XIII
An hour later the Doctor, looking out of his study window, saw a buggy drive up and stop at his carriage-block. It contained a rustic-looking young man, dressed in new and showy garments that had the cachet of the department store, and a young woman brave in such finery as young women wear when approaching the most important hour of their lives. Instinctively the Doctor reached for his prayer-book, an inspired volume that had a way of opening almost automatically at the marriage service.
But only the young man alighted. He came up the front walk with an expression of fell determination about his firm-set mouth. The young woman, holding the reins, frowned at Dr. Gowdy's house-front—in marked repugnance and indignation.
Jared had come to tell Dr. Gowdy what he thought of him—their first and only meeting. Dr. Gowdy at a distance had impressed him as an abstract moral force, but Dr. Gowdy close at hand was a mere man like himself. Jared pushed aside all deference and spoke his mind.
"You set me up an inch," said Jared hardily, "and then you went to work to take me down an ell. You've tried to harm me all you could; you've tried to ruin me. But it couldn't be done. Let me tell you this: I've sold seventeen hundred dollars' worth of my work here, and the first of the month I'm going East with a lot more of it. A man with money in his pocket can get his rights," said Jared truculently.
Dr. Gowdy, to whom Jared too had been an abstraction—an abstraction compact of bumptious heresy as regarded art and of crass ignorance as regarded life in general—finally realized him now as a human being, faulty and ill-regulated, indeed, but not altogether unlikeable, and by no means lacking in a sort of rude capacity. He experienced, not for the first time, the alleviating quality resident sometimes in personal presence, even the presence of an antagonist.
But Jared had no sense of this. "You've made fun of me," he went on; "you've made me ridiculous in my own home. They're all laughin' at me down there. All but her"—with an awkward gesture toward Melissa, visible through the front window. "She's stuck to me right along. She believed in me from the beginning. It was her gave me that book of yours——"
"That book, that book!" groaned Dr. Gowdy. Alas for the refining and ennobling influences of art! Threatened and hectored in his own house by a loutish, daubing plough-boy!
"You've interfered with my success; you've taken money out of my pocket. Do you want to know what I'm goin' to do? I'm goin' to sue you, that's what! Her father is our county attorney, and he'll help me see that I get my rights!"
"Sue me? Do, you poor ignorant young cub!" cried the Doctor. "I've just had one lawsuit to-day, and what I want more than anything else is another!"