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Page 41
"Oh, well," said Doctor Gordon, "wait. If you need more medicine, or it
seems necessary that I should drive over to see your wife, you can do a
little work on my garden in the spring, or you can let me have a bushel
of your new potatoes when they are grown next summer, or some apples,
and we'll call it square. Wait; I don't want any money for that bottle
of medicine to-night anyhow. Did you walk over, Joe?"
Joe said that he had walked over. "Aaron might just as well drive you
home as not," said Gordon. "The sooner your wife has that medicine the
better. How is the baby getting along?"
"First-rate. I'd just as soon walk, doctor."
For answer Gordon opened the door and called Aaron, and told him to
hitch up and take the man home.
"Doctor Elliot has gone with the bay," said Aaron. "The teams are about
played out, and there's nothin' except the gray."
"Take her then."
"She looked when I fed her jest now as if she was half a mind to balk at
takin' her feed," Aaron remarked doubtfully.
"Nonsense! Give her a loose rein, and she'll be all right."
Aaron went out grumbling.
Gordon offered the man a cigar, which he accepted as if it had been a
diamond. "I'll save it up for next Sunday, when I've got a little time
to sense it," he said. "I know what your cigars be."
Gordon forced another upon him, and the man looked as pleased as a
child.
Presently a shout was heard, and Gordon opened the office door.
"Here's Aaron with the buggy," he said.
He stood in the doorway watching, but the gray, instead of balking, went
out of the yard with an angry plunge. Gordon shook his head.
"Confound him, he's pulling too hard on the lines," he muttered. Then he
closed and locked the office door, and went into the living-room to find
it deserted. Gordon called up the stairs. "Have you gone to bed, Clara?"
His voice was at once tenderly solicitous and angry.
Mrs. Ewing answered him from above, and in her tone was something
propitiating. "Yes, Tom, dear," she called.
Gordon hesitated a moment. His face took on its expression of utmost
misery. "Is--the pain very bad?" he called then, and called as if he
were in actual fear.
"No, dear," the woman's patient, beseeching voice answered, "not very
bad."
"Not very?"
"No, only I felt a little twinge, and thought I had better go to bed. I
am quite comfortable now. I think I shall go to sleep. I am sorry to
leave you alone all the evening, Tom."
"That's right," called Gordon. His voice rang harsh, in spite of his
effort to control it. He threw his arm over his eyes, and fairly groped
his way back to his office, stifling his sobs. When he was in his office
he flung himself into a chair, and bent his head over his hands on the
table, and his whole frame shook. "Oh, my God!" he muttered. "Oh, my
God!" He did not weep, but he gasped like a child whom his mother has
commanded not to weep. Terrible emotion fairly convulsed him. He
struggled with it as with a visible foe. At last he sat up and filled
his pipe. The dog had crept close to him, and was nestling against him
and whimpering. Gordon patted his head. The dog licked his hand.
The simple, ignorant sympathy of this poor speechless thing nearly
unnerved the man again, but he continued to smoke. He looked at the dog,
whose honest brown eyes were fixed upon him with an almost uncanny
understanding, and reflected how the woman upstairs, who was passing out
of his life, had become in a few days so associated with the animal,
that after she was gone he could never see him without a pang. He
looked about the office, with whose belongings she was less associated
than with anything in the house, and it seemed to him that everything
even there would have for him, after she had passed, a terrible sting of
reminiscence. It seemed to him, as he looked about, as if she were
already gone. He was, in fact, suffering as keenly in anticipation as he
would in reality. The horror, the worst horror of life, of being left
alive with the dead and the associations of the dead was already upon
him. Some people are comforted by such associations, others they rend.
Gordon was one whom they would rend, whom they did rend. He made up his
mind, as he sat there, that he would have to go away from Alton, and
enter new scenes for the healing of his spirit, and yet he knew that he
should not go: that at the last his courage would assert itself.
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