beard became slightly flushed, that was all.
+
+James drank rather sparingly. The stuff seemed to him rather fiery, and
+he remembered the goddess in the doctor's house. He could imagine her
+look of high disdain at him should he return under the influence of
+liquor. Besides, he did not particularly care for the apple-jack.
+
+It was midnight before they left. Georgie K. went to the door with them,
+and he and the doctor shook hands heartily. "Come again," said Georgie
+K., "and the sooner the better, and bring the young Doc. We'll make him
+have a good time."
+
+Until they were near home, Doctor Gordon continued his strangely
+incongruous conversation, telling story after story, and shouting with
+laughter. When they came in sight of the house Gordon stopped suddenly
+and leaned against a great maple beside the road. He stared at the
+house, two of the upper windows of which were lighted, and gave a great
+sigh, almost a groan. James stopped also and stared at him. He wondered
+if the apple-jack had gone to the doctor's head after all. "What is the
+matter?" he ventured.
+
+"Nothing, except the race is at a finish, and I am caught as I always
+am," replied Doctor Gordon.
+
+"The race--" repeated James vaguely.
+
+"Yes, the race with myself. Myself has caught up with me, God help me,
+and I am in its clutches. The time may come when you will try to race
+with self, my boy. Let me tell you, you will never win. You will tire
+yourself out, and make a damned idiot of yourself for nothing. I shall
+race again to-morrow. I never learn the lesson, but perhaps you can, you
+are young. Well, come along. Please be as quiet as you can when you go
+into the house. My sister may be asleep. She is perfectly well, but she
+is a little nervous. I need not repeat my request that you do not
+mention your adventure with Clemency this afternoon to her."
+
+"Certainly not," said James. He walked on beside the doctor, and entered
+the house, more and more mystified. James was not sure, but he thought
+he heard the faintest little moan from upstairs. He glanced at Doctor
+Gordon's face, and it was again the face of the man whom he had seen
+before going to Georgie K.'s.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+The next morning after breakfast, at which Mrs. Ewing did not appear,
+Doctor Gordon observed that she always took her rolls and coffee in bed.
+James followed Doctor Gordon into his office. Clemency, who had presided
+at the coffee urn, had done so silently, and looked, so James thought,
+rather sulky, as if something had gone wrong. Directly James was in the
+office, the doctor's man, Aaron, appeared. He was a tall, lank
+Jerseyman, incessantly chewing. His lean, yellow jaws appeared to have
+acquired a permanent rotary motion, but he had keen eyes of intelligence
+upon the doctor as he gave his orders.
+
+"Put in the team," said Gordon. "We are going to Haver's Corner. Old Sam
+Edwards is pretty low, and I ought to have gone there yesterday, but I
+didn't know whether that child with diphtheria at Tucker's Mill would
+live the day out. Now he has seen the worst of it, thank the Lord! But
+to-day I must go to Haver's. I want to make good time, for there's
+something going on this afternoon, and I want an hour off if I can get
+it." Again the expression of simple jocularity was over the man's face,
+and James remembered what he had said the night before about again
+running a race with himself the next day.
+
+After Aaron had gone out Gordon turned to James. He pointed to his great
+medicine-case on the table. "You might see to it that the bottles are
+all filled," he said. "You will find the medicines yonder." He pointed
+to the shelf. "I have to speak to Clemency before I go."
+
+James obeyed. As he worked filling the bottles he heard dimly Gordon's
+voice talking to Clemency on the other side of the wall. The girl seemed
+to be expostulating.
+
+When Doctor Gordon returned Aaron was at his heels with an immense
+bottle containing a small quantity of red fluid. "S'pose you'll want
+this filled?" he said to Gordon with a grin which only disturbed for a
+second his rotary jaws.
+
+"Oh, yes, of course," replied Gordon, "we want the aqua."
+
+James stared at him as he poured a little red-colored liquid from one of
+the bottles on the shelves into the big one. "Now fill it up from the
+pump, and put it in the buggy; be sure the cork is in tight," he said to
+Aaron.
+
+Gordon looked laughingly at James when the man had gone. "I infer that
+you are wondering what 'aqua' may be," he said.
+
+"I was brought up to think it was water," said James.
+
+"So it is, water pure and simple, with a little coloring matter thrown
+in. Bless you, boy, the people around here want their medicines by the
+quart, and if they had them by the quart, good-by to the doctor's job,
+and ho for the undertaker! So the doctor is obliged to impose upon the
+credulity of the avariciously innocent, and dilute the medicine. Bless
+you, I have patients who would accuse me of cheating if I prescribed
+less than a cupful of medicine at a time. They have to be humored. After
+all, they are a harmless, good lot, but stiffened with hereditary ideas,
+worse than by rheumatism. If I should give a few drops in half a glass
+of water, and order a teaspoonful at a time, I should fly in the face of
+something which no mortal man can conquer, sheer heredity. The
+grandfathers and great-grandfathers of these people took their physic on
+draft, the children must do likewise. Sometimes I even think the
+medicine would lose its effect if taken in any other way. Nobody can
+estimate the power of a fixed idea upon the body. All the same, it is a
+confounded nuisance carrying around the aqua. I will confess, although I
+see the necessity of yielding, that I have less patience with men's
+stiff-necked stupidity than I have with their sins."
+
+James drove all the morning with Doctor Gordon about the New Jersey
+country. It was a moist, damp day, such as sometimes comes even in
+winter. It was a dog day with an atmosphere slightly cooler than that of
+midsummer. Overcoats were oppressive, the horses steamed. The roads were
+deep with red mud, which clogged the wheels and made the hoofs of the
+horses heavy. "It's a damned soil," said Doctor Gordon. This morning
+after appearing somewhat saturnine at breakfast, he was again in his
+unnatural, rollicking mood. He hailed everybody whom he met. He joked
+with the patients and their relatives in the farmhouses, approached
+through cart-tracks of mire, and fluttered about by chickens, quacking
+geese, and dead leaves. Now and then, stately ranks of turkeys charged
+in line of battle upon the muddy buggy, and the team, being used to it,
+stood their ground, and snorted contemptuously. The country people were
+either saturnine with an odd shyness, which had something almost hostile
+in it, or they were effusively hospitable, forcing apple-jack upon the
+two doctors. James was much struck by the curious unconcern shown by the
+relatives of the patients, and even by the patients themselves. In only
+one case, and that of a child suffering from a bad case of measles, was
+much interest evinced. The majority of the patients were the very old
+and middle-aged, and they discussed, and heard discussed, their symptoms
+with much the same attitude as they might have discussed the mechanism
+of a wooden doll. If any emotion was shown it was that of a singular
+inverted pride. "I had a terrible night, doctor," said one old woman,
+and a smirk of self-conceit was over her ancient face. "Yes, mother
+_did_ have an awful night," said her married daughter with a triumphant
+expression. Even the children clustering about the doctor looked
+unconsciously proud because their old grandmother had had an awful
+night. The call of the two doctors at the house was positively
+hilarious. Quantities of old apple-jack were forced upon them. The old
+woman in the adjoining bedroom, although she was evidently suffering,
+kept calling out a feeble joke in her cackling old voice.
+
+"Those people seem positively elated because that old soul is sick,"
+said James when he and the doctor were again in the buggy.
+
+"They are," said Doctor Gordon, "even the old woman herself, who knows
+well enough that she has not long to live. Did you ever think that the
+desire of distinction was one of the most, perhaps the most, intense
+purely spiritual emotion of the human soul? Look at the way these people
+live here, grubbing away at the soil like ants. The most of them have in
+their lives just three ways of attracting notice, the momentary
+consideration of their kind: birth, marriage, sickness and death. With
+the first they are hardly actively concerned, even with the second many
+have nothing to do. There are more women than men as usual, and although
+the women want to marry, all the men do not. There remains only sickness
+and death for a stand-by, so to speak. If one of them is really sick and
+dies, the people are aroused to take notice. The sick person and the
+corpse have a certain state and dignity which they have never attained
+before. Why, bless you, man, I have one patient, a middle-aged woman,
+who has been laid up for years with rheumatism, and she is fairly
+vainglorious, and so is her mother. She brags of her invalid daughter.
+If she had been merely an old maid on her hands, she would have been
+ashamed of her, and the woman herself would have been sour and
+discontented. But she has fairly married rheumatism. It has been to her
+as a husband and children. I tell you, young man, one has to have his
+little footstool of elevation among his fellows, even if it is a mighty
+queer one, or he loses his self-respect, and self-respect is the best
+jewel we have."
+
+They were now out in the road again, the team plodding heavily through
+the red shale. "It's a damned soil," said the doctor for the second
+time. He looked down at the young man beside him, and James again felt
+that resentful sense of youth and inexperience. "I don't know how you've
+been brought up," said the elder man. "I don't want to infuse heretic
+notions into your innocent mind."
+
+James straightened himself. He tried to give the other man a knowing
+look. "I have been about a good deal," he said. "You need not be afraid
+of corrupting _me_."
+
+Doctor Gordon laughed. "Well, I shall not try," he said. "At least, I
+shall not mean to corrupt you. I am a pessimist, but you are so young
+that you ought not to be influenced by that. Lord, only think what may
+be before you. You don't know. I am so far along that I know as far as I
+am concerned. I did not know but you had been brought up to think that
+whatever the Lord made was good, and that in saying that this red, gluey
+New Jersey soil was darned bad, I was swearing the worst way. I don't
+want to have millstones and that sort of thing about my neck. I was
+quite up in the Scriptures at one time."
+
+"You need not be afraid," said James with dignity; "I think the soil
+darned bad myself." He hesitated a little over the darned, but once it
+was out, he felt proud of it.
+
+"Yes, it is," said Doctor Gordon, "and if the Lord made it, he did not
+altogether succeed, and I see no earthly way of tracing the New Jersey
+soil back to original sin and the Garden of Eden."
+
+"That's so," said James.
+
+Doctor Gordon's face grew sober, his jocular mood for the time had
+vanished. He was his true self. "Did it ever occur to you that disease
+was the devil?" he asked abruptly. "That is, that all these infernal
+microbes that burrow in the human system to its disease and death, were
+his veritable imps at work?"
+
+James shook his head, and looked curiously at his companion's face with
+its gloomy corrugations.
+
+"Well, it has to me," said the doctor, "and let me ask you one thing.
+You have been brought up to believe that the devil's particular
+residence was hell, haven't you?"
+
+James replied in a bewildered fashion that he had.
+
+"Well," said Doctor Gordon, "if the devil lives here, as he must live,
+when there's such failures in the way of soil, and such climates, and
+such fiendish diseases, and crimes, why, this is hell."
+
+James stared at him.
+
+Doctor Gordon nodded half-gloomily, half-whimsically. "It's so," he
+said. "We call it earth; but it's hell."
+
+James said nothing. The doctor's gloomy theology was too much for him.
+Besides, he was not quite sure that the elder man was not chaffing him.
+
+"Well," said Doctor Gordon presently, "hell it is, but there are
+compensations, such as apple-jack, and now and then there's something
+doing that amuses one even here. I am going to take you to something
+that enlivens hell this afternoon, if somebody doesn't send a call. I am
+trying to get my work done this morning, the worst of it, so as to have
+an hour this afternoon."
+
+The two returned a little after twelve, and found luncheon waiting for
+them. Mrs. Ewing took her place at the table, and James thought that she
+did not look quite so ill as she had done the evening before. She talked
+more, and ate with some appetite. Doctor Gordon's face lightened, not
+with the false gayety which James had seen, but he really looked quite
+happy, and spoke affectionately to his sister.
+
+"What do you think, Tom," said she, "has come over Clemency? I don't
+know when there has been a morning that she has not gone for a tramp,
+rain or shine, but she has not stirred out to-day. She says she feels
+quite well, but I don't know."
+
+"Oh, Clemency is all right," said Doctor Gordon, but his face darkened
+again. As for Clemency, she bent over her plate and looked sulkier than
+ever. She fairly pouted.
+
+"She can go out this afternoon," said Mrs. Ewing. "It looks as if it
+were going to clear off."
+
+"No, I don't want to go," said Clemency. "I am all out of the humor of
+it." She spoke with an air of animosity, as if somebody were to blame,
+but when she saw Mrs. Ewing's anxious eyes she smiled. "I would much
+prefer staying with you, dear," she said, "and finish Annie's Christmas
+present." She spoke with such an affectionate air, that James looked
+admiringly at her. She seemed a fellow-worshipper. He thought that he,
+too, would much prefer staying with Mrs. Ewing than going with Doctor
+Gordon on the mysterious outing which he had planned.
+
+However, directly after luncheon Gordon led James out into the stable
+and called Aaron. "Are they ready, Aaron?" inquired the doctor.
+
+Aaron grinned, opened a rude closet, and produced a number of objects,
+which James recognized at once as dummy pigeons. So Doctor Gordon was to
+take him to a pigeon-shooting match. James felt a little disgusted. He
+had, in fact, taken part in that sport with considerable gusto himself,
+but, just now, he being fairly launched, as it were, upon the serious
+things of life, took it somewhat in dudgeon that Doctor Gordon should
+think to amuse him with such frivolities. But to his amazement the
+elder man's face was all a-quiver with mirth and fairly eager. "Show the
+pigeons to Doctor Elliot, Aaron," said Doctor Gordon. James took one of
+the rude disks called pigeons from the hand of Aaron with indifference,
+then he started and stared at Doctor Gordon, who laughed like a boy,
+fairly doubling himself with merriment. Aaron did not laugh, he chewed
+on, but his eyes danced.
+
+"Why, they are--" stammered James.
+
+"Just so, young man," replied Doctor Gordon. "They are wood. Aaron made
+them on a lathe, and not a soul can tell them from the clay pigeons
+unless they handle them. Now you are going to see some fun. Jim Goodman,
+who is the meanest skunk in town, has cheated every mother's son of us
+first and last, and this afternoon he is going to shoot against Albert
+Dodd, and he's going to get his finish! Dodd knows about it. He'll have
+clay pigeons all right. Goodman has put up quite a sum of money, and he
+stands fair to lose for once in his life."
+
+"Come on, Aaron, put the bay mare in the buggy. We'll drive down to the
+field. We haven't got much time to spare."
+
+Aaron backed the mare out of her stall and hitched her to the
+mud-bespattered buggy, and the two men drove off with the wooden pigeons
+under the seat. They had not far to go, to a large field intersected
+with various footpaths and with, a large bare space, which evidently
+served as a football gridiron. "This field is used like town property,"
+explained the doctor, "but the funny part of it is, it belongs to an old
+woman who is, perhaps, the richest person in Alton, and asks such a
+price for the land that nobody can buy it, and it has never occurred to
+her to keep off trespassers. So everybody trespasses, and she pays the
+taxes, and we are all satisfied, especially as there are plenty of
+better building sites in Alton to be bought for less money. That old
+woman bites her nose off every day, and never knows it."
+
+On this barren expanse, intersected with the narrow footpaths, covered
+between with the no color of last year's dry weeds and grass, were
+assembled some half dozen men and boys. They rushed up as the doctor's
+buggy came alongside. "Got 'em?" they cried eagerly. Doctor Gordon
+fumbled under the seat and drew out the batch of wooden pigeons, which
+one young fellow, who seemed to be master of ceremonies, grasped and
+rushed off with to the queer-looking machine erected in the centre of
+the football clearing, for the purpose of making them take wing. The
+others went with him. Doctor Gordon got out of his buggy, accompanied by
+James, and they, too, joined the little group. "Got the others?" asked
+Gordon in a half whisper.
+
+"Yes, you bet. We've got the others all right," said the young fellow,
+and everybody laughed.
+
+Men and boys began to gather until the field was half filled with them.
+They all wore grinning countenances. "For Heaven's sake, boys, don't act
+as if it were so awful funny, or you'll spoil the whole thing," said the
+young fellow who had come for the pigeons.
+
+Only one face was entirely sober, even severe, as with resolve, and that
+was the face of a small, mean-looking man between forty and fifty. He
+carried a gun, and looked at once important and greedy. "That's Jim
+Goodman," whispered Doctor Gordon to James, "and he's a crack shot, too.
+Albert isn't as sure, though he's pretty good, too."
+
+James began to catch the spirit of it himself. He felt at once disgusted
+and uneasy about the doctor, but as for himself he was only a young
+man, after all, and sport was still sweet to his soul. He shouted with
+the rest when the first pigeon was launched into the air, and Albert
+Dodd, a tall, serious young man, fired. He hit the bird, which at once
+flew into fragments, as a clay pigeon properly should.
+
+Georgie K. came up and joined them. He was evidently not in the secret,
+for he looked intensely puzzled when Jim Goodman, who had next shot, hit
+his bird fairly, but it only hopped about and descended unbroken. "What
+the deuce!" he said.
+
+"Hush up, Georgie K.," said Doctor Gordon. The other man turned and
+looked at him keenly, but the doctor's imperturbable, smiling face was
+on the sport. Georgie K.'s great pink face grew grave. Every time Albert
+Dodd fired the pigeons dropped in pieces, every time Jim Goodman fired
+they hopped as if they were alive. Jim Goodman swore audibly. He looked
+to his cartridges. The whole field was in an uproar of mirth. The
+gunshots were hardly audible for the yells and wild halloos of
+merriment. The match at last was finished. Jim Goodman's last pigeon
+hopped, and he was upon it in a rage. He took it up and examined it. It
+was riddled with shot. He felt it, weighed it. Then his face grew
+fairly black. From being only mean, he looked murderous. He was losing
+money, and money was the closest thing to his soul. He looked around at
+the yelling throng, one man at bay, and he achieved a certain dignity,
+even in the midst of absurdity.
+
+"This darned pigeon is wood," said he. "They are all wood, all I have
+shot. This is a put-up job! It ain't fair." He turned to the young
+fellow who had taken the pigeons, and who acted as referee.
+
+"See here, John," he said, "you ain't going to see me done this way, be
+you? You know it ain't a fair deal. Albert Dodd's shot clay pigeons, and
+I've shot wood. It ain't fair."
+
+"No, it ain't fair," admitted the young fellow reluctantly, with a side
+glance at Doctor Gordon. Gordon made a movement, but Georgie K. was
+ahead of him. James saw a roll of bills pass from his hands to Jim
+Goodman's. Gordon came up to Georgie K.
+
+"See here!" he said.
+
+"Well," replied Georgie K., without turning his head.
+
+"Georgie K."
+
+"I can't stop. Excuse me, Doc." Georgie K. jumped into a light wagon on
+that side of the field, and was gone with a swift bounce over the hollow
+which separated it from the road. Doctor Gordon hurried back to his own
+buggy, with James following, got in and took the road after Georgie K.
+"He mustn't pay that money," said Gordon. James said nothing.
+
+"I never thought of such a thing as that," said Doctor Gordon, driving
+furiously, but they did not catch up with Georgie K. until they reached
+the Evarts House, and he was out of his wagon.
+
+Doctor Gordon approached him, pocketbook in hand. "See here, Georgie
+K.," he said, "I owe you a hundred."
+
+"Owe me nothing," said Georgie K. It had seemed impossible for his great
+pink face to look angry and contemptuous, but it did. "I don't set up
+for much," said he, "but I must say I like a square deal."
+
+"Good Lord! so do I," said Gordon. "Here, take this money. I had Aaron
+make those darned wooden pigeons. Jim Goodman has skinned enough young
+chaps here to deserve the taste of a skin himself."
+
+"He ain't skinned you."
+
+"Hasn't he? He owes me for two wives' last sicknesses, to say nothing
+of himself and children, and he's living with his third, and I shall
+have to doctor her for nothing or let her die. But that wasn't what I
+did it for."
+
+Georgie K. turned upon him. "What on earth did you do it for, Doc?" said
+he.
+
+"Because I felt the way you have felt yourself."
+
+"When?"
+
+"When the woman that made those wax-flowers, and loved that little
+stuffed bird in there, died."
+
+Georgie K.'s face paled. "What's the matter, Doc?"
+
+"Nothing, I tell you."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Nothing. Who said there was anything? I had to have my little joke. I
+tell you, Georgie K., I've _got_ to have my little joke, just as I've
+got to have my game of euchre with you and my glass of apple-jack; a man
+can't be driven too far. I meant to make it right with him. He's a mean
+little cuss, but I am not mean. I intended to spend a hundred on my
+joke, and you got ahead of me. For God's sake, take the money, Georgie
+K."
+
+Georgie K., still with a white, shocked, inquiring face, extended his
+hand and took the roll of bills which the doctor gave him.
+
+"Come in and take something," said he, and Doctor Gordon and James
+accepted. They went again into the state parlor on whose shelf were the
+wax-flowers and the stuffed canary, and they partook of apple-jack.
+
+Then Doctor Gordon and James took leave. Georgie K. gave Gordon a hearty
+shake of the hand when he got into the buggy. Gordon looked at James
+again with his gloomy face, as he took up the lines. "Failed in the race
+again," he said. "Now we've got to hustle, for I have eight calls to
+make before dinner, and it's late. I ought to change horses, but there
+isn't time."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+The weeks went on, and James led the same life with practically no
+variation. The sense of a mystery or mysteries about the house never
+left him, and it irritated him. He was not curious; he did not in the
+least care to know in what the mystery consisted, but the fact of
+concealment itself was obnoxious to him. As for himself, he never
+concealed anything, and when it came to mystery, he had a vague idea of
+something shameful, if not criminal. Doctor Gordon's incomprehensible
+changes of mood, of almost more than mood, of character even, disturbed
+him. Why a man should be one hour a country buffoon, the next an
+absorbed gentleman, he could not understand. And he could not understand
+also why Clemency had never left the house since he had met her on the
+day of his arrival. She evidently was herself angry and sulky at being
+housed, but she did not attempt to resist, and whenever Mrs. Ewing
+expressed anxiety about her health, she laughed it off, and made some
+excuse, such as the badness of the roads, or some Christmas work which
+she was anxious to finish. However, at last Mrs. Ewing's concern grew so
+evident that Doctor Gordon at dinner one day gave what seemed a
+plausible reason for Clemency remaining indoors. "If you will have it,
+Clara," he said, "Clemency has a slight pain in her side, and pleurisy
+and pneumonia are all about, and I told her that she had better take no
+chances, and the weather has been raw."
+
+Mrs. Ewing turned quite white. "Oh, Tom," she murmured, "why didn't you
+tell me?"
+
+"I did not tell you, Clara dear, because you would immediately have had
+the child in a galloping consumption, and it is really nothing at all. I
+only want to be on the safe side."
+
+"It is a very little pain, mother dear," said Clemency. When Clemency
+spoke to Mrs. Ewing, her voice had a singing quality. At such times,
+although the young man's very soul was possessed of the mother, he could
+not help viewing the daughter with favor. But he was puzzled about the
+pleurisy. The girl seemed to him entirely well, although she was losing
+a little of her warm color from staying indoors. Still, after all, a
+pain is as invisible as a spirit. Her friend, Annie Lipton, spent a few
+days with her, and then James saw very little of Clemency. The two girls
+sat together in Clemency's room, and only the Lord of innocence and
+ignorance knew what they talked about. They talked a great deal. James,
+whenever he was in the house, was conscious of the distant murmur of
+their sweet young voices, although he could not distinguish a word.
+Annie Lipton was a prettier girl than Clemency, though without her
+personal charm. Her beauty seemed to abash her, and make her indignant.
+She was a girl who should have been a nun, and viewed love and lovers
+from behind iron bars. She treated James with exceeding coolness.
+
+"Annie Lipton is an anomaly," Doctor Gordon remarked once over his
+after-dinner pipe, when they sat in the study listening to the feminine
+murmur on the other side of the wall. It sounded like the gentle ripple
+of a summer sea.
+
+"Why?" returned James.
+
+"She defies her sex," replied Doctor Gordon, "and still there is nothing
+mannish about her. She is a woman angry and ashamed at her womanhood.
+If she ever marries, it will be at the cost of a terrible mental
+struggle. There are women-haters among men, and there are a very few--so
+few as to rank with albinos and white blackbirds in scarcity--man-haters
+among women. Annie is a man-hater."
+
+"She is very pretty, too," said James.
+
+"If you attempt the conquest, I'll warn you there will be scaling
+ladders and all the ancient paraphernalia of siege needed," said Doctor
+Gordon laughingly. James colored.
+
+"It may be that I am a woman-hater," he replied, and looked very young.
+Doctor Gordon again laughed.
+
+A little later they went to Georgie K.'s. They went nearly every evening
+while Annie Lipton was with Clemency. After she had left they did not go
+so often. "It is pretty dull for Clemency," Doctor Gordon would say, and
+they would remain at home and play whist with the two ladies. James
+began to be quite sure that Doctor Gordon's visits to Georgie K.'s were
+mostly made when Mrs. Ewing looked worse than usual and did not eat her
+dinner. James became convinced in his own mind that Mrs. Ewing was not
+well, although he never dared broach the subject again to the doctor,
+and although it made no difference whatever in his own attitude toward
+her. As well might he have turned his back upon the Venus, because of
+some slight abrasion which her beautiful body had received from the
+ages.
+
+But one day, having come in unexpectedly alone, he found her on the
+divan in the living-room, evidently weeping, and his heart went out to
+her. He flung himself down on his knees beside her.
+
+"Oh, what is it? What is the matter?" he whispered.
+
+Her whole body was writhing. She uncovered her eyes and looked at him
+pitifully, and yet with a certain dignity. Those beautiful eyes,
+brimming with tears, were not reddened, and their gaze was steady. "If I
+tell you, will you keep my secret?" she whispered back, "or, rather, it
+is not a secret since Doctor Gordon knows it. I wish he did not, but
+will you keep your knowledge from him?"
+
+"I promise you I will," said James fervently.
+
+"I am terribly ill," said Mrs. Ewing simply. "I suffer at times
+tortures. Don't ask me what the matter is. It is too dreadful, and
+although I have no reason to feel so, it seems to me ignominious. I am
+ashamed of being so ill. I feel disgraced by it, wicked." She covered
+her face again and sobbed.
+
+"Don't, don't," said James, out of his senses completely. "Don't, I
+can't bear it. I love you so. Don't! I will cure you."
+
+"You cannot. Doctor Gordon does not admit that my case is hopeless, but
+he gives no hope, and you must have noticed how he suffers when he sees
+me suffer. He runs away from me because he can do nothing to help me.
+That is the worst of it all. I could bear the pain for myself, but for
+the others, too! Oh, I wish there was some little back door of life out
+of which one could slip, and no blame to anybody, in a case like this.
+But there is nothing but the horrible front door, which means such agony
+to everybody who is left, as well as the one that goes." Mrs. Ewing had
+completely lost control of herself. She sobbed again and moaned.
+
+James covered one of her cold hands with kisses. "Don't, don't," he
+begged. "Don't, I love you."
+
+Suddenly Mrs. Ewing came to the comprehension of what he said. She
+looked at his bent head--James had a curly head like a boy's--and a
+strange look came into her eyes, as if she were regarding him across an
+immeasurable gulf. Nobody had ever seemed quite so far away in the world
+as this boy with his cry of love to the woman old enough to be his
+mother. It was not the fact of her superior age alone, it was her
+disease, it was her sense of being done forever with anything like this
+that gave her, as it were, a view of earth from outside, and yet she had
+a sense of comfort. James was even weeping. She felt his tears on her
+hand. It did her good that anybody could love her so little as to be
+able to stay by and see her suffer, and weep for her, and not rush forth
+in a rage of misery like Thomas Gordon. In a second, however, she had
+command of herself. She drew her hand away. "Doctor Elliot," she said,
+"you forget yourself."
+
+"No, no, I don't," protested James. "It is not as if I--I were thinking
+of you in that way. I am not. I know you could not possibly think of me
+as a girl might. It is only because I love you. I have never seen
+anybody like you."
+
+"You must put me out of your head," said Mrs. Ewing. "I am old enough to
+be your mother; I am ill unto death. You must not love me in any way."
+
+"I cannot help it"
+
+Mrs. Ewing hesitated. "I have a mind to tell you something," she said in
+a low voice. "Can I rely upon you?"
+
+"I would die before I told, if you said I was not to," cried James.
+
+"It might almost come to that," said the woman gravely. "A very serious
+matter is involved, otherwise there would not be this secrecy. I cannot
+tell you what the matter is, but I can tell you something which will
+cure you of loving me."
+
+"I don't want to be cured," protested James, "and I have told you it is
+a love like worship, it is not--"
+
+Mrs. Ewing interrupted him. "The worship of a young man is not to be
+trusted," she said. "I cannot have you made to suffer. I will tell you,
+but, remember, if you betray me you will do awful harm. Neither the
+doctor nor Clemency even must know that I tell you. The doctor knows, of
+course, the secret; Clemency does not know, and must never know. It
+would be the undoing of all of us, the terrible undoing, if this were to
+get out, but I will tell you. You are a good boy, and you shall be
+spared needless pain. Listen." She leaned forward and whispered close to
+his ear. James started back, and stared at her as white as death. Mrs.
+Ewing smiled. "It hurts a little, I know," she said, "but better this
+now than worse later. You are foolish to feel so about me; you were at a
+disadvantage in coming here. It is only right that you should know. Now
+never speak to me again about this. Think of me as your friend, and your
+friend who is in very great suffering and pain, and have sympathy for
+me, if you can, but not so much sympathy that you too will suffer. I
+want sympathy, but not agony like poor Tom's. That makes it harder for
+me."
+
+"Does she know?" asked James, half-gasping.
+
+"You mean does Clemency know I am ill?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"She knows I am ill. She does not know how terrible it is. You must help
+me to keep it from her. I almost never give way when she is present. I
+knew she was taking a nap this afternoon, and the pain was so awful. It
+is better now. I think I will go to my room and lie down for a while."
+Mrs. Ewing rose, and extended her hand to James. "I have forgotten
+already what you told me," she said.
+
+"I can never forget!"
+
+"You must, or you must go away from here."
+
+"I can never forget, but it shall be a thing of the past," said James.
+
+"That is right," Mrs. Ewing said with a maternal air. "It will only take
+a little effort. You will see."
+
+She went out of the room with a flounce of red draperies, and left
+James. He sat down beside a window and stared out blankly. The thought
+came to him, how many avowals of love and deathless devotion such a
+woman must have listened to. Her manner of receiving his made him think
+that there had been many. "It is quite proper," he thought to himself.
+"A woman like that is born to be worshiped." Then he thought of what she
+had told him, and a sort of rage filled his heart. He recognized the
+fact that she had been right in her estimation of the worship of a young
+man. He is always trying to turn his idol into clay.
+
+The door opened and Clemency entered, but he did not notice it. She came
+and sat down in front of him, and looked angrily at him, then for the
+first time he saw her. He rose. "I beg your pardon, I did not hear you
+come in," he said.
+
+"Sit down again," said Clemency pettishly. "Don't be silly. I am used
+to having young men not see anybody but my mother when she comes into a
+room, and it is quite right, too. I don't think there ever was a woman
+so beautiful as she, do you?"
+
+"No, I don't," replied James.
+
+Clemency eyed him keenly. Then she blushed at the surmise which came to
+her, and James also blushed at the knowledge of the surmise. "You can't
+be much older than I am. I am twenty-three," said Clemency after a
+while. Then the red suffused her very throat.
+
+"I am twenty-three, too," said James. Then he added bluntly, for he
+began to be angry, "A man can think a woman the most beautiful he ever
+saw without--"
+
+"Oh, I didn't think you were such a fool," said Clemency; then she
+added, in a meek and shamed voice, "I should have been awfully disgusted
+with you if you had not thought my mother the most beautiful woman you
+ever saw, and I am used to men not seeing me. I don't want them to. I
+think I feel something as Annie Lipton does about men. She says she
+feels as if she wanted to kill every man who looks at her as if he
+loved her. I think I should, too."
+
+"Miss Lipton has a great many admirers," remarked James by way of
+changing the subject.
+
+"Oh, yes, every young man for miles around, ever since she was grown up.
+She doesn't like any of them." Clemency looked at James with sudden
+concern. "I am going to tell you something," she said, "even if it is
+rather betraying confidence. I think I ought to. Annie told me she had
+taken a great dislike to you, from the very first moment she saw you, so
+it would be no use--"
+
+"I am sorry," replied James stiffly, "but as I had no particular feeling
+for her, except admiration of her beauty, it makes no especial
+difference."
+
+"I thought, of course, you would fall in love with her," said Clemency.
+Then she added, with most inexplicable inverted jealousy, "You must have
+very poor taste, or you would. You are the first one."
+
+"Some one has to be first," James said, laughing.
+
+"I don't know but I was horrid to tell you what I did," said Clemency,
+looking at him doubtfully.
+
+"I don't thing it as horrid for a girl to assume that every man is in
+love with her friend as it would be if she assumed something else," said
+James. He knew that his speech was ungallant; but it seemed to him that
+this girl fairly challenged him to rudeness. But she looked at him
+innocently.
+
+"Oh, no, I never should think that," said she. "Being with two women so
+very beautiful as my mother and Annie so much makes me quite sure that
+nobody is thinking of me. It is only sometimes that I feel a little like
+a piece of furniture, only chairs can't walk into rooms." She ended with
+a girlish laugh. Then her face suddenly sobered. "Doctor Elliot, I want
+you to tell me something," said she. "Uncle Tom wouldn't if I asked him,
+and I don't dare ask him anyway. Do you think mother is very well?"
+
+James hesitated. "You ought to tell me," Clemency said imperatively.
+
+"I have thought sometimes that she did not look quite well," said James.
+
+"What do you think the matter is?"
+
+"It may be indigestion."
+
+"Do you think it is?"
+
+"I don't know. Doctor Gordon has told me nothing, and Mrs. Ewing has
+told me nothing."
+
+"I thought doctors could tell from a person's looks."
+
+"Not always."
+
+"Doctors aren't much good anyhow," said Clemency. "I don't care if you
+are one, and Uncle Tom is one. I notice people die just the same. So you
+think it is indigestion? Well, it may be. Mother doesn't have much
+appetite."
+
+"Yes, I have noticed that," said James.
+
+"Then there is something else I want to ask you," said Clemency. "I have
+a right to know if you know. What does Uncle Tom make me stay in the
+house so for?"
+
+"I don't know," replied James, looking honestly at her.
+
+"Don't you, honest? Hasn't he told you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Of course, I know the first of it came from my meeting that man the day
+you came here, but it does seem such utter nonsense that I have to stay
+housed this way. I never met a man that frightened me before, and it is
+not likely that I shall again. It does not stand to reason that that man
+is hanging around here waiting to intercept me again. It is nonsense,
+but Uncle Tom won't let me stir out. He has even ordered me to keep away
+from the windows, and be sure that the curtains are drawn at night. I
+don't know what the matter is. I can't say a word about it to mother,
+she is so nervous. I have to pretend that I like to stay in the house,
+and some days I really think I am going mad for fresh air. Uncle Tom
+won't even let me go driving with him. So you don't know anything about
+it?"
+
+"Nothing whatever."
+
+"Well, I can't stand it much longer," said Clemency with an obstinate
+look. "As for the pain in my side, that's an awful lie; I haven't the
+ghost of a pain. I can't stand it much longer. Here's Uncle Tom. You are
+not going to tell him I said anything about it?"
+
+"Of course, I am not," answered James. He began to feel that he was
+entangled in a web of secrecy, and his feeling of irritation increased.
+He would have gotten out of it and spent Christmas at his own home, but
+Doctor Gordon had an unusual number of patients suffering from grippe,
+and pneumonia was almost epidemic, and he felt that he should not
+leave. It was the second week of the new year when James, returning from
+a call at a near-by patient, whither he had walked, found Mrs. Ewing in
+the greatest distress. It was ten o'clock at night, and she was pacing
+the living-room. Immediately when he entered she ran to him. "Oh," she
+gasped, "Clemency, Clemency!"
+
+"Why, what is it?" asked James. Clemency had not been at the
+dinner-table, but he had supposed her sulking, as she had been doing of
+late, and that she had taken advantage of Doctor Gordon's absence at a
+distant patient's to remain away from the table.
+
+"She begged so hard to go out, and said the pain was quite well," gasped
+Mrs. Ewing, "that I said she might go and see Annie, and here it is ten
+o'clock at night, and Tom has gone to Grover's Corner, and may not be
+home until morning, and Aaron is with him, and I had no one to send. I
+thought I would not say anything to you. I thought every minute she
+would come in, and Emma has walked half a mile looking for her, and I am
+horribly worried."
+
+"I will go directly and look for her," said James. "I will put the bay
+in the light buggy, and drive to Westover. Don't worry. I'll bring her
+back in half an hour."
+
+"The bay is so lame she can't travel, I heard Tom say this morning,"
+said Mrs. Ewing.
+
+"Then I'll take the gray."
+
+"She balks, you know."
+
+James laughed. "Oh, I'll risk the balking," he said.
+
+He hurried out to the stable and put the gray in the buggy. It was a
+very short time before James was on the road, and the gray went as well
+as could be desired, but just before she reached Westover she stopped
+short, and James might as well have tried to move a mountain as that
+animal with her legs planted at four angles of relentless obstinacy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+James had considerable experience with, horses. He knew at once that it
+was probably a hopeless undertaking to change the mare's mind, or rather
+her obstinacy. However, he tried the usual methods, touching with the
+whip, getting out and attempting to lead, but they were all, as he had
+supposed from the first, in vain. A terrible sense of being up against
+fate itself seized him: an animal's will unreasoning, unrelenting,
+bears, in fact, the aspect of fate itself. It is at once sensate and
+insensate. James thought of Clemency, and decided to waste no more time.
+
+The gray mare was near enough to a tree to tie her, and he tied her and
+set out on foot. It was a very dark night, cloudy and chilly and
+threatening snow. He walked on, as it were, through softly enveloping
+shadows, which seemed to his excited fancy to be coming forward to meet
+him. He began to be very much alarmed. He had wasted most of his young
+sentiment upon Clemency's mother, but, after all, he suddenly
+discovered that he had a feeling for the girl herself. He thought that
+it was only the natural anxiety of any man of honor for the safety of a
+helpless young girl out alone at night, and beset by possible dangers,
+but he realized himself in a panic. His plan was of course to go
+directly to Annie Lipton's home, some two miles farther on, then it
+occurred to him that Clemency must inevitably have left there. If she
+were lying dead or injured on the road, how in the world was he to see?
+He felt in his pocket for matches, and found just one. He lit that and
+peered around. While it burned he saw nothing except the frozen road
+with its desolate borders of woods and brush, a fit scene for countless
+tragedies. When the match burned out he thought of something else.
+Supposing that Clemency were lying half-dead anywhere near the road, how
+was she to know that a friend was near? Immediately he began to whistle.
+Whistling was a trick of his, and he had a remarkably sweet, clear pipe.
+He knew that Clemency, if she were to hear his whistle, would know who
+was near. He whistled "Way down upon the Suwanee River" through, then he
+began on the "Flower Song" from Faust, walking all the time quite
+rapidly but with alert ears. He was half through the "Flower Song" when
+he stopped short. He thought he heard something. He listened, and did
+hear quite distinctly an exceedingly soft little voice, which might have
+been the voice of shadows--"Is that you?"
+
+"Clemency," he cried out, and rushed toward the wood, and directly the
+girl was clinging to him. She was panting with sobs, but she kept her
+voice down to a whisper. "Speak low, speak low," she said in his ear. "I
+don't know where he is. Oh, speak low." She clung to him with almost a
+spasmodic grip of her slender arms. "If you had been ten minutes longer
+I think I should have died," she whispered. "Don't make a sound. I don't
+know where he is."
+
+"Was it--" began James. He felt himself trembling at the thought of what
+the girl might be going to reveal to him.
+
+"Yes, that same dreadful man. Uncle Tom was right. I stayed too long at
+Annie's. It was almost dark when I left there. She persuaded me to stay
+to dinner. They had turkey. I was about half a mile below here when he,
+the man, came out of the woods, just as he did before. I heard him, and
+I knew. I did not look around. I ran, and I heard his footsteps behind
+me. The darkness seemed to shut down all at once. I knew he could catch
+me, and remembered what I had heard about wild animals when they were
+hunted. I had gone a little past here, running just as softly as I
+could, when I turned right into the woods, and ran back. Then I lay
+right down in the underbrush and kept still. I heard him run past. Then
+I heard him come back. He came into the woods. I expected every minute
+he would step on me, but I kept still. Finally I heard him go away, but
+I have not dared to stir since! I made up my mind I would keep still
+until I heard a team pass. It did seem to me one must pass, and one
+would have at any other time, but it has been hours I have been lying
+there. Then I heard your whistle. I was almost afraid to speak then.
+Don't speak above a whisper now. Did you come on foot?"
+
+"I had the gray mare, and she balked about half a mile from here. You
+are sure you are not hurt?"
+
+"No, only I am trying hard not to faint. Let us walk on very fast, but
+step softly, and don't talk."
+
+James put his arm around the girl and half carried her. She continued
+to draw short, panting breaths, which she tried to subdue. They reached
+the place where the gray mare loomed faintly out of the gloom with the
+dark mass of the buggy behind her.
+
+"Let us get in," whispered Clemency. "Quick!"
+
+"I am afraid she won't budge."
+
+"Yes, she will for me. She has a tender mouth, that is why she balks.
+You must have pulled too hard on the lines. Sometimes I have made her go
+when even Uncle Tom couldn't."
+
+Clemency ran around to the gray's head and patted her, and James untied
+her. Then the girl got into the buggy and took the reins, and James
+followed. He was almost jostled out, the mare started with such impetus.
+They made the distance home almost on a run.
+
+"Oh, I am so glad," panted Clemency. "You see I can seem to feel her
+mouth when I hold the lines, and she knows. Was poor mother worried?"
+
+"A little."
+
+"I know she was almost crazy."
+
+"She will be all right when she sees you safe," said James.
+
+"Is Uncle Tom home yet? No, of course I know he isn't, or he would have
+come instead of you. Oh, dear, I know he will scold me. I shall have to
+tell him, but I mustn't tell mother about the man. What shall I tell
+her? It is dreadful to have to lie, but sometimes one would rather run
+the risk of fire and brimstone for one's self than have anybody else
+hurt. If I tell mother she will have one of her dreadful nervous
+attacks. I can't tell her. What shall I tell her, Doctor Elliot?"
+
+"I think the simplest thing will be to say that Miss Lipton persuaded
+you to stay to supper, and so you were late, and I overtook you," said
+James.
+
+"Mother will never believe that I stayed so long as that," said
+Clemency. "I shall have to lie more than that. I don't know exactly what
+to say. I could have Charlie Horton come in to play whist, and be taking
+me home in his buggy. He always drives, and you could meet me on the
+road."
+
+"Yes, you could do that."
+
+"It is a very complicated lie," said Clemency, "but I don't know that a
+complicated lie is any worse than a simple one. I think I shall have to
+lie the complicated one. You need not say anything, you know. You can
+take the mare to the stable, and I will run in and get the lie all told
+before you come. You won't lie, will you?"
+
+James could not help laughing. "No, I don't see any need of it," he
+replied.
+
+"It is rather awful for you to have to live with people who have to lie
+so," remarked Clemency, "but I don't see how it can be helped. If you
+had seen my mother in one of her nervous attacks once, you would never
+want to see her again. There is only one thing, I do feel very weak
+still, and I am afraid I shall look pale. Hold the lines a minute. Don't
+pull on them at all. Let them lie on your knees."
+
+"What are you doing?" asked James when he had complied.
+
+"Doing? I am pinching my cheeks almost black and blue, so mother won't
+notice. I don't talk scared now, do I?"
+
+"Not very."
+
+"Well, I think I can manage that. I think I can manage my voice. I am
+all over being faint. Oh, I will tell you what I will do. You haven't
+got your medicine-case with you, have you?"
+
+"No, I started so hurriedly."
+
+"Well, I will go in the office way. I know where Uncle Tom keeps
+brandy, and I will be so chilled that I'll have to take a little before
+mother sees me. That will make me all right. I wouldn't take it for
+myself, but I will for her."
+
+"And you are chilled, all right," said James.
+
+"Yes, I think I am," said Clemency. "I did not think of it, but I guess
+it was cold there in the woods keeping still so long." Indeed, the girl
+was shaking from head to foot, both with cold and nervous terror. "It
+was awful," she said in a little whisper.
+
+James felt the girl shaking from head to foot. Suddenly a great
+tenderness for the poor, little hunted thing came over him. He put his
+arm around her. "Poor little soul," he said. "It must have been terrible
+for you lying out there in the cold and dark and not knowing--"
+
+Clemency shrank into his embrace as a hurt child might have done. "It
+was perfectly terrible," she said, with a little sob. "I didn't know but
+he might come back any minute and find me."
+
+"It is all over now," James said soothingly.
+
+"Yes, for the time," Clemency replied with a little note of despair in
+her voice, "but there is something about it all that I don't understand.
+Only think how long I have had to stay in the house, and he must have
+been on the watch. I don't know when it is ever going to end."
+
+"I think that I will end it to-morrow," said James with fierce
+resolution.
+
+"You? How?"
+
+"I am going to put a stop to this. If an innocent girl can't step out of
+the house for weeks at a time without being hounded this way, it is high
+time something was done. I am going to get a posse of men and scour the
+country for the scoundrel."
+
+"Oh, will you do that?"
+
+"Yes, I will. It is high time somebody did something."
+
+"You saw him. You know just how he looks?"
+
+"I could tell him from a thousand."
+
+Clemency drew a long breath. "Well," she said doubtfully, "if you can,
+but--"
+
+"But what?"
+
+"Nothing, only somehow I doubt if Uncle Tom will think it advisable.
+There must be some mystery about all this or Uncle Tom himself would
+have done that very thing at first. I don't understand it. But I don't
+believe Uncle Tom will consent to your hunting for the man. I think for
+some reason he wants it kept secret." Suddenly, Clemency gave a
+passionate little outcry. "Oh, how I do hate secrets!" she said. "How I
+have always hated them! I want everything right out, and here I seem to
+be in a perfect snarl of secrets! I wonder how long I shall have to stay
+in the house."
+
+"Perhaps you are wrong, and your uncle will take measures now this has
+happened for the second time," said James.
+
+"No, he won't," replied the girl hopelessly. "I am almost sure that he
+will not."
+
+Clemency was right. After she had made her entry and told her little lie
+successfully, and explained that she had taken some brandy because she
+was chilled, and Mrs. Ewing had gently scolded her for staying so late,
+and kissed and embraced her, and gotten back her own composure, Doctor
+Gordon arrived, and James, who had waited for him in the study, told him
+the story in whispers. "Now I think you had better let me get a posse of
+men and scour the country to-morrow," he concluded. "It seems to me
+that this thing has gone far enough."
+
+Doctor Gordon sat huddled up before him in an arm-chair. He had not even
+taken off his overcoat, which was white with snow. The storm had begun.
+"It will be easy to track him on account of the snow," added James.
+
+"Tracking is not necessary," replied Gordon, with his haggard face fixed
+upon James. "I know exactly where the man is, and have known from the
+first."
+
+"Then--" began James.
+
+"You don't know what you are talking about," Gordon said gloomily. "I
+would have that fiend arrested to-morrow. I would have him hung from the
+nearest tree if I had my way, but I can do absolutely nothing."
+
+"Nothing?"
+
+"No, I can do nothing, except what I have been doing, so far in vain, it
+seems, to try to tire him out. I traded too much on his impatience, it
+seemed. I did not think he would have held out so long."
+
+"You mean you will have to keep that poor little thing shut up the way
+you have been doing?"
+
+"I see no other way. God knows I have tried to think of another, day and
+night."
+
+"I don't see why you or I could not take her out sometimes when we
+visit patients anyway," said James in a bewildered fashion.
+
+"You don't understand," replied Doctor Gordon irritably. "The main point
+is: the girl must not be even seen by that man. That is the trouble.
+Driving, she might be perfectly safe; in fact, in one way she is safe
+anyhow. She is not in any danger of bodily harm, as you may think, but I
+don't want her seen."
+
+"Why not let me take her out sometimes of an evening then?" said James,
+more and more mystified. "If she wore a veil, and went out driving in
+the evening, I can't see how anybody could get a glimpse of her."
+
+"You don't understand that we have to deal with a very devil incarnate,"
+said Doctor Gordon wearily. "He will be on the watch for just that very
+manoeuvre. However, perhaps we may be able to manage that; I will see."
+
+"She will be ill if she remains in the house so closely," said James,
+"especially a girl like her, who has been accustomed to lead such an
+outdoor life. In fact, I don't think she does look very well now. It is
+telling on her."
+
+"Yes, I think it is," agreed Doctor Gordon gloomily, "but again, I say,
+I see no other way out of it. However, perhaps you or I can take her out
+sometimes of an evening. I suppose it had better be you, on some
+accounts. I will see. Well, I will take off my coat and get something to
+eat. I suppose Clara and Clemency have gone to bed."
+
+"They went hours ago," replied James. It was, in fact, two in the
+morning. James followed the doctor, haggard and weary, into the kitchen,
+where, according to custom at such times, some dinner had been left to
+keep warm on the range. "I'll sit down here," said Doctor Gordon. "It is
+warmer than in the dining-room, and I am chilled through. If you don't
+mind, Elliot, I wish you would get me a bottle of apple-jack from the
+dining-room. I must have something to hearten me up, or I shall go by
+the board, and I don't know what will become of her--of them."
+
+James sat and waited while the doctor ate and drank. When he had
+finished he looked a little less haggard. He stretched himself before
+the warm glow from the range and laughed. "Now I feel my fighting blood
+is up again," he said. "After all, if there is anything in the Good
+Book, the wicked shall not always triumph, and I may win out. I shall
+do my best anyhow. But I confess you took the wind out of me with what
+you told me when I came in. I am glad Clara does not know. Poor little
+Clemency having to pave her way with lies, but it would kill Clara. Oh,
+God, it does seem as if I had enough before. Take my advice, young man,
+and try to think more of yourself than anybody else in the world. Don't
+let your heart go out to anybody. Just as sure as you do, the door of
+the worst torture-chamber in creation swings open. The minute you become
+vulnerable through love, you haven't a strong place in your whole
+armor."
+
+"What a doctrine!" observed James.
+
+"I know it, but I have taken a fancy to you, boy; and hang it if I want
+you to suffer as I have to."
+
+"But a man would not be a man at all if he did not think enough of
+somebody to suffer," said James, and now he was thinking of poor little
+Clemency, and how she had nestled up to him for protection.
+
+"Maybe," said Doctor Gordon gloomily, "but sometimes I wonder whether it
+pays in the long run to be what you call a man. Sometimes I wish that I
+were a rock or a tree. I do to-night."
+
+"You will feel better after you have had a little sleep," James said,
+as the two men rose.
+
+Suddenly one of Doctor Gordon's inexplicable changes of mood came over
+him. He laughed. "If it were not so late we would go down to Georgie
+K.'s," said he. "I never felt more awake. Well, I guess it's too late.
+You must be dead tired yourself. I have not thanked you at all for your
+rescue of the girl. She would have been down with a serious illness if
+you had not gone, for she would have lain in that place being snowed
+over until somebody came."
+
+"She was mighty clever to do what she did," said James.
+
+"Yes, she is clever," returned Doctor Gordon. "She is a good girl, and
+it stings me to the very heart that she has to suffer such persecution.
+Well, 'all's well that ends well.' Did it ever occur to you that God
+made up to mankind for the horrors of creation, by stating that there
+would be an end to it some day? Good God, if this terrible world had to
+roll on to all eternity!" Doctor Gordon laughed again his unnatural
+laugh. "Fancy if you were awakened to-night by the last trump," he said.
+"How small everything would seem. Hang it, though, if I wouldn't try to
+have a hand at that man's finish before the angel of the Lord got his
+flaming sword at work."
+
+James looked at him with terror.
+
+"Don't mind me, boy," said Gordon. "I don't mean to blaspheme; but Job
+is not in it with me just now. You cannot imagine what I had to contend
+with before this melodramatic villain appeared on the stage. Sometimes I
+think this is the finish," Gordon's mouth contracted. He looked savage.
+James continued to stare at him. Gordon laid his hand on James's
+shoulder. "Thank the Lord for one thing," he said almost tenderly, "that
+he sent you here. Between us we will take care of poor little Clemency
+anyhow. Now go to bed, and go to sleep."
+
+James obeyed as to the one, but he could not as to the other. He became,
+as the hours wore on, so nervous that he was half-inclined to take a
+sleeping powder. The room seemed full of flashes of lightning. He heard
+sounds which made him cold with horror. He was highly strung nervously,
+and was really in a state bordering upon hysteria. The mystery which
+surrounded him was the main cause. He was never himself before an
+unknown quantity. He had too much imagination. He made all sorts of
+surmises as to the stranger who was haunting Clemency. Starting with two
+known quantities, he might have accomplished something, but here he had
+only one: Clemency herself. He had a good head for algebra, but a man
+cannot work out a problem easily with only one known quantity. He began
+to wonder if the poor girl herself were sleeping. He realized a sort of
+protective tenderness for her, and indignation on her behalf. It did not
+occur to him as being love. Still the image of her wonderful mother
+dominated him. But his mind dwelt upon the girl. He thought of a piazza
+whose roof opened as he knew upon Clemency's room. He wondered if a man
+like that would stick at anything. Then he recalled what Doctor Gordon
+had said about Clemency's not being in any bodily danger, and again he
+speculated. The room began to grow pale with the late winter dawn.
+Familiar objects began to gain clearness of outline. There were two
+windows in James's room. They gave upon the piazza. Suddenly James made
+a leap from his bed. He sprang to one of the windows. Flattened against
+it was the face of the man. But the face was so destitute of
+consciousness of him, that James doubted if he saw rightly. The wide
+eyes seemed to gaze upon him without seeing him, the mouth smiled as if
+at something within. The next moment James was sure that the face was
+not there. He drew on his trousers, thrust his feet into his shoes, and
+was out of his room and the house, and on the piazza. It was still
+snowing, but the dawn was overcoming the storm. The whole world was lit
+with dead white pallor like the face of a corpse. James rushed the
+length of the piazza. He looked at the walk leading to it. He thought he
+could distinguish footprints. He looked on the piazza, but the wind,
+being on the other side of the house, there was not enough snow there to
+make footprints visible. The snow on the walk was drifted. He looked at
+it closely, and made sure of deep marks. He stood for a moment undecided
+what to do. He disliked to arouse Doctor Gordon. He was afraid of
+awakening Mrs. Ewing, if he ventured into the upper part of the house.
+Then he thought of the man Aaron who slept in a room over the stable. He
+reentered the house, locked the front door, went softly into the
+doctor's study, and out of the door which was near the stable. Then he
+made a hard snowball, and threw it at Aaron's window. The window opened
+directly, and Aaron's head appeared. James could see, even in the dim
+light, and presumably just awakened from sleep, the rotary motion of his
+jaws. He was probably not chewing anything, simply moving his mouth from
+force of habit. "Hullo!" said Aaron, "that you Doctor Gordon?"
+
+"No, it is I," replied James. "Put on something as quick as you can, and
+come down here. Something is wrong."
+
+Aaron's head disappeared. In an incredibly short space of time the
+stable door was unlocked and slid cautiously back, and Aaron stood
+there, huddled into his clothes. "What's up?" he asked.
+
+"I don't know. Have you got a lantern in the stable?"
+
+"Yep."
+
+"Light it quick, then, and come along with me."
+
+Aaron obeyed. "Anybody sick," he asked, coming alongside with the
+flashing lantern. He threw a cloth over it so as to prevent the rays
+shining into the house windows. "I don't want to frighten her," he said,
+and James knew that he meant Mrs. Ewing. "She's awful nervous," said
+Aaron. Then he said again, "What's up?"
+
+"I saw a man's face looking into one of my windows," replied James.
+
+Aaron gave a low whistle. "Somebody wanted the doc?" he inquired.
+
+"No," replied James shortly, "it was not."
+
+"Must have been."
+
+"No, it was not."
+
+"Must have been," repeated Aaron, chewing.
+
+"I tell you it was not. I knew--" James stopped. He suddenly wondered
+how much he ought to tell the man, how much Doctor Gordon had told him.
+
+Aaron chewed imperturbably, but a sly look came into his face. "I have
+eyes, and they see, and ears, and they hear," he said, after an odd
+Scriptural fashion, "but don't you tell me nothin', Doctor Elliot.
+Either I take what I get from the fountain-head, or I makes my own
+conclusions that I can't help. Don't you tell me nothin'. S'pose we look
+an' see ef there's footprints that show anythin'."
+
+Aaron flashed the lantern, all the time carefully shading it from the
+house windows, over the walk which led to the front door and the piazza.
+James followed him. "Well," said Aaron, "there's been somebody here,
+but, with snow like this, it might have been a monkey or a rhinoceros
+or an alligator. You can't make nothin' of them tracks. But they do go
+out to the road, and turn toward Stanbridge."
+
+"Suppose we--" began James. He was about to suggest following the
+prints, when he remembered Doctor Gordon's injunction to the contrary.
+
+However, Aaron anticipated him. "Might as well leave the devil alone,"
+said he. "It might have been the old one himself, for all we can tell by
+them tracks. You had better go back to bed, Doctor Elliot. You ain't got
+much on. It ain't near breakfast time yet. Better go back to bed."
+
+And James thought such a course the wiser one himself. He went back to
+bed, but not to sleep. He kept his eyes fixed upon the windows. He was
+prepared at any instant, should the man reappear, to spring out. He felt
+almost murderous. "It has come to a pretty pass," he thought, "if that
+scoundrel, whoever he may be, is lurking around the house at night."
+
+The daylight came slowly on account of the storm. When it did come, it
+was an opaque white daylight. James began to smell coffee and frying
+ham. He rose and dressed himself, and looked out of the window. It was
+like looking into a blurred mirror. He began to wonder if he could have
+been mistaken, if possibly that face had been simply a vision which had
+come from his overwrought brain. He wondered if he should tell Doctor
+Gordon, if it might not disturb him unnecessarily. He wondered if he
+should have enforced secrecy upon Aaron. He was still undecided when the
+Japanese gong sounded, and he went out to breakfast. Clemency was
+looking worn and ill. Somehow the sight of her piteous little face
+decided James. He thought how easily an athletic man could climb up one
+of those piazza posts, which was, moreover, encircled by a strong old
+vine which might almost serve as ladder. He made up his mind to tell
+Doctor Gordon, and he did tell him when they were out upon their rounds,
+tilting and sliding along the drifted country roads in an old sleigh. "I
+don't think I can be mistaken," he said when he had finished.
+
+Doctor Gordon looked at him intently. "You are sure," he said. "You are
+a nervous subject for a man, and you had not slept, and you had this man
+very much on your mind, and there must have been some snow on the
+window which could produce an illusion. Be very sure, because this is
+serious."
+
+James thought again of Clemency's little white face. "Yes," he said, "I
+am sure."
+
+"You have no doubt at all?"
+
+"None. The man had his face staring into the room. He did not seem to
+see me, but looked past me at the bed."
+
+"He might easily have thought that room, being on the ground floor and
+accessible to night-calls, was mine," said Doctor Gordon, as if to
+himself.
+
+"I thought how easily he could have climbed up one of the piazza posts
+to her room," said James.
+
+The Doctor started. "Yes, that is so," he said. "He might have had two
+motives. That is so."
+
+The next call was at a patient's who had a slight attack of grippe.
+Doctor Gordon left James there, saying that he would make another call
+and be back for him directly. James noticed how he urged the horses out
+of the drive at almost a run. He was back soon, and James having made up
+his prescription, went out and got into the sleigh. Doctor Gordon looked
+at him gloomily. "He is no longer where he has been staying," he said,
+and his face settled into a stern melancholy. That evening, although the
+storm continued, he suggested a visit to Georgie K.'s; and at supper
+time he insisted upon Clemency's occupying another room that night. "The
+wind is on your side of the house," he said, "and I am afraid you will
+take more cold." Clemency stared and pouted, then said, "All right,
+Uncle Tom!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Even the apple-jack and euchre at Georgie K.'s were not sufficient to
+entirely establish Doctor Gordon in his devil-may-care mood. Georgie K.
+kept looking at him with solicitation, which had something tender about
+it. "Don't you feel well, Doc?" he asked.
+
+"Never felt better in my life," returned Gordon quickly. "To-night I am
+feeling particularly good, because I really think I have evolved an
+utterly new theory of death and disease which ought to make me famous,
+if I ever get a chance to write a book about it."
+
+Georgie K. stared at him inquiringly.
+
+"I don't know that you will understand, old man," said Gordon, "but here
+it is. It is simple in one way. Nobody will deny that we come of the
+earth; well, we are sick and die of the earth. We grow old and weary and
+drop into our graves, because of the tremendous, though unconscious and
+involuntary, wear upon nerves and muscles and emotion which is required
+to keep us here at all. Gravitation kills us all in the end, just as
+surely as if we fell off a precipice. Gravitation is the destroyer, and
+gravitation is earth-force. The same monster which produces us devours
+us. That's so. I hope I shall get a chance to write that book. Clubs are
+trumps; pass."
+
+"Sure you are well, Doc?" inquired Georgie K., again scowling anxiously.
+
+"Never felt better, didn't I just say so? You are a regular old hen,
+Georgie K. You cluck at a fellow like a setting hen at one chicken."
+
+Still Doctor Gordon's gloomy face, although he tried to be jocular, did
+not relax. Going home late that night, or rather early next morning, he
+laid his hand heavily on James's shoulder.
+
+"Boy, I am about at the finish!" he groaned out.
+
+"Now, see here, Doctor Gordon, can't I be of some assistance if you were
+to tell me?" asked James. He passed his hand under the older man's arm,
+and helped him through a snowdrift as if he had been his father. A great
+compassion filled his heart.
+
+But Gordon only groaned out a great sigh. "No," he said. "Secrecy is the
+one shield I have. I don't say weapon, but shield. In these latter days
+we try to content ourselves with shields; and secrecy is the strongest
+shield on earth. If I were going to commit a crime, I should never even
+intimate the slightest motive for it to any man living. I should trust
+no man living to help me through with it."
+
+James felt a vague horror steal over him. He tried to speak lightly to
+cover it. "I trust there is no question of crime?" he said, laughing.
+
+"Not the slightest," replied Gordon. "I have no intention to use a
+weapon, but my shield I must stick to. Thank the Lord, you were awake
+last night, and to-night Clemency is in another room. By the way, I have
+bought a dog."
+
+"A dog?"
+
+"Yes, a bull terrier, well trained, but he has a voice like a whole pack
+of hounds. Clemency likes dogs. I will venture that no one comes near
+the house after this without waking him up."
+
+"You will keep him tied though."
+
+"Yes, unless I get driven too far," replied Gordon grimly.
+
+"Does Mrs. Ewing like dogs?"
+
+"She is as fond of them as Clemency."
+
+When, the next day, the dog arrived James was assured of the fact that
+both Clemency and Mrs. Ewing did like dogs. They seemed more pleased
+than he had ever seen them, and the dog responded readily to their
+advances. He was a splendid specimen of his breed, very large, without a
+spot on his white coat, and with beautiful eyes. Doctor Gordon had a
+staple fixed in the vestibule, and the dog was leashed to it at night.
+"I can't have my patients driven away," he said with a laugh.
+
+That evening Doctor Gordon had a call, and he took Aaron with him. That
+left James alone with Clemency, as Mrs. Ewing retired almost immediately
+after Doctor Gordon left.
+
+After the jingle of the sleigh-bells had died away Clemency laid down
+her work and looked at James. The new dog was lying at her feet. "Uncle
+Tom bought this dog on account of him," she said. As she spoke, she gave
+an odd significant gesture over her shoulder as if the man were there,
+and a look of horror came over her face. Immediately the dog growled,
+and sprang up, raced to the door, and let forth a volley of howls and
+barks. "He knows," said Clemency. "Isn't it queer? That dog knows there
+is something wrong just by the way I spoke and looked."
+
+James himself was not quite so sure. He glanced at the closed shutters.
+Then he went himself to the door to be sure that it was bolted as usual,
+and through into the study. Everything was fast, but the dog continued
+to race wildly back and forth from door to windows, barking wildly, with
+a slender crest of hair erect on his glossy white back. Emma, the maid,
+came in from the kitchen, and met James and Clemency in the hall. She
+looked white, and was trembling. "I know there was somebody about the
+house," she said.
+
+James hesitated. He thought of a possible patient. Still there had been
+no ring at the office door. He considered a moment. Then he sent
+Clemency, the maid, and the dog back into the parlor, and before he
+opened the outer door of the office he locked the other which
+communicated with the rest of the house, and put the key in his pocket.
+Then he threw open the outer door and called, "Anybody there?"
+
+Utter silence answered him. He looked into a black wall of night. It was
+not snowing, but the clouds were low and thick, and no stars were
+visible. He called again in a shout, "Hullo there! Who is it?" and
+obtained no response. Then he closed the door, fastened it, and returned
+to the living-room. "I guess you were right," he said to Clemency.
+
+"Yes, I think so," said Clemency. She spoke to Emma. "Jack acted so
+because of something I said to Doctor Elliot," she added. "He thought
+something was wrong. He is very intelligent." The dog was again lying at
+her feet.
+
+But Emma shook her head obstinately. She was the middle-aged daughter of
+a New Jersey farmer, and had lived with the family ever since they had
+resided in Alton. She had a harsh face, although rather good-looking, "I
+have been used to dogs all my life," said she, "and I never knowed a dog
+to act like that unless there was somebody about the house."
+
+"Well, I have done all I could," said James. "I called out the office
+door, and nobody answered. It could not have been a patient."
+
+"There was somebody about the house," repeated Emma. "Well, I must go
+and mix up the bread."
+
+When she was gone, Clemency looked palely at James. "Oh," she said, "do
+you think it could have been that man?"
+
+"No," replied James firmly; "it must have been your gesture. That is a
+very intelligent dog, and dogs have imagination. He imagined something
+wrong."
+
+"I hope it was that," said Clemency faintly. "It seems to me I should
+die if I thought that terrible man were hanging about the house. It is
+bad enough never to be able to go out of doors."
+
+"Doctor Gordon says I may take you out driving some evening," said James
+consolingly.
+
+Clemency looked at him with a brightening face. "Did he?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Then to James's utter surprise Clemency broke down, and began to cry.
+"Oh," she wailed, "I don't know as I want to go. I am afraid all the
+time. If we were out driving, and he came up to the horse's head, what
+could we do?"
+
+"He would get a cut across the face that he would remember," James
+returned fiercely.
+
+"But he would see me."
+
+"It would be dark."
+
+"He might have a lantern."
+
+"You can wear a thick veil."
+
+Clemency sobbed harder than ever. "Oh, no," she wailed, "I don't want to
+go so, in the dark, with a thick veil over my face, thinking every
+minute he may come. Oh, no, I don't want to go."
+
+"You poor little soul," said James, and there was something in his voice
+which he himself had never heard before. Clemency glanced up at him
+quickly, and he saw as plainly as if he had been looking in a glass
+himself in her blue eyes. Instantly emotions of which he had dreamed,
+but never experienced, leaped up in his heart like flame. He knew that
+he loved Clemency. What he had felt for her mother had been passionless
+worship, giving all, and asking nothing. This was love which asked as
+well as gave. "Clemency," he began, and his voice was hoarse with
+emotion. She turned her head away, the tears were still on her cheeks,
+but they were very red, and her cheeks were dimpling involuntarily.
+
+"Well?" she whispered.
+
+"Do you care anything about--me?"
+
+Clemency nodded, still keeping her face averted.
+
+"That means--"
+
+Clemency said nothing.
+
+"That means you love me," James whispered.
+
+Clemency nodded again. Then she turned her head slowly, and gave him a
+narrow blue glance, and smiled like a shy child.
+
+"I was afraid--" she began.
+
+"Afraid of what, dear?" James put his arm about the girl, and the
+ashe-blonde head dropped on his shoulder.
+
+"Afraid you--didn't."
+
+"Afraid I didn't care?"
+
+Clemency nodded against his breast.
+
+"I think I must have cared all the time, only at first, when I saw your
+mother--"
+
+Clemency raised her head immediately and gave it an indignant toss.
+"There," said she. "I knew it. Very well, if you would rather be my
+stepfather, you can, only I think you would be a pretty one, no older,
+to speak of, than I am, and I know my mother wouldn't have you anyway.
+The idea of your thinking that my mother would get married again anyway,
+and especially to you," Clemency said witheringly. She sat up straight
+and looked at James. "I wish your father were a widower, then I would
+marry him the minute he asked me," said she, "and see how you would
+like it. I guess you would have a step-mother who would make you walk
+chalk." Clemency tossed her head again. Then she gave a queer little
+whimsical glance at James, and both of them burst out laughing, and she
+was in his arms again, and he was kissing her. "There, that is enough,"
+said she presently. "I once wore out a doll I had kissing her. She was
+wax, and it was warm weather, and I actually did wear that doll out. The
+color all came off her cheeks, and she got soft."
+
+"You are not a doll, darling," said James fervently, and he would have
+kissed her again, but she pushed him away. "No," said she, "I know the
+color won't come off my cheeks, but I might get soft like that doll. One
+can never tell. You must stop now. I want to talk to you. It is all
+right about my mother."
+
+"It was only because I never saw such a woman in all my life before,"
+said James. "I never thought of marrying."
+
+"You would have had to take it out in thinking," said Clemency, "but it
+is all right. I think myself that my mother is the most wonderful woman
+that ever lived. I think the old Greek goddesses must have looked just
+like her. I don't wonder you felt so about her. I don't know as I should
+have thought much of you if you hadn't. Why, everybody falls down and
+worships her. Of course I know that I am nothing compared to her. I
+should be angry if you really thought so."
+
+"I don't think so in one way," James said honestly. "I don't think you
+are as beautiful as your mother, but I love you, Clemency."
+
+"Well, that will do for me," said Clemency. "No, you need not kiss me
+again. I think myself I shall make you a better wife than a
+stepdaughter. You need not think for one minute that I would have minded
+you as I do Uncle Tom."
+
+"But you will have to when we are married," said James.
+
+Clemency blushed and quivered. "Well, maybe I will," she whispered. "I
+suppose I shall be just enough of a fool to stay in the house, if you
+order me, the way I do when Uncle Tom does."
+
+"You shall stay in the house for no man alive when I have you in
+charge," said James. "Clemency--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"I will take you out now, if you say so. I can protect you."
+
+"I know you can," Clemency said, "but I guess we had better not. You see
+Uncle Tom doesn't know yet, and he will be coming home, and--"
+
+"I am going to tell him just as soon as he does," declared James.
+
+"I wonder if you had better not wait," Clemency said thoughtfully.
+
+"Wait? Why?"
+
+"Nothing, only poor Uncle Tom is frightfully worried about something
+now. He worries about that dreadful man, and I am afraid he worries
+about mother. I don't know exactly what he worries about; but I don't
+want him worried about anything else."
+
+"I can't see for the life of me why he should worry about this," said
+James with a piqued air. He was, in fact, considering quite naively that
+he was not a bad match, taking into consideration his prospects, and
+Clemency evidently needed all the protection she could get.
+
+Clemency understood directly what his tone implied. "Oh, goodness," said
+she, "of course, as far as you are concerned, Uncle Tom will be pleased.
+Why shouldn't he? and so will mother. Here you are young and handsome,
+and well educated, and good, what more could anybody want for a girl,
+unless they were on the lookout for a ducal coronet or something of that
+sort? It isn't that, only there is something queer, there must be
+something queer, about that man, and I don't know how much this might
+complicate it. I don't know but Uncle Tom might have more occasion to
+worry."
+
+"I don't see why," said James mystified, "but I'll wait a few days if
+you say so, only I hate to have anything underhanded, you know. How
+about your mother?"
+
+"Please wait and tell her when you tell Uncle Tom," pleaded Clemency.
+All the time she was completely deceiving the young man. What she was
+really afraid of was that James himself might run into danger from this
+mysterious persecutor of hers if the fact of her betrothal became known.
+"I shall not mind staying in the house at all now," she added. An
+expression came over her face which James did not understand, which no
+man would have understood. Clemency was wonderfully skilled at
+needle-work, and she had plenty of material in the house. She was
+reflecting innocently how she could begin at once upon some dainty
+little frills for her trousseau. A delight, purely feminine, filled her
+fair little face.
+
+"All the same," said James, "I am going to take you out before long. You
+must have some fresh air."
+
+"I don't mind," said Clemency, then she broke off suddenly. She ran to
+the farther end of the room, sat down, and snatched a book from the
+table and opened it in the middle, "It is Uncle Tom," she remarked.
+
+James laughed, crossed the room swiftly, kissed her, then went into the
+office to greet Doctor Gordon. Doctor Gordon stood by the office fire
+taking off his overcoat. He looked gloomier than usual. "Who is in
+there?" he asked, pointing to the living-room wall.
+
+"Your niece," answered James. He felt himself color, but the other man
+did not notice it.
+
+"Mrs. Ewing has gone to bed?"
+
+"Yes, went directly after you left."
+
+Doctor Gordon's face grew darker. He had tossed his coat over a chair,
+and stood staring absently at the table with its prismatic lights.
+
+"I know where he is," he said presently in a whisper.
+
+"You mean?"
+
+"Yes," said Doctor Gordon impatiently. "You know whom I mean. I saw him
+go in--well, no matter where."
+
+"I suspect that he has been hanging about here," said James.
+
+"What makes you think so?"
+
+"The dog barked and acted queer."
+
+"Dogs always did hate him," said Doctor Gordon, with a queer expression.
+Then he gave himself a shake. Here he said: "Let's have something hot
+and a smoke." He called to Emma to bring some hot water and sugar and
+lemons and glasses. Then he produced a bottle from a cabinet in the
+office, and himself brewed a sort of punch, the like of which James had
+never tasted before.
+
+"That's my own recipe," said Doctor Gordon, laughing. "Nobody knows what
+it is, not even Georgie K. But--" he hesitated a little, then he added
+laughing, "I have left it in my will for Georgie K. I made my will some
+little time ago."
+
+James felt it incumbent upon himself to say something about Doctor
+Gordon being still a young man comparatively, and healthy. To his
+sanguine young mind a will seemed ominous.
+
+"Well, I have not reached the allotted span," Gordon replied, "but
+healthier men than I have come to their end sooner than they expected,
+and I wanted to make sure of some things. I wanted especially to make
+sure that Clemency--Mrs. Ewing has relatives in the West, and--"
+
+James felt somewhat bewildered. He could not quite see what Gordon
+meant, but he took another sip of the golden, fragrant compound before
+him, and again remarked upon its excellence.
+
+"That makes me think," said Gordon, evidently glad himself to turn the
+conversation. "A sip of this will do poor little Clemency good. You say
+she is in the parlor."
+
+"Yes."
+
+Gordon opened the door and called Clemency, who came with a little
+reluctance. The girl was afraid of her uncle's eyes. She sidled into the
+office like a child who had done something wrong. She took her little
+glass of punch, and never looked at James or her uncle. James, too, did
+not look at her. He smoked, and almost turned his back upon her. Doctor
+Gordon looked from one to the other, and his face changed. Clemency
+slipped out as soon as she could, saying that she was tired. Then
+Gordon turned abruptly upon James. "There is something between you two,
+Clemency and you," he said in a brusque voice.
+
+James colored and hesitated.
+
+"Out with it," said Gordon peremptorily.
+
+"Clemency wished--" began James.
+
+"Wished you to keep it secret, of course. Well, she told me herself,
+poor little soul, the moment she came into the room."
+
+James sat still. He did not know what to do. Finally he said in a
+stammering voice that he hoped there would be no objection.
+
+"No objection certainly on my part or Mrs. Ewing, if Clemency has taken
+a fancy to you," replied Doctor Gordon. "But--" he hesitated a moment.
+"It is only fair to tell you that you yourself may later on entertain
+some very reasonable objection," Gordon said grimly.
+
+"It is impossible," James cried eagerly. "I have known her only a few
+weeks, but I feel as if it were a lifetime. Nothing can change me. And
+as for money, if you mean anything of that kind, I don't care if she
+hasn't a cent. I have my profession, and my father is well-to-do. Then,
+besides, I have a little that an aunt, my mother's sister, left me. I
+can support Clemency."
+
+"It is not that," Gordon said. "Clemency has--at least I think I can
+secure it to her--a little fortune of her own, and she will have
+something besides. I was not thinking of money at all."
+
+"Then there can be nothing," James said positively. His sense of
+embarrassment had passed. He beamed at the older man.
+
+"There can be something else. There is something else," Gordon said
+gloomily. "I don't know but I ought to tell you, but, the truth is, you
+know my theory with regard to secrecy. I don't doubt but you can hold
+your tongue, yet the whole affair is so dangerous, that I dare not, I
+cannot, tell you yet. I can only say this, that there does exist some
+obstacle to your marriage with my niece, and your engagement must be
+regarded by myself in a tentative light. If the time ever comes when you
+know all, and wish to withdraw, you can do so in my opinion with perfect
+honor. In the meantime you had better say nothing to any one outside.
+You had better not even tell Mrs. Ewing. I hope Clemency herself will
+not. Perhaps when she has had a few hours in which to collect herself,
+her face will not be quite so tell-tale."
+
+"Nothing whatever can change me," said James, with almost anger.
+
+Gordon shook his head. "I begin to think I may have done you a wrong
+having you come here at all," he said. "I suppose I ought to have
+thought of the possibility, but I have had so much on my mind."
+
+"You have done me the greatest good I ever had done me in my whole
+life," James said fervently.
+
+Gordon rose and shook the young man's hand. "As far as Clemency and I
+and Mrs. Ewing are concerned," he said, "nothing could have been better.
+Well, we will hope for the best, my boy." He clapped James on the
+shoulder and smiled, and James went to his room feeling dizzy with
+happiness and mystery, and a trifle so with the doctor's punch.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+The next morning James was awakened by loud voices coming from the
+vicinity of the stable. He had not slept very well, and now at dawn felt
+drowsy, but the voices would not let him sleep. He rose, dressed, and
+went out in the stable-yard. There he found Doctor Gordon, Aaron, and a
+strange man, small, and red-haired, and thin-faced, with shifty eyes,
+holding by the bridle a fine black horse.
+
+"Don't want to buy a horse with a bridle on," Doctor Gordon was saying
+as James appeared.
+
+"Do you think I'm the man to bear insults?" inquired the little
+red-haired man with fierceness.
+
+"Insult nothing. It is business," said Gordon.
+
+"That's so," Aaron said, chewing and eyeing the black horse and the
+red-haired man thoughtfully.
+
+"Well," said the little red-haired man with an air at once of injured
+innocence and ferocity, "if you want to know why I object to selling
+this horse without a bridle, come here, and I'll show you." Gordon and
+Aaron and James approached. The red-haired man slipped the bridle, and
+underneath it appeared a small sore. "There, that's the reason, and I'll
+tell you the truth," said the man defiantly. "Here I am trying to sell
+this darned critter; paid a cool hundred for him, and everybody says
+jest as you do, won't buy him with the bridle on. Then I takes off the
+bridle, and they sees this little bile, and there's an end to it. I
+suppose it's the same with you. Well, good day, gentlemen. You're losin'
+a darned good trade, but it ain't my fault. Here's an animal I paid a
+cool hundred for, and I'm offering him for ninety. I'm ten dollars out,
+besides my time."
+
+"Let me see that sore again," said Gordon. He slipped the bridle and
+examined the place carefully. Then he looked hard at the horse, which
+stood with great docility, although he held his head proudly. He was a
+fine beast, glossy black in color, and had a magnificent tail.
+
+"Make it eighty-five," said Gordon.
+
+"Couldn't think of it."
+
+"I don't know as I want the horse anyway," said Gordon.
+
+"I'll call it eighty-seven and a half," said the little red-haired man.
+
+Gordon stood still for a moment. Then he pulled out his wallet.
+"Eighty-six and call it square," he said.
+
+"All right," said the red-haired man. "It's a-givin' of him away, but
+I'm so darned tired of trampin' the country with him, that I'll call it
+eighty-six, and it's the biggest bargain you ever got in your life in
+the way of horse flesh. I wouldn't let him go at that figure, but my
+wife's sick, and I want to get home."
+
+The red-haired man carefully counted over the roll of bank-notes which
+Doctor Gordon gave him, although it seemed to James that he used some
+haste. He also thought that he was evidently anxious to be gone. He
+refused Gordon's offer of breakfast, saying that he had already had some
+at the hotel. Then he was gone, walking with uncommon speed for such a
+small man. Aaron, James, and Doctor Gordon stood contemplating the new
+purchase. James patted him. "He looks like a fine animal," he remarked.
+Aaron shifted his quid, and said with emphasis, "Want me to hitch up and
+bring that little red-haired cuss back?"
+
+"Why, what for?" asked Doctor Gordon. "I guess I have made a good trade,
+Aaron."
+
+"You mark my words, there's somethin' out," said Aaron dogmatically.
+
+"I guess you're wrong this time," said Doctor Gordon, laughing. "Come,
+Elliot, it is time for breakfast, and we have to drive to Wardville
+afterward for that fever case."
+
+James followed Gordon into the dining-room. Clemency said good morning
+almost rudely, then she hid her face behind the coffee-urn. Gordon
+glanced at her and smiled tenderly, but the girl did not see it. James
+never looked her way at all. She turned the coffee with apparent
+concentration. She did not dare look at either of the two men. She had
+never felt so disturbedly happy and so shy. She had not slept all night,
+she was so agitated with happiness, but this morning she showed no
+traces of sleeplessness. There was an unwonted color on her little fair
+face, and her blue eyes were like jewels under her drooping lids.
+
+They were nearly through breakfast when the door which led into the
+kitchen was abruptly thrown open, and Aaron stood there. In his hand he
+flourished dramatically a great streaming mass of black. "Told you so,"
+he observed with a certain triumph. The others stared at him.
+
+"What on earth is that?" asked Gordon.
+
+"That new horse's tail; it comes off," replied Aaron with brevity. Then
+he chewed.
+
+"Comes off?"
+
+Aaron nodded, still chewing.
+
+Gordon rose from the table saying something under his breath.
+
+"That ain't all," said Aaron, still with an air of sly triumph.
+
+"What else, for Heaven's sake?" cried Gordon.
+
+"Well, he cribs," replied Aaron laconically. Then he chewed.
+
+"That was why he didn't want to take the bridle off?"
+
+Aaron nodded.
+
+Gordon stood staring for a second, then he burst into a peal of
+laughter. "Bless me if I ever got so regularly done," said he. "Say,
+Aaron, that was a smart chap. He has talent, he has."
+
+"Aren't you going to try to find him?" asked James.
+
+"Well, we'll keep a lookout on the way to Wardville," said Gordon; "and,
+Aaron, you may as well put the chestnut in the old buggy and drive
+Stanbridge way, and see if you can get sight of him."
+
+"He's had a half-hour's start," said Aaron. "You might track a fox, but
+you can't him."
+
+"I guess you are about right," said Gordon, "but we'll do all we can.
+However, I think I'll try to get even with Sam Tucker. It's a good
+chance. I'll drive the new horse to Wardville. Aaron, you just tie that
+tail on again, and fasten it up so as to keep it out of the mud."
+
+Aaron grinned. "Goin' to get even for that white horse?"
+
+"I'm going to try it."
+
+Gordon was all interest. James regarded him as he had done so many times
+before with wonder. That such a man should have such powers of
+assimilation astounded him. He was actually as amused and interested in
+being done, as he called it, and in trying in his turn to wipe off some
+old score, as any countryman. He seemed, to the young man, to have
+little burrows like some desperate animal, into which he could dive, and
+be completely away from his enemies, and even from himself, when he
+chose.
+
+He hurriedly drank the remainder of his coffee, and was in his office
+getting his medicine-case ready. James lingered, in the hopes of
+getting a word and a kiss from Clemency. But the child, the moment her
+uncle went out, fled. It was odd. She wanted to stay and have a minute
+with James alone more than she had ever wanted anything, but it was for
+just that very reason that she ran away.
+
+James felt hurt. At that time, the mind of a girl, and its shy workings,
+were entirely beyond his comprehension. He saw no earthly reason why
+Clemency should have avoided him. He followed Gordon with rather a
+downcast face into the office, and begun assisting him with his
+medicines. Gordon himself was too full of interest in the horse trade to
+remark anything. At times he chuckled to himself. Now and then he would
+burst out anew in a great peal of laughter. "Hang it all! I don't like
+to be done any better than any other man, but that little red-haired
+scamp was clever and no mistake," he said, "showing me that little sore.
+I believe he had sandpapered the poor beast on purpose. He took me in as
+neatly as I ever saw anything done in my life. Well, Elliot, you wait
+and see me get even with Sam Tucker. I have been waiting my chance.
+About two years ago he worked me, and not half as cleverly as this
+either. He made me feel that I was a fool. The red-haired one needed the
+devil himself to get round him, and see through his little game. Sam
+Tucker sold me, or rather traded with me a veritable fiend of a horse
+for an old mare. The mare was old, but she had a lot of go in her, and
+was sound, and the other, well, Sam had bought him for a song, because
+nobody would drive him, and he had killed two men. He was a white horse
+with as wicked an eye as you ever saw, and ears always cocked for
+mischief, like the arch fiend's horns. Well, Sam, he made some kind of a
+dye, and he actually dyed that animal a beautiful chestnut, and traded
+him for my old mare. I even paid a little to boot. Well, next morning I
+sent Aaron down to the store in a soaking rain, and the horse bolted at
+a white rock beside the road, and the buggy was knocked into kindling
+wood. Aaron wasn't hurt. He always comes out right side up. But when he
+came leading that snorting, dancing beast home, the chestnut dye was
+pretty well off, and I knew him in a minute. Well, he was shot, and I
+was my old mare and some money out. I wasn't going to have men's lives
+on my conscience. But this is another matter. Now I've got my chance to
+get even, and I'm going to get my old mare back."
+
+Presently the two men were out on the road driving the black horse. He
+went well enough, and seemed afraid of nothing. "There's not much the
+matter with this animal except the tail and the cribbing, I guess," said
+the doctor. "As for the tail, that is simply a question of ornament and
+taste. The cribbing is more serious, of course, but I guess Sam Tucker
+won't be in any danger of his life." They had not gone far before the
+doctor drew up before a farmhouse on the left. A man with a serious
+face, thin and wiry, was coming around the house with a wheelbarrowful
+of potatoes. "Hullo, Sam!" called Doctor Gordon. The man left his barrow
+and came alongside. James could see that he had a keen eye upon the
+horse. "Fine morning," said the doctor.
+
+Sam Tucker gave a grunt by way of assent. He was niggardly with speech.
+
+"Have you got any more of those Baldwin apples to sell?" asked Doctor
+Gordon, to James's intense surprise.
+
+Sam Tucker looked reflectively at the doctor for a full minute, then
+gave utterance to a monosyllable. "Bar'l."
+
+"So you've got a barrel to sell," said Gordon.
+
+Sam nodded.
+
+"Well, I'll send my man over for them. They are mighty fine apples, and
+Emma said yesterday that we were about out. I suppose they are the same
+price."
+
+Sam nodded.
+
+"Seems as if you might take off a little, it is so late, and you might
+have them spoiling on your hands," said Gordon, and James began to
+wonder if they had come to drive a sharp bargain on apples instead of
+horses.
+
+Sam shook his head emphatically. "Same," he said.
+
+"Well, I suppose I've got to pay it if you ask it," said Gordon. "I
+can't buy any such apples elsewhere. You've got it your way. I'll send
+the money over by Aaron." Doctor Gordon gathered up the reins, but Sam
+Tucker seemed to experience a sudden convulsion all over his lank body.
+"Horse," he said.
+
+Doctor Gordon drove on a yard, but Sam, running alongside, he stopped.
+"Yes," he said placidly, "horse. What do you think of him?"
+
+Sam said nothing. He looked at the horse.
+
+"He's the biggest bargain I ever got," said Gordon. "I am going to hang
+on to him. Once in a while there is an honest deal in horses. I am not
+bringing up anything, Sam. I believe in letting bygones be bygones,
+although you did risk my life and my man's. But this time I am all
+right." Gordon gathered up the reins again, and again Sam Tucker stopped
+him. James barely saw the man's mouth move. He could not hear that he
+said anything, but a peculiar glow of eager greed lit up his long face,
+and Gordon seemed to understand him perfectly. "You can take your oath
+not," he said brusquely. "What do you take me for? You have stuck me
+once, and now you think you are going to do it again. You can bet your
+life you are not." Again he gathered up the reins. Sam Tucker's face
+gleamed like a coal. James saw for the first time in its entirety the
+trading instinct rampant. Again Gordon seemed to understand what had
+apparently not been spoken. "No, Sam Tucker," he declared almost
+brutally, "I will not trade back for that old mare you cheated me out
+of, not if you were to give me your whole farm to boot. I know that old
+mare. I wasn't the only one that got stuck. She's got the heaves. I know
+her. No, sir, you don't do me again. I've got a good horse this time,
+and I mean to hang on to him."
+
+Again Gordon attempted to drive on, and once more Sam stopped him. James
+felt at last fairly dizzy, when he heard the farmer almost beg Gordon to
+trade horses, offer him twenty-five dollars to boot, and the apples. He
+sat in the buggy watching while the mare was led out of the stable, the
+black horse was taken out of the traces, and the bridle was left on
+without a remonstrance on Sam's part, and exchanged for a much newer
+one, while twenty-five dollars in dirty bank-notes were carefully
+counted out by Sam, and then Gordon jumped into the buggy and drove off.
+He was quivering with suppressed mirth. "The biter is bitten this time,"
+he said as soon as he was out of hearing of Sam Tucker. Then he made an
+exclamation of dismay.
+
+"What's the matter?" asked James.
+
+"Well, I have left my whip. I must risk it and go back. I paid a lot for
+that whip."
+
+Gordon turned and drove back at a sharp trot. When they came alongside
+the farm fence James saw the whip lying on the ground, and jumped out to
+get it. He was back in the buggy, and they were just proceeding on
+their way, when there was a shout, and Sam Tucker came rushing around
+the house, and held the horse's tail as Aaron had done in the morning.
+"Comes off," he gasped.
+
+"Of course," said the doctor coolly. "I didn't say it didn't. It's for
+convenience in muddy weather."
+
+"Cribs," gasped Sam Tucker.
+
+"Yes, a little," said Gordon. "Keep him away from hitching-posts. You
+didn't say you wanted a horse to hitch. He never cribs when he's driven.
+Good-day, Sam."
+
+Gordon and James were off again. Gordon was doubled up with merriment,
+in which James joined. "I'm glad to get behind old Fanny once more,"
+said Gordon. "She's worth two of that other animal! Clemency will be
+glad to see her again. She felt badly when I traded her. In fact, I
+wouldn't have done it if I had known how much the child cared for the
+mare. She used to drive her a lot and pet her. I think it will be
+perfectly safe for you to take Clemency out driving when there isn't a
+moon. Fanny is pretty fast when she is touched with the whip, and,
+though she's gentle, she hasn't much use for strangers. I don't think
+she would stand a stranger at her head. I think you may go out to-night,
+if you like. Poor Clemency needs the air. We'll use the team this
+afternoon, and Fanny will be fresh by evening."
+
+James colored. He remembered how Clemency had avoided him that morning.
+"Perchance she won't care to go," he said.
+
+"Of course, she will," said Gordon. "She will go, and I want her to, but
+you must always bear in mind what I told you last night, and--" he
+hesitated. "Don't do your utmost to make the poor little thing think you
+are the moon and sun and stars in case you should change your mind," he
+finished.
+
+"I shall never change my mind," James said hotly.
+
+"You will be justified if you do," Gordon said gravely. "Perhaps you
+will not. But you are old enough, and ought to have self-command enough
+to keep your head, and shield the poor child against possible
+contingencies. You have not known each other very long. It is not
+possible that she would die of it now, nor you. If you can only keep
+your head, and meander along the path of love instead of plunging into
+bottomless depths, it will be better for both of you. I know what I am
+talking about. I am old enough to be your father. Go slow, for God's
+sake, if you care about the girl."
+
+"She is the whole world to me," said James.
+
+"Then, go slow! It will be better for her if you are not the whole world
+to her, until you know what a day may bring forth."
+
+"I don't care what a day brings forth."
+
+"You are tempting the gods?" said Gordon. "Elliot, you don't know what
+you are talking about. I am not treating you fairly not to tell you the
+whole story, but I don't see my way clear. You must bear in mind what I
+say. I did not think of any such complication when you came here. I was
+a fool not to. I know what young people are, and Clemency is a darling,
+and you have your good points. The amount of it is, if I don't get stuck
+by Sam Tucker in a horse trade, Fate sticks me in something bigger. I
+don't see the inevitable, I suppose, because I am so close to it that it
+is like facing the wall of a precipice all the time. We have to stop
+here. The woman's daughter is coming down with a fever, which will not
+kill her, and she will have it to brag of all her life. She will date
+all earthly events from this fever. Whoa, Fanny!"
+
+That evening James and Clemency went for a drive. It was a clear night,
+but dark, save for the stars. Clemency had a thick veil over her face,
+which seemed entirely unnecessary. Directly as they started, she made a
+little involuntary nestling motion toward the young man at her side. It
+was as innocent as the nestling of a baby. James put his arm around her.
+He thought with indignation of Doctor Gordon's warning, as if anything
+in the world could cause him to change his mind about this dear child
+who loved him. "You darling!" he whispered. "So you have not thought
+better of it."
+
+"What do you mean?" Clemency whispered back.
+
+"Why, dear, you have fairly run away from me all day long."
+
+"I was afraid," Clemency whispered, then she put her head against his
+shoulder, and laughed a delicious little laugh. "I never was in love
+before, and I don't know how to act," said she.
+
+"Put up your veil," said James.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I want a kiss."
+
+Clemency put up her veil obediently and kissed him like a child. Then
+there was a sudden flash of light from a lantern, and a dark form was
+at the mare's head. But she was true to her master's opinion of her. She
+gave a savage duck at the man and started violently, so that James was
+forced to release Clemency and devote his entire attention to driving.
+Clemency shrank close to him, shivering like one in a chill. "He saw
+me," she gasped. "It was that same man, and this time he saw me."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+James and Clemency had hardly started upon their drive before there was
+a ring at the office door, and Doctor Gordon, who was alone there,
+answered it. He was confronted by a man who lived half-way between Alton
+and the next village on the north. He had walked some three miles to get
+some medicine for his wife, who was suffering from rheumatism. He was
+pathetically insistent upon the fact that his wife did not require a
+call from the doctor, only some medicine. "Now, see here, Joe," said
+Gordon, "if I really thought your wife needed a call, I would go, and it
+should not cost you a cent more than the medicine, but I am dog tired,
+and not feeling any too well myself, and if her symptoms are just as you
+say, I think I can send her something which will fix her up all right."
+
+"She is just the way she was last year," said the man. He did not look
+unlike Gordon, although he was poorly clad, and was a genuine son of the
+New Jersey soil. His poor clothes, even his skin, had a clayey hue, as
+if he had been really cast from the mother earth. It was frozen outside,
+but a reddish crust from the last thaw was on his hulking boots. He
+spoke with a drawl, which was nasal, and yet had something sweet in it.
+"I would have came this afternoon, but I was afraid you might have went
+out," he remarked.
+
+"Yes, I was out," replied Gordon, who was filling out a prescription.
+The man stooped and patted the bull terrier, which had not evinced the
+slightest emotion at his entrance.
+
+"Mighty fine dog," said the man.
+
+"Yes, he is a pretty good sort," replied Gordon.
+
+"Shouldn't like to meet him if I had came up to your house an' no one
+round, and he had took a dislike to me."
+
+"I should not myself," said Gordon. "But he does not dislike you."
+
+"Dogs know me pooty well," said the man. "They ain't no particler likin'
+for me. Don't want to run and jump an' wag, but they know I mean well,
+and they mostly let me alone."
+
+"Yes, I guess that's so," said Gordon. "Jack would have barked if he had
+not known you were all right, Joe."
+
+"Queer how much they know," said the man reflectively, and a dazed look
+overspread his dingy face with its cloud of beard. If once he became
+launched upon a current of reflection, he lost his mental bearings
+instantly and drifted.
+
+"Well, they do know," said Gordon. "Now listen, Joe! You see this
+bottle. You give your wife a spoonful of the medicine in a glass of
+water every three hours. Mind, you make it a whole tumbler full of
+water."
+
+"Yes, sir," replied the man.
+
+"Of course, you need not wake her up if she gets to sleep," said the
+doctor, "but every three hours when she is awake."
+
+"Yes, sir." The man began fumbling in his pocket, but Gordon stopped
+him. "No," he said, "put up your pocketbook, Joe. I don't want any
+money. I get this medicine at wholesale, and it don't cost much."
+
+"I come prepared to pay," said the man. He straightened his shoulders
+and flushed.
+
+"Oh, well," said Doctor Gordon, "wait. If you need more medicine, or it
+seems necessary that I should drive over to see your wife, you can do a
+little work on my garden in the spring, or you can let me have a bushel
+of your new potatoes when they are grown next summer, or some apples,
+and we'll call it square. Wait; I don't want any money for that bottle
+of medicine to-night anyhow. Did you walk over, Joe?"
+
+Joe said that he had walked over. "Aaron might just as well drive you
+home as not," said Gordon. "The sooner your wife has that medicine the
+better. How is the baby getting along?"
+
+"First-rate. I'd just as soon walk, doctor."
+
+For answer Gordon opened the door and called Aaron, and told him to
+hitch up and take the man home.
+
+"Doctor Elliot has gone with the bay," said Aaron. "The teams are about
+played out, and there's nothin' except the gray."
+
+"Take her then."
+
+"She looked when I fed her jest now as if she was half a mind to balk at
+takin' her feed," Aaron remarked doubtfully.
+
+"Nonsense! Give her a loose rein, and she'll be all right."
+
+Aaron went out grumbling.
+
+Gordon offered the man a cigar, which he accepted as if it had been a
+diamond. "I'll save it up for next Sunday, when I've got a little time
+to sense it," he said. "I know what your cigars be."
+
+Gordon forced another upon him, and the man looked as pleased as a
+child.
+
+Presently a shout was heard, and Gordon opened the office door.
+
+"Here's Aaron with the buggy," he said.
+
+He stood in the doorway watching, but the gray, instead of balking, went
+out of the yard with an angry plunge. Gordon shook his head.
+
+"Confound him, he's pulling too hard on the lines," he muttered. Then he
+closed and locked the office door, and went into the living-room to find
+it deserted. Gordon called up the stairs. "Have you gone to bed, Clara?"
+His voice was at once tenderly solicitous and angry.
+
+Mrs. Ewing answered him from above, and in her tone was something
+propitiating. "Yes, Tom, dear," she called.
+
+Gordon hesitated a moment. His face took on its expression of utmost
+misery. "Is--the pain very bad?" he called then, and called as if he
+were in actual fear.
+
+"No, dear," the woman's patient, beseeching voice answered, "not very
+bad."
+
+"Not very?"
+
+"No, only I felt a little twinge, and thought I had better go to bed. I
+am quite comfortable now. I think I shall go to sleep. I am sorry to
+leave you alone all the evening, Tom."
+
+"That's right," called Gordon. His voice rang harsh, in spite of his
+effort to control it. He threw his arm over his eyes, and fairly groped
+his way back to his office, stifling his sobs. When he was in his office
+he flung himself into a chair, and bent his head over his hands on the
+table, and his whole frame shook. "Oh, my God!" he muttered. "Oh, my
+God!" He did not weep, but he gasped like a child whom his mother has
+commanded not to weep. Terrible emotion fairly convulsed him. He
+struggled with it as with a visible foe. At last he sat up and filled
+his pipe. The dog had crept close to him, and was nestling against him
+and whimpering. Gordon patted his head. The dog licked his hand.
+
+The simple, ignorant sympathy of this poor speechless thing nearly
+unnerved the man again, but he continued to smoke. He looked at the dog,
+whose honest brown eyes were fixed upon him with an almost uncanny
+understanding, and reflected how the woman upstairs, who was passing out
+of his life, had become in a few days so associated with the animal,
+that after she was gone he could never see him without a pang. He
+looked about the office, with whose belongings she was less associated
+than with anything in the house, and it seemed to him that everything
+even there would have for him, after she had passed, a terrible sting of
+reminiscence. It seemed to him, as he looked about, as if she were
+already gone. He was, in fact, suffering as keenly in anticipation as he
+would in reality. The horror, the worst horror of life, of being left
+alive with the dead and the associations of the dead was already upon
+him. Some people are comforted by such associations, others they rend.
+Gordon was one whom they would rend, whom they did rend. He made up his
+mind, as he sat there, that he would have to go away from Alton, and
+enter new scenes for the healing of his spirit, and yet he knew that he
+should not go: that at the last his courage would assert itself.
+
+He sat smoking, the dog's head on his knee. There was not a sound to be
+heard in the house. Emma, the maid, had gone away to visit a sick
+sister. She might not be back that night. So there was absolute silence,
+even in the kitchen. Suddenly the dog lifted his head and listened to
+something which Gordon could not himself hear. He watched the dog
+curiously. The dog gave a low growl of fear and rage, and made for the
+office door. He began scratching at the threshold, and emitted a perfect
+volley of barks. It did not sound like one dog, but a whole pack.
+Gordon, with an impulse which he could not understand, quickly put out
+the prism-fringed lamp which hung over his table. Then he sprang to the
+dog, and had the dog by the collar. "Be still, Jack," he said in a low
+voice, and the dog obeyed instantly, although he was quivering under his
+hand. Gordon could feel the muscles run like angry serpents under the
+smooth white hair, he felt the crest of rage along his back. But the
+animal was so well trained that he barked no more. He only growled very
+softly, as if to himself, and quivered.
+
+Gordon ordered him to charge in a whisper, and the dog stretched himself
+at his feet, although it was like the crouch of a live wire. Then Gordon
+rose and went softly to a window beside the door. The office had very
+heavy red curtains. It was impossible, since they were closely drawn,
+that a ray of light from within should have been visible outside. Gordon
+had reasoned it out quickly when he extinguished the lamp. Whoever was
+without would have had no possible means of knowing that anything except
+the dog was in the office, but the light once out, Gordon could peep
+around the curtain and ascertain, without being himself seen, what or
+who was about. He had a premonition of what he should see, and he saw
+it. The stable door was almost directly opposite that of the office.
+Between the two doors there was a driveway. On this driveway the only
+pale thing to be seen in the darkness was the tall, black figure of a
+man standing perfectly still, as if watching. His attitude was
+unmistakable. The long lines of him, upreared from the pale streak of
+the driveway, were as plainly to be read as a sign-post. They signified
+watchfulness. His back was toward the office. He stood face toward the
+curve of the drive toward the road, where any one entering would first
+be seen. Gordon, peeping around his curtain, knew the dark figure as he
+would have known his own shadow. In one sense it had been for years his
+shadow, and that added to the horror of it. The man behind the curtain
+watched, the man in the drive watched; and the dog, crouched at the
+threshold of the door, watched with what sublimated sense God alone
+knew, which enabled him to know as much as his master, and now and then
+came the low growl. Gordon began to formulate a theory in his mind. He
+remembered suddenly the man whom Aaron had driven home. He realized that
+the watching man might easily have mistaken him for Gordon himself,
+going away with his man to make a call upon some patient. He suspected,
+with an intensity which became a certainty, that the man knew that
+Clemency and Elliot were out and would presently return, and that it was
+for them he was watching. All the time he thought of the sick woman
+upstairs, and was glad that her room faced on the other side of the
+house. He was in agony lest she should be disturbed.
+
+Doctor Gordon was usually a man of resources, but now he did not know
+what to do. The dark figure on the park-drive made now and then a
+precautionary motion of his right arm as he watched, which was
+significant. Gordon knew that he was holding a revolver in readiness. In
+the event of Aaron returning alone he would probably be puzzled, and
+Gordon thought that he might slip away. In the event of James and
+Clemency returning first, Gordon thought that he knew conclusively what
+he purposed--a bullet for James, and then away with the girl, unless he
+was hindered.
+
+Gordon let the curtain slip back into place, and with a warning gesture
+to the dog, who was ready for action, he tiptoed across the room to the
+table, in a drawer of which he kept his own revolver. He opened the
+drawer softly, and rummaged with careful hands. No revolver was there.
+He made sure. He even opened other drawers and rummaged, but the weapon
+was certainly missing. He stood undecided for a moment. Then he went
+softly out of the room, bidding in a whisper the dog to follow. He crept
+upstairs and paused at a closed chamber door. Then he opened it very
+carefully. Mrs. Ewing at once spoke. "Is that you, dear?" she said.
+
+"Yes, I wanted to tell you not to be frightened, dear, if you should
+hear a shot or the dog bark."
+
+There was a rustling in the dark room. Mrs. Ewing was evidently sitting
+up in bed. "Oh, Tom, what is it?" she whispered.
+
+Gordon forced a laugh. "Nothing at all," he replied, "except there's a
+fox or something out in the yard, and Jack is wild. I may get a shot at
+him. Do you know where my revolver is?"
+
+"Why, where you always keep it, dear, in the table drawer in the
+office."
+
+"I don't seem to see it. I guess I will take your little pistol."
+
+"Oh, Tom, I am sorry, but I know that won't go off. Clemency tried it
+the other day. You remember that time Emma dropped it. I think something
+or other got bent. You know it was a delicate little thing."
+
+"Oh, well," said Gordon carelessly, "I dare say I can find my revolver."
+
+"I don't see who could have taken it away." said Mrs. Ewing. "I am sorry
+about my pistol, because you gave it to me too, dear."
+
+"I'll get another for you," said Gordon, "Those little dainty,
+lady-like, pearl-mounted weapons don't stand much."
+
+"I am feeling very comfortable, dear," Mrs. Ewing said in her anxious,
+sweet voice. "You will be careful, won't you, with your revolver, with
+that dog jumping about?"
+
+"Yes, dear. I dare say I shall not use the revolver anyway, but don't be
+frightened if you should hear a little commotion."
+
+"No, Tom."
+
+"Go to sleep."
+
+"Yes, I think I can. I do feel rather sleepy."
+
+Gordon closed the door carefully and retraced his steps to the office,
+the dog at his heels. He slipped the curtain again and looked out. The
+man still stood watching in the driveway. Gordon had never been at such
+a loss as to his best course of action. He was absolutely courageous,
+but here he was unarmed, and he could have no reasonable doubt that if
+he should go out, he would be immediately shot. In such a case, what of
+the woman upstairs? And, moreover, what of James and Clemency? He
+thought of any available weapon, but there was nothing except his own
+stick. That was stout, it was true, but could he be quick enough with
+it? His mad impulse to rush out unarmed except with that paltry thing
+could hardly be restrained, but he had to think of other lives beside
+his own.
+
+He began to think that the only solution of the matter was the return of
+Aaron alone. The watching man would immediately realize that he had made
+some mistake, that he, Gordon, was in the house, or had been left at the
+home of a patient. He could have no possible reason for molesting the
+man. He would probably slip aside into a shadow, then make his way back
+to the road. In such a case Gordon determined that he and Aaron would
+follow him to make sure that no harm came to James and Clemency. So
+Gordon stood motionless waiting, in absolute silence, except for the
+frequently recurring mutter of fear and rage of the dog. As time went on
+he became more and more uneasy. It seemed to him finally that Aaron
+should have been back long before. He moved stealthily across the room,
+and consulted his watch by the low light of the hearth fire. Aaron had
+been gone an hour. He should have returned, for the mare was a good
+roadster when she did not balk. Gordon shook his head. He began to be
+almost sure that the mare had balked. He returned to the window. His
+every nerve was on the alert. The moment that James and Clemency should
+drive into the yard, he made ready to spring, but the horrible fear lest
+it should be entirely unavailing haunted him. If only Aaron would come.
+Then the man would slip into cover of the shadows, and steal out into
+the road, and Gordon would jump into the buggy, and he and Aaron would
+follow him. He knew the man well enough to be sure that he would never
+venture an attack upon James and Clemency with witnesses. If only Aaron
+would come! Gordon became surer that the mare had balked. He vowed
+within himself that she should be shot the next day if she had. Every
+moment he thought he heard the sound of wheels and horse's hoofs. His
+nervous tension became something terrible. Once he thought of stealing
+through the house, and out by the front door, and walking to meet James
+and Clemency so as to warn them. But that would leave the helpless woman
+upstairs alone. He dared not do that.
+
+He thought then of going to the front of the house, and watching there,
+and endeavoring to intercept James and Clemency before they turned into
+the driveway. But he felt that he could not for one second relax his
+watch upon the watching man, and he had no guarantee whatever that, at
+the first sound of wheels, the man himself would not make for the front
+of the house. Then he thought, as always, of not disturbing the sick
+woman whose room faced the road. It seemed to him that his only course
+was to remain where he was and wait for the return of Aaron before James
+and Clemency. He knew now that the horse must have balked. His only hope
+was that James and Clemency, since it was such a fine night, and time
+is so short for lovers, might take such a long drive that even the balky
+mare might relent. Always he heard at intervals the trot of a horse,
+which only existed in his imagination. He began to wonder if he should
+know when Aaron, or Clemency and James, actually did drive into the
+yard, if he should be quick enough. Suddenly he thought of the dog: that
+he would follow him, and of what might happen. The dog's chain-leash was
+on the table. He stole across, got it, fastened it to the animal's
+collar, and made the end secure to a staple which he had had fixed in
+the wall for that purpose. As yet no intention of injury to the man
+except in self-defense was in his mind. If actually attacked, he must
+defend himself, of course, but he wished more than anything to drive the
+intruder away with no collision. That was what he hoped for. The time
+went on, and the strain upon the doctor's nerves was nearly driving him
+mad. Sometimes the mare balked for hours. He began to hope that Aaron
+would leave her, and return home on foot. That would settle the matter.
+But he remembered a strange trait of obstinacy in Aaron. He remembered
+how he had once actually sat all night in the buggy while the mare
+balked. The man balked as well as the horse. "The damned fool," he
+muttered to himself in an agony. The dog growled in response. Then it
+was that first the thought came to Gordon of what might be done to save
+them all. He stood aghast with the horror of it. He was essentially a
+man of peace himself, unless driven to the wall. He was a good fighter
+at bay, but there was in his heart, along with strength, utter good-will
+and gentleness toward all his kind. He only wished to go his way in
+peace, and for those whom he loved to go in peace, but that had been
+denied him. He began considering the nature of the man whose dark figure
+remained motionless on the driveway. He knew him from the first. It
+sounded sensational, his recapitulation of his knowledge, but it was
+entirely true. It was that awful truth, which is past human belief,
+which no man dares put into fiction. That man out there had been from
+his birth a distinct power for evil upon the face of the earth. He had
+menaced all creation, so far as one personality may menace it. He was a
+force of ill, a moral and spiritual monster, and the more dangerous,
+because of a subtlety and resource which had kept him immune from the
+law. He outstripped the law, whose blood-hounds had no scent keen enough
+for him. He had broken the law, but always in such a way that there was
+not, and never could be, any proof. There had not been even suspicion.
+There had been knowledge on Gordon's part, and Mrs. Swing's, but
+knowledge without proof is more helpless than suspicion with it. The man
+was unassailable, free to go his way, working evil.
+
+Again Gordon thought he heard the nearing trot of a horse, and again the
+dog growled. Gordon was not quite sure that time that a horse had not
+passed the house. He told himself in despair that he could not be sure
+of knowing when James and Clemency came, and again the awful thought
+seized him, and again he reflected upon the man outside. Suppose,
+instead of wearing the semblance of humanity, he had worn the semblance
+of a beast, then his course would have been clear enough. Suppose it
+were a hungry wolf watching out there, instead of a man, and this man
+was worse than any wolf. He was like the weir-wolf of the old
+Scandinavian legend. He had all the cowardly cruelty of a wolf, he was a
+means of evil, but he had the trained brain of a man.
+
+Gordon thought he heard footsteps, and the man made a very slight
+motion. Gordon thought joyfully that Aaron had left the balky mare, and
+had returned, but it was not so. He had heard nothing except the
+pulsations of the blood in his own overwrought brain.
+
+He wondered if he were really going mad, although all the time his mind
+was steadily at work upon the awful problem which had been forced upon
+it. Should any power for evil be allowed to exist upon the earth if
+mortal man had strength to stamp it out? Suppose that was a poisonous
+snake out there, and not a man. What was out there was worse than any
+snake. Gordon reasoned as the first man in Eden may have reasoned; and
+he did not know whether his reasoning were right or wrong. Meantime, the
+danger increased every moment. Of one thing he was perfectly sure: he
+had no personal motive for what he might or might not do. He had reached
+that pass when he was himself, as far as he himself was concerned,
+beyond hate of that man outside. It was a principle for which he argued.
+Should a monster, something abnormal in strength and subtlety and
+wickedness, something which menaced all the good in the world, be
+allowed to exist? Gordon argued that it should not. He was driven to it
+by years of fruitless struggling against this monstrous creation in the
+shape of man. He had seen such suffering because of him; his whole life
+had been so turned and twisted this way and that way because of him,
+that he himself had in the end become abnormal, and mentally askew, with
+the system of things. He was conscious of it himself. He had been
+naturally a good, simple, broad-visioned man, full of charity, with
+almost no subtlety. He had been forced to lead a life which strained and
+diverted all these good traits. Where he would have been open, he had
+been secret. Where he would have had no suspicion of any one, his first
+sight now seemed to be for ulterior motives. He weighed and measured
+where he naturally would have scattered broadcast. He had been obliged
+to compress his broad vision into a narrow window of detection. He was
+not the man he had been. Where he had gazed out of wide doors and
+windows at life, he now gazed through keyholes, and despised himself for
+so doing. In order to evade the trouble which had fallen to his lot, he
+took refuge in another personality. Thomas Gordon was a man whom a
+happy and untroubled life would have kept from all worldly blemish. Now
+the gold was tarnished, and he himself always saw the tarnish, as one
+sees a blur before the eye. Twenty years before, if any one had told him
+that he would at any period of his life become capable of standing and
+arguing with himself as to the right or wrong of what was now in his
+mind, he would have been incredulous. He had in reality become another
+man. Circumstances had evolved him, during the course of twenty years,
+into something different, as persistent winds evolve a pliant tree into
+another than its typical shape. Gordon had lost his type.
+
+As he stood at the window the room grew cold. The hearth fire had died
+down. He knew that the furnace needed attention, but he dared not quit
+his post and his argument. He became sure that the maid would not return
+that night. He knew that Aaron was sitting with his human obstinacy
+behind the obstinate brute, somewhere on the road. He knew that James
+and Clemency might at any moment drive in, and he might rush out too
+late to prevent murder and the kidnapping of the girl. He knew what the
+man was there for. And he knew the one way to thwart him, but it was so
+horrible a way that it needed all this argument, all this delay and
+nearing of danger, before he adopted it.
+
+The increasing cold of the room seemed to act as a sort of physical goad
+toward action. "By God, it _is_ right!" he muttered. Then he looked at
+the dog crouching still with that wiry intentness before the door. The
+dog came of a good breed of fighters. He was in himself both weapon and
+wielder of weapon. He was a concentrated force. His white body was
+knotted with nerves and muscles. The chances were good if--Gordon
+pictured it to himself--and again the horror and doubt were over him. He
+himself had acquired a certain stiffness and lassitude from years, and
+long drives in one position. He would stand no chance unarmed against a
+bullet. But the dog--that was another matter. The dog would make a
+spring like the spring of death itself, and that white leap of attack
+might easily cause the aim to go wrong. It would be like aiming at
+lightning. He knew how the dog would gather himself together, all ready
+for that terrible leap, the second he opened the door. He knew that he
+might be able to open the door for the leap without attracting the
+man's attention, faced as he was the other way, if he could keep the dog
+quiet. He knew how it would be. He could see that tall dark figure
+rolled on the drive, struggling as one struggles with death, for breath,
+under the vise-like grip on his throat. Gordon knew that the dog's
+unerring spring would be for the throat; that was the instinct of his
+race, a noble race in its way, to seize vice and danger by the throat,
+and attack the very threshold of life.
+
+Gordon returned to the window. It seemed to him again that he heard a
+horse's trot. He felt sure that it was not the trot of the gray, who had
+a slight lameness. He knew the trot of the gray. He became sure that
+James and Clemency would the next moment enter the drive. He set his
+mouth hard, crept toward the dog, and patted him. As he patted him he
+felt the rage-crest rise higher on his back. Gordon bade him be quiet,
+and slipped his leash from the staple. Then he took it from the collar.
+He listened again. It seemed to him that his ears could not deceive him.
+It seemed to him that James and Clemency were coming. He was almost
+delirious. He fancied he heard their voices and the girl's laugh ring
+out. Holding the dog firmly by the collar, he rose and very carefully
+and noiselessly slipped the bolt of the door back. Then he waited a
+second. Then as slowly and carefully, still holding the dog by the
+collar, and whispering commands to hush his growls, he turned the door
+knob.
+
+[Illustration: "There was a white flash of avenging brute force upon the
+man." Page 177.]
+
+Then the thing was done. He flung the door open. He saw the man in the
+drive, standing with his face toward the road. He had heard nothing.
+Then he loosened his grasp of the straining dog's collar, and there was
+a white flash of avenging brute force upon the man. Gordon saw only one
+leap of the dog before the man was down. A futile pistol shot rang out.
+Then came the snarl and growl of a fighting dog fastened upon his prey.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+When Clemency and James returned from their drive, they saw a glimmer of
+light between the house and stable. "Aaron is out there with a lantern,"
+whispered Clemency. She sat up straight, leaned into her corner of the
+buggy, and adjusted her hat and straightened her hair with the pretty
+young girl motions of secrecy and modesty.
+
+James peered ahead into the darkness through which the lantern moved
+like a will-o'-the-wisp. "Your uncle is here, too," he said. Then he
+drew rein with a sudden, "Halloo, what is wrong?" Aaron came forward,
+leaving the lantern on the ground. It lit weirdly Dr. Gordon, who was
+kneeling on the ground beside a dark mass, which looked horribly
+suggestive. Then James saw another dark mass to the right, the balky
+mare and a buggy.
+
+"Doctor Gordon says you had better hitch to this post here," said Aaron
+in a sort of hoarse whisper, "and then come to him. He says he needs
+help, and Miss Clemency, he says, must go around the house and in the
+front door, and be careful not to let the dog out, but go upstairs, and
+if her mother is awake, tell her it ain't anything for her to fret
+about, and Doctor Gordon will be in very soon."
+
+"Oh, Aaron, what is the matter?" said Clemency, in a frightened whisper,
+as James sprang out of the buggy.
+
+"It ain't nothin'," replied Aaron doggedly. "Jest a man fell coming to
+the office. Reckon he had a jag on. Doctor says he may have broke a rib.
+He's doctorin' him. You jest run round the house, and in the front door,
+Miss Clemency, and don't let out the dog, an' see to your ma."
+
+James assisted Clemency out, and she fled, with a wild glance over her
+shoulder at the lantern-lit group in front of the office door. While
+Aaron tied the horse to the post James ran to Doctor Gordon. When he
+drew nearer the sight became sanguinary in its details, and he could
+hear from the office the raging growls and howls of the dog. He also
+heard him leap against the door, as if he would break it down. Gordon
+had a pail of water and a basin beside him, and he was applying water
+vigorously to the throat of the prostrate figure. The water in the
+basin gleamed, in the lantern light, blood red. "Just empty this basin
+and fill it up from the pail," ordered Gordon in a husky voice, and
+again he squeezed the reddened cloth over the throat, which James now
+discerned was badly torn. The man lay doubled up upon himself as limp as
+a rag.
+
+"No, I don't think so," replied Gordon, as if in answer to an unspoken
+question, as James, having complied with his request, drew near with the
+basin of fresh water.
+
+"Was it the dog?" asked James in a low voice.
+
+"Yes, the fool came round to the office door, and--" Gordon stopped with
+a miserable sigh which was almost a groan, and dipped the cloth in the
+basin.
+
+"How did you get him off?" asked James.
+
+"I had the whip, and Aaron came in just then with that damned mare. She
+had balked. I don't think it is the jugular. It can't be. Damn it, how
+he bleeds! Run into the office, Elliot, and get the absorbent cotton and
+the brandy. I've got to stop this somehow. Oh, my God!"
+
+James suddenly recognized the man on the ground, and gave an exclamation
+which Gordon did not seem to notice. "For God's sake, don't let that
+dog out!" he cried. "Don't risk the office door. Go around the house,
+the front way! Be quick!"
+
+James obeyed. He rushed around the house, and opened the front door.
+Immediately Clemency was clinging to him in the dim vestibule. "Mother
+is asleep. I think Uncle Tom must have given her some medicine to make
+her sleep. Oh, what is the matter? Who is that man out there, and what
+ails him, and what ails the dog? I started to go in the office, but he
+leapt against the door, so I didn't. I was afraid he might get out and
+run upstairs and wake mother. Oh, what is it all about?"
+
+"Nothing for you to worry about, dear," replied James. "Now you must be
+a good little girl, and let me go. Your uncle is in a hurry for some
+things in the office." He put away her clinging arms gently, and hurried
+on toward the office, but the girl followed him. "If I don't stand ready
+to shut the door behind you, that dog will be out," she said. All at
+once a conviction as to something seized her, and she cried out in
+terror and horror, "Oh, I know it is that man out there, and Jack wants
+to get at him. I know."
+
+"It is nothing for you to worry about, dear."
+
+"I know. Is he going to die? Is he hurt much?"
+
+"No, your uncle doesn't think so. Don't hinder me, dear."
+
+"No, I won't. I will stand ready and bang the door together after you
+before Jack can get out. Oh, it is that man!" Clemency was
+half-hysterical, but she stood her ground. When James opened the office
+door cautiously and slipped through the opening, she pushed it together
+with surprising strength. "Don't get bitten yourself," she called out
+anxiously.
+
+For a moment James thought that he might be bitten, for the dog was so
+frenzied that he was almost past the point of recognizing his friends.
+He made a powerful leap upon James, the crest upon his back as rigid as
+steel, but James snatched at his collar, threw him, and spoke, and the
+well-trained animal succumbed before his voice. "Charge!" thundered the
+young man, and the dog obeyed, although still bristling and growling.
+James hurriedly caught up his leash and fastened him to the staple, then
+he opened the inner office door, and spoke quickly and reassuringly to
+Clemency, who was huddled behind it shaking with fear. "He is all
+right. I have fastened him," he said. "Don't worry. Now I must go and
+help your uncle."
+
+"He didn't bite you?"
+
+"Oh, no, he knew me the minute I spoke. Sit down here by the fire and
+don't be frightened; that's a good little girl."
+
+With that James was out by the other door and in the drive beside
+Gordon, who was still assiduously applying water to the red throat of
+the prostrate man. "It is beginning to slack up a little," he said
+hoarsely. "Here, give me the cotton, and see if you can't get a drop of
+brandy between his teeth. They are clinched, but just now he moved a
+little. He may be able to swallow. Aaron, put the team into the wagon,
+and get a mattress and some blankets from the storeroom. Hurry, he may
+come to himself any minute, and he must not stay here any longer than
+necessary." Gordon was working fiercely as he spoke, and James took the
+cork from the brandy flask, and attempted to force a little between the
+man's clinched teeth. Aaron hurried into the stable and lit another
+lantern, and went about executing his orders. James, kneeling over the
+prostrate man, attempting to minister to him, saw the face fully in the
+glare of the lantern. The unconscious face did not look as evil as he
+remembered it. He even had a doubt if it were the face of the man who
+had that evening stood at his horse's head, and so terrified Clemency.
+Then he became convinced that it was the same. There could be no
+mistaking the features, which were unusually regular and handsome, but
+with a strange peculiarity of lines. It seemed to James that, even while
+the man was unconscious, all his features presented slightly upturned
+lines as of bitter derision, intersected with downward lines of
+melancholy. All these lines were very delicate, but they served to give
+expression. He looked like a man who had suffered and made others suffer
+for his sufferings, with a cruel enjoyment at the spectacle. It was a
+strange face, but not an evil one. However, after James had succeeded in
+forcing a few drops of brandy, which were met with convulsive
+swallowing, between the man's teeth, he moved again, and his eyes
+opened, and immediately the evil shone out of the face like a malignant
+flame in a lamp. Knowledge of, and delight in, evil gleamed out of the
+sudden brightness of the man's great eyes. Then the evil seemed to leap
+to rage, as a spark leaps to flame. He tried to raise himself, and
+cursed in a choking voice. He seemed awake most fully to consciousness,
+and to know exactly what had happened. The dog in the office sent forth
+a perfect volley of barks. The man had been obliged to sink back, but
+his right hand fumbled feebly for his pocket.
+
+"It is not there," Gordon said coolly.
+
+"Shoot him, you--or--" croaked the man in his voice of unnatural rage.
+
+"Time enough for that," said Gordon. He spoke coolly, but James saw him
+shaking as if with the ague. He was deadly white, and his whole face
+looked drawn and withered. Aaron came leading the team harnessed to the
+wagon out of the stable. He had brought down the mattress and blankets,
+as the doctor had directed, and the three men after the rude bed had
+been made in the wagon lifted the man thereon. He seemed to be
+conscious, but his muttering was so weak as to be almost inaudible, save
+for occasional words.
+
+After he was in the wagon Gordon, turning to James, said: "You had
+better go in the house and stay with the women. Aaron will go with me. I
+shall take this man to the hotel, to Georgie K.'s."
+
+A perfect volley of mumbled remonstrances came from the prostrate figure
+in the wagon. Gordon seemed to understand him. "No, I shall not take you
+there," he said, "but to the hotel. You will be better cared for. I know
+the proprietor."
+
+He got in beside the man, and seated himself on the floor of the wagon.
+Aaron mounted to the driver's seat.
+
+"Tell Clemency and her mother not to worry if they are awake," Gordon
+called to James as the horses started.
+
+James said yes and went into the house. He entered through the office
+door, and directly Clemency was in his arms, all trembling and
+half-weeping. "Oh, what has happened? Has Uncle Tom taken him away?" she
+quavered.
+
+"Hush, dear, you will wake your mother. Yes, he has taken him away."
+
+"What was the matter, tell me."
+
+"He was unconscious. He had fallen."
+
+"He came to. I heard him speak. Were any bones broken?"
+
+"No, I think not. You must go to bed; it it very late, dear."
+
+Clemency had put fresh wood on the hearth, and the little place was all
+a-waver and a-flicker with firelight. Grotesque shadows danced over the
+walls and ceiling, and sprawled uncertainly on the floor. Clemency
+looked up in James's face, and her own had a shocked whiteness and
+horror, in spite of the tenderness in his. "Tell--" she began.
+
+"What, dear?"
+
+"Was it--that man?"
+
+James hesitated.
+
+"Tell me," Clemency said imperiously.
+
+"Yes, I think it was."
+
+Clemency glanced as if instinctively at the dog, lying asleep in a white
+coil on the hearth. "What was the matter with him?" she asked in a
+hardly audible voice.
+
+"He had fallen, dear, and was unconscious."
+
+"Nothing--" Clemency glanced again at the dog, and did not complete her
+question.
+
+"He had recovered consciousness," James said hastily.
+
+"Then he is not going to die." It was impossible to say what kind of
+relief was in the girl's voice, but relief there was.
+
+"I see no reason why he should. I don't think your uncle thought he
+would die."
+
+"Where have they taken him?"
+
+"To the hotel. Now, Clemency dear, you must put all this out of your
+mind and go to bed."
+
+Clemency obeyed like a child. She kissed James, took a candle, and went
+upstairs.
+
+James went into his own room, but he did not undress or go to bed.
+Instead, he sat at the window facing the street and stared into the
+darkness, watching for Doctor Gordon's return. He sat there for nearly
+two hours, then he heard wheels, and saw the dark mass of the team and
+wagon lumber into sight. He ran through the house, and was in the drive
+with a lantern when the team entered. "Have you been waiting for us,
+Elliot?" called Doctor Gordon's tired voice.
+
+"Yes, I thought I would."
+
+"I stayed until I was sure he was comfortable," said Gordon. He
+clambered over the wheel of the wagon like an old man. When he was in
+the office with James, and the lamp was lit, he sank into a chair, and
+looked at the younger man with an expression almost of despair.
+
+"He is not going to die of it?" asked James hesitatingly.
+
+"No," cried Gordon, "he shall not!" He looked up with sudden, fierce
+resolution and alertness. "Why should he die?" he demanded. "He is far
+from being old or feeble. His vitals are not touched. Why on earth
+should you think he would die?"
+
+"I see no reason," James replied hastily, "only--"
+
+"Only what, for God's sake?"
+
+"I thought you looked discouraged."
+
+"Well, I am, and tired of the world, but this man is going to live. See
+here, boy, suppose you see if there is any hot water in the kitchen, and
+we'll have something to drink, then we will go to bed, and God grant we
+don't have a night call."
+
+After Gordon had drank his face lightened somewhat, still he looked
+years older than he had done at dinner time, with that awful aging of
+the soul, which sometimes comes in an instant. When finally he went
+upstairs James noticed how feebly he moved. It was on his tongue's end
+to offer to assist him, but he did not dare.
+
+The next morning, before James was up, he heard the rapid trot of a
+horse on the drive, and wondered if Doctor Gordon had had a call so
+early. When the breakfast-bell rang only Clemency was at the table. The
+maid had returned in season to get breakfast, and was waiting with a
+severely interrogative face.
+
+She had noticed blood on the frozen surface of the drive and had stood
+surveying it before she entered. She had asked Clemency if anything had
+happened, and the girl had told her that a man had fallen near the
+office door on the preceding evening and been injured, and Doctor Gordon
+had taken him home.
+
+"What's the man's name?" Emma had inquired sharply.
+
+"I don't know," said Clemency, and indeed she did not know, but there
+was something secretive in her manner. Emma set her mouth hard and
+tossed her head. Curiosity was almost a lust with her. She was always
+enraged when it was excited and not gratified.
+
+When James entered, she glanced severely at him and then at Clemency, as
+she passed the muffins. She suspected something between them, and she
+was baffled there.
+
+"Has Doctor Gordon gone out?" James asked.
+
+"Yes, he went right out as soon as he got up. Just had a cup of coffee;
+wouldn't wait for breakfast," replied Emma in a nipping tone.
+
+Neither Clemency nor James made any comment. Both knew where he had
+gone, and Emma, seeing that they both knew, grew more hostile than
+ever. Her manner of serving the beefsteak was fairly warlike.
+
+After breakfast Aaron told James of some parting instructions which
+Gordon had left with him. He had the team harnessed, and was to take
+James to visit certain patients.
+
+James went off on a long drive across the country, calling on his way at
+the scattered houses of the patients. He did not return until noon, just
+before the luncheon-bell rang. Entering by the office door he found
+Gordon sitting before the hearth-fire, smoking, and staring gloomily at
+the leaping flames. He looked up when James entered, said good morning
+in an abstracted fashion, and asked some questions about the patients
+whom he had visited. James hesitated about inquiring for the man who had
+been injured the night before, but finally he did so. The dog had sprung
+up to greet him, and between his pats on the white head and commands of
+"Down, sir, down!" he asked as casually as he could if Gordon had seen
+his patient who had fallen in the drive the night before, and how he
+was. Gordon turned upon James a face of such fierce misery that the
+younger man fairly recoiled. "He isn't going to die?" he cried.
+
+"No, he is not going to die. He shall not die!" Gordon replied with
+passionate emphasis. Then he added, in response to James's wondering,
+half-frightened look, "I have been there all the morning. I have just
+come home. I have left everything for him. I don't dare get a nurse. I
+am afraid. He may talk a good deal. Georgie K. is with him now. I can
+trust him, but I can't trust a nurse. I am going back after luncheon,
+and you may go with me. I would like you to see him."
+
+"Does he seem to be very ill?" James asked timidly.
+
+"Not from the--the--wound," replied Gordon, "but I am afraid of
+something else."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Erysipelas. I am afraid of that setting in. In fact, I am not
+altogether sure that it has not. He is an erysipelas subject. He has
+told me of two severe attacks which he has had. When he fell he got an
+abrasion of the cheek. That looks worse than the--the--wound. I should
+like you to see him. You have seen erysipelas cases, of course, in your
+hospital practice."
+
+"Oh, yes."
+
+"There is the bell for luncheon. We will go directly afterward."
+
+James wondered within himself at the feverish haste with which Gordon
+swallowed his luncheon, frequently looking at his watch. He was actually
+showing more anxiety over this man who had hounded him, of whom he had
+lived in dread, than James had seen him show over any patient since he
+had been with him. It seemed to him inconsistent. Mrs. Ewing did not
+come down to luncheon; Clemency said that she was not feeling as well as
+usual but Gordon did not seem much disturbed even by that. He gave
+Clemency some powders, with instructions how to administer them to the
+sick woman before he left, but he did not show concern, and did not go
+upstairs to see her. Clemency herself looked pale and anxious.
+
+She found a chance to whisper to James before he went. "Is that man very
+much hurt?" she said close to his ear.
+
+"Hush, dear. I am afraid so."
+
+"Uncle Tom seems terribly worried. I have never seen him so worried even
+over mother, and he doesn't seem worried about her now. Oh, James, she
+is suffering frightfully, I know." Clemency gave a little sob. Then
+Gordon's voice was heard calling imperiously, "Elliot, come along!"
+James kissed the poor little face tenderly, and whispered that she must
+not worry, that probably the powders would relieve her mother, and then
+that she herself had better lie down and try to get a little sleep, and
+hurried out.
+
+Gordon was seated in the buggy, waiting for him. "I don't want to lose
+any time," he said brusquely as James got in beside him. "Even a few
+minutes sometimes work awful changes in a case like this. If he is no
+worse I will leave you with him, and make a call on Mrs. Wells. I
+haven't seen her to-day, and yesterday it looked like pneumonia, then
+there is that child with diphtheria at the Atwaters'. I ought to go
+there myself, but if he is worse you will have to go, and to a few
+others, and I must stay with him."
+
+Gordon drove furiously. Heads appeared at windows; people on the street
+turned faces of wonder and alarm after him. It was soon noised about
+Alton that there had been a terrible accident, that somebody was at the
+point of death, but of that Gordon and James knew nothing.
+
+When they arrived at the hotel, Gordon, after he had tied his horse,
+took his medicine-case, and, followed by James, entered, and went
+directly upstairs to a large room at the back of the hotel. This room
+was somewhat isolated in position, having a corridor on one side and
+linen closets on another, it being a corner apartment with two outer
+walls. Gordon opened the door softly and entered with James behind him.
+The bed stood between the two west windows. It was a northwest room. The
+afternoon sun had not yet reached it. It was furnished after the usual
+fashion of country hotel bedrooms. It was clean and sparse, and the
+furniture had the air of having a past, of having witnessed almost
+everything which occurs to humanity. It seemed battered and stained,
+though not with wear, but with humanity. The old-fashioned black walnut
+bedstead in which the sick man lay seemed to have a thousand voices of
+experiences. A great piece was broken off one corner of the footboard.
+The wound in the wood looked sinister. Directly opposite the bed stood
+the black walnut bureau, with its swung glass. The glass was cracked
+diagonally, and reflected the bed and its occupant with an air of
+experience. Gordon went directly to his patient. Beside him sat Georgie
+K. He looked at the two doctors and shook his head gravely. His great
+blond face was unshaven and paled with watching. Nobody spoke a word.
+All three looked at the man in the bed, who lay either asleep, or
+feigning sleep, or in a stupor. Gordon felt for his pulse softly, with
+keen eyes upon his face. This face was unspeakably ghastly. The throat
+was swathed in bandages. There was one tiny spot of red on the white of
+the linen. The man's eyes were rolled upward. Around an abrasion on the
+cheek, which glistened oily with some unguent which had been applied to
+it, was a circle of painful red clearly defined from the pallor of the
+rest of the cheek.
+
+Gordon spoke. "How do you feel?" he asked of the man, who evidently
+heard and understood, but did not reply. He simply made a little motion
+of facial muscles, of shoulders, of his whole body under the
+bed-clothes, which indicated rage and impatience.
+
+"Does that place on your cheek burn?" asked Gordon.
+
+Again there was no answer, this time not even any motion.
+
+"Have you any pain?" asked Gordon. The man lay motionless. "Is there any
+one in the parlor?" Gordon asked abruptly of Georgie K.
+
+"No, Doc. You can go right in there."
+
+Gordon beckoned to James, and the two went downstairs, and entered the
+room of the wax flowers and the stuffed canary.
+
+"It looks like erysipelas," Gordon said with no preface.
+
+James nodded.
+
+"All I have done so far, in the absence of any positive proof of the
+truth of that diagnosis, is to apply what you will think an old woman's
+remedy, but I have known it to give good results in light cases, and I
+did not like to resort to the more strenuous methods until I was sure of
+my ground, for fear of complications. I applied a little mutton tallow,
+and that was all, but the inflammation has increased since I saw him. It
+now looks to me like a clearly defined case of erysipelas."
+
+"It does to me," said James.
+
+"So far--the--wound in the throat seems to be doing well," said Gordon
+gloomily. Then he looked at the younger physician with an odd, helpless
+expression. "His life must be saved," said he. "Which do you prefer of
+the two methods of treating the disease--that is, of the two primary
+ones? Of course, there are methods innumerable. I may have grown rusty
+in my country practice. Do you prefer the leaches, the nitrate of
+silver, the low diet, or the reverse?"
+
+"I think I prefer the reverse."
+
+"Well, you may be right," said Gordon, "and yet you have to consider
+that this is a man in full vigor," he added, "that presumably he has
+considerable reserve strength upon which to draw. Still if you prefer
+the other treatment--"
+
+"I have seen very good results from it," said James. He was becoming
+more and more astonished at the older man's helpless, almost appealing,
+manner toward himself. "What is the man's name?" he asked.
+
+"I don't know what name he has given here," Gordon replied evasively. "I
+will tell you later on what his name is."
+
+Suddenly the parlor door was flung open, and a woman appeared. She was
+middle-aged, very large, clad in black raiment, which had an effect of
+sliding and slipping from her when she moved. She kept clutching at the
+buttons of her coat, which did not quite meet over her full front. She
+brought together the ends of a black fur boa, she reached constantly for
+the back of her skirts, and gave them a firm tug which relaxed the next
+moment. Her decent black bonnet was askew, her large face was flushed.
+She had been a strapping, handsome country girl once; now she was almost
+indecent in her involuntary exuberance of coarse femininity.
+
+"How do you do, Mrs. Slocum?" Doctor Gordon said politely.
+
+James rose, Gordon introduced him. Mrs. Slocum did not bow, she jerked
+her great chin upward, then she spoke with really alarming ferocity.
+"Where has my boarder went? That's what I want to know. That's what I
+have come here for, not for no bowin's and scrapin's. Where has my
+boarder went?"
+
+A keen look came into Gordon's face. "I don't know who your boarder is,
+Mrs. Slocum," he said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+Mrs. Slocum looked at the doctor with a wide gape of surprise.
+
+"Thought you knew," said she. "His name is Meserve, Mr. Edward Meserve,
+and if he has come and went, and not told where, he was good pay, and if
+he was took sick whilst he was to my house, I could have asked twice as
+much as I did before. I'd like to know what right you had to take my
+boarder to the hotel. He was my boarder. He wan't your boarder. I want
+him fetched right back. That's what I have came for."
+
+"Mrs. Slocum," said Gordon in a hard voice, "Mr. Meserve is too sick to
+be moved, and his disease may be contagious. You might lose all your
+other boarders, and whether he recovers or not, you would be obliged to
+fumigate your house, and have his room repapered and plastered."
+
+"He's got money enough to pay for it," Mrs. Slocum said doggedly.
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"You think he ain't?"
+
+Gordon looked imperturbable.
+
+"He always paid me regular, and he ain't been to meals or to home nights
+two-thirds of the time."
+
+Gordon said nothing.
+
+"You mean if my other boarders went, and the room had to be done over,
+he ain't got money enough to make it good?"
+
+Gordon said nothing. The woman fidgeted. "Well," said she, "if there's
+any doubt of it, mebbe he _is_ better off here." Suddenly she gave a
+suspicious glance at Gordon. "Say," said she, "the room here will have
+to be done over. Who's goin' to pay for that?"
+
+"The room is isolated," replied Gordon briefly.
+
+The woman stared. She evidently did not know the meaning of the word.
+
+"Well," said she at last, "if the room _is_ insulted, it will have to be
+done over. Who's going to pay for that?"
+
+"I am."
+
+"Well, I don't see why you couldn't pay _me_ for that as well as Mr.
+Evans."
+
+"Don't you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, I do. Now, Mrs. Slocum, I really have no more time to waste. Mr.
+Meserve is a very sick man, and I have to go to him. I came down here
+to consult with my assistant, and you have hindered us. Good-day!"
+
+But the woman still stood her ground. "I'm goin' to see him," she said.
+"He's my boarder."
+
+"You will do so at your own risk, and also, if your call should prove
+injurious to him, at a risk of being indicted for manslaughter, besides
+possibly catching the disease."
+
+"You say it's ketching?"
+
+"I said it might be. We have not yet entirely formed our diagnosis."
+
+The woman stared yet again. Then she turned about with a switch which
+disclosed fringy black petticoats and white stockings. "Well, form your
+noses all you want to," said she. "You have took away my boarder, an' if
+he gits well, and it ain't ketchin', I'll have the law on ye."
+
+Gordon drew a deep breath when the door closed behind her. "It seems
+sometimes to me as if comedy were the haircloth shirt of tragedy," he
+said grimly. "Well, Elliot, we will go upstairs and begin the fight. I
+am going to fight to the death. I shall remain here to-night. You will
+have to look after my other patients when you leave here. I am sorry to
+put so much upon you."
+
+"Oh, that's all right," said James, following Gordon upstairs. But as he
+spoke he wondered more and more that this man, after what he had known
+of him, should be of more importance to Gordon than all others.
+
+Even during the short time they had been downstairs the angry red around
+the abrasion on the cheek had widened, and widened toward the head.
+Gordon opened his medicine-case and took out a bottle and hairbrush and
+commenced work. Directly the entire cheek was blackened with the
+application of iron. Georgie K. had brought glasses, and medicine had
+been forced into the patient's mouth. "Now go and have some eggnog
+mixed, Georgie K.," said Gordon, "and bring it here yourself, if you
+will. I hate to trouble you."
+
+"That's all right, Doc," said Georgie K., and went.
+
+James remained only a short time, since he had the other calls to make.
+He returned quite late to find that dinner had been kept waiting for
+him, and Clemency in her pretty red gown was watching. Mrs. Ewing had
+not come down all day. "Mother says she is easier," Clemency observed,
+"only she thinks it better to keep perfectly still." Clemency said very
+little about the man at the hotel. She seemed to dread the very mention
+of him. She and James spent a long evening together, and she was
+entirely charming. James began to put behind him all the mystery and
+dark hints of evil. Clemency, although fond, was as elusive as a
+butterfly. She had feminine wiles to her finger tips, but she was quite
+innocent of the fact that they were wiles. It took the whole evening for
+the young man to secure a kiss or two, and have her upon his knee for
+the space of about five minutes. She nestled closely to him with a
+little sigh of happiness for a very little while, then she slipped away,
+and stood looking at him like an elf. "I am not going to do that much,"
+said she.
+
+"Why not, darling?"
+
+"Because I am not. It is silly. I love you, but I will not be silly. I
+want only what will last. The love will last, but the silliness won't.
+We are going to be married, but I shall not want to sit on your knee all
+the time, and what is more, you will not want me to. Suppose we should
+live to be very old. Who ever saw a very old woman sitting on her very
+old husband's knee? The love will last, but that will not. We will not
+have so very much of that which will not last."
+
+For all that, James caught Clemency and kissed her until her soft face
+was crimson, but he said to himself, when he was in his own room, that
+never was a girl so wise, and how much more he wanted to hold her upon
+his knee--as if he had not already held her there--and yet she was not
+coquettish. She was simply earnest, with an odd, wise, childlike
+earnestness.
+
+Early the next morning James went to the hotel, and found Gordon haggard
+and intense, sitting beside his patient, who was evidently worse. The
+terrible red fire of Saint Anthony had mounted higher, and settled
+lower. "It has attacked his throat now," Gordon said in a whisper. "I
+expect every minute it will reach his brain. When it does, nobody but
+you and I must be with him, not even Georgie K. He is getting some rest.
+He was up half the night, bless him! But when it reaches the brain two
+will be needed here, and the two must be you and I. Take this list, and
+make the calls as quickly as you can, and come back here." James, with a
+last glance at the black and swollen face of the man, who now seemed to
+be in a state of coma, obeyed. He hurried through his list, and
+returned. He found no apparent change in the patient, and tried to
+persuade Gordon to take a little rest, but the elder man was obdurate.
+"No" he said, "here I stay. I have had a bit to eat and drink. You go
+down yourself and get something, then come back. The crisis may arrive
+any second. Then I shall need you."
+
+The fire had outstripped the blackness on the man's cheek toward the
+temple. One eye was closed.
+
+When James returned after a hurried lunch, he heard a loud, terrible
+voice in the room. Outside the door a maid stood with a horrified face
+listening. James grasped her roughly by the shoulder. "Get out of this,"
+he ordered. "If I find you or any one else here listening, you'll be
+sorry for it."
+
+The maid gasped out an excuse and fled. James tried the door, but it was
+locked. "Is that you, Elliot?" called Gordon above the other awful
+voice.
+
+"Yes."
+
+The door was unlocked, and James sprang into the room, but he was hardly
+quick enough, for the man was almost out of bed, when the two doctors
+forced him back with all their strength. Then he sat up and raved, and
+such raving! James felt his very blood cold within him. Revelations as
+of a devil were in those ravings. Once in a while James opened the door
+cautiously to be sure that no one was listening. The raving man
+reiterated names as of a multitude. Gordon's was among them, and many
+names of women, one especially--Catherine. He repeated that name more
+frequently than the others, but the others were legion. There was
+something indescribably horrible in hearing this repetition of names of
+unknown people, accompanied with statements beyond belief regarding them
+and the raving man. Gordon's face was ghastly, and so was the younger
+doctor's. "Look and see if any one is listening, for God's sake," Gordon
+gasped, after one terrific outburst, and James looked, but Georgie K.
+was keeping watch that nobody approached the door.
+
+James never knew how long he was in that room with Gordon listening to
+those frenzied ravings, and striving with him to keep the man from
+injuring himself. The daylight waned, James lighted a lamp. Then a
+mighty creaking was heard outside, and Georgie K., himself bearing a
+great supper tray, knocked at the door. "It's me, and I brought you
+something," he shouted, and then they heard his retreating footsteps.
+Much delicacy was there in Georgie K., and much affection for Doctor
+Gordon.
+
+James brought in the tray, and now and then he and Gordon took advantage
+of a slight lull to take a bite, but neither had any desire for food. It
+was only the instinctive sense that they must keep up their strength in
+order that nobody else should hear what they were hearing, that forced
+them to eat and drink. Well into the evening the ravings stopped
+suddenly, the man fell back upon his pillow, and lay still. James
+thought at first that all was over, but presently stertorous breathing
+began.
+
+"Now get Georgie K. up," Gordon said hoarsely. "There is no further need
+for us to be alone, and there will be directions to be given."
+
+James went out and found Georgie K. sitting up in his bar-room.
+
+"Doctor Gordon wants you," he said.
+
+"How is he?" asked Georgie K., following James.
+
+"Dying."
+
+Georgie K. made an indescribable sound in his throat as the two men
+ascended the stair.
+
+The man was a long time dying. It seemed to James as if that awful
+struggle of the soul for release from the body would never cease. He
+knew, or thought he knew, that there was no suffering to the dying man,
+but, after all, the sounds as of suffering seemed almost to prove it.
+Gordon whispered for a while to Georgie K., as if the dying man might be
+disturbed by audible speech. Then Georgie K. tiptoed out in his creaking
+boots, and James knew that some arrangements were to be perfected for
+the last services to the dead. Gordon stood over the bed, with his own
+face as ghastly as that of its occupant. James dared not speak to him.
+
+It was midnight when the dreadful breathing ceased, and there was
+silence. Georgie K. had returned. The three living men looked at one
+another with ghastly understanding of what had happened, then they
+hastily arranged some matters. The dead man was decently composed and
+dressed, his throat swathed anew in linen handkerchiefs, and another
+handkerchief laid over the discolored face, which had in death a strange
+peace, as if relieved of an uneasy and wearing tenant. Before Georgie K.
+went out, the village undertaker had been summoned, and had been waiting
+for some time in the parlor with a young assistant. They mounted the
+stairs bearing some appurtenances of their trade. Gordon addressed the
+undertaker briefly, giving some directions, then he motioned to James,
+and they passed out. Georgie K. remained in the room. He prevented the
+undertaker from removing the linen swathe on the dead man's throat. "Doc
+says it's catching," he said, and the undertaker drew back quickly.
+
+When Gordon and James were in the buggy on the way home, Gordon all at
+once gave a great sigh, like that of a swimmer who yields to the force
+of the current, or the fighter who sinks before his opponent. "I'm about
+done, too," he said. "Here, take the lines, Elliot."
+
+James took the reins and looked anxiously at his companion's face, a
+pale blue in the moonlight. "You are not ill?" he said.
+
+"No, only done up. For God's sake let me rest, and don't talk till we
+get home!" James drove on. Gordon's head sank upon his breast, and he
+began to breathe regularly. He did not wake until James roused him when
+they reached home.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next morning before breakfast James was awakened by a loud voice in
+the office, the high-pitched one of a woman. He recalled how exhausted
+Doctor Gordon had been the night before, and rose and dressed quickly.
+When he entered the office Gordon was sitting huddled up in his old
+armchair before the fire, while bolt upright beside him sat Mrs. Slocum,
+discoursing in loud and angry tones, which Gordon seemed scarcely to
+heed. When James entered she turned upon him. "Now I'll see if I can git
+anythin' out of you," she said. "He" (pointing to Gordon) "don't act as
+if he was half-alive. I'm goin' to have my rights if I have to go to law
+to git 'em. Doctor Gordon took away my boarder. And if I'd had him sick
+and die to my house, I could have got extra. Now what I want is jest
+this, an' I'm goin' to hev it, too! Doctor Gordon said Mr. Meserve
+didn't have money. I don't know nothin' about that. I ain't went through
+his pockets, but his trunk is to my house, and there's awful nice men's
+clothes into it, and I mean to hev 'em. That ain't nothin' more'n fair.
+That's what I hev came here for, jest as soon as I heard the poor man
+had passed away. I left my daughter to git the breakfast for the
+boarders, and I hev came here to see about that trunk, and hisn's
+clothes."
+
+James laughed. "But, Mrs. Slocum," he said, "what on earth do you want
+with men's clothes? You can't wear them."
+
+To his intense surprise the great face of the woman suddenly reddened
+like that of a young girl, but the next moment she gave her head a
+defiant toss, and stared boldly at him. "What if I can't?" said she.
+"There's other men as can wear 'em, and they'll jest fit Bill Todd. He's
+been boardin' with me five year, and if he wants to git married and save
+his board bill, it's his business and mine and nobody else's."
+
+James turned to Gordon, who seemed prostrated before this feminine
+onslaught. "Do you object to this woman's having the trunk?" he asked.
+
+Gordon made an effort and roused himself. "She can have it after I have
+examined it for papers," he said.
+
+"There ain't a scrap of writin' in the trunk," Mrs. Slocum vociferated.
+"Me an' my boarder hev looked. There ain't no writin' an' no jewelry,
+an' no money. He used to carry his money with him, and he had a bank
+book in his pocket, and a long, red book he used to git money out of the
+bank. I've seen 'em. Doctor Gordon said he didn't have no money. He did
+hev money. Once he left the long, red book on his bureau, and I looked
+in it, and the leaves that are as good as money wan't a quarter torn
+out. I know he had money, an' I've been cheated out of it. But all I ask
+is that trunk."
+
+"For God's sake take the trunk and clear out," shouted Gordon with
+unexpected violence, "but if there is a scrap of written paper in that
+trunk, and you keep it, you'll be sorry."
+
+"There ain't," said the woman with evident truthfulness. She rose and
+clutched at the back of her skirt, and tugged at her boa and coat.
+"Thank you, Doctor Gordon," said she. "When is the funeral goin' to be?"
+
+"Tell her to-morrow at two o'clock at the hotel, and tell her to leave,"
+said Gordon, and his voice was suddenly apathetic again.
+
+When the woman had gone Gordon turned to James. "How comedy will prick
+through tragedy," he said.
+
+"Yes," James answered vaguely. He looked anxiously at Gordon, whose eyes
+had at once a desperate and an utterly wearied appearance. "I will make
+all the arrangements for the funeral, if you wish, Doctor Gordon," he
+said. "I know the undertaker, and I can manage it as well as you. You
+look used up."
+
+"I am pretty nearly," muttered Gordon. Then he gave an almost
+affectionate glance at James. "Do you think you can manage it?" he said.
+
+James smiled. "It is a new thing to me, but I have no doubt I can," he
+replied.
+
+"You cannot imagine what a weight you would take off my shoulders. Don't
+spare money. See to it that everything is good and as it should be. The
+bills are to be sent to me."
+
+Gordon answered an unspoken question of James. "Yes," he said, "he had
+money, a considerable fortune, and he has no heirs--at least, I am as
+sure as I need be that he has none. In his pockets were two bank books,
+small check books, and a security register book. I have done them up in
+a parcel. See to it that they are buried with him."
+
+"But," said James.
+
+"Oh, yes, I know. Sooner or later there will be advertisements in the
+papers, and that sort of thing, but that will pass. God knows I would
+not touch his money with the devil's pitchfork, nor allow anybody whom I
+loved to touch it. Let him be buried under the name by which he was
+known here. It is not the name, needless to say, on the bank books.
+While living under other than his rightful name, he must have gone to
+New York in person to supply himself with cash. There was some two
+hundred dollars in bank notes in his wallet. That is with the other
+things. Let the whole be buried with him, and see to it that Drake does
+not discover it. You had better take the parcel now. Open the right
+drawer of the table, and you will find it in the corner. Then, after
+breakfast, you had better see Drake at once. I will attend to the
+patients to-day."
+
+"You are not able."
+
+"Able is a word which I have eliminated from my vocabulary as applied to
+myself."
+
+The funeral, which was held the next afternoon in the parlor of the
+hotel, was at once a ghastly and a grotesque function. The two doctors,
+the undertaker and his assistant, Georgie K. and the bar-tender, and
+Mrs. Slocum with a female friend, and a man, evidently the boarder to
+whom she had referred, were the only persons present. The boarder wore a
+hat which had belonged to the dead man. It was many sizes too large for
+his grayish blond, foolish little head, and, when he put it on, it
+nearly obscured his eyes. Mrs. Slocum sniffed audibly through the
+service, which was short, being conducted by the old Presbyterian
+clergyman of Alton. He hardly spoke above a whisper of "the stranger who
+had passed from our midst into the beyond." His concluding prayer was
+quite inaudible. Mrs. Slocum had brought a bouquet of cheerful pink
+geraniums from her window plants, which on the top of the closed black
+casket made an odd spot of color and life in the dim room. Among the
+blossoms were some rose-geranium leaves, whose fragrance seemed to
+mantle everything like smoke. While the clergyman conducted the
+inaudible services loud voices were heard in the bar-room, and the yelp
+of a dog. On one side of the house was the hush of death, on the other
+the din of life. James wondered what the clergyman found to say: all
+that he had distinguished was the expression, "The stranger within our
+midst."
+
+It all seemed horribly farcical to him. The dead man in his casket had
+no personality for him; the sniffs of Mrs. Slocum, her boarder with the
+hat, assumed, in his eyes, the character of a "Punch and Judy" show. But
+along with that feeling came the realization of a most terrible pathos.
+He felt a sort of pity for the dead man, whose very personality had
+become nothing to him, and the pity was the greater because of that. It
+became a pity for the very scheme of things, for man in the abstract,
+born perhaps, through no fault of his own, to sin and misery, both
+miserable and causing misery throughout his life, and then to end in the
+grave, and vanish from the sight and minds of other men. He felt that it
+would not be so sad if it were sadder, if Mrs. Slocum's sniffs had come
+from her heart, and not from her sentimentality. He felt that a funeral
+where love is not is the most mournful function on earth. Then, too, he
+felt a great anxiety for Doctor Gordon, who sat shrugged up in his gray
+overcoat, with his gray grizzle of beard meeting the collar, and his
+forehead heavily corrugated over pent and gloomy eyes.
+
+He was heartily glad when the service was over, when the casket had been
+lowered into the grave, when the village hearse had turned off into a
+street, the horse going at a sharp trot, and he and Doctor Gordon were
+left alone. He drove. Gordon sat hunched into a corner of the buggy, as
+he had sat in the corner of the hotel parlor. James hesitated about
+saying anything, but finally he spoke, he felt foolishly enough,
+although he meant the words to be comforting. "You did all you could to
+save his life," he said.
+
+Gordon made no reply.
+
+When they reached the house, Clemency's head disappeared from the
+window, where she had evidently been watching. She met them at the
+office door, with an odd, shocked, inquiring expression on her little
+face. James kissed her furtively, while Gordon's back was turned, as he
+divested himself of his gray coat.
+
+"Dinner is nearly ready," Clemency said in an agitated voice.
+
+"How is she?" asked Gordon, then before she had time to reply, he added
+almost roughly, "What on earth are you fretting about?"
+
+"I am not fretting," Clemency answered in a weak little voice.
+
+"There is nothing in all this for you to concern yourself with. Put it
+out of your head!"
+
+"Yes, Uncle Tom."
+
+"How is she?"
+
+"She has been asleep all the afternoon."
+
+"She has not had another attack?"
+
+"No, Uncle Tom."
+
+Then the dinner-bell rang.
+
+To James's surprise, but everything surprised him now, Gordon seemed to
+recover his spirits. He ate heartily. He laughed and joked. After dinner
+he went upstairs to see Mrs. Ewing, and when he came down insisted that
+James should accompany him to the hotel for a game of euchre. James
+would have preferred remaining with Clemency, whose eyes were wistful,
+but Gordon hurried him away. They remained until nearly midnight in the
+parlor, where the funeral had taken place a short time before, playing
+euchre, telling stories, and drinking apple-jack. James noticed that the
+hotel man often cast an anxious and puzzled glance at Gordon. He began
+to fancy that what seemed mirth and jollity was the mere bravado of
+misery and a ghastly mask of real enjoyment. He was glad when Gordon
+made the move to leave. Georgie K. stood in the door watching the two
+men untie the horse and get into the buggy. "Take care of yourself,
+Doc," he hallooed, and there was real affection and concern in his
+voice.
+
+Gordon drove now, and the mare, being on her homeward road, made good
+time. James helped Gordon unharness, as Aaron had gone to bed. His deep
+snores sounded through the stable from his room above. "It's a pity to
+wake up anything," Gordon said. "Guess well put the mare up ourselves."
+Now his voice was bitter again. Gordon had the key of the office door,
+and after locking the stable the two men entered. Gordon threw some wood
+on the fire. The lamp with its dangling prisms was burning. "Sit down a
+minute," Gordon said, "'I have something to tell you. I may as well get
+it off my mind now. It has got to come sometime."
+
+James sat down and lit a cigar. He felt himself in a nervous tension.
+Gordon filled his pipe and lit it, then he began to speak in an odd,
+monotonous voice, as though he were reciting.
+
+"That man's name was James Mendon. He was an Englishman. When I first
+began practice it was in the West. That man had a ranch near the little
+town where I lived with my sister Alice. Alice was a beautiful girl. We
+had lost our parents, and she kept house for me. The man was as handsome
+as a devil, and he had the devil's own way with women. God only knows
+what a good girl like my sister saw in him. He had a bad name, even out
+in that rough country. Horrible tales were circulated about his cruelty
+to animals for one thing. His cowboys deserted him and told stories.
+His very dog turned on him, and bit him. God knows how he was torturing
+the animal. I saw the scar on his hand when he lay on his death-bed.
+Well, however it was, my sister loved him and married him, and he
+treated her like a fiend. She died, and it was a merciful release. He
+deserted her three months before her death. Sold out all he had, and
+left her without a cent. She came back to me, and three months later
+Clemency was born."
+
+Gordon paused and looked at James. "Yes," he said, "that man was
+Clemency's father."
+
+He waited, but only for a second. The young man spoke, and his clear
+young voice rang out like a trumpet. "I never loved Clemency as I love
+her now," he said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Gordon smiled at James. "God bless you, boy!" he said.
+
+"What possible difference do you think that could make?" demanded James
+hotly. "Could that poor little girl help it?"
+
+"Of course she could not, but some men might object, and with reason, to
+marrying a girl who came of such stock on her father's side."
+
+"I am not one of those men."
+
+"No, I don't think you are, but it is only my duty to put the case
+plainly before you. That man who was buried this afternoon was simply
+unspeakable. He was a monstrosity of perverted morality. I cannot even
+bring myself to tell you what I know of him. I cannot even bring myself
+to give you the least hint of what my poor young sister, Clemency's
+mother, suffered in her brief life with him. You may fear heredity--"
+
+"Heredity, nothing! Don't I know Clemency?"
+
+"I myself really think that you have nothing whatever to fear. Clemency
+is her mother's living and breathing image as far as looks go, and as
+far as I can judge in the innermost workings of her mind. I have not
+seen in her the slightest taint from her evil father, though God knows I
+have watched for it with horror as the years have passed. After she was
+born I smuggled her away by night, and gave out word that the child had
+died at the same time with the mother. There was a private funeral, and
+the casket was closed. I had hard work to carry it through successfully,
+for I was young in those days, and broken-hearted at losing my sister,
+but carry it through I did, and no one knew except a nurse. I trusted
+her, I was obliged to do so, and I fear that she has betrayed me. I
+established a practice in another town in another State, and there I met
+Clara. She has told me that she informed you of the fact that she was my
+wife, but not of our reasons for concealing it. Just before we were
+married I became practically certain that Clemency's father had gained
+in some way information that led him to suspect, if not to be absolutely
+certain, that his child had not died with his wife. I had a widowed
+sister, Mrs. Ewing, who lived in Iowa with her only daughter just about
+Clemency's age. Just before our marriage she decided to remove to
+England to live with some relatives of her deceased husband. They had
+considerable property, and she had very little. I begged her to go
+secretly, or rather to hint that she was going East to live with me,
+which she did. Nobody in the little Iowa village, so far as I knew, was
+aware of the fact that my sister and daughter had gone to England, and
+not East to live with me. Clara and I were married privately in an
+obscure little Western hamlet, and came East at once. We have lived in
+various localities, being driven from one to another by the danger of
+Clemency's father ascertaining the truth; and my wife has always been
+known as Mrs. Ewing, and Clemency as her daughter. It has been a life of
+constant watchfulness and deception, and I have been bound hand and
+foot. Even had Clemency's father not been so exceedingly careful that it
+would have been difficult to reach him by legal methods, there was the
+poor child to be considered, and the ignominy which would come upon her
+at the exposure of her father. I have done what I could. I am naturally
+a man who hates deception, and wishes above all things to lead a life
+with its windows open and shades up, but I have been forced into the
+very reverse. My life has been as closely shuttered and curtained as my
+house. I have been obliged to force my own wife to live after the same
+fashion. Now the cause for this secrecy is removed, but as far as she is
+concerned, the truth must still be concealed for Clemency's sake. It
+must not be known that that dead man was her father, and the very
+instant we let go one thread of the mystery the whole fabric will
+unravel. Poor Clara can never be acknowledged openly as my wife, the
+best and most patient wife a man ever had, and under a heavier sentence
+of death this moment than the utmost ingenuity of man could contrive."
+Gordon groaned, and let his head sink upon his hands.
+
+"She told me some time ago that she was ill," James said pityingly.
+
+"Ill? She has been upon the executioner's block for years. It is not
+illness; that is too tame a word for it. It is torture, prolonged as
+only the evil forces of Nature herself can prolong it."
+
+Gordon rose and shook himself angrily. "I am keeping her now almost
+constantly under morphine," he said. "She has suffered more lately. The
+attacks have been more frequent. There has never been the slightest
+possibility of a surgical operation. From the very first it was utterly
+hopeless, and if it had been the dog there, I should have put a bullet
+through his head and considered myself a friend." Gordon gazed with
+miserable reflection at the dog. "I am glad that the _direct_ cause of
+that man's death was not what it might have been," he said.
+
+He shook himself again as a dog shakes off water. He laughed a miserable
+laugh. "Well," he said, "Clemency is free now. She can go her ways as
+she will. You see she resembled her mother so closely that I had to
+guard her from even the sight of her father. He would have known the
+truth at once. Clemency is free, but I have paid an awful price for her
+freedom and for your life. If I had not done what you doubtless know I
+did that night, you would have been shot, and it would have been a
+struggle between myself and her father, with the very good chance of my
+being killed, and Clara and the girl left defenseless. His revolver
+carried six deaths in it. It would all have depended upon the quickness
+of the dog, and I should have left too much hanging upon that."
+
+"I don't see what else you could do," James said in a low voice. He was
+pale himself. He did not blame Gordon. He felt that he himself, in
+Gordon's place, would have done as he had done, and yet he felt as if
+faced close to a horror of murder and death, and he knew from the look
+upon the other man's countenance that it was the same with him.
+
+"I saw no other way," Gordon said in a broken voice, "but--but I don't
+know whether I am a murderer or an executioner, and I never shall know.
+God help me! Well," he added with a sigh, "what is done, is done. Let us
+go to bed."
+
+James said when they parted at his room door that he hoped Mrs. Ewing
+would have a comfortable night.
+
+"Yes, she will," replied Gordon quietly. Then he gave the young man's
+hand a warm clasp. "God bless you!" he whispered. "If this had turned
+you against the child, it would have driven me madder than I am now. I
+love her as if she were my own. You and your loyalty are all I have to
+hold to."
+
+"You can hold to that to the end," James returned with warmth, and he
+looked at Gordon as he might have looked at his own father.
+
+Late as it was, he wrote that night to his own father and mother,
+telling them of his engagement to Clemency. There now can be no possible
+need for secrecy with regard to it. James, in spite of his vague sense
+of horror, felt an exhilaration at the thought that now all could be
+above board, that the shutters could be flung open. He felt as if an
+incubus had rolled from his mental consciousness. Clemency herself
+experienced something of the same feeling. She appeared at the
+breakfast-table the next morning with her hat. "Uncle says I may go with
+you on your rounds," she said to James. She beamed, and yet there was a
+troubled and puzzled expression on her pretty face. When she and James
+had started, and were moving swiftly along the country road, she said
+suddenly, "Will you tell me something?"
+
+James hesitated.
+
+"Will you?" she repeated.
+
+"I can't promise, dear," he said.
+
+"Why not?" she asked pettishly.
+
+"Because it might be something which I ought not to tell you."
+
+"You ought to tell me everything if--if--" she hesitated, and blushed.
+
+"If what?" asked James tenderly.
+
+She nestled up to him. "If you--feel toward me as you say you do."
+
+"If. Oh, Clemency!"
+
+"Then you ought to tell me. No, you needn't kiss me. I want you to tell
+me something. I don't want to be kissed."
+
+"Well, what is that you want to know, dear?"
+
+"Will you promise to tell me?"
+
+"No, dear, I can't promise, but I will tell you if I am able without
+doing you harm."
+
+"Who was that man who was buried yesterday, who had been hunting me so
+long, and frightening me and Uncle Tom, and why have I been compelled to
+stay housed as if I were a prisoner so much of my life?"
+
+"Because you were in danger, dear, from the man."
+
+"You are answering me in a circle." Clemency sat upright and looked at
+James, and the blue fire in her eyes glowed. "Who was the man?" she
+asked peremptorily.
+
+"I can't tell you, dear."
+
+"But you know."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Why can't you tell me then?"
+
+"Because it is not best."
+
+Clemency shrugged her shoulders. "Why did he hunt me so?"
+
+"I can't tell you, dear."
+
+"But you know."
+
+"I am not sure."
+
+"But you think you know."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then tell me."
+
+"I can't, dear."
+
+"When will you tell me?"
+
+"Never!"
+
+Clemency looked at him, and again she blushed. "You will tell me
+after--we are--married. You will have to tell me everything then," she
+whispered.
+
+James shook his head.
+
+"Won't you then?"
+
+"No, dear, I shall never tell you while I live."
+
+Clemency made a sudden grasp at the reins. "Then I will never marry
+you," she said. "I will never marry you, if you keep things from me."
+
+"I will never keep things from you that you ought to know, dear."
+
+"I ought to know this!"
+
+James remained silent. Clemency had brought the horse to a full stop.
+"Won't you ever tell me?" she asked.
+
+"No, never! dear."
+
+"Then let me get out. This is Annie Lipton's street. I am going to see
+her. I have not seen her for a long time. I will walk home. It is safe
+enough now. You can tell me that much?"
+
+"Yes, it is, but Clemency, dear."
+
+"I am not Clemency, dear. I am not going to marry you. You say you wrote
+your father and mother last night that we were going to get married.
+Well, you can just write again and tell them we are not. No, you need
+not try to stop me. I will get out. Good-by! I shall not be home to
+luncheon. I shall stay with Annie. I like her very much better than I
+like you."
+
+With that Clemency had slipped out of the buggy and hurried up a street
+without looking back. James drove on. He felt disturbed, but not
+seriously so. It was impossible to take Clemency's anger as a real
+thing. It was so whimsical and childish. He had counted upon his long
+morning with her, but he went on with a little smile on his face.
+
+He was half inclined to think, so slightly did he estimate Clemency's
+anger, that she would not keep her word, and would be home for luncheon.
+But when he returned she was not there, and she had not come when the
+bell rang.
+
+"Why, where is Clemency?" Gordon said, when they entered the
+dining-room.
+
+"She insisted upon stopping to see her friend Miss Lipton," said James.
+"She said that she might not be home to lunch." Emma gave one of her
+sharp, baffled glances at him, then, having served the two men, she
+tossed her head and went out. Nobody knew how much she wished to listen
+at the kitchen door, but she was above such a course.
+
+"Clemency and I had a bit of a tiff," James explained to Gordon. "She
+seemed vexed because I would not tell her what you told me last night.
+She is curious to know more about--that man."
+
+"She must not know," Gordon said quickly. "Never mind if she does seem a
+little vexed. She will get over it. I know Clemency. She is like her
+mother. The power of sustained indignation against one she loves is not
+in the child, and she must not know. It would be a dreadful thing for
+her to know. I myself cannot have it. It is enough of a horror as it is,
+but to have that child look at me, and think--" Gordon broke off
+abruptly.
+
+"She will never know through me," James said, "and I think with you that
+her resentment will not last."
+
+"She will be home this afternoon," said Gordon, "and the walk will do
+her good."
+
+But the two returned from their afternoon calls, and still Clemency had
+not returned. Emma met them at the door. "Mrs. Ewing says she is worried
+about Miss Clemency," she said. Gordon ran upstairs. When he came down
+he joined James in the office. "I have pacified Clara," he said, "but
+suppose you jump into the buggy, Aaron has not unharnessed yet, and
+drive over to Annie Lipton's for her. It is growing colder, and Clemency
+has not been outdoors much lately, and she has rather a delicate throat.
+It is time now that she was home."
+
+James smiled. "Suppose she will not come with me?" he suggested.
+
+"Nonsense," said Gordon. "She will be only too glad if you meet her
+half-way. She will come. Tell her I said that she must."
+
+"All right," replied James.
+
+He went out, got into the buggy, and drove along rapidly. He had the
+team, and the horses were still quite fresh, as they had not been long
+distances that day. There was a vague fear in the young man's mind,
+although he tried to dispel it by the force of argument. "What has the
+girl to fear now?" his reason kept dinning in his ears, but, in spite
+of himself, something else, which seemed to him unreason, made him
+anxious. When he reached Annie Lipton's home, a fine old house, overhung
+with a delicate tracery of withered vines, he saw Annie's pretty head at
+a front window. She opened the door before he had time to ring the bell,
+and she looked with alarmed questioning at him.
+
+"I have come for Miss Ewing, her uncle--" James began, but Annie
+interrupted him, her face paling perceptibly. "Clemency," she said;
+"why, she left here directly after lunch. She said she must go. She felt
+anxious about her mother, and did not want to leave her any longer.
+Hasn't she come home yet?"
+
+"No," said James.
+
+"And you didn't meet her? You must have met her."
+
+"No."
+
+The two stood staring at each other. A delicate old face peeped out of
+the door at the right of the halls. It was like Annie's, only dimmed by
+age, and shaded by two leaf-like folds of gray hair as smooth as silver.
+"Oh, mother, Clemency has not got home!" Annie cried. "Dr. Elliot, this
+is my mother. Mother, Clemency has not got home. What do you think has
+happened?"
+
+The lady came out in the hall. She had a quiet serenity of manner, but
+her soft eyes looked anxious. "Could she have stopped anywhere, dear?"
+she said.
+
+"You know, mother, there is not a single house between here and her own
+where Clemency ever stops," said Annie. She was trembling all over.
+
+James made a movement to go. "What are you going to do?" cried Annie.
+
+"Stop at every house between here and Doctor Gordon's, and ask if the
+people have seen her," replied James.
+
+Then he ran back to the buggy, and heard as he went a little nervous
+call from Annie, "Oh, let us know if--"
+
+"I will let you know when I find her, Miss Lipton," he called back as he
+gathered up the lines. He kept his word. He did stop at every house, and
+at every one all knowledge of the girl was disclaimed. There were not
+many houses, the road being a lonely one. He was met mostly by women who
+seemed at once to share his anxiety. One woman especially asked very
+carefully for a description of Clemency, and he gave a minute one. "You
+say her mother is ill, too," said the woman. She was elderly, but still
+pretty. She had kept her tints of youth as some withered flowers do,
+and there seemed still to cling to her the atmosphere of youth, as
+fragrance clings to dry rose leaves. She was dressed in rather a
+superior fashion to most of the countrywomen, in soft lavender cashmere
+which fitted her slight, tall figure admirably. James had a glimpse
+behind her of a pretty interior: a room with windows full of blooming
+plants, of easy-chairs and many cushioned sofas, beside book-cases. The
+woman looked, so he thought, like one who had some private anxiety of
+her own. She kept peering up and down the road, as they talked, as
+though she, too, were on the watch for some one. She promised James to
+keep a lookout for the missing girl. "Poor little thing," she murmured.
+There was something in her face as she said that, a slight phase of
+amusement, which caused James to stare keenly at her, but it had passed,
+and her whole face denoted the utmost candor and concern.
+
+When James reached home he had a forlorn hope that he should find
+Clemency there; that from a spirit of mischief she had taken some cross
+track over the fields to elude him. But when Aaron met him in the drive,
+and he saw the man's frightened stare, he knew that she had not come.
+It was unnecessary to ask, but ask he did. "She has not come?"
+
+"No, Doctor Elliot," replied Aaron. He did not even chew. He tied the
+horses, and followed James into the office, with his jaws stiff. Gordon
+stood up when James entered, and looked past him for Clemency. "She was
+not there?" he almost shouted.
+
+"She left the Liptons at two o'clock, and I have stopped at every house
+on my way, and no one has seen her."
+
+"Oh, my God!" said Gordon, with a dazed look at James.
+
+"What do you think?" asked James.
+
+"I don't know what to think. I am utterly at a loss now. I supposed she
+was entirely safe. There are almost no tramps at this season, and in
+broad daylight. At two, you said? It is almost six. I don't know what to
+do. What will come next? I must tell Clara something before I do
+anything else."
+
+Gordon rushed out of the office, and they heard his heavy tread on the
+stairs. Aaron stared at James, and still he did not chew.
+
+"It's almost dark," he said with a low drawl.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"We've got to take lanterns, and hunt along the road and fields."
+
+"Yes, we have."
+
+The dog, which had been asleep, got up, and came over to James, and laid
+his white head on his knee. "We can take him," Aaron said. "Sometimes
+dogs have more sense than us."
+
+"That is so," said James. He felt himself in an agony of helplessness.
+He simply did not know what to do. He had sunk into a chair and his head
+fairly rung. It seemed to him incredible that the girl had disappeared a
+second time. A queer sense of unreality made him feel faint.
+
+Gordon reentered the room. "I have told Clara that you have come back,
+and that Clemency is to stay all night with Annie Lipton," he said. Then
+he, too, stood staring helplessly. Emma had come into the room, and now
+she spoke angrily to the three dazed men. "Git the lanterns lit, for
+goodness' sake," said she, "and hunt and do something. I'm goin' to git
+her supper, and I'll keep her pacified." Emma gave a jerk with a sharp
+elbow toward Mrs. Ewing's room. "For goodness' sake, if you don't know
+yet where she has went, why don't you do somethin'?" she demanded. The
+men went before her sharp command like dust before her broom. "Keep as
+still as you can," ordered Emma as they went out. "_She_ mustn't, git to
+worryin' before she comes home."
+
+[Illustration: "Saw a little dark figure running toward him." Page 239.]
+
+For the next two hours Gordon, James, and Aaron searched. They walked,
+each going his separate way into the fields and woods on the road,
+having agreed upon a signal when the girl should be found. The signal
+was to be a pistol shot. James went first to the wood, where he had
+found Clemency on her former disappearance. He searched in every shadow,
+throwing the gleam of his lantern into little dark nests of last year's
+ferns, and hollows where last year's leaves had swirled together to die,
+but no Clemency. At last, wearied and heart-sick, he came out on the
+road. The moon was just up, a full moon, and the road lay stretched
+before him like a silver ribbon covered with the hoar-frost. He gazed
+down it hopelessly, and saw a little dark figure running toward him. He
+was incredulous, but he called, "Clemency!"
+
+A glad little cry answered him. He himself ran forward, and the girl was
+in his arms, sobbing and trembling as if her heart would break.
+
+"What has happened? What has happened, darling?" James cried in an
+agony. "Are you hurt? What has happened?"
+
+"Something very strange has happened, but I am not hurt," sobbed
+Clemency. James remembered the signal. "Wait a second, dear," he said;
+"your uncle and Aaron are searching, and I promised to fire the pistol
+if I found you." James fired his pistol in the air six times. Then he
+returned to Clemency, who was leaning against a tree. "How I wish we had
+driven here!" James said tenderly.
+
+"I can walk, if you help me," Clemency sobbed, leaning against him. "Oh,
+I am so sorry I acted so this morning. I got punished for it. I haven't
+been hurt, nobody has been anything but kind to me, but I have been
+dreadfully frightened."
+
+Gordon and Aaron came running up. "Where have you been, Clemency?"
+Gordon demanded in a harsh voice. "Another time you must do as you are
+told. You are too old to behave like a child, and put us all in such a
+fright."
+
+Clemency left James, and ran to her uncle, and clung to him sobbing
+hysterically. "Oh, Uncle Tom, don't scold me," she whimpered.
+
+"Are you hurt? What has happened?"
+
+"I am not hurt a bit," sobbed Clemency.
+
+Gordon put his arm around her. "Well," he said, "as long as you are safe
+keep your story until we get home. Elliot, take her other arm. She is
+almost too used up to walk. Now stop crying, Clemency."
+
+When they were home, in the office, Clemency told her story, which was a
+strange one. She had been on her way home from Annie Lipton's, and had
+reached a certain house, when the door opened and a woman stood there
+calling her. She described the woman and the house, and James gave a
+start. "That must be the same woman whom I saw," he exclaimed.
+
+"She was a woman I had never seen," said Clemency. "I think she had only
+lived there a very short time."
+
+Gordon nodded gloomily. "I know who she is, I fear," he said. "Strange
+that I did not suspect."
+
+"She looked very kind and pleasant," said Clemency, "and I thought she
+wanted something and there was no harm, but when I reached her the first
+thing I knew she had hold of me, and her hands were like iron clamps.
+She put one over my mouth, and held me with the other, and pulled me
+into the house and locked the door. Then she made me go into a little
+dark room in the middle of the house and she locked me in. She told me
+if I screamed nobody would hear me, but she did speak kindly. She was
+very kind. Once she even kissed me, although I did not want her to. She
+brought a lamp in, and made me lie down on a couch in the room and drink
+a glass of wine. She told me not to be afraid, nobody would hurt me. She
+seemed to me to be always listening, and every now and then she went
+out, but she always locked the door behind her. When she came back she
+would look terribly worried. About half an hour ago she went out, and
+when she came back brought a tray with tea and bread and cold chicken
+for me. I told her I would starve before I ate anything while she kept
+me there. She did not seem to pay much attention, she looked so
+dreadfully worried. She sat down and looked at me. Finally, she said, as
+if she were afraid to hear her own voice, 'Has any accident happened
+near here lately that you have heard of?' I told her about the man that
+fell down in our drive and died of erysipelas. I did not tell her
+anything else. All at once she almost fell in a faint. Then she stood
+up, and she looked as if she were dead. She told me to stay where I was
+just fifteen minutes, then I might go, but I must not stir before. Then
+she kissed me again, and her lips were like ice. She went out, and I
+knew the door was not locked, but I was afraid to stir. I could hear her
+running about. Then I heard the outer door slam, and I looked at my
+watch, and it was fifteen minutes. Then I ran out and up the road as
+fast as I could. Just before I saw Doctor Elliot the New York train
+passed. I heard it. I think she was hurrying to catch that."
+
+Gordon nodded.
+
+"Oh, Uncle Tom, who was she, and why did she lock me up?" asked
+Clemency.
+
+"Clemency," said Gordon, in a sterner voice than Clemency had ever heard
+him use toward her, "never speak, never think, of that woman or that man
+again. Now go out and eat your dinner."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+Clemency was so worn out that Doctor Gordon insisted upon her going to
+bed directly after dinner, and he and James had a solitary evening in
+the office, with the exception of Gordon's frequent absence in his
+wife's room. Each time when he returned he looked more gloomy. "I have
+increased the morphine almost as much as I dare," he said, coming into
+the office about ten. He sat down and lit his pipe. James laid down the
+evening paper which he had been reading. "Is she asleep now?" he asked.
+
+"Yes. By the way, Elliot, have you guessed who that woman was who
+kidnapped Clemency?"
+
+James hesitated. "I don't fairly know whether I am right, but I have
+guessed," he replied.
+
+"Who?"
+
+"The nurse."
+
+"You are right. It was the nurse. That man had won her over, and set her
+up housekeeping in Westover. He had been staying at the hotel there
+before he came here. He was her lover, of course, although he was too
+circumspect not to guard the secret. She has been living in that house
+for the last three months under the name of Mrs. Wood, a widow. The
+former occupants went away last summer, Aaron has been telling me. He
+said that once he himself saw the man enter the house, and he had seen
+the woman on the street. She had made herself quite popular in Westover.
+It was no part of that man's policy to keep his vice behind locked
+doors. Locks themselves are the best witness against evil. She attended
+the Dutch Reformed Church regularly. She was present at all the church
+suppers, and everybody has called on her in Westover. Now I think she
+has fled, half-crazed with grief over the death of her lover, and afraid
+of some sort of exposure. Unless I miss my guess, there will be a furor
+around here shortly over her disappearance. She was not a bad woman as I
+remember her, and she was attractive, with a kindly disposition. But he
+had his way always with women, and I suppose she thought she was doing
+him a service by kidnapping poor little Clemency. I am sorry for her. I
+hope she did not go away penniless, but she has her nursing to fall
+back upon. She was a good nurse. That makes me think. I must see if Mrs.
+Blair cannot come here to-morrow. Clara must have somebody beside
+Clemency and Emma. I should prefer a trained nurse, and this woman is
+simply the self-taught village sort, but Clara prefers her. She shrinks
+at the very mention of a trained nurse. Of course, it is unreasonable,
+but the poor soul has always had an awful dread of hospitals and a
+possible operation, and I believe that in some way she thinks a trained
+nurse one of a dreadful trinity. She must be humored, of course. The
+result cannot be changed."
+
+"You have no hope, then?" James said in a low voice.
+
+"I have had no more from the outset than if she had been already dead,"
+said Gordon.
+
+James said nothing. An enormous pity for the other man was within him.
+He thought of Clemency, and he seemed to undergo the same pangs. He felt
+such a terrible understanding of the other's suffering that it passed
+the bounds of sympathy. It became almost experience. His young face took
+on the same expression of dull misery as Gordon's. Presently Gordon
+glanced at him, and spoke with a ring of gratitude and affection in his
+tired voice.
+
+"You are a good fellow, Elliot," he said, "and you are the one ray of
+comfort I have. I am glad that I have you to leave poor little Clemency
+with."
+
+James looked at him with sudden alarm. "You are not ill?" he said.
+
+"No, but there is an end to everybody's rope, and sometimes I think I am
+about at the end of mine. I don't know. Anyway, it is a comfort to me to
+think that Clemency has you in case anything should happen to me."
+
+"She has me as long as I live," James said fervently. Red overspread his
+young face, his eyes glistened. Again the great pity and understanding
+with regard to the other man came over him, and a feeling for Clemency
+which he had never before had: a feeling greater than love itself, the
+very angel of love, divinest pity and protection, for all womanhood,
+which was exemplified for himself in this one girl. His heart ached, as
+if it were Clemency's upstairs, lying miserably asleep under the
+influence of the drug, which alone could protect her from indescribable
+pain. His mind projected itself into the future, and realized the
+possibility of such suffering for her, and for himself. The honey-sting
+of pain, which love has, stung him sharply.
+
+Gordon seemed to divine his thoughts. "God grant that you may never have
+to undergo what I am undergoing, boy," he said. Then he added, "It was
+in poor Clara's blood, her mother before her died the same way. Clemency
+comes, on her mother's side at least, of a healthy race, morally and
+physically, although the nervous system is oversensitive. If my poor
+sister had been happy, she would have been alive to-day. And as far as I
+know of the other side, there was perfect physical health, although he
+had that abnormal lack of moral sense that led one to dream of
+possession. Did you notice how much less evil he looked when he was
+dead, even with that frightfully disfigured face?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"There are strange things in this world," said Gordon with gloomy
+reflection, "or else simple things which we are strange not to believe.
+Sometimes I think people will have to take to the Bible again in that
+literal sense in which so many are now inclined to disregard it. Well,
+Elliot, I honestly feel that you have nothing to fear in taking poor
+little Clemency. I should tell you if I thought otherwise. She will
+make you happy, and I can think of no reason to warn you concerning any
+possible lapses, in either her physical or her moral health, and I have
+had her in my charge since she first drew the breath of life. Come, my
+son, it is late, and we have a great deal to do to-morrow. This awful
+business has made me neglect patients. I have to see Clara again, and
+get what rest I can." Gordon looked older and wearier than James had
+ever seen him, as he bade him good-night, old and weary as he had often
+seen him look. A sudden alarm for Gordon himself came over him. He
+wondered, after he had entered, his room, if he were not strained past
+endurance. He recalled his own father's healthy, ruddy face, and Gordon
+was no older.
+
+He lay awake a while thinking anxiously of Gordon, then his own happy
+future blazoned itself before him, and he dreamed awake, and dreamed
+asleep, of himself and Clemency, in that future, whose golden vistas had
+no end, so far as his young eyes could see. The sense of relief from
+anxiety over the girl was so intense that it was in itself a delight.
+Clemency herself felt it. The next morning at breakfast she looked
+radiant. Gordon had assured her the sick woman had rested quietly, and
+told her that Mrs. Blair was coming.
+
+"To-day I can go where I choose," Clemency exclaimed gayly.
+
+"Not until afternoon," replied Gordon, then he relented at her look of
+disappointment, and suggested that she go with Elliot to make his calls,
+while he went with Aaron and the team. It was a beautiful morning;
+spring seemed to have arrived. Everywhere was the plash of running
+water, now and then came distant flutings of birds. "I know that was a
+bluebird," Clemency said happily. "I feel sure mother will get well now.
+It seems wicked to be glad that the man is dead, especially on such a
+morning, but I wonder if it is, when he would have spoiled the morning."
+
+"Don't think about it, anyway!" James said.
+
+"I try not to."
+
+"You must not!"
+
+"I know why Uncle Tom did not want me to go out alone this morning,"
+Clemency said, with one of her quick wise looks, cocking her head like a
+bird.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"He wanted to make sure that that woman has really gone."
+
+"Clemency, you must not mention that man or woman to me again," said
+James.
+
+"I am not married to you yet," Clemency said, pouting.
+
+"That makes no difference, you must promise."
+
+"Well, then, I will. I am so happy this morning, that I will promise
+anything."
+
+James looked about to be sure nobody was in sight before he kissed the
+little radiant face.
+
+"I won't speak of them again, but I am right," Clemency said with a
+little toss and blush, and it proved that she was.
+
+At luncheon Doctor Gordon told Clemency that she could go wherever she
+liked. She gave a little glance at James, and said gayly, "All right,
+Uncle Tom."
+
+That afternoon Gordon and James made some calls in company, driving far
+into the hills. They had hardly started before Gordon said abruptly,
+"Well, the woman is gone, and there is a wild excitement in Westover
+over her disappearance. I believe they are about to drag the pond. A man
+who knew her well by sight declares that she boarded that New York
+train, but the people will not give up the theory that she has been
+murdered for her jewelry. By the way, I think I need not worry over her
+immediate necessities. It seems that she had worn a quantity of very
+valuable jewels. Of course her going without any baggage except a
+suit-case, and leaving behind the greater part of her wardrobe, does
+look singular. But it seems that the house was rented furnished, and I
+fancy she lived always in light marching orders, and probably carried
+the most valuable of her possessions upon her person and in her
+suit-case. Well, I am thankful she has decamped."
+
+"You don't fear her returning?" asked James with some anxiety.
+
+"No, I have no fear of that. She is probably broken-hearted over the
+death of that man. She is not of the sort to kidnap on her own account.
+It was only for him. Clemency has nothing more to fear."
+
+"I am thankful."
+
+"You can well believe that I am, when I tell you that this afternoon I
+am absolutely sure, for the first time in years, that the girl is safe
+to come and go as she pleases. I have had hideous uncertainty as well as
+hideous certainty to cope with. Now it is down to the hideous certainty.
+That is bad enough, but fate on an open field is less unmanning than
+fate in ambush. I have long known to a nicety the fate in the field."
+Gordon hesitated a second, then he said abruptly, with his face turned
+from his companion, in a rough voice, "Clara can't last many days."
+
+James made an exclamation.
+
+"She has gone down hill rapidly during the last two days," said Gordon.
+"I have been increasing the morphine. It can't last long." Gordon ended
+the sentence with a hoarse sob.
+
+"I can't say anything," James faltered after a second, "but you know--"
+
+"Yes, I know," Gordon said. "You are as sorry as any one can be who is
+not, so to speak, the hero, or rather the coward, of the tragedy. Yes, I
+know. I'm obliged to you, Elliot, but all of us have to face death,
+whether it is our own or the death of another dearer than ourselves,
+alone. A soul is a horribly lonely thing in the worst places of life."
+
+"Have you told Clemency?"
+
+"No, I have put it off until the last minute. What good can it do? She
+knows that Clara is very ill, but she does not know, she has never
+known, the character of the illness. Sometimes I have a curious feeling
+that instinct has asserted itself, and that Clemency, fond as she is of
+my wife, has not exactly the affection which she would have had for her
+own mother."
+
+"I don't think she knows any difference at all," James said. "I think
+the poor little girl will about break her heart."
+
+"I did not mean to underestimate Clemency's affection," said Gordon,
+"but what I say is true. The girl herself will never know it, and, you
+may not believe it, but she will not suffer as she would suffer if Clara
+were her own mother. These ties of the blood are queer things, nothing
+can quite take their place. If Clemency had died first Clara would have
+been indignant at the suggestion, but she herself would not have mourned
+as she would mourn for her own daughter. I must touch up the horses a
+bit. I want to get home. I may not be able to go out again to-night.
+Last night I was up until dawn with Clara." Gordon touched the horses
+with a slight flicker of the whip. He held the lines taut as they sprang
+forward. His face was set ahead. James glancing at him had a realization
+of the awful loneliness of the other man by his side. He seemed to
+comprehend the vastness of the isolation of a grief which concerns one,
+and one only, more than any other. Gordon had the expression of a
+wanderer upon a desert or a frozen waste. Illimitable distances of
+solitude seemed reflected in his gloomy eyes.
+
+James did not attempt to talk to him. It seemed like mockery, this
+effort to approach with sympathy this set-apart man, who was
+unapproachable.
+
+That night Gordon's wife was much worse. Gordon came down to James's
+room about two o'clock. James had been awake for some time listening to
+the sounds of suffering overhead, and he had lit his lamp and dressed,
+thinking that he might be needed. Gordon stood in the doorway almost
+reeling. He made an effort before he spoke.
+
+"Come into my office, will you?" he said.
+
+James at once followed him. Going through the hall the sounds of agony
+became more distinct. When they entered the office Gordon fairly slammed
+the door, then he turned to Elliot with a savage expression. "Hear
+that," he said, as if he were accusing the other man. "Hear that, I say!
+The last hypodermic has not taken effect yet, and her heart is weak. If
+I give her more--"
+
+He stopped, staring at James, his face worked like a child's. Then
+suddenly an almost idiotic expression came over it, the utter numbness
+of grief. Then it passed away. Again he looked intelligently into the
+young man's eyes. "If I don't give her more," he gasped out, "if I
+don't, this may last hours. If I do--"
+
+The two men stood staring at each other. James thought of Clemency. "Has
+Clemency been in to see her?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, she heard, and came in. I sent her out. She is in her own room
+now; Emma is with her." Suddenly Gordon gave a look of despairing appeal
+at James. "I--wish you would go up and see Clara," he whispered.
+
+James knew what he meant. He hesitated.
+
+"Go, and send Mrs. Blair down here," said Gordon. "Tell her I want to
+see her."
+
+"Well," said James slowly.
+
+The two men did not look at each other again. Gordon sank into his
+chair. James went out of the room and upstairs. He knocked on the door
+of the sick-room, and Mrs. Blair, the village nurse, answered his knock.
+She was a large woman in a voluminous wrapper. Her face had a settled
+expression of gravity, almost of sternness. She looked at James. The
+screams from the writhing mass of agony in the bed did not appear to be
+moving her, whereas she in reality was herself screwed to such a pitch
+of mental torture of pity that she was scarcely able to move. She was
+rigid.
+
+"Doctor Gordon sent me," whispered James. "He wished me to see her. He
+asked me to say to you that he would like to see you for a minute in the
+office."
+
+The woman did not move for a second. Then she whispered close to James's
+ear, "_It is on the bureau_."
+
+James nodded. They passed each other. James entered the room and closed
+the door. A lamp was burning on a table with a screen before it. The bed
+was in shadow. The screams never ceased. They were not human. James
+could not realize that the beautiful woman whom he had known was making
+such sounds. They sounded like the shrieks of an animal. All the soul
+seemed gone from them.
+
+James approached the bed. There was a roll of dark eyes at him. Then a
+voice ghastly beyond description, like the snarl of a hungry beast, came
+from between the straight white lips. "More, more! Give me more! Be
+quick!"
+
+James hesitated.
+
+"Quick, quick!" demanded the voice.
+
+James crossed the room to the dresser. The sick woman now interspersed
+her screams with the word "quick!"
+
+James filled a hypodermic syringe from a glass on the bureau and
+approached the bed again. He bared a shuddering arm and inserted the
+instrument quickly. "Now try and be quiet," he said. "You will go to
+sleep."
+
+Then he went out of the room. The screams had ceased. As James
+approached the stair another door opened, and Clemency in a wrapper
+looked out. She was very pale, her eyes were distended with fear, and
+her mouth was trembling. "How is she?" she whispered.
+
+"Better, dear. Go back in your room and lie down. We are doing all we
+can."
+
+When James entered the office Gordon and Mrs. Blair turned with one
+accord, and fixed horribly searching eyes upon his face. He sat down
+beside the table, and mechanically lit a cigar.
+
+"How did she seem?" Gordon asked almost inaudibly.
+
+"Better."
+
+"Was she quiet?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Gordon gave a long sigh. His face was deadly white. He leaned back in
+his chair, and both James and the nurse sprang. They thought he had
+fainted. While James felt his pulse Mrs. Blair got some brandy. Gordon
+swallowed the brandy, and raised his head.
+
+"It is nothing," he said in a harsh voice. "You had better go back to
+her, Mrs. Blair."
+
+A look of strange dread came over the woman's grave face.
+
+"I will be there directly," said Gordon.
+
+Mrs. Blair went out. She left the door ajar. The house was so still that
+one could seem to hear the silence. There was something terrible about
+it after the turmoil of sound. Then the silence was broken. A scream
+more terrible than ever pierced it like a sword. Another came. Gordon
+sprang up and faced James. The young man's eyes fell before the look of
+fierce questioning in Gordon's.
+
+"I could not," he gasped. "Oh, Doctor Gordon, I could not! Instead of
+that I used water. I thought perhaps her mind being convinced that it
+was morphine, she might--"
+
+"Mind!" shouted Gordon. "Mind, how much do you suppose the poor,
+tortured thing has to bring to bear upon this? I tell you she is being
+eaten alive. There is no other word for it. Gnawed, and worried, and
+eaten alive." Gordon ran out of the room.
+
+James closed the door. The dog, who had been asleep beside the fire,
+started up, came over to James, laid his white head on his knee and
+whimpered, with an appealing look in his brown eyes, which were turned
+toward the young man's face. Almost immediately Mrs. Blair entered the
+room. She was very pale. "Doctor Gordon sent me down for the brandy,"
+she said abruptly. She went to the table on which the brandy flask
+stood, but she seemed in no hurry to take it.
+
+"How is she?" asked James.
+
+"I think she is a little quieter." The nurse stood staring at the fire
+for a second longer. Then she took the brandy flask and went out with a
+soft, but jarring, tread.
+
+Doctor Gordon must have passed her on the stairs, for he returned almost
+directly after she had left, and stood with his back to James, fussing
+over some bottles on the shelves opposite the fireplace. He stood there
+for some five minutes. James glancing over his shoulder saw that he was
+trembling in a strange rigid fashion, but he seemed intent upon the
+bottles. The house was very still again. Gordon at last seemed to have
+finished whatever he was doing with the bottles. He left them and sat
+down in his chair. The dog left James and went to him, but Gordon pushed
+him away roughly. Then Gordon spoke to James without turning his face in
+his direction. "I wish you would go upstairs," he said hoarsely. "Mrs.
+Blair is alone, and I--I am about done too."
+
+James obeyed without a word. When he reached the head of the stairs he
+felt a sudden draught of cold wind. Mrs. Blair came out of the
+sick-room, closing the door behind her. Her face looked as stern as fate
+itself. James knew what had happened the moment he saw her.
+
+James began to speak stammeringly, but she stopped him. "Call Doctor
+Gordon," she said shortly. "She is dead."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+About two weeks after the death of Doctor Gordon's wife James went to
+the post office before beginning his round of calls. Lately nearly all
+the practice had devolved upon him. Gordon seemed sunken in a gloomy
+apathy, from which he could rouse himself only for the most urgent
+necessities. Once aroused he was fully himself, but for the most part he
+sat in his office smoking or seemingly half-asleep. Once in a while a
+very sick patient acted upon him as a momentary stimulus, but Alton was
+unusually healthy just then. After an open and, for the most part,
+snowless winter, which had occasioned much sickness, the spring brought
+frost and light falls of snow, which seemed to give new life to people
+in spite of unseasonableness. James had had little difficulty in
+attending to most of the practice, although he was necessarily away from
+home the greater part of the time. However, he often took Clemency with
+him, and she would sit well wrapped up in the buggy reading a book while
+he made calls. Then there were the long drives over solitary roads,
+which, though rough, causing the wheels to jolt heavily in deep ridges
+of frozen soil, or sink into the red mud almost to the hubs, as the case
+might be, seemed like roads of Paradise to the young man. Although he
+himself grieved for Gordon's wife, and Gordon himself filled him with
+covert anxiety, yet he was young and the girl was young, and they were
+both released from a miserable sense of insecurity and mystery, which
+had irritated and saddened them; their thoughts now turned toward their
+own springtime, as naturally and innocently as flowers bloom. There was
+grief, and the shadow of trouble, but of past trouble; their eyes looked
+upon life and love and joy instead of death, as helplessly as a flower
+looks toward the sun. They were happy, although half-ashamed of their
+happiness; but, after all, perhaps, being happy after bereavement and
+trouble means simply that the soul has turned to God for consolation.
+
+James's face was beaming with his joyful thoughts as he drew up before
+the village store, got out of the buggy, and tied the horse. When he
+entered he said "good morning!" in a sort of general fashion. There were
+many men lounging about. The morning mail had been distributed, and
+although Alton people got very few letters, still there was a wide
+interest in the post office, a little boxed-off space in a corner of the
+store. The store-keeper, Henry Graves, was the postmaster. He felt the
+importance of his position. When he sorted and distributed the mail from
+the limp leather bag, he realized himself as an official of a great
+republic. He loved to proudly ignore, and not even seem to see, the
+interested and gaping faces watching the boxes. Doctor Gordon's box was
+an object of especial interest. Indeed, that was the only one to be
+depended upon to contain something when the two mails per day arrived.
+Gordon, moreover, took the only New York paper which reached the little
+hamlet. Alton had no paper of its own. The nearest was printed in
+Stanbridge. One man, the Presbyterian minister, subscribed to the
+Stanbridge paper, and paid for it in farm produce. He had a little farm,
+and tilled the soil when he was not saving souls. The Stanbridge paper
+had arrived the night before, and the minister had been good enough to
+impart some of its contents to the curious throng in the store. He was
+accustomed to do so. Likewise Gordon, when he was not too hurried,
+would open his New York paper, and read the most startling "headers" to
+a wide-eyed audience. This morning the paper was in the box as usual,
+with a number of letters. The men pressed in a suggestive way around
+James, as he took the parcel from the postmaster. There were no
+lock-boxes. James hesitated a moment. He had not much time, but he was
+good-natured, and the eager hunger in the men's eyes appealed to him.
+There was something pathetic about this outreaching for intelligence of
+their kind, and its progress or otherwise, among these plodding folk,
+who had so to count their pence that a newspaper was an unheard-of
+luxury to them.
+
+James opened the paper and glanced over the headlines on the first page.
+Now, had he looked, he might have seen something sinister and malicious
+in the curious eyes, but he was so dazed by the very first thing he saw
+as to be for the moment oblivious to anything else. On the right of the
+first page was the headline: "Strange dual life of a prominent physician
+in Alton, New Jersey. Doctor Thomas B. Gordon has lived with his wife
+for years, and called her his widowed sister, Mrs. Clara Ewing. Upon
+her death, a few days since, he revealed the secret. Will give no
+reasons for this strange conduct, simply states that he was justified,
+even compelled, by circumstances." Then followed a caricature portrait
+of Gordon, a photograph of the house, one of the village church, and the
+cemetery and Gordon's wife's grave, with various surmises and comments,
+enough to fill the column. James paled as he read. He had not known of
+Gordon's action in telling that the dead woman was his wife. He looked
+around in a bewildered fashion, and met the hungry eyes. One small, mean
+face of a small man peered around his shoulder gloatingly. "Some news
+this mornin'?" he observed, with a smack of the lips, as if he tasted
+sweets.
+
+Then James arose to the occasion. He faced them all and smiled coolly.
+"Yes," he replied; "you mean about Doctor Gordon?"
+
+There was a murmur of assent.
+
+James read the article from beginning to end. "I suppose it is news to
+you," he said, when he had finished. He looked at them all with a
+superior air. He looked older and more manly than when he had first come
+in their midst. He _was_ older and more manly, and he was superior. The
+men recognized it, not sullenly nor defiantly, but with the
+unquestioning attitude of the New Jerseyman when he is really below the
+scale in birth and education. Still their faces all expressed malicious
+cunning and cruel curiosity, which they hesitated to put into words.
+They knew that Elliot was to marry Gordon's niece; they were overawed by
+both men, but they were afraid of Gordon.
+
+Still Jim Goodman found courage of his meanness and smallness and spoke.
+"It seems a strange thing," he said, "that Doctor Gordon should hev came
+and went here for years, and all of us thinkin' his wife were his sister
+when she were not."
+
+"Well, what of it?" asked James.
+
+The men stared at one another.
+
+"What of it?" repeated James. "I don't suppose there is anything
+criminal in a man's calling his wife by his sister's name. Doctor Gordon
+has a sister named Ewing."
+
+Again the men stared at one another, and Jim Goodman was the only one
+who had the miserable courage to speak. "S'pose him an' her were
+married," he said, in a thin voice like the squeal of a fox.
+
+"Which of you wants to be knocked down can make a statement to the
+contrary," thundered James. "Is that what you make of it?"
+
+Goodman shuffled from one foot to the other. Men nudged shoulders,
+Goodman spoke. "Nobody never knows what is true or ain't true in them
+newspapers," he observed, and there was a note of alarm in his voice.
+
+"I did not read a thing in the whole column which even implied such a
+thing as you intimated," James said hotly. "Don't put it off on the
+newspapers!"
+
+Then another man spoke, a farmer, tall, dry, lank, and impervious. He
+was a man about whom were ill-reports. His wife had died some years
+before, and he had a housekeeper, a florid, blonde creature, dressed
+with dingy showiness, of whom people spoke with covert laughs. "All we
+want to know is why Doctor Gordon has never said that her was his wife,
+and not his sister," he said in a defiant nasal voice.
+
+The malignant Jim Goodman saw his chance. He jumped upon it like a
+spider. "That's so," he said. "Why didn't he say she was his
+housekeeper?" There was a shout of coarse laughter. The farmer gave a
+hateful look at Goodman and puffed at a rank pipe.
+
+James was furious, but he saw the necessity of a statement of some kind,
+and his wits leaped to action. "Well," he said, "suppose there was a
+question of money."
+
+The crowd pressed closer and gaped.
+
+"Money!" said Goodman.
+
+"Yes, money," pursued James recklessly. "Did you never hear of people
+being opposed to marriages, rich people I mean, and threatening to
+disinherit a woman if she married the man they did not pick out for
+her?"
+
+"Was that it?" asked Goodman.
+
+"I am not saying that it was or was not. I am not going to discuss
+Doctor Gordon's secrets with you. It's none of your business, and none
+of my business. All I am saying is this, suppose there had been a girl
+years ago with a very rich bachelor brother. Suppose the brother had
+been jilted by a girl, and hated the whole lot of women like poison, and
+had no idea of getting married himself, and his sister would be his only
+heiress, and he had set his foot down that she should not marry Doc--the
+man she had set her heart upon. Suppose he went to--well, the South Sea
+Islands, for the rest of his life, to get out of sight and sound of
+women like the one who had jilted him, told his sister before he went
+that if she married the man she wanted he would make a will and leave
+his money away from her, build an hospital or a library or something,
+suppose she hit upon the plan of marrying the man she wanted, and
+keeping it quiet."
+
+"Was that it?"
+
+"Didn't I tell you that I would not say whether it was or not? I only
+say suppose that was the case. Doctor Gordon has a married sister by the
+name of Ewing living in foreign parts. You can see for yourself how easy
+it might have been."
+
+"What about the girl?" asked Goodman in a dry voice.
+
+James flushed angrily. "That is nobody's business," said he. "She is
+Doctor Gordon's niece."
+
+Goodman was unabashed. "How does it happen her name is Ewing?" he asked.
+
+"Couldn't it possibly have happened that two sisters of Doctor Gordon's
+married two brothers?" James cried. He elbowed his way out. When he was
+in the buggy driving home, he began to realize how the fairy tale which
+he had related in the store would not in the least impose upon Clemency,
+how she would almost inevitably hear of the statements in the papers. He
+wondered more and more that Gordon should have divulged a secret which
+he had kept so fiercely for so long.
+
+When he reached home he went at once into the office, and gave Gordon
+his mail and the New York paper. Gordon glanced at it, then at James.
+"Have you seen this?" he asked.
+
+James nodded.
+
+"I suppose you think me most inconsistent," said Gordon gloomily, "but
+the truth is I kept the secret while Clara was alive, though I found I
+could not, oh, God, I could not after she was dead and gone! I had not
+realized what that would mean: to never acknowledge her as my wife, dead
+or alive. I found that when it came to the death certificate, and the
+notice in the paper, and the erection of a stone to her memory, that I
+could not keep up the deception, no matter what the consequence. My God,
+Elliot, I cannot commit sacrilege against the dead! Dead, she must have
+her due. I anticipated this. There was something last night in the
+_Stanbridge Record_, and yesterday, while you were out three reporters
+from New York came. I told them that I had done what I had for good and
+sufficient reasons, which were not dishonorable to myself or to others,
+and beyond that I would say nothing. I suppose the poor fellows had to
+tax their imaginations to fill their columns. I don't know what the
+result will be with regard to Clemency, but I could not help it." There
+was something painfully appealing in Gordon's look and manner. He seemed
+so broken that James was alarmed. He said everything that he was able to
+say to soothe him, commended the course which he had taken, and told him
+what he had said at the store, without repeating the insinuations which
+had led him to fabricate such a tale. Gordon smiled bitterly. "All your
+fellowmen want of you is food for their animal appetites or their
+mental," he said. "They must have meat and drink for their stomachs, as
+well as for their curiosity and malice. I have lived here all these
+years, and labored for them for mighty poor recompense, and sometimes
+for none at all, and I'll warrant that to-day I am more in their minds
+than I have ever been before, because they have found out my secret,
+which has been the torture of my life. I wonder if Clemency has heard
+anything about it."
+
+"I will go and see," replied James.
+
+The minute he saw Clemency, who was in the parlor, he knew that she
+knew. By her side on the floor was the _Stanbridge Record_. She looked
+at James and pointed to it without a word. Her face was white as death.
+James took up the paper. That merely announced the fact of Mrs. Gordon's
+death, dwelt upon her many beautiful qualities of mind and body, her
+great suffering, and stated briefly the astonishment with which the news
+was received that she was Doctor Gordon's wife, and not his sister, as
+people had been led to suppose. "Little Annie Codman just brought it
+over," said Clemency. "She said her mother sent it. It is just like her
+mother. Mr. Codman never would have done such a thing."
+
+Mr. Codman was the minister.
+
+James, for a second, did not know what to say. He thought of the absurd
+story which he had told, or rather suggested, at the store, and realized
+that such a fabrication would not answer here.
+
+Immediately Clemency fired a point-blank question at him. "Who am I?"
+she asked.
+
+"You are Doctor Gordon's niece, dear."
+
+"But--she was not my mother."
+
+"No, dear."
+
+"Who am I?"
+
+"You are the daughter of Doctor Gordon's youngest sister, who died when
+you were born."
+
+Clemency sat reflecting, her forehead knit, a keen look in her blue
+eyes. "I knew my father was dead," she said after a little. "Uncle Tom
+has always told me that he passed away three months before I was born,
+but--" She raised a puzzled, shocked, grieved face to James. "What is my
+name?" she asked. "My real name?"
+
+James hesitated. Then his mind reverted to the tale which he had told at
+the store. He could see no other way out of the difficulty. "Did you
+never hear of two brothers marrying two sisters, dear?" he asked.
+
+Clemency gazed at him with a puzzled, almost suspicious, look. "I knew I
+had an aunt and cousin in England named Ewing," she said, "but I always
+supposed that my English aunt was not my real aunt, only my aunt by
+marriage, that she had married my father's brother."
+
+"Your English aunt is your uncle's own sister," said James.
+
+"I see: my own mother and my aunt were sisters, and they married
+brothers," Clemency said slowly.
+
+"That is unusual, but not unprecedented," said James. He had never been
+involved in such a web of fabrication. He felt his cheeks burning. He
+was sure that he looked guilty, but Clemency did not seem to notice it.
+She was reflecting, still with that puzzled knitting of her forehead and
+that introspective look in her blue eyes. "I wonder if I look in the
+least like my own mother?" she said in a curious voice, as of one who
+feels her way.
+
+"Once your uncle said to me that you were your own mother's very image,"
+replied James eagerly. He was glad to have the chance to say anything
+truthful.
+
+Clemency's face lightened. She spoke with that fatuous innocence and
+romance of young girls, and often of older women, to whom romance and
+sentiment are in the place of reason. "Then I know who that man was,"
+she announced in a delighted voice. "You and Uncle Tom thought I would
+never know, but I do know. I have found out my own self."
+
+"Who was he, dear?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know who he was really, and I don't know who that woman
+was. She does mix up things a good deal, but this much I do know--why
+Uncle Tom passed off my aunt for my mother, and why we were always
+hiding from that man. He was in love with my mother, and he was in love
+with me, because I am so much like her. Now, tell me honest, dear,
+didn't Uncle Tom ever tell you that that man was in love with my mother
+before I was born?"
+
+"Yes, dear," James answered, fairly bewildered over the fashion in which
+truth was lending itself to the need of falsehood.
+
+Clemency nodded her head triumphantly. "There, I told you I knew," said
+she. "Poor man, it was dreadful of him to pursue me so, and make us all
+so unhappy, and of course I never could have married him, even if it had
+not been for you. I do think he looked like a wicked man, and of course
+I never could have endured the thought of marrying a man who had been in
+love with my mother, even if he had been ever so good. But I can't help
+being sorry for him; he must have loved my mother so much, and he must
+have wasted his whole life; and then to die among strangers so suddenly,
+poor man."
+
+James felt a sort of pleasure at hearing the girl express, all
+unknowingly, sympathy for her dead father. The tears actually stood in
+her eyes. "The queerest thing to me is that woman," she added musingly,
+after a minute. Then again her face lightened. "Why, I do believe she
+was his sister," she cried, "and that was the reason she wanted to get
+me, and the reason why she was so dreadfully upset when she heard he was
+dead, poor thing. Well, of course, I can't help feeling glad that I am
+not in danger any more; but I am sorry for that poor man, even if he
+wasn't good." A tear rolled visibly down Clemency's cheeks. Then she got
+out her handkerchief and sobbed violently. "Oh, I haven't realized," she
+moaned, "I haven't realized until this minute, how terrible it is that
+she wasn't my mother."
+
+"She was as good as a mother to you, dear."
+
+"Yes, I know, but she wasn't, and it hurts me worse now she is gone than
+it would have done when she was alive. I don't seem to have anything."
+
+"You have me."
+
+Then Clemency ran to him, and he held her on his knee and comforted her,
+then tore himself away to make his morning round of calls. Clemency
+followed him to the door, and kissed her hand to him as he drove away.
+James had good reason to remember it, for it was the last loving
+salutation from her for many a day.
+
+When he returned at noon the girl's manner was unaccountably changed
+toward him. She only spoke to him directly when addressed, and then in
+monosyllables. She never looked at him. She sat at the table at luncheon
+and poured the chocolate, and there was almost absolute silence. Emma
+waited jerkily as usual. James fancied once, when he met her eyes, that
+there was an expression of covert triumph on her face. Emma had never
+liked him. He had been conscious of the fact, but it had not disturbed
+him. He had no more thought of this middle-aged, harsh-featured New
+Jersey farmer's daughter than he had of one of the dining-chairs. Gordon
+sat humped upon himself, as he sat nowadays, a marked stoop of age was
+becoming visible in his broad shoulders, and he ate perfunctorily
+without a word. James, after a number of futile attempts to talk to
+Clemency, subsided himself into bewildered silence, and ate with very
+little appetite. There were chops and potatoes and peas, and apple-pie,
+for luncheon. When it came to the pie Emma served Clemency and Doctor
+Gordon, and deliberately omitted James. Nobody seemed to notice it,
+although James felt sure that the omission was intentional. He felt
+himself inwardly amused at the antagonism which could take such a form,
+and went without his pie uncomplainingly, while Gordon and Clemency ate
+theirs. The dog at this juncture came slinking into the room and close
+to James, who gave him a lump of sugar from the bowl which happened to
+stand near him. At once Emma took the bowl and moved it to another part
+of the table out of his reach. James felt a strong inclination to laugh.
+
+The dog sat up and begged for more sugar, and James, when they all left
+the table, coolly took a handful of sugar from the bowl and carried it
+into the office, the dog leaping at his side. Emma slammed the
+dining-room door behind him. Clemency, without a look at him,
+immediately ran upstairs to her own room. Gordon and James sat down in
+the office as usual for a smoke until James should start upon his
+afternoon rounds. Gordon asked him a few questions about the patients
+whom he had seen that morning, but in a listless, abstracted fashion,
+then he spoke of those whom James would see that afternoon. "You had
+better take the team," he said.
+
+"Clemency is going with me," James said.
+
+Gordon looked at him with faint surprise. "I think you must be
+mistaken," he said. "Clemency came to me just before luncheon and asked
+if I had any objections to her spending a few days with Annie Lipton. I
+told her we could get on perfectly well without her, and Aaron is going
+to drive her over. She will have to take a suit-case. I knew you had to
+go in another direction, and could not take her. I thought the change
+would do her good. Didn't she say anything to you about it?"
+
+"I think it will do her good. She needs a little change," James replied
+evasively. As he spoke Aaron came out of the stable leading the bay mare
+harnessed to a buggy.
+
+"She is going right away," said Gordon, looking a little puzzled. He had
+hardly finished speaking before Clemency's voice was heard in the hall.
+It rang rather hard, but quite clearly. "Good-by," she called out.
+
+"Good-by," responded Gordon and James together. Gordon looked at James,
+astonished that he did not go out to assist Clemency into the buggy, and
+bid her good-by. He seemed about to question him, then he took another
+puff at his pipe, and his face settled into its wonted expression of
+gloomy retrospection. Boy's and girl's love affairs seemed as motes in a
+beam of sunlight to him at this juncture.
+
+James started to go, the horses were stamping uneasily in the drive, and
+he had a long round of calls to make that afternoon.
+
+Gordon removed his pipe. "I am putting a good deal on you, Elliot," he
+said with a kind of hard sadness.
+
+"That's all right," James replied cheerfully, "I am strong. I can stand
+it if the patients can. I fancied old Mrs. Steen was rather disgusted to
+see me this morning. I heard her say something about sendin' a boy to
+her daughter, and when I went into the bedroom, she glared at me, and
+said, 'You?'" James laughed.
+
+"Her case is not at all desperate," Gordon said gloomily. "She is merely
+on the downward road of life. Nothing ails her except that. You can
+supply the few inadequate crutches of tonics as well as any one. There
+is not one desperately sick patient on the whole list now, that I know
+of, although I must confess that that Willoughby girl rather puzzles me.
+She breaks every diagnosis all to pieces."
+
+"Hysteria," said James.
+
+"Oh, yes, I know hysteria is a good way to account for our own lack of
+insight," said Gordon, "and it may be that girls are queer subjects.
+Sometimes I wonder if they know what they know. Lilian Willoughby does
+not."
+
+Gordon, to James's intense surprise, flared into a burst of anger. "Yes,
+she does know," he declared. "Down in her inner consciousness I believe
+she does, poor little overstrung, oversensitive girl, half-fed, as to
+her body, on coarse food which she cannot assimilate, starved
+emotionally. If a girl like that has to exist anyway, why cannot she be
+born under different circumstances? That girl as daughter of a New
+Jersey farmer is an anomaly. If she mates at all it must be with another
+New Jersey farmer, then she dies after bringing a few degenerates into
+the world. Providence does things like that, and the doctors are
+supposed to right things. That girl has had symptoms of about every
+known disease, and my diagnosis has failed to prove the existence of one
+of them. Yet there are the symptoms. Call it hysteria, or what you will.
+I call it an injustice on the part of the Higher Power. I suppose that
+is blasphemy, but I am forced to it. Can that girl help the longings
+for her rights, her longings which are abnormally acute because of her
+over-fine nervous system? Those longings, situated as she is, can never
+be satisfied in any way except for her own harm. Meantime she eats her
+own heart, since she has nothing else, and heart-eating produces all
+kinds of symptoms. I am absolutely powerless in such a case, though
+sometimes I make a diagnosis which I think may be correct, sometimes I
+think there is some organic trouble which I can mitigate. But always I
+fall back upon the miserable truth which I am convinced underlies her
+whole existence. She is a creature born into a life which does not and
+never will afford her the proper food for her physical and spiritual
+needs. Oh, the horror in this world, and what am I to set myself to
+right it? Shut the door."
+
+"The horses are uneasy," James said.
+
+"Never mind, shut the door. Clemency is away, and Emma out in the
+kitchen. I must speak to somebody, or I shall go mad."
+
+James shut the door and turned to Gordon, who sat rigid in his chair,
+his hands clutching the arms. "Do you think I did right?" he groaned.
+"You know what I did. Was it right?"
+
+"If you mean about your wife," James said, "I think you did entirely
+right."
+
+"But you could not," Gordon returned bitterly. "It was too much for you
+to attempt, and yet she was nothing to you as she was to me, and the sin
+would not have been so terrible."
+
+"I had not the courage," James replied simply.
+
+"You did not think it right. You did not wish to burden your soul with
+such a responsibility. I was wrong to try to shift it upon you, wrong
+and cowardly, but she was bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; it was
+a double crime for me, murder and suicide. It was not because you had
+not the courage: you have faced surgical operations and dissecting. You
+dared not commit what you were not sure was not a crime. There is no use
+in your hedging, Elliot. I know the truth."
+
+"Still I think you did right," James said stubbornly. "She had to die
+anyway. Death was upon her. You simply hastened it."
+
+Gordon looked at James, and his eyes seemed to fairly blaze with somber
+fire; for a moment the young man thought his reason was unhinged. "But
+what am I? Who is any man to take whip or spur to the decrees of the
+Almighty, to hasten them?"
+
+"She was suffering--" James began.
+
+"What of that? Who can say, though she had led the life of a saint on
+earth, so far as any one could see, what subtle sins of life itself her
+pains were counteracting? Who can tell but I have deprived her of untold
+joys which would have compensated a thousand times for those pains by
+shortening them?"
+
+"Doctor Gordon, you are morbid," James said, looking at him uneasily.
+
+"How do you know I am morbid? Then that other--Mendon. Who is to say
+that I was right even about that? It is probable I saved your life, and
+possibly my own, as well as Clemency from misery. But who can say that
+death would not have been better for both you and me than life, and even
+misery for Clemency had that man lived? God had allowed him life upon
+the earth. I may have shortened that life. He was a monster of
+wickedness, but who can say that he was not a weapon of God, and that I
+have not done incalculable mischief by depriving him of that weapon?
+There is only one consolation which I have with regard to him; unless my
+diagnosis was entirely at fault, he would have had that attack of
+erysipelas anyway. I hardly think I deceive myself with regard to that,
+and there is a very probable chance that the attack would have been
+fatal. He had nearly lost his life twice before with the same disease.
+That I know, and I do not think that unless the poison was already in
+his blood, it would have developed so rapidly from that slight bruise.
+So far as the simple wound from the dog went, he was in no danger
+whatever. I have that consolation in his case, in not being absolutely
+certain that I caused his death; I am not even absolutely sure that I
+hastened it by any appreciable time. He might have been attacked that
+very night with the disease. Still there is, and always will be, the
+slight doubt."
+
+"I don't think you ought to brood over that, Doctor Gordon," James said
+soothingly. He went close to the older man and laid a hand upon his
+shoulder. Gordon looked up at him, and his face was convulsed. He spoke
+with solemn and tragic emphasis. "It is not for mortal man to interfere
+with the ways of God, and he does so at his own peril," he said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+The confidence which Gordon had reposed in James seemed for a time to
+have given him a measure of relief. While he never for an instant
+appeared like his old self, while the games of euchre at Georgie K.'s
+were not resumed, nor the boyish enjoyment of things, which James now
+recognized to have been simply feverish attempts to live through the
+horrible ordeal of his life and keep his sanity, while he had now
+settled down into a state of austere gloom, yet he begun again to attend
+to his practice and to take interest in it. Clemency remained away for a
+week. Then Gordon brought her home. She was at the dinner-table that
+night when James returned rather late from a call on a far-off patient.
+She simply said, "Good evening! Doctor Elliot," as if he had been the
+merest acquaintance, and went on to serve his soup. James gave her a
+bewildered, half-grieved, half-angered look, which she seemed not to
+notice. Immediately after dinner she went to her own room. James,
+smoking with Gordon in the office, heard her go upstairs. Gordon nodded
+at James through the cloud of smoke.
+
+"She has taken a notion, my son," he said. "She told me on the way home
+that she wished to break the engagement with you. She would give no
+reason. She wished me to tell you. I don't take her seriously. She cares
+as much for you as ever. Girls are queer cattle. She has some utterly
+unimaginable idea in her head, which will run itself out. If I were you
+I would pay no attention to it. Simply take her at her word, and let her
+alone for a little while, and she herself will urge you for a
+reconciliation. I know the child. She simply cannot remain at odds for
+any length of time with any one whom she loves, and she does love you;
+but she is freakish, and at times inclined to strain at her bit. Perhaps
+Annie Lipton has been putting ideas into her head against marriage in
+general. She may have frightened her, and they may have sworn celibacy
+together in the watches of the night. Girls hatch more mischief when
+they ought to be asleep. They are queer cattle."
+
+"The trouble began before Clemency went away," James said soberly. He
+was quite pale.
+
+"Trouble? What trouble?"
+
+"I don't know. All I know is, that the very day when Clemency went away
+she seemed changed to me. You remember how she called out good-by, and I
+did not go out to help her off as I should naturally have done."
+
+"Yes, I do remember that, and I did wonder at your not going."
+
+"I did not go because I was quite sure that she did not wish it. She had
+been very curt with me, and had shown me unmistakably that my attentions
+were not welcome."
+
+"And you don't know why? There had been no quarrel?"
+
+"Not the slightest. I have not the faintest idea what the trouble is or
+was, and why she wishes to break the engagement. All I know is that as
+suddenly as a weather vane turns from west to north, she turned, and
+seemed to have no more use for me."
+
+"Queer," Gordon said reflectively. He eyed James keenly. "You absolutely
+know of no reason?"
+
+"I absolutely know of none. Clemency is the very first girl about whom I
+have ever thought in this way. There is nothing in my whole life, past
+or present, which I could not spread before her like an open book, so
+far as any fear lest it should turn her against me."
+
+"I questioned her," Gordon said, "and she absolutely refused to give me
+any reason for breaking her engagement. She simply repeated over and
+over, 'I have changed my mind, Uncle Tom.' I asked her if she had seen
+anybody else."
+
+James flushed hotly. "What did she say to that?"
+
+"She said, 'Whom could I have seen, Uncle Tom? You yourself know how
+many men I have seen here, and you know I never see men at Annie's.'
+There is no one else. You may be sure of that, and also sure that she
+still cares for you. I know that from her whole manner. She has simply
+taken one of those unaccountable freaks which the best of girls will
+take. Just let her alone, and the whole will right itself. She may have
+got a sudden scare at the idea of marriage itself, for all I know. I
+still cling to the idea that Annie Lipton has been putting ideas into
+her head, in spite of what you say of her coldness before she went
+there. She may have started herself in the path, but Annie helped her
+further on."
+
+"Of course I must leave here," James said gloomily.
+
+Gordon started. "Leave here?"
+
+"Yes, of course. Clemency will naturally not wish to have me a member of
+the household in the existing state of things."
+
+"Clemency will wish it. Of course you are going to stay, Elliot."
+
+"I don't feel as if I could, Doctor Gordon."
+
+"Nonsense!"
+
+"It will naturally not be very pleasant for me," James said, coloring.
+
+"Why not?" asked Gordon irritably. "You are not a love-sick girl."
+
+"No, I am not," James returned with spirit. "I know I am jilted, but I
+mean to take, and I think I am taking it, like a man. If Clemency does
+not want me, I am sure I do not want her to have me. And I can stand
+seeing her daily under the altered condition of things. I am no
+milk-sop. Generally speaking, living under a roof when you are an object
+of aversion to a member of the household, is not exactly pleasant."
+
+"You are not an object of aversion."
+
+"I might as well be."
+
+Gordon looked at the young man pitifully. "For God's sake, then don't
+leave _me_, Elliot," he said.
+
+James stared at him. There was so much emotion in his face.
+
+"What do you think my life would be without you?" said Gordon. "Aside
+from your assistance, which I cannot do without, you are my only solace,
+especially since Clemency is in this mood. Stay for my sake, if it is
+unpleasant, Elliot."
+
+"Well, I will stay, if you feel so about it, doctor," James replied.
+
+"Clemency is treating you shamefully," Gordon said.
+
+"A girl has a right to her own mind in such a matter, if she has in
+anything."
+
+"The worst of it is, it is not her mind. I tell you I know that."
+
+"I am not so sure."
+
+"Wait and see! You underestimate yourself, boy."
+
+James laughed sadly. Then there was a knock on the office door and
+Georgie K. appeared. He looked shyly at Gordon. He had a bottle under
+his arm. "I have brought over a little apple-jack; thought it might do
+you good," he stammered, his great face suffused like a girl's.
+
+Gordon looked affectionately at him. "Thank you, Georgie K.," he said.
+"Sit down and we will have a game. I'll get the hot water and glasses.
+Emma is out."
+
+"I'll get them," James said eagerly. He went out to the kitchen, but
+Emma was not out. She was sitting sewing in a gingham apron.
+
+"What do you want?" she demanded severely.
+
+James explained meekly.
+
+"Well, go back to the office, and I'll fetch the things," Emma said in a
+hostile tone. James obeyed. Presently Emma appeared bearing a tray with
+the hot water and two glasses, Gordon did not notice the omission of a
+third glass, until she had gone out. "Why, she only brought two
+glasses," he said.
+
+James felt absurdly unequal to facing Emma again. "I don't think I'll
+take anything to-night," he said.
+
+"Nonsense!" returned Gordon. He went to the door and shouted for Emma
+with no response. "She can't have gone upstairs so quickly," he said.
+But when after another shout he got no response, he went himself into
+the dining-room, and got a tumbler from the sideboard. "She must have
+gone upstairs at once," he remarked when he returned. "The kitchen is
+dark."
+
+Georgie K. did not remain very late. He seemed nervously solicitous
+with regard to Doctor Gordon. When he left he shook hands with him, and
+bade him take good care of himself.
+
+"I love that man," Gordon said, when the door had closed behind him.
+
+When James entered his room that night he found fresh proof of Emma's
+inexplicable hostility. The room was in total darkness. He lit matches
+and searched for lamp or candles, to find none. He fumbled his way out
+into the kitchen, and got a little lamp, which gave but a dim light, and
+read, as was his habit, after he had gone to bed, with exceeding
+difficulty. He also was subjected to a most absurd annoyance from the
+presence of some gritty particles in the bed. After he extinguished his
+lamp he could not go to sleep because of them, and lit his lamp again,
+and tore the sheet off and shook it. The gritty particles seemed to him
+to be crumbs of very hard and dry bread. He made the bed up again after
+his clumsy masculine fashion. James had not much manual dexterity, and
+rested very uncomfortably, from a pronounced inclination of the
+coverings to slide off his feet, and over one side of the bed.
+
+The next morning Emma did not bring hot water for his shaving. She
+usually set a pitcher outside his door, but this morning there was none.
+He was obliged to go out to the kitchen and prefer a request for some.
+"I have jest filled up the coffee-pot and the tea-kettle, and I guess
+the water ain't very hot," Emma said in a malicious tone, as she filled
+a pitcher for him.
+
+The water was not very hot. James had a severe experience shaving, and
+his annoyances were not over then. There was no napkin beside his plate
+at breakfast. He did not like to apply to Clemency, whose cold good
+morning had served to establish a higher barrier between them, and who
+sat behind the coffee urn with a forlorn but none the less severe look.
+He also did not like to apply to Gordon for fear of offending her. It
+was about as bad to ask Emma, but he finally did, in a low tone.
+
+Emma apparently did not hear. He was forced to repeat his request for a
+napkin loudly. Gordon looked up. "Emma, why do you not set the table
+properly?" he asked, in a severe tone.
+
+Emma tossed her head and muttered. She brought a napkin, and laid it
+beside James's plate with an impetus as if it had been a lump of lead.
+Presently James discovered that he had only one spoon, but he made that
+do duty for his cereal and coffee, and said nothing. He was aware of
+Emma's eyes of covert, malicious enjoyment upon him, as he
+surreptitiously licked off the oatmeal, and put the spoon in his coffee.
+He began to wonder what he could do, if this state of things was to
+continue. It all seemed so absurd, the grievances were so exceedingly
+petty. He could not imagine what had so turned Emma against him. He was
+even more at a loss where she was concerned than in Clemency's case. A
+girl engaged might find some foolish reason, which seemed enormous to
+her, to turn the cold shoulder to him, but it was inconceivable that
+Emma should. He had always treated her politely, even with a certain
+deference, knowing, as he did, that she was an old and faithful servant,
+and as the daughter of a farmer being, in her own estimation at least,
+of a highly superior station to that of servants in general. He could
+not imagine why Emma was subjecting him to these ridiculous
+persecutions, before which he was almost helpless. She had heretofore
+treated him loftily, as was her wont with everybody, except Gordon and
+Clemency, but certainly she had neglected none of her duties with
+regard to him. Miserable as James was concerning Clemency, he could not
+but feel that if he were to be subjected to these incomprehensible
+annoyances from Emma, life in the house would be almost impossible. He
+could bear sorrow like a man, but to bear pinpricks beside was almost
+too much to ask. That noon, when he returned from his rounds, he
+realized that there was to be no cessation. Clemency was not at the
+lunch-table. Gordon said she had a headache and was lying down. Emma in
+passing James his cup of tea, contrived to spill it over him. He was not
+scalded, but his shirt-front and collar were stained, thereby
+necessitating a change, and he was in a hurry to be gone directly after
+lunch.
+
+Gordon roused himself, however. "Be more careful another time, Emma," he
+said sharply.
+
+Emma tossed her head. "Doctor Elliot moved jest as I was coming with the
+cup," she said in a thin, waspish voice.
+
+"He did no such thing," Gordon said harshly, "and if he had, it was your
+business to be careful. Get Doctor Elliot another cup of tea."
+
+Emma obeyed with a jerk. She set the cup and saucer down beside James's
+plate as hard as she dared, and James at the first sip found that the
+tea was salted. However, he said nothing. Gordon after his outburst had
+resumed his former state of apathy, and was eating and drinking like a
+machine, whose works were rusty and almost run down. He could not
+trouble him with such an absurdity. Then, too, he was too vexed to
+please the girl so much. He forced himself to drink the tea without a
+grimace, knowing that Emma's eyes were upon him. But the climax was
+almost reached. That night when on his return he wished to change his
+collar before dinner, he found every one with the buttonholes torn. It
+was skilfully done, so skilfully that no one could have declared
+positively that it had not been done accidentally in the laundry. James
+would not appear at the dinner-table in a soiled collar, and was forced
+to hurry out to the village store and purchase new ones. These, with the
+exception of the one he put on, he locked in his trunk. He was late for
+dinner, and the soup was quite cold. When Doctor Gordon complained
+irritably, Emma replied with one of her characteristic tosses of the
+head that she couldn't help it, Doctor Elliot was late. James said
+nothing. He swallowed his luke-warm soup in silence. He began to wonder
+what he could do. He did not wish to complain to Doctor Gordon,
+especially as the result might be the dismissal of Emma, and he felt
+that he could say nothing to Clemency about it. Clemency appeared at the
+dinner-table, but she looked pale and forlorn, and said good evening to
+James without lifting her eyes. When her uncle asked if her head was
+better, she said, "Yes, thank you," in a spiritless tone. She ate almost
+nothing. After dinner, James had a call to make, and, on his return,
+entered by the office door. He found Gordon fast asleep in his chair,
+with the dog at his feet. The dog started up at sight of James, but he
+motioned him down, and went softly out into the hall. There was a light
+there, but none in the parlor. James heard distinctly a little sob from
+the parlor. He hesitated a moment, then he entered the room. It was
+suffused with moonlight. All the pale objects stood out like ghosts.
+Clemency by the window, in a little white wool house-gown, looked,
+ghostly.
+
+James went straight across to her, pulled up a chair beside her, seated
+himself, and pulled one of her little hands away from her face almost
+roughly, and held it firmly in spite of her weak attempt to remove it.
+"Now, Clemency," he said in a determined voice, "this has gone quite far
+enough. You told your uncle that you wished to break your engagement to
+me. I have no wish to coerce you. If you really do not want to marry me,
+why, I must make the best of it, but I have a right to know the reason
+why, and I will know it."
+
+Clemency was silent, except for her sobs.
+
+"Tell me," said James.
+
+"Don't," whispered Clemency.
+
+"Tell me."
+
+Then Clemency let her other hand, which contained a moist little ball of
+handkerchief, fall. She turned full upon him her tearful, swollen face.
+"If you want to know what you know already," said she, in a hard voice,
+"here it is. She wasn't my mother, but I loved her like one, and you
+killed her."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+James sat as if turned to stone. All in a second he realized what it
+must be. He let Clemency's hand go, and leaned back in his chair. "What
+do you mean, Clemency?" he asked finally, but he realized how senseless
+the question was. He knew perfectly well what she meant, and he knew
+perfectly well that he was utterly helpless before her accusation.
+
+"You know," said Clemency, still in her unnatural hard voice. "You
+killed her."
+
+"How?"
+
+"You know. You gave her more morphine, and her heart was weak. Emma
+overheard Uncle Tom say so, and that more morphine was dangerous. She
+might have been alive to-day if it had not been for you."
+
+James sat staring at the girl. She went on pitilessly. "You did not see
+Emma that last time you came upstairs," she said, "but she saw you. She
+was standing in the door of her room, and she had no light. She saw you
+and Mrs. Blair going away from her room, and she heard Mrs. Blair tell
+you she was dead. You killed her. I want nothing whatever to do with a
+murderer."
+
+James remembered that draught of cold air. It must have come from the
+open door of Emma's room at the end of the hall. He understood that Emma
+could not have seen him coming upstairs, but that she had seen him with
+Mrs. Blair at the door of the sick-room, and had jumped at her
+conclusion.
+
+"Emma knew when you went upstairs first," said Clemency. "You left her
+door a little ajar. Emma saw you giving her a hypodermic. And then when
+that did not kill her you gave her another. Uncle Tom did not know. He
+must never know, for it would kill him, but you did kill her."
+
+James was silent for a moment. He realized the impossibility of clearing
+himself from the accusation unless he told the whole truth and
+implicated Doctor Gordon. Finally he said, miserably enough, "You don't
+know how horribly she was suffering, dear. You don't know what torments
+she would have had to suffer."
+
+He knew when he said that that he incriminated himself. Clemency
+retorted immediately, "You don't know. I have heard Uncle Tom say that
+nobody can ever know. She might have gotten well. Anyway, you killed
+her." With that Clemency sprang up and ran out of the room, and James
+heard her sob.
+
+As for himself, he remained where he was for a long time. He never knew
+how long. He felt numb. He realized himself to be in a gulf of
+misunderstanding, from which he could not be extricated, even for the
+sake of Clemency. It seemed to him again that he must go away, but he
+remembered Gordon's pitiful plea to him to remain. Finally he went into
+his room, to find that Emma, in her absurd malice, had left only the
+coverlid on the bed. She had stripped it of the sheets and blankets. He
+lay down with his clothes on and passed a sleepless night.
+
+The next morning at the breakfast-table he looked haggard and pale. He
+could eat nothing. Doctor Gordon looked at him keenly.
+
+"What is the matter, Elliot?" he asked.
+
+Clemency gave a quick glance at him, and her face worked.
+
+"Nothing," replied James.
+
+"You look downright ill."
+
+"I am not ill."
+
+Clemency rose abruptly and left the table.
+
+"What is the matter, Clemency? Where are you going?" Gordon called out.
+
+"I have finished my breakfast," the girl replied in a stifled voice.
+
+Gordon insisted on making some calls that morning, and relieving James.
+"You are worn out, my son," he said in a voice of real affection, and
+clapped him on the shoulder. He sent James on a short round in spite of
+his objections, and the consequence was that James reached home half an
+hour before luncheon.
+
+It was a beautiful morning. Spring seemed to have come with a winged
+leap. A faint down of green shaded the elms, and there was a pink cloud
+of peach bloom in the distance. The cherry trees were swollen almost to
+blossom, and the apple trees had pale radiances in the glance of the
+sun. The grass was quite green, and here and there were dandelions.
+Clemency was out in the yard, working in a little flower-garden, as
+James drove in. She had on a black dress, and her fair head was
+uncovered. She pretended not to see James, but he had hardly entered the
+office before she came in. Her face was all suffused with pink. She
+looked at him tenderly and angrily.
+
+"Are you ill?" she said, in an indignant voice which had, in spite of
+herself, soft cadences.
+
+"No, Clemency."
+
+"Then why do you look so?" she demanded.
+
+James turned at that. "Clemency, you accuse me of cruelty," he said,
+"but you yourself are cruel. You do not realize that you cannot tell a
+man he is a murderer, and throw him over when he loves you, and yet have
+him utterly unmoved by it."
+
+Suddenly Clemency was in his arms. "I love you, I love you," she sobbed.
+"Don't be unhappy, don't look so. It breaks my heart. I love you, I do
+love you, dear. I can't marry you, but I love you!"
+
+"If you love me, you can marry me."
+
+Clemency shrank away, then she clung to him again. "No," she said, "I
+can't get over the thought of it. I can't help it, but I do love you. We
+will go on just the same as ever, only we will not get married. You know
+we were not going to get married just yet anyway. I love you. We will go
+on just the same. Only don't look the way you did this morning at
+breakfast."
+
+"How did I look?"
+
+"As if your heart were broken."
+
+"So it is, dear."
+
+"No, it is not. I love you, I tell you. What is the need of bothering
+about marriage anyway? I am perfectly happy being engaged. Annie says
+she is never going to get married. Let the marriage alone. Only you
+won't look so any more, will you, dear?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+After this James encountered a strange state of things: the semblance of
+happiness, which almost deceived him as to its reality.
+
+Clemency was as loving as she had ever been. Gordon congratulated James
+upon the reconciliation. "I knew the child could never hold out, and it
+was Annie Lipton," he said. James admitted that Annie Lipton might have
+been the straw which turned the balance. He knew that Clemency had not
+told Gordon of her conviction that he had given the final dose of
+morphine to her aunt. Everything now went on as before. Clemency
+suddenly became awake to Emma's petty persecutions of James, and they
+ceased. James one day could not help overhearing a conversation between
+the two. He was in the stable, and the kitchen windows were open. He
+heard only a few words. "You don't mean to say you are goin' to hev
+him?" said Emma in her strident voice.
+
+"No, I am not," returned Clemency's sweet, decided one.
+
+"What be you goin' with him again for then?"
+
+James knew how the girl blushed at that, but she answered with spirit.
+"That is entirely my own affair, Emma," she said, "and as long as Doctor
+Elliot remains under this roof, and pays for it, too, he must be treated
+decently. You don't pass him things, you don't fill his lamp. Now you
+must treat him exactly as you did before, or I shall tell Uncle Tom."
+
+"You won't tell him why?" said Emma, and there was alarm in her voice,
+for she adored Gordon.
+
+"Did you ever know me to go from one to another in such a way?" asked
+Clemency. "You know if I told Uncle Tom, he would not put up with it a
+minute. He thinks the world of Doctor Elliot."
+
+"It's awful queer how men folks can be imposed on," said Emma.
+
+"That has nothing to do with it," Clemency said. "You must treat Doctor
+Elliot respectfully, Emma."
+
+"I'm jest as good as he be," said Emma resentfully.
+
+"Well, what if you are? He's as good as you, isn't he? And he treats you
+civilly. He always has."
+
+"I'm a good deal better than he be," Emma went on irascibly. "I wouldn't
+have gone and went, and--"
+
+"Hush!" ordered Clemency in a frightened voice. "Emma, you must do as I
+say."
+
+James drove out of the yard and heard no more, but after that he had no
+fault to find with Emma, so far as her service was concerned. It is true
+that she gave him malignant glances, but she made him comfortable,
+albeit unwillingly. It was fortunate for him that she did so, or he
+would have found his position almost unbearable. Doctor Gordon relaxed
+again into his state of apathetic gloom. His strength also seemed to
+wane. Almost the whole practice devolved upon James. Gordon seemed less
+and less interested even in extreme cases. Georgie K. also lost his
+power over him. Now and then of an evening he came, but Gordon, save to
+offer him a cigar, took scarcely any notice of him. One evening Georgie
+K. made a motion to James behind Gordon's back when he took leave, and
+James made an excuse to follow him out. In the drive Georgie K. took
+James by the arm, and the young man felt him tremble. "What ails him?"
+asked Georgie K.
+
+"I hardly know," James replied in a whisper.
+
+"I know," said Georgie K. By the light from the office window James
+could see that the man was actually weeping. His great ruddy face was
+streaming with tears. "Don't I know?" he sobbed.
+
+James remembered the stuffed canary and the wax flowers, and the story
+Gordon had told him of Georgie K.'s grief over his wife's death.
+
+"I dare say you are right," he returned.
+
+"He's breakin' his heart, that's what he's doin'," said Georgie K.
+"Can't you get him to go away for a change or somethin'?"
+
+"I have tried."
+
+"He'll die of it," Georgie K. said with a great gulp as he went out of
+the yard.
+
+When James reentered the office Gordon looked up at him. "That poor old
+fellow called you out to talk about me," he said quietly. "I know I'm
+going downhill."
+
+"For heaven's sake, can't you go up, doctor?"
+
+"No, I am done for. I could get over losing her, but I can't get over
+what--you know what."
+
+"But her death was inevitable, and greater agony was inevitable."
+
+Gordon turned upon him fiercely. "When you have been as long in this
+cursed profession as I have," he said, "you will realize that nothing is
+inevitable. She might have recovered for all I know. That woman, at
+Turner Hill, who I thought was dying six months ago, being up and around
+again, is an instance. I tell you mortal man has no right to thrust his
+hand between the Almighty and fate. You know nothing, and I know
+nothing."
+
+"I do know."
+
+"You don't know, and you don't even know that you don't know. There is
+no use talking about this any longer. When I am gone you must marry
+Clemency, and keep on with my practice."
+
+James considered when he was in his own room that the event of his
+succeeding to the practice might not be so very remote, but as to his
+marrying Clemency he doubted. He dared not hint of the matter to Gordon,
+for he knew it would disturb him, but Clemency, as the days went on,
+became more and more variable. At times she was loving, at times it was
+quite evident that she shrank from him with a sort of involuntary
+horror. James began to wonder if they ever could marry. He was fully
+resolved not to clear himself at the expense of Doctor Gordon; in fact,
+such a course never occurred to him. He had a very simple
+straightforwardness in matters of honor, and this seemed to him a matter
+of honor. No question with regard to it arose in his mind. Obviously it
+was better that he should bear the brunt than Gordon, but he did ask
+himself if it would ever be possible for Clemency to dissociate him from
+the thought of the tragedy entirely, and if she could not, would it be
+possible for her to be happy as his wife? That very day Clemency had
+avoided him, and once when he had approached she had visibly shrunk and
+paled. Evidently the child could not help it. She looked miserably
+unhappy. She had grown thin lately, and had lost almost entirely her
+sense of fun, which had always been so ready.
+
+James went to sleep, wondering how she would treat him the next day. He
+never knew, for the girl shifted like a weather-cock, driven hither and
+yon by her love and terror like two winds. The next day, however, solved
+the problem in an entirely unexpected fashion. James, that morning after
+breakfast, during which Clemency had sat pale and stern behind the
+coffee-urn, and scarcely had noticed him, set off on a round of calls.
+Doctor Gordon, to his surprise, announced his intention of making some
+calls himself; he said that he would take the team, and James must drive
+the balky mare, as the bay was to be taken to the blacksmith's. Gordon
+that morning looked worse than usual, although he evinced such unwonted
+energy. He trembled like a very old man. He ate scarcely anything, and
+his mouth was set hard with a desperate expression. James wished to urge
+him to remain at home, but he did not dare. Gordon, when he left the
+breakfast-table, proposed that James should take Clemency with him, but
+the girl replied curtly that she was too busy. Gordon started on his
+long circuit, and James set off to make the rounds of Alton and
+Westover. The mare seemed in a very favorable mood that morning. She did
+not balk, and went at a good pace. It was not until James was on his
+homeward road that the trouble began. Then the mare planted her four
+feet at angles, in her favorite fashion, and became as immovable as a
+horse of bronze. James touched her with the whip. He was in no patient
+mood that morning. Finally he lashed her. He might as well have lashed a
+stone, for all the effect his blows had. Then he got out and tried
+coaxing. She did not seem to even see him. Her great eyes had a curious
+introspective expression. Then he got again into the buggy and sat
+still. A sense of obstinacy as great as the animal's came over him.
+"Stand there and be d----d!" he said.
+
+"Go without your dinner if you want to." He leaned back in a corner of
+the buggy, and began reflecting.
+
+His reflections were at once angry and gloomy. He was, he told himself,
+tired of the situation. He began to wonder if he ought not, for the sake
+of self-respect, to leave Alton and Clemency. He wondered if a man ought
+to submit to be so treated, and yet he recognized Clemency's own view of
+the situation, and a great wave of love and pity for the poor child
+swept over him. The mare had halted in a part of the road where there
+were no houses, and flowering alders filled the air with their faint
+sweetness. Under that sweetness, like the bass in a harmony, he could
+smell the pines in the woods on either hand. He also heard their voices,
+like the waves of the sea. It was a very warm day, one of those days in
+which Spring makes leaps toward Summer. James felt uncomfortably heated,
+for the buggy was in the full glare of sunlight. All his solace came
+from the fact that he himself, sitting there so quietly, was outwitting
+the mare by showing as great obstinacy as her own. He knew that she
+inwardly fretted at not arousing irritation. That a tickle, even a lash
+of the whip, would delight her. He sat still, leaning his head back. He
+was almost asleep when he heard a rumble of heavy wheels, and looking
+ahead languidly perceived a wagon laden with household goods of some
+spring-flitters approaching. He sat still and watched the great wagon
+drawn by two lean, white horses, and piled high with the poor household
+belongings--miserable wooden chairs and feather beds, and a child's
+cradle rocking imminently on the top. A lank Jerseyman was driving. By
+his side on the high seat was his stout wife holding a baby. The weak
+wail of the child filled the air. James looked to make sure that there
+was room for the team to pass. He thought there was, and sat idly
+watching them. The woman looked at him, made some remark to the man, and
+then both grinned weakly, recognizing the situation. The man on the team
+drove carefully, but a stone on the outer side caused his team to swerve
+a trifle. The wheels hit the wheels of the buggy, and the cradle tilted
+swiftly on to the back of the balky mare, and she bolted. In all her
+experience of a long, balky life, a cradle as a means of breaking her
+spirit had not been encountered. James had not time to clutch the lines
+which had fallen to the floor of the buggy before he was thrown out. He
+felt the buggy tilting to its fall, he heard a crashing sound and a
+fierce kicking, and then he knew no more.
+
+When he came to himself he was on the lounge in Doctor Gordon's office.
+Emma was just disappearing with a pitcher in the direction of the
+kitchen, and he felt something cool on his forehead. He smelled aromatic
+salts, and heard a piteous little voice, like the bleat of a wounded
+lamb, in his ears, and kisses on his cheeks, and a soft hand rubbing his
+own. "Oh, darling," the little voice was saying, "oh, darling, are you
+much hurt? Are you? Please speak to me. It is Clemency. Oh, he is dead!
+He is dead!" Then came wild sobs, and Emma rushed into the room, and he
+heard her say, "Here, put this ice on his head, quick!"
+
+James was still so faint that he could only gasp weakly. And he could
+open his eyes to nothing but darkness and a marvellous spinning and whir
+as of shadows in a wind.
+
+"He's comin' to," said Emma. Her voice sounded as if she felt moved.
+"Don't take on so, Miss Clemency," she said; "he ain't dead."
+
+Again James felt the soft kisses and tears on his face, and again came
+the poor little voice, "Oh, darling, please listen, please don't do so.
+I will marry you. I will. I know you did just right. I read one of Uncle
+Tom's books this morning, and I found out what awful suffering she might
+have had hours longer. You did right. I will marry you. I will never
+think of it again. Please don't look so. Are you dreadfully hurt? Oh,
+when they came bringing you in I thought you were killed! There is a
+great bruise on your head. Does it hurt much? You do feel better, don't
+you? Oh, Emma, if Uncle Tom would only come. Can't you hear me, dear? I
+will marry you. I take it all back. I will marry you! I will marry you
+whenever you wish. Oh, please look at me! Please speak to me! Oh, Emma,
+there is Uncle Tom. I am so glad."
+
+And then poor, little Clemency, all unstrung and frightened, sank into
+an unconscious little heap on the floor as Gordon entered. "What the
+devil?" he cried out. "I saw the buggy smashed on the road, and that
+mare went down the Ford Hill road like a whirlwind. What, Elliot, are
+you hurt, boy? Clemency, Emma, what has happened?"
+
+All the time Gordon was talking he was examining James, who was now able
+to speak feebly. "The mare was frightened and threw me," he gasped. "I
+was stunned. I am all right now. See to Clemency!"
+
+But Clemency was already staggering weakly to her feet.
+
+"Oh, Uncle Tom, he isn't killed, is he?" she sobbed.
+
+"Killed, no," said Gordon, "but he will be if you don't stop crying and
+making a goose of yourself, Clemency."
+
+"We put ice on his head," sobbed Clemency. "He isn't--"
+
+"Of course he isn't. He was only stunned. That is only a flesh wound."
+
+"I tried to git some brandy down him, but I couldn't," said Emma.
+
+"Give it to me," said Gordon. He poured out some brandy in a spoon, and
+James swallowed it. "He will be all right now," Gordon said. "You won't
+be such a beauty that the women will run after you for a few days,
+Elliot, but you're all right."
+
+"I feel all right," James said.
+
+"It is nothing more than a little boy with a bump on his forehead," said
+Gordon to Clemency. "Now, child, stop crying, and go and bathe your
+eyes. Emma, is luncheon ready?"
+
+When both women had gone Gordon, who had been applying some ointment to
+James's forehead, said in a low voice, broken by emotion, "You are all
+right, Elliot, but--you did have a close call."
+
+"I suppose I did," James said, laughing feebly.
+
+He essayed to rise, but Gordon held him down. "No, keep still," he said.
+"You must not stir to-day. I will have your luncheon brought in.
+Clemency will be only too happy to wait on you, hand and foot."
+
+"Poor little girl, I must have given her an awful fright," said James.
+
+"Well, you are not exactly the looking object to do anything else," said
+Gordon laughing.
+
+"Where is there a glass?"
+
+"Where you won't have it. You won't be scarred. It is simply a temporary
+eclipse of your beauty, and Clemency will love you all the more for it.
+You need not worry. Talk about the vanity of women. I thought you were
+above it, Elliot. Now lie still. If you get up you will be giddy."
+
+James lay still, smiling. He felt very happy, and his love for Clemency
+seemed like a glow of pure radiance in his heart. He lay on the office
+lounge all the afternoon. He fell asleep with Clemency sitting beside
+holding his hand. Gordon had gone out to finish the calls. It was six
+o'clock before he drove into the yard. James had just awakened and lay
+feeling a great peace and content. Clemency was smiling down at his
+discolored face, as if it were the face of an angel. The windows were
+open, and the distant lowing of cattle, waiting at homeward bars, the
+monotone of frogs, and the songs of circling swallows came in. James
+felt as if he saw in a celestial vision the whole world and life, and
+that it was all blessed and good, that even the pain and sorrow
+blossomed in the end into ineffable flowers of pure delight.
+
+But when Doctor Gordon entered this vision was clouded, for Gordon's
+face had reassumed its old expression of settled melancholy and despair.
+He inquired how James found himself with an apathetic air, and then sat
+down and mechanically filled his pipe. After it was filled he seemed to
+forget to light it, so deep was his painful reverie. He sat with it in
+hand, staring straight ahead. Then a strange thing happened. The office
+door opened and Mrs. Blair, the nurse, entered. She was dressed in
+black, she carried a black travelling bag, and she wore a black bonnet,
+with a high black tuft on the top by way of trimming. Mrs. Blair was
+very tall, and this black tuft, when she entered the door, barely grazed
+the lintel.
+
+Gordon rose and said good evening, and regarded her in a bewildered
+fashion, as did James and Clemency.
+
+Mrs. Blair spoke with no preface. "I am going to leave Alton," she said
+in her severe voice, "and I want to tell you something first, and to say
+good-by." She looked at Gordon, then at the others, one after another,
+then at Gordon again. "I did not think at first that it would be
+necessary for me to say what I am going to," she continued, "but I
+overheard some things that were said that night, and I have been
+thinking--and then I heard the other day (I don't know how true it is)
+that Clemency and Doctor Elliot had had a falling out, and I didn't know
+but--I didn't quite know what anybody thought, and I wanted you all to
+know the truth. I didn't want any mistakes made to cause unhappiness."
+She hesitated, her eyes upon Doctor Gordon grew more intense. "Maybe
+_you_ think you gave her that dose of morphine that killed her," she
+said steadily, "but you didn't. Doctor Elliot gave her water, and you
+gave her mostly water. I had diluted the morphine, and you didn't know
+it. I had made up my mind that she was going to have the morphine, but I
+had made up my mind that nobody but me should have the responsibility of
+it. I'm all alone in the world, and my conscience upheld me, and I felt
+I'd rather take the blame, if there was to be any. I made up my mind to
+wait till a certain time and then give it to her, and I did. I am the
+one who gave her the morphine that killed her. I am going to leave Alton
+for good. My trunk is down at the station. I came to tell you that I
+gave her the morphine, and if I did wrong in helping God to shorten her
+sufferings, I am the one to be punished, and I stand ready to bear the
+punishment."
+
+Gordon looked at her. He did not speak, but it was with his face as if a
+mask of dreadful misery had dropped from it.
+
+"Good-by!" said Mrs. Blair. She went out of the door, and the black tuft
+on her bonnet barely grazed the lintel.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
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