“Doctor Vailer won’t receive you,—professional pride much lacerated by the criticism of his course expressed by your precious relative, Tom Treherne,—excuse me if I pause here to particularly curse him—and you know when you touch a really learned technician of any sort on his professional pride, you have got hold of his keenest susceptibility, where he feels most acutely and most high-mindedly, the very nerves of his soul, so to speak, his spiritual essence. Doctor Vailer won’t have you.”
“But there are other alienists, other asylums in Mississippi.”
“And under your favor there is me in Mississippi,—and there is the law of the land. I tell you, Hugh, that Tom Treherne might as well try to bottle up the Mississippi River as to incarcerate you again without Doctor Vailer’s sanction, of course, so long as I am out of the ground.”
Hugh Treherne stirred uneasily and crossed and uncrossed his legs as he sat opposite the Colonel in a big mahogany chair before the frowsy hearth where the ashes of nearly all the fires since fall set in were banked behind the big tarnished brass dogs—the Colonel was no dainty housekeeper, and deserved the frequent declaration that “de Cunnel don’t know de diffunce.”
“People generally, Colonel, will approve the course of my relations,” Treherne argued. “It will seem the proper thing as long as I am—am—occasionally—absent.”
“Well, you are all here, now, in one piece,” declared the old man, wagging his head with vehement emphasis.
“It will seem very generous of Tom Treherne to offer, to desire to maintain me at his own expense at a high-priced private sanatorium, since I have no means of my own.”
He paused, a bitter look of repulsion on his face. All these years—these long years, the men of his own age, the compeers of his youth, had been at work restoring their shattered fortunes, after the terrible cataclysm of war that had wrecked the financial interests as well as the face of the southern country, achieving eminence and distinction in their varied lines of effort, life signifying somewhat of attainment even to those of meanest ability, while he was gone to waste, destroyed by his own gallant exploit; the blow of the sabre, the jeering accolade of Fate, when he had triumphantly led his troop to the capture of a strong battery, had consigned him to forty years of idleness, helplessness, imprisonment, in effect. “Be brave, loyal, and fortunate,” quotha.
He was silently revolving these reflections so long that Colonel Kenwynton, puffing his pipe with gusto, declared:
“I’ll make Tom Treherne’s liberality look like thirty cents before I am done with him. He can’t choke you off and hide you out because he is afraid you might be troublesome to him in the future,—dispose of you for good and all,—not while I am alive. Why, damme, man, you commanded a troop in my regiment.”