Mr. Ledger was making inquiries as to the possibility of their reducing shortly their indebtedness to him, and the Doctor was forced to write him a frank statement of affairs. He had never worked so hard in his life, he wrote; he had never had so much practice; but he could collect nothing, and it was all he could do to meet his taxes.
“Why don’t you collect your bills?” naturally inquired Mr. Ledger.
“Collect my bills?” replied the Doctor. “How can I press my neighbors who are as poor, and poorer, than I am?”
However, inspired by Mr. Ledger’s application, the Doctor did try to collect some of the money due him. He did not send out his bills. He had never done that in his life. Instead, he rode around on a collecting-tour. He was successful in getting some money; for he applied first to such of his debtors as were thriftiest. Andy Stamper, who had just returned from town where he had been selling sumac, chickens, and other produce, paid him with thanks the whole of his bill, and only expressed surprise that it was so small. “Why I thought, Doctor, ’twould be three or four times that?” said Andy. “I’ve kept a sort of account of the times you’ve been to my house, and seems to me’t ought to be?”
“No, sir, that’s all I have against you,” said the Doctor, placidly; replying earnestly to Andy’s voluble thanks. “I am very much obliged to you.” He did not tell Andy that he had divided his accounts by three and had had hard work to bring himself to apply for anything.
This and one or two other instances in the beginning of his tour quite relieved the Doctor; for they showed that, at least, some of his neighbors had some money. So he rode on. He soon found, however, that he had gleaned the richest places first. On his way home he applied to others of his patients with far different results. Not only was the account he received very sorrowful; but the tale of poverty that several of them told was so moving that the Doctor, instead of receiving anything from them, distributed amongst them what he had already collected, saying they were poorer than himself. So when he reached home that evening he had no more than when he rode away.
“Well, Bess,” he said, “it is the first time I ever dunned a debtor, and it is the last.” Mrs. Cary looked at him with the expression in her eyes with which a mother looks at a child.
“I think it is just as well,” she said, smiling.
“You must go and see old Mrs. Bellows,” he said. “She is in great trouble for fear they’ll sell her place.”
Blair Cary, like her mother, watched with constant anxiety the change in her father. His hair was becoming white, and his face was growing more worn.