“The dollars are much scarcer now, eh?” asked the Young Doctor quizzically.
“I should think I had just enough to pay you,” said the other, bridling up suddenly; for it seemed to him the Young Doctor had become ironical and mocking; and though he had been mocked much in his day, there were times when it was not easy to endure it.
The truth is the Young Doctor was somewhat of an expert in human nature, and he deeply wanted to know the history of this wandering habitant, because he had a great compassionate liking for him. If he could get the little man excited, he might be able to find out what he wanted. During the days in which the wanderer had been in his house, he had been far from silent, for he joked at his own suffering and kept the housekeeper laughing at his whimsical remarks; while he won her heart by the extraordinary cleanliness of his threadbare clothes, and the perfect order of his scantily-furnished knapsack. It had the exactness of one who was set upon a far course and would carry it out on scientific calculation. He had been full of mocking quips and sallies at himself, but from first to last he never talked. The things he said were nothing more than surface sounds, as it were—the ejaculations of a mind, not its language or its meanings.
“He’s had some strange history, this queer little man,” said the housekeeper to the Young Doctor; “and I’d like to know what it is. Why, we don’t even know his name.”
“So would I,” rejoined the Young Doctor, “and I’ll have a good try for it.”
He had had his try more than once, but it had not succeeded. Perhaps a little torture would do it, he thought; and so he had made the rather tactless remark about the scarcity of dollars. Also his look was incredulous when Jean Jacques protested that he had enough to pay the fee.
“When you searched me you forgot to look in the right place,” continued Jean Jacques; and he drew from the lining of the hat he held in his hand a little bundle of ten-dollar bills. “Here—take your pay from them,” he said, and held out the roll of bills. “I suppose it won’t be more than four dollars a day; and there’s enough, I think. I can’t pay you for your kindness to me, and I don’t want to. I’d like to owe you that; and it’s a good thing for a man himself to be owed kindness. He remembers it when he gets older. It helps him to forgive himself more or less for what he’s sorry for in life. I’ve enough in this bunch to pay for board and professional attendance, or else the price has gone up since I had a doctor before.”
He laughed now, and the laugh was half-ironical, half-protesting. It seemed to come from the well of a hidden past; and no past that is hidden has ever been a happy past.
The Young Doctor took the bills, looked at them as though they were curios, and then returned them with the remark that they were of a kind and denomination of no use to him. There was a twinkle in his eye as he said it. Then he added:
“I agree with you that it’s a good thing for a man to lay up a little credit of kindness here and there for his old age. Well, anything I did for you was meant for kindness and nothing else. You weren’t a bit of trouble, and it was simply your good constitution and a warm room and a few fly-blisters that pulled you through. It wasn’t any skill of mine. Go and thank my housekeeper if you like. She did it all.”