The others fell back at her brave confession, and they all began to like her. They meekly suffered themselves to be dispersed, and they cowered together on the piazza while a messenger ran for the doctor. Then, while the ladies waited his report, they talked together in low tones, though they were separated from Mrs. Farrell’s room by the whole depth of the house. Not a voice dissented from the praises of the heroine of a love episode whose dramatic interest reflected luster upon them all. The ladies were even more enthusiastic than the men, and several rebuked their husbands, who had formerly been too forward in doing justice to Mrs. Farrell, for coldness in responding now to their own pleasure in her.
“George, how can you smoke?” asked the youngest of the married ladies, and reproachfully drew her husband’s newspaper away from him and sent him into the orchard with his cigar. Another made her husband take the children away for a walk, in order that the ladies might not be distracted by their play while attending the verdict of the physician. The common belief was that Easton would die, and in the meantime they excited themselves over the question as to how, when, and where he had fallen. The husband with the cigar was suffered to approach and say that he had known an old fellow once who had been out in the heat a good deal, and had gone into the woods to cool off, and had come home in the evening with a cut in his head and a story that he had been attacked and knocked down.
“Yes,” said one of the ladies, who had a logical mind, “but Mr. Easton doesn’t pretend to have been knocked down, and—and he isn’t an old fellow.”
“I was going to say,” retorted the smoker, taking a good long whiff, with half-closed eyes, insensible to the frantically gesticulated protest of his wife, “that this old fellow was supposed not to have been attacked at all; he had got giddy with the heat and tumbled over and barked his skull against a tree, and then fancied he’d been knocked down; they often do.”
The theory seemed to have reason in it, but the language in which it was clothed made it too repulsive for acceptance, and there was open resentment of it by the tribunal before which it was offered. At this moment the doctor was seen slanting down the grass toward the gate from the side door; the ladies called after him and captured him.
“The wound is a very slight matter,” said the doctor; “but Mr. Easton had something like a sunstroke this summer in New York, and is very sensitive to the heat.”
“Yes, yes,” said the spokeswoman, eager for all, “but what happened to him? How did he get hurt?”
“His friend thinks he was overcome by the heat and struck his face against a point of rock in falling, over there in the valley by the sugar orchard.”
“There!” said the young wife, who at heart had felt keenly injured by the indifference to her husband’s theory, “it’s just as George said. Oh, George!” She took him by the arm, joying in his wisdom, and looked fondly into his face, while he smoked imperturbably.
“Yes, but will he get well?” tremulously demanded the spokeswoman of the group, pursuing the doctor on his way to the gate.