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. [pg 263] 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 [pg 264] 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 [pg 265] 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, [pg 266] 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 [pg 267] 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 [pg 269] 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 [pg 270] 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 [pg 271] 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 [pg 272] 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 [pg 273] 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 [pg 276] 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 [pg 277] 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, [pg 278] 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 [pg 279] 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 [pg 280] 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 [pg 281] 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 [pg 283] 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 [pg 285] 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 [pg 286] 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.