XI.
FACE TO FACE.
THE stranger, thus hailed, turned as the doctor’s voice rang down the road, and acknowledging the somewhat rough summons with a bow of mock affability, stepped obligingly up the hill. The neighbors who had flocked into the street to watch the meeting, saw the doctor’s lip curl as the wretched figure advanced. This man, Ephraim Earle? Why had he called these credulous creatures fools? They were simply madmen. But in another moment his countenance changed. The miserable fellow had paused and was standing a few feet off with what could not be called other than a look of old comradeship. He spoke first also and with quite a hearty ring to his naturally strident voice.
“Well, Oswald, old boy, this is a pleasure! Now don’t say you don’t remember me—” for the doctor had started back with an irrepressible gesture of disgust that to some eyes was not without its element of confusion, “I know I am changed, but no more so than you are, if you have led a more respectable life than I.”
“Scoundrel!” leaped from Dr. Izard’s white lips. “How dare you address me as if we were, or ever had been, friends! You are a brazen adventurer, and I—”
“And you are the perfectly irreproachable physician with a well-earned fame, and a past as free from shadow as—well, as your face is free from surprise at this unexpected return of one you probably thought dead.”
Confounded by this audacity and moved by many inner and conflicting emotions, Dr. Izard first flushed, then stood very still, surveying the man with a silent passion which many there thought to be too emphatic a return for what sounded to them like nothing more than an ill-judged pleasantry. Then he spoke, quietly, but with a sort of gasp, odd to hear in his usually even and melodious voice.
“I do not know you. Whatever you may call yourself, you are a stranger to me, and no stranger has a right to address me with impertinence. What do you call yourself?” he suddenly demanded, advancing a step and darting his gaze into the other’s eyes with a determination that would have abashed most men whether they were all they proclaimed themselves to be or not.
A playful sneer, a look in which good-natured forbearance still struggled uppermost, were all that he got from this man.
“So you are determined not to recognize Ephraim Earle,” cried the stranger. “You must have good reasons for it, Oswald Izard; reasons which it would not be wise perhaps for one to inquire into too curiously.”