Doctor Zay

VIII.

THE patient continued for several days clearly worse for the episode of Molly and Jim. The physician was penitently assiduous in her attentions. As soon as he was better they cooled off quietly, but so obviously that Mrs. Butterwell turned her soft eyes, not without sympathy, upon her invalid lodger.

“ She’s like a candle, — knows her mould, and gets into it, and no fuss. Some folks are like ice-cream; can't freeze without churning. Doctor’s always just so with patients. I would n’t notice her, — she has to be ; they ’d lean her life out.”

In fact. Yorke found himself reduced to his office-calls again, and to a limited allowance of those. He now took occasional meals with the family, and thus sometimes met her at the table. She was very irregular. The office - bell pealed, or Handy summoned her authoritatively ; or she was hours behind time. She nodded to him kindly when she came, or they chatted a few moments. She glanced at him with her direct, brilliant, healthy look. He watched her with his sad, refined, invalid eyes. She poured her abundant personality into half a hundred empty lives a day. He received into his vacant hours the influences of the moment. She went; he stayed. He suffered; she acted. He remembered ; she forgot.

One day he called her, as he sat on the piazza. She was coming from the dining-room, after a late and hurried dinner. She had her hat and gloves in her hand. “ Doctor,” he said, “ do you know that this is August ? ”

“ It is the 3d, — yes.”

“ I thought you would n’t know. How did you happen to ?”

“ I always date my prescriptions.”

“ I might have known there was a scientific reason. For, as nearly as an ignorant layman can observe, the seasons slip away from your attention like cured patients. One is like another, to you. Doctor Zay, do you know that you have never asked me yet to call on you ? ”

“ To call on — Oh, you mean ” — She stopped.

“ As a person, I mean, not a patient. Is there any reason why I should n’t?”

“ Why, no ! ” she said cordially, — “ none in the world.”

“ Only you never thought of it.”

“ That is all,” quietly.

“All!” cried Yorke.

She swept upon him a fine look ; half rebuke, like a monarch’s, half perplexity, like a little girl’s. He hastened to placate this expression.

“ Would you like to have me come ? I had rather be denied than endured.”

“ That is manly. So should I. Certainly, I should like to see you. Only I never am at home. I suppose it was rude not to ask you before. I am so out of the way of — all these little things.”

She spoke the last three words with an accent before which his heart shrank. But he only said, —

“ May I come — to-night ? ”

“ Oh, yes,” she answered lightly; “ any time you like, after office-hours and before your bed-time.”

“ I ’m coming,” he said, in a low, significant tone.

“ What did you say ? ”

He rose and confronted her. He leaned upon his crutch, but she felt that the man was waxing strong.

“ I’m coming,” he repeated firmly. She had turned to go, but regarded him for an instant over her shoulder. A beautiful mocking light darted from her lip to her eye. She did not say a word. But he heard every nerve in the woman defy him. It was like the challenge before a battle. The convalescing man welcomed the signal of contest.

He went that evening, “ after officehours and before bed-time,” dutifully, as she had bidden. It was a superb evening, and he lingered a moment outside the door to watch the western colors behind the forest. He had already acquired that half-plaintive sympathy with the setting sun which is so noticeable a feature in the lives of invalids. Is it because the hour marks another finished period of suffering, or that it promises renewal of life, which is always resurrection of hope ?

It was a quiet sunset of pale chromes and violets, sinking gently into gray below, melting to the deep blue of advancing night above. The long forest, with its procession of pine outlines, cut the horizon. The heavy mists of the Maine evening rose from the little river and the mill-ponds. This fog caught fire, and the village seemed to stagger in it. Mr. and Mrs. Isaiah Butterwell were picking currants together in the garden, stooping to their task in the level light; they did not watch the sunset. Handy was watering Old Oak at the spring in the pasture behind the barn. The stage was late, and the two worn horses struggled, with hanging heads, up the lonely street. Two or three lumbermen followed the stage, singing. They sang a chorus which ran, —

Mr. Butterwell called out to the driver to toss him over a paper. The stage crawled on, and turned the corner to the post-office. The fire fell from the mists, the deserted road grew gray, and Yorke felt damp as soon as the color dropped.

The solitude of the scene oppressed him at that moment, as if he had known that he should never have power to separate himself from it. The limit of life in this poor place, its denial, its desolateness, came to his consciousness with the vividness and remorselessness of personal fate. He thought of that wealthy nature, that glorious vigor, that delicate youth, impoverished here. He thought of going back to Boston, and leaviug her. He rang the office-bell sharply, and entered without waiting for it to be answered.

No one was in the reception-room, and he passed through. The office was empty. All the doors were open. As he stood hesitating, she came from the parlor beyond. She stood in the doorway, and held out her hand.

“ Ah, it is you ? ” she said graciously. He was confused by a consciousness of change in her, but could not have told what it was. As he followed her into the room, he perceived that this impression came from her dress. She wore a muslin gown of a violet color ; it was finished at the throat and wrists by fluttering satin ribbons and lace ; it was a cool, sheer thing, as befitted the warm night, — a parlor dress, sweeping the floor. He had always seen her in her business clothes.

He was not sure at first that he liked to see her in any other way. He felt a vague jealousy of her individuality, on which this dainty feminine gear seemed to encroach. But in a moment, when he had accustomed his eye to the transformation, he acknowledged that he would not have missed it for the world.

“ What is the matter ? ” she asked, in her outright fashion ; her profession had cultivated in her, to perhaps an extreme limit, what was probably great native directness of manner.

“ Excuse me. Was I staring ? I have never seen you in a — don’t you call them trails ? ”

She blushed a little, looking over her shoulder down at the wave of purple color, out of which she seemed to rise, as if she floated on it.

“ I do not wear such things. I do not respect them,” she said, with a latent vexation in her voice. " I feel as if I ought to apologize to my womanhood or something, every time I encumber my feet and other people’s in this way. But it was so warm, and this is the coolest thing I have. I had been dusty and uncomfortable all day. And it is pretty, in itself, I think; don’t you ? ”

“ I shall not — that is to say I cannot — tell you what I think,” he answered. The undisguised admiration in his eyes roamed over her with daring leisure.

It was characteristic of these two people— and to which the more creditable, one can hardly say — that it no more occurred to the young man that there was a remote touch of pardonable feminine coquetry in the coincidence of his call and the violet muslin than it did to the lady that he might think so. Doctor Zay knew how often she wore that gown on warm evenings, shut in alone in her dark little parlor, after the last patient was gone, after the care and fever of the long day were spent, —when the doctor melted into the woman. And Yorke was beginning to know Doctor Zay.

He took the easy-chair which she offered him, quietly observing the scene upon which he had fallen, and in which the violet muslin was only what artists would call the “ high light.” After his hair-cloth sofa and framed certificate, this young lady’s parlor affected him like a restored and precious painting. He felt the powerful influence of the cultivated interior, to which he yielded with that composite emotion, half homesickness, half instinct, which we all know, and which draws the exile from what we are pleased to call “ the world,” like a magnet, back.

Yorke, as he sat and talked of little things, assimilated his surroundings gently : the books, the engravings, few but fine, the bronze Psyche, the little landscape of Gifford’s, magazines, newspapers, reviews, and colors that he had not seen since he left home.

While she busied herself in drawing the long curtains and lighting the lamps, he noticed the Chickering upright across the corner, and a curious afghan, knit of dull harmonious tints, like a Persian rug. There were flowers, too. The lamps had green and yellow globes. There were many pillows in the room, of odd shapes, and all sorts of hospitable things to sit on ; an open fire-place, filled now with ferns : yet nothing seemed to be a reproduction of a fashionable craze. There was no incoherent attempt at affecting cracked bricabrac, deteriorated Japanese art, or doubtful colonial fashions. One did not even think of Queen Anne or Louis Quinze, but only of Doctor Zay, who had a pleasant room and lived there.

It affected Yorke strongly to meet his doctor here, — a lady, like other ladies, in a shelter, among little lovely things, quiet and set apart, protected from encroachments, forgetful of care. He was glad that the patients were never allowed to come into that room. He felt dizzy with his own privilege.

He leaned his head back against his boldly modern but proportionally easy chair, and watched her, while they chatted pleasantly. They talked of Boston, of books, of people, of well things. Left to herself, he noticed that she avoided all pathological subjects with a rigor which in itself was all that reminded him of their existence. She made no inquiries about the state of his prevailing sensations, nor alluded in any way to his relation as a patient to herself. She had a fine tact in this, which made him feel as if he were a well man again. He rested in her dainty vicinity, the quiet things she said, the sound of her voice, the delicacy of her dress, in herself. He forgot for one delicious hour the real and rugged world in which she lived. Or rather, perhaps, if he analyzed his feeling, he had a vague sense of mastery, as stimulating as it was unprecedented, as if he himself were the agent, not the subject, of a new experience, in which he drew her from a consecration to a dream.

He asked her to play to him.

“ No,” she said, " you are a Bostonian.”

“ But not a critic.”

“ Impossible ! You approve the Handel and Haydn, and patronize the Symphony. You do your duty by the prevailing artists; hold them at arm’slength as I do my last new babies, with about the same complacency in their existence, as if the Creator had an obligation to you for the fact. You are like the man who declined to be a vegetarian on the ground that pâté de foie gras was good enough for him. I had a patient once who abandoned smoking because his taste had developed so fastidious a quality that he could find no tobacco fine enough for him.”

“I am still a crude smoker. Play to me, please ! ”

“ I know two tunes : one is China, and the other is n't. Which will you have ? ”

“ The other one. Play to me ! ”

“ It is a Scotch song. Do you like Scotch songs ? ”

“ Do you sing ? ”

“ Not in the least. I can play you the accompaniment.”

He made a little movement of impatience. He was by nature of a restless, not to say an imperious temper, which his illness (or perhaps it would be more precise to say, his physician) had subdued rather than instigated.

Her ready merriment came to her eyes.

“ You cannot make me believe,” he insisted, “ that you are not musical. Physicians are.”

“ That is true enough,” she answered, quickly warming to the subject. “ Science is harmony. Music and science are twins. Music is the feminine, thoua'li, I think.”

“ It is a fine marriage. Oh, yon called them twins, though.”

“ You are not so far out of the way. There is an element of twinship in all absolute marriage.” This was said with her scientific expression, as if she were dissecting a radial artery.

“ How many ' absolute ’ marriages have you known ? ” asked Yorke, as nearly as possible in the same tone.

“ Just three,” said Doctor Zay.

“ In all your experience ? Only three that would — that you would have been satisfied with ? ”

“ It is not a question of what would satisfy one’s self,” she said, freezing swiftly and slightly, like thin November ice. “ It is a matter of psychological investigation.”

“ What a horrible advantage over mankind your profession gives ! ” said Yorke, between his teeth. She nodded gravely.

“ It is unmatched, I believe. Even the clergy have a poor one beside us. We stand at an eternal confessional, in which the chance of moral escape or evasion is reduced to a minimum. It is holding human hearts to count their beats. When you add the control of life and death you have a position unique in human relations. When I began, it seemed to me like God’s. My mother used to ” — She stopped.

“ What did your mother do ? ” asked Yorke, geutly.

“ She encouraged that feeling,” said Doctor Zay. “ She said no one was fit to enter the profession who did not have it.”

“ I wish I had known your mother,” he ventured.

“ You would have loved her,” said the doctor, simply.

“ And I wish you knew mine ! ” continued the young man, fatuously.

“ She would not be interested in me,” returned Doctor Zay, coldly. It was good, honest December ice now. He could have skated on the barrier she had thrust between them, he neither knew how nor why.

“ Oh, you don’t know her ” — he began. At this moment the office-bell rang. Handy answered it, and knocked at the parlor door to announce (with evident pleasure) the presence of a patient who “ was in an Ananias ’n’ Sapphiry hurry. Guessed it was somebody dyin’ or smushed.”

The doctor rose leisurely, too used to these interruptions to expend nerve force on little haste or premature excitement, and went into the receptionroom. She did not excuse herself to her visitor. She left the doors ajar, and he could hear her hearty voice : —

“ Well, Mr. Beckwith ! What now ? ”

“ Wall,” replied the man’s voice that Yorke had heard on his first office-call, " Puella, you see, she’s bad. She’s took screeehin’ bad ag’in, and don’t give none of us no peace. She wants you right away. She made me tackle up so’s to bring you myself. I told her, says I, ’t was a kind of shame ! — you’d be all beat out, this time o’ night. But, Doctor,” plaintively, “ it ain’t no use to tell Puella things.”

“ Anything new, Mr. Beckwith ? Any serious change in the case? What are the symptoms ? ”

“ Wall,” said Mr. Beckwith slowly, “ I can’t say’s it’s so very noo. It’s that same crookedness in her mind. She suffers a sight,” solemnly, “ from crookedness in the mind, Doctor.”

“ I ’ll send her something,” said the doctor kindly. “ I do not think it necessary for me to go to-night. There ! One powder dry on the tongue, if you please, every two hours. I will look in to-morrow.”

“ I told her you would n’t come,” said Mr. Beckwith, triumphantly. “ And what’s more, I said, says I, Puella, I would n’t if I was her, says I. But says she, You don’t none of you know what it is to have crookedness into your mind.”

Silence succeeded. The doctor returned, closing the doors as she came. She made no comments on the interruption. She drifted into the quiet room, past the green and golden lamps, in her violet dress, and resumed her chair in silence. Yorke looked at her without speaking.

“ What are you thinking ? ” she asked abruptly. There was a dash of something which he could almost have dared to call friendly freedom in the tone of the question.

“ I was thinking that you harmonize with your environment.”

“ That would be the acquisition, as it is the aspiration, of one’s life-time. The compliment is too large for the occasion.”

For answer, he glanced about the room and back at herself. She smiled, not without a touch of scorn, or it might have been of bitterness.

“ But then,” he continued dreamily, “ you are of course an exception, not a representative, among women who adopt your vocation.”

“ You only exhibit your ignorance by such a remark,” said the young lady quietly. “ Among the thousand of us now practicing medicine in this country, there are many more successful than I, and abroad there is some superb work done. I should like to give you the figures some time. They are very interesting. But I won’t bore you now. It would be like putting sermons in a novel.”

“ What is the proportion of ladies in the profession ? ” asked Yorke, with a slight shrug.

“ What is the proportion of gentlemen in the profession ? ”

“ Except that I really know nothing about it, I should suppose it is larger.”

“It probably is, a little. Until recently, it needed force rather than fineness to bring a woman to the surface of a great progressive movement. We are coming to a point where both are to be absolutely necessary to success in the art of healing. A union of these qualities will be demanded of women, because they are women, such as has never been expected of men, or perhaps been possible to them. We have a complex task before us.”

“It seems a dreary one to me,” said Yorke, rather sadly. “ And yet you find it ” —

“ Bright ! ” she said quickly ; “ bright, bright! ” Her earnest face fired.

“You really seem happy,” he urged.

“ I am happy ! ” she cried, in her resonant, joyous tone.

“ I wonder if I could say as much, if I had done as much? ” queried the sick man.

Her whole expression changed instantly. Both felt, what neither said, that they had approached difficult and delicate ground.

“ I do not take as dark a view of your case as you do,” she said.

“ In other words, I am not lost to your respect, because I have not become an eminent jurist at the age of — I am only twenty-eight, after all,” he added.

“ I am a year older than that,” she smiled. “ I ought to have done more. What is the trouble, Mr. Yorke? Don’t you get any clients ? ” She took unconsciously the professional tone she had so long assumed to him, as if she had asked, “ Does n’t your dinner agree with you ? ”

“ I had one divorce case last winter ; I lost it.”

“You resent my asking questions. You ought not to.”

“ I feel it. I do not resent it.”

“ That is kind in you, and discriminating. You silence me.”

“ No, go on. Say what you think of me. Tell me, — I can stand it. What a consummate donkey a man of my sort must seem to a woman of yours ! And yet I’m not a donkey; I am really a very good sort of fellow.”

“ You are rudimentary,” said the doctor, with an inscrutable look.

“ Hum — um — um.”

“ Honestly, Mr. Yorke, my diagnosis of you is different from — It is my own, at any rate, be it worth little or much.”

“ You have had some chance to form one, I ’ll admit,” said Yorke. “ Let me make a guess at it: Inherited inertia. Succumbed to his environment. Corrosion of Beacon Street upon what might, in a machine-shop, for instance, or a factory, have been called his brain. Native indolence, developed by acquired habit. Hopeless correlation of predestined forces. Atrophied ambition. Paralyzed aspiration. No struggle for existence. Destitute of scientific basis. Reductio ad absurdum, — Laborare est orare, — Facilis descensus. No correspondent in the Materia Medica. Hahnemann knew not of him. (He was mobbed for a great cause.) The Organon foresaw him not. There is no divine remedy for him. Give him sac. lac. powders, and send him back to Beacon Street. By the way, Doctor, did you ever give me a sugar powder ? ”

“ Once.”

“ When was that ? I ’ll know, or I ’ll never forgive you.”

“ The day you disobeyed me about going out-doors, and caused me an unnecessary call.”

“ On your honor, is that the only time ? ”

“ By my diploma! — the only time.”

“ You did not say whether I had hit the diagnosis, Doctor Zay.”

She did not answer him at once, and when she spoke he felt, rather than saw, that it was with her guarded look.

“ I do not make it a case of paralysis, exactly. I should rather call it one of hyperæsthesia.”

“ Hyperæs— that was what was the matter with me when I could n’t let Mrs. Butterwell shut a door, or drop a thimble; when the horses kept me awake, stamping in the barn. You mean that you do me the honor to infer that I have ideals, despite my failure to give an inquiring world evidence of the fact, and that (if I do not strain your goodness) the idealizing fibre is not without superfluous sensitiveness ? ”

“ Superfluous, and therefore injurious, sensitiveness. You experience a certain scorn of the best into which you know yourself capable of resulting. You cherished this scorn, at one time, as a silent proof of superiority of nature, patent only to yourself, and the more precious, like family lace or jewels worn out of sight. You were met at the outset of life by the conviction that you were without extraordinary gifts, and it struck you as original to snub the ordinary ones, as if it were their fault. I am not sure that it was even original ; it certainly was not admirable. But you have outgrown that. I recognize now a genuine modesty at root of your inertia. Your self-estimate is calculably less than that of almost any other Boston man I ever met. I prognosticate that the next phase of experience will be a healthier and haughtier one. I think you capable of service.” The young lady uttered these sentences slowly, with palliative pauses between them ; she had an absorbed and studious look.

“ I always thought I might have made a good head - waiter,” said the young man grimly.

“ Take me as you please,” persisted the doctor. “ I have paid you a compliment; my first — and last. Cut yourself with it, if you want to. It would be malpractice, but I am not the surgeon.”

Yorke made no reply. He sat and watched her, thinking that he would not have borne from any other woman in the world what came like a fine intoxication from her; he drank her noble severity like gleaming wine.

“ You are not a great man,” she urged gently, as if she had to say, “ You have a spinal injury,” “ but you have uncommon qualities, — perhaps I should say quality ; you have hardly taken the trouble, as yet, to indicate what your qualities are. You could be successful if you chose. The difficulty has been that you have not respected what we are in the habit of calling success.”

“ Frankly, no ; it has never seemed worth while.”

“ The Christians have a phrase,” said Doctor Zay, “ which expresses the deficiency in most of our standards. They talk of consecration. It means something, I find.”

“ Are you a Christian ? ” asked Yorke.

“ I do not know — yet,” she answered, gravely.

“ Now, I have always thought I was,” he said, smiling sadly.

“ Are you ? ” She looked at him wistfully.

“ At least I was confirmed once, to please my mother. It may belong to that pervasive weakness of nature, which you classify so indulgently as sensitiveness, that I never have grown away as far from all that as many fellows I know. There, now, is an ideal! Where in history or philosophy can it be mated ? Faith is beauty. I should like to hold on to my faith, if I can, — if I had no other reason, just as I should wish to keep my paintings or bronzes. But I know it is harder for a camel to go through the knee of an idol, as the little boy said, than for a student of science to enter the kingdom of heaven. Are you one of the two atheists, in the historic three doctors ? ”

“ God forbid ! ” she cried. “ I am a seeker, still. That is all I mean to say. And I know t must seem ” — She paused, stricken by an unprecedented and beautiful blushing embarrassment.

“ What must you seem ? ”

“ It was nothing, — a foolish speech. It is time for you to go home, Mr. Yorke, and go to bed.”

“ What must it make you seem ? I will go when I know. Tell me, — you shall! Indulge me, please.” He limped over towards her; his words fell over each other; his figure towered above her.

She gave one glance at his agitated face, and collected herself by a movement swift and secretive as the opening of a water-lily.

“ I only meant to say that a woman usually — naturally, perhaps — is the guide in matters of belief. Spiritual regnancy belongs to her historically, and prophetically too, I do not dispute. It occurred to me, at that moment, how it must strike a man, if she were below him on that basis ; if she had no power to heighten or deepen his ideal, — that was all. Good-night, Mr. Yorke. If you don’t sleep, take that powder marked ' Cham. 5 m.’ Now go ! ”

“ You heighten and deepen every other ideal I have,” said the young man, solemnly. “ You cannot fail me there. It will not be possible to you.”

His agitation had urged itself upon her now, against her will ; he was half shocked, half transported, to see that a slow pallor advanced like a spirit towards him, over her resolute face. He watched it with a kind of awe, and made a gesture with one of his thin hands, as if to check an invisible presence which he was not strong enough to meet. It was the movement of a sick man whose physical strength was spent by emotion. The physician perceived this instantly.

“ There is the office-bell,” she said, in her business tone, “ I will answer it as I help you out.”

He made no reply, and they left the parlor in uneasy silence. He had tried to come on one crutch that night; now, weakened with excitement, he made bad work of the experiment.

“ Put your hand on my shoulder,” ordered Doctor Zay.

“ You are not tall enough,” he objected.

“ I am strong enough,” she insisted.

He obeyed her, and thus came limping to the front door between the lady and the crutch. The patient who had rung the office-bell stood in the doorway. It was a man. It was a gentleman. It was a stranger. At sight of him Doctor Zay colored with impulsive pleasure. She said: —

“ Why, Doctor ! ”

The stranger answered : —

“ Good-evening, Doctor.”

Yorke found this dialogue monotonous, and removed his hand from the violet muslin shoulder.

“ Walk in,” said the lady, turning heartily to her guest. " Go right through into the parlor. I will be with you in a moment.”

The stranger, bowing slightly to Yorke, stepped in and passed them. By the sharp light of the kerosene entry lamp Yorke perceived a man of years and dignity; in fact, a person of distinguished appearance.

“ I will not trouble you to go any farther with me,” said Doctor Zay’s patient, stiffly.

“ Nonsense ! ”

The soft, warm shoulder presented itself with a beautiful — it seemed to Yorke a terrible — unconsciousness, leaning towards him like a violet indeed.

“ No, no,” he said, roughly ; “ I don’t want it. It won’t help me. Don’t you understand a man better than that?”

As soon as the words were uttered, he would have given, let us say, his sound ankle to recall them. She shrank all over, as if, indeed, he had stepped on a flower, and, gathering herself with a grave majesty, swept away from him.

IX.

Yorke limped back to his room, and sank into the first chair that presented itself. It happened to be the high rocker, and he put his head back, and thrust his hands into his pockets, and got his ankle across another chair, and for a few moments occupied himself in a savage longing for a smoke. His physician had forbidden him his cigars pending the presence of certain spinal symptoms, which she was pleased to consider of importance to her therapeutic whims. A good square disobedience would have relieved him. He would have liked nothing better than for the odor of the tobacco to steal around through her parlor windows, while she sat there in that trailed gown making herself lovely to that fellow. Was it possible she knew he was coming when she put the thing on ? . . .

Yorke found himself engulfed in a chasm of feeling, across which, like a bridge whereon he had missed his footing, ran one slender thought: —

“ I ought to have gone home three weeks ago.”

It was quarter past nine when she sent him to his room. He sat in the big rocker, in the dark, without moving, till ten. No sound had come from the doctor’s side of the house. Acting upon a sudden impulse, of which he was half ashamed, half defensive, and which he owned himself wholly disinclined to resist, he groped for his crutches and got out upon the piazza, where he could see the light from her windows making a great radiance upon the acacia-tree, and showing the outlines of the short, wet grass. A honeysuckle clambered over the nearest window. When the curtain drifted in the warm wind, the longnecked flowers seemed to look in. The subdued sound of voices came to his ear. He went hack, and got upon the lounge. As he lay there, the lumbermen returned, singing, —

Mrs. Butterwell came in to say goodnight. She held a candle, which made fickle revelations of her black silk dress and sallow cheeks. She expressed surprise at finding her lodger in the dark, and lighted his Japanese lantern assiduously. She thought Mr. Yorke had been calling on the doctor.

“ She sent me to bed,” said Yorke. “ She has another fellow there.”

“ They will come at all hours,” replied Mrs. Butterwell, serenely. “ More blame to ’em ! ”

“ Who will come at all hours ? ” gasped Yorke.

“ Why, patients, of course. Who else ? ”

“ This is n’t a patient. This is a gentleman.”

“ I want to know! ” said Mrs. Butterwell, putting down the light.

“ And so do I,” said Yorke, grimly.

“ A tall, dark-complected gentleman ? Wears a crush felt hat and gray gloves, — a beautiful fit ? ”

“ I did n’t notice his gloves,” savagely.

“ A handsome man, was n’t he ? ” pursued Mrs. Butterwell, cruelly. “ Splendid figure and great blue eyes ” —

“ How should I know about his eyes ? ” groaned Yorke.

“Oh, it must be he,” returned Mrs. Butterwell, placidly. “ I wonder I did n’t see him in the stage. I always mean to look in the stage. May be he drove, — he sometimes does.”

Yorke made no answer. Every word of Mrs. Butterwell’s caused an acute pain in his left temple, like the nail in the brain of Sisera; he put up his hand to his head.

“ His name is Penhallow,” hammered Mrs. Butterwell, — “ Doctor Penhallow, of Bangor. He is a famous surgeon,— very famous. He sets the world by her.”

“ It can’t be — it is n’t the fellow she telegraphed to about my case, at the beginning ? ” cried Yorke.

“ Oh, I dare say. Doctor did n’t mention it to me. Doctor never talks about her cases. She admires Doctor Penhallow above all. He was her preceptor. He’s old enough to be — well, it would be a young sort of father ; but he’s well along ; he could n’t be so famous if he was n’t; nor she would n’t feel that kind of feeling for him, — that looking up. He’s the only man I ever saw doctor look up to. She ain’t like the rest of ns; we wear our upper lids short with it. I declare ! It seems to me in course of generations women would n’t have had any eyelids; they’d be what you call nowadays selected away, by worshipin' men-folks, if Providence hadn’t thrown in such lots of little men,—mites and dots of souls, too short for the biggest fool alive to call the tallest. Then, half the time, she gets on her knees to him to make out the difference. Oh, I’ve seen ’em ! Down on their knees, and stay there to make him think he’s as big as he wants to be, and pacify him. Then, another thing,” added Mrs. Butterwell, gently, “ is babies. You’ve got to look down to your babies, and that keeps the balance something like even. Providence knew what he was up to when he made women, though I must say it looks sometimes as if he’d made an awful botch of it.”

“ Is he married?” asked Yorke.

“ Who? Oh, Doctor Penhallow ? (I was thinking about Providence.) No. He’s an old bach,” said Mrs. Butterwell in a mysterious manner, “ and only one sister, and she just married and gone to Surinam to live. It seems to make it such a useful place ; I never felt as if anybody lived there before. He used to have to have her home in Bangor till a gracious mercy removed her, for she was squint-eyed and had spells. He was a friend of her father’s, too.”

“ Whose father’s ? ” cried Yorke, desperately.

“ Why, doctor’s father’s, — Doctor Zay’s father’s. Old Doctor Lloyd and Doctor Penhallow were friends, the dearest kind ; he was his preceptor, too, and Doctor ” —

“ We are getting our pronouns, not to say our physicians, dreadfully mixed,” interrupted the young man wearily. “ And I suppose the lady has a right to her admirers, whether they meet our views or not. There really is nothing extraordinary about it, except the fact that it should never have occurred to me that she could have them, in this wilderness.”

“ Well, there ! I should like to know why not! ” Mrs. Butterwell fired at once. “ You don’t suppose a woman ain’t a woman because she’s a doctor, do you ? There was a fellow here last summer, — a family of summer folks at the Sherman Hotel, three brothers: one was a minister, and one was an editor of something, — I forget what, but he wasn’t a widower, that I ’m sure of, — and one had a patent on mouse-traps. I can’t say much for the minister, for he preached on woman’s sphere in the Baptist church,— may the Lord forgive him, if he ever heard the sermon, which I don’t believe he did, — and the mousetrap was engaged, besides having his front teeth out, and coming down here to wait till he shrank for a new set. But that poor little editor, Mr. Yorke, I wish you could have made his acquaintance. The table-girl at the Sherman House told my girl he ’d lost his appetite to that pass he would n’t eat a thing but shoo-fly potatoes. Think,” added Mrs. Butterwell, with a gravity which deepened to solemnity, “ of supporting an honorable and unrequited affection on shoo-fly potatoes ! ”

“ I did not know,” observed Yorke, acutely conscious of the indiscretion of his remark, “ that physicians — men physicians — were apt to be appreciative of the lady members of the profession in any way, least of all in that. Many of these facts in social progress, you see, are novel to me. I am very dull about them.”

“ Well, I declare ! ” objected Mrs. Butterwell. “ I must say I think you are. For my part, I can’t conceive of anything more natural. When you consider the convenience of taking each other’s overflow practice, and consulting together when folks die, and the sitting down of an evening to talk over operations ; and then one boy would do for both sets of horses. And when you think of having a woman like Doctor to turn to, sharin’ the biggest cares and joys a man has got, not leanin’ like a water-soaked log against him when he feels slim as a pussy-willow himself, poor fellow, but claspin’ hands as steady as a statue to help him on, —and that hair of hers, and her eyes, for all her learning ! But there, Mr. Yorke ! I’ve talked you dead as East Sherman. I ’ll fix your blinds for you and put in the pegs, and get your milk, and go. Don’t you lie awake listening for him. He won’t go till half past eleven. He never does. He ain’t able to get over very often, for his business is tremendous, and he’s sent for all over the State, consultin’. He’s famous enough for her, if that is all,” she added, by way of final consolation.

Mrs. Butterwell’s prophecy proved so far correct that at quarter of eleven the hospitable light still shone from Doctor Zay’s parlor upon the acacia leaves and clovers, and the slender-throated honeysuckles, curious and dumb. It was with an emotion of exultance, for which he blamed and shamed himself with bitter helplessness, that Yorke heard, at ten minutes before eleven, the office-bell struck by what he knew was the imperious hand of a messenger in mortal need.

He heard Doctor Zay come out quickly to the wagon which had brought the order. She did not wait for her own horse to be harnessed, but was driven rapidly and anxiously away. It seemed to him that he heard Jim Paisley’s voice, and that Jim said something about Molly. Yorke was sorry for Molly, but he was not sorry for Doctor Penhallow, whose distinguished footsteps echoed down the lonely street, on their way back to the Sherman Hotel.

“ I think, Doctor, if I was you, — which I ain’t, goodness knows, I don’t mean to set myself up, — I should go and look at Mr. Yorke before you go out,” said Mrs. Butterwell, presenting herself at the office the next morning. “ He has a dreadfully peakéd look, and he’s got past Sally Lunn for breakfast. As long as he took his Sally Lunns, I knew you’d found THE REMEDY.” (Mrs. Butterwell pronounced these two wqrds with that accent of confiding reverence by which the truly devout homœopathist may be instantly classified.) “ But now I’m afraid you have n’t. He never looked at a thing only his coffee, and he swore at that, too. He thought I 'd goue, but I had n’t.”

“ I never heard Mr. Yorke swear,” observed Doctor Zay dryly.

“ Well, he did; he said he supposed the sooner he drank the infernal thing and done with it, the better. I was clear across the entry, but I heard him.”

The doctor went as she was bidden, fortified by her hat and gloves and full professional demeanor. Yorke was on the lounge, glaring at his breakfast tray. He pushed it aside when he saw her, and held out his hand. She did not take it, but drew out her note-book and medicine-case, and coldly asked for the symptoms.

“ I owe you an apology,” said the patient at once, drawing back his hand.

“ You do indeed,” she answered sternly.

“ I can do no more than offer it,” returned the young man with spirit. “ If you had ever been a man, you would be less implacable.”

“ I am not implacable,” she softened. “ No one ever called me that.”

“ It is possible that no one ever called you several things that I shall have occasion to,” observed the patient, running his white hand through his hair, and sturdily meeting her eyes, which seemed to overlook him with a fathomless, fatal calm, as if he were a being of another solar system, speaking in an unknown tongue.

“ Mrs. Butterwell said you were worse.”

“ I have had no sleep and no breakfast : it does not signify.”

“ It does signify,” returned Doctor Zay ; “ it is — ridiculous.”

“ You use sympathetic language, Doctor Lloyd.”

“I do not feel sympathetic.” She looked deeply annoyed ; she drew out her miniature vial with her tiny pincers in frowning hesitation. “ I have no symptoms. Give me some symptoms before I prescribe.”

“ Where is your friend ? ” asked Yorke abruptly. “ Has he gone ? ”

She evinced neither surprise nor displeasure at the question, but laconically answered, —

“ Yes.”

“ Then you will not be engaged with him. Will you take me to ride tonight ? ”

“ What do you want to do that for ? ”

“ I am going home next week. I want a ride before I go.”

“ Very well,” said Doctor Zay, after a severe pause. “ Have it as you will. Only remember that I did not invite you.”

“ I promise you to remember as much as that.”

“ Did you take that powder, last night ? ”

“ No.”

“ Why not ? ”

“ I did not want your sugar ! ” with rising fierceness. He quickly repented this outburst, and as she was leaving the room, he asked, with what he thought a masterly effort to be civil, if not natural, “ What does Cham. 5 m. stand for, Doctor ? ”

“ Champs Elysées, five miles,” she said, without turning around.

“ That is a long tramp for a man on crutches.”

“ Altogether too long,” retorted the doctor. “ He should n’t try it.”

The phaeton came to the door directly after an early tea, and Yorke went out, and got in without further invitation. Handy helped him. The doctor did not offer her shoulder. She came down the walk consulting her visitinglist with an absorption which the vainest of men could not have interpreted as less than real. It bitterly occurred to Yorke that she had already forgotten even to seem to forget what had cost him more than he had nerve of soul or body to waste. She took the reins without speaking, and they drove for some time silently towards the large August sunset. She wore a white dress which did not, for some reason become her. It was one of her plainest hours. He watched her studious and anxious face, on which lines of care were beginning — he had never noticed before — to notch themselves lightly, as if with the probational or preparatory motion which the heavy chisel stroke must follow soon and surely. It came to his thought with a complex emotion how dear she looked to him when she was not beautiful. It would have been hard to say why this discovery was so fraught with significance to him.

“ You are anxious and tired, to-night,” he ventured at length, when her silence had lasted so long that he felt it was veering over the margin between the oppressive and the dangerous.

“ I have a diphtheria case that is going hard,” she said, weariedly. “ It is Johnny Sanscrit, the minister’s little boy, — his only child. I never stand it well with only children. They sent Doctor Adoniram off, in their extremity, which makes it worse. That is too often the way : the patient comes into onr hands just in time for us to sign the” —

“ Death warrant?” interrupted Yorke.

“ The technical expression is death certificate; you can take your choice. This is the house. I must stop here first.”

Yorke did not experience that acute anxiety in behalf of Johnny Sanscrit which perhaps should have been expected of a humane neighbor. He occupied himself with dwelling upon the modern disadvantages attending an interest in the Useful Woman, who has no time to be admired, and perhaps less heart. It occurred to him to picture one of Scott’s or Richardson’s stately heroes stranded meekly in a basket phaeton, with matters of feeling trembling on his lips, while the heroine made professional calls and forgot him. How was a man going to approach this new and confusing type of woman ? The old codes were all astray. Were the old impulses ruled out of order, too ?

But Johnny Sanscrit, as fate would, was better, and the doctor returned to the phaeton, transformed.

“ It is a remarkable adaptation of Lachesis,” she said, with a radiant smile.

“ Is it ? ” said Yorke.

“ And I hope you have n’t got chilly ? ” She looked at him absently, with her hazy, happy eyes. She began to sparkle with conversation, and overflow with good humor. Yorke reminded himself that it was owing to Johnny Sanscrit.

She had regained herself, and looked superbly. The opacity of the white dress softened in the softening light. As the sun dropped, she drew over her shoulders a fine Stuart plaid shawl which he liked. He welcomed her moody beauty with exultance, as he had protected its absence with tenderness.

They drove to poor Molly’s, who proved to be better. Everybody was better. The doctor was girlishly happy. They rode past the mill-pond and the silent wheel, and through the well of trees, and up the darkening hill ; and she said she had but one more call to make, and then they would go home. There was a wood-cutter’s wife who expected her, if Mr. Yorke felt able to go. Mr. Yorke felt quite able, and they turned from the road into the narrow cart-path, that wound at that hour like a blazing green and golden serpent through the late light and long shadow, towards the forest’s heart.

“ Are you never tired of it ? ” asked Yorke, suddenly, as they entered the cart-path.

“ Of my work ? Never ! ”

“ I don’t mean that. It would be like tiring of a great opal to be fickle with usefulness like yours.”

“ What a pretty thought! ” she interrupted, with that delicate and gradual expression of surprise by which a poetic image always overtook her practically occupied imagination.

“ I meant,” explained Yorke, “ don’t you get tired of the surroundings you have chosen for it ? Do you never feel the need of resetting it ? ”

“ What could be better? ” She pointed with her whip down the sinuous, shaded driveway. The trees met above it. The horse’s feet sounded softly on the grass. The great shadows from the forest advanced. The great glory of the receding sun struggled through the shield of fine leaf-outlines. The entrance to the road, like its termination, was blotted out in splendid curves and colors, which seemed to bar the intruders in, as if they had trespassed upon some sweet or awful secret of the woods, with which they could not be trusted if set free. It was one of those scenes, it was one of those moments, when the power of the forest overshadows the soul like the power of the Highest, and when Nature seems to approach us on her knees in the service of a Greater than herself, bearing a message too mystic for any but our unworldly, unspotted selves to receive.

Yorke looked from the face of the wilderness to the face of the woman.

“ It is very beautiful,” he said, “ but it is very lonely.”

She did not answer him, but, turning a sudden soft grassy corner, came to a halt at her wood-cutter’s, and forsook him for her patient with that easy adaptability to which he never became accustomed. She was not gone long, but it was darkening rapidly in the woods when she came out, and she drove slowly through the looming shadow, over the rude road.

“ There is a short cut home through the woods,” she said. “ We will take it, unless it seems damp to you.”

“ No, let us take it,” he said absently. They rode through the sweet, dry dusk among the pines. It was too dark to see each other’s faces. The consciousness of her presence, their solitude, their approaching separation, arose and took hold of Yorke like a hand at his throat, from whose grip he was strangling. It was to him as if he struck out for his life when he said, —

“ Miss Lloyd, I told you I was going home next week. I wish to tell you why.”

“ Don’t! ” she said quickly. “ Don't! ”

He thrust her words aside, as if they had been women, with a fierce gesture of his invalid hands. “ It is not for you to tell me what I shall do or not. I am not talking about my ankle or my spine. This is not a case of pellets and bandages and faints and fol-de-rol. I will not have your precautions and advice. I will say what I have to say. I will take no interference. I will speak, and you shall hear.”

“ If you speak, I must hear, but I warn you. I beg you not! ”

“ And why, I demand, do you beg me not? What right have you ? What ” —

“ The right of my responsibility,” she answered, in a tone too low to be calm, and yet too controlled to be agitated.

“ I relieve you of the slightest responsibility ! ”

“ You cannot.”

“ But I do assume that deadly burden. My shoulders are broad enough yet, — though I am a poor fool of a sick man, dependent on your wisdom, in debt to you for his unfortunate life ” —

“ Oh, please, Mr. Yorke ” —

“ I insist. You will oblige me by explaining why I should not say what I like to you, as well as to any other woman.”

“ Because you are not strong enough.”

“ I am strong enough to love you, at all events.” He drew one great breath, and looked at her through the dark with straining eyeballs, like a blind man. She gave no sign of surprise or frail feminine protest. Although it was so dark, he could see (her long gloves were white) the steady pull of her hand on the reins, at which the pony was twitching and shying over the uneven road. After a moment of oppressive silence, she said, with cruelly gentle sadness, —

“ That is exactly what you are not strong enough to do.”

“ Do you presume to tell a man he doesn’t know when he loves a woman ? ” cried Yorke, quivering, stung beyond endurance.

“ You are not in love,” she said calmly, “ you are only nervous.”

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.