Read Ebook: Red Pepper's Patients With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular by Richmond Grace S Grace Smith

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Ebook has 1354 lines and 65547 words, and 28 pages

"You don't--or won't--understand." Coolidge evidently strove hard to keep himself quiet. "We have come to a definite understanding that we can't--get on together. She's not coming back. And I don't want her to."

Burns lowered his gaze from the ceiling to his friend's face, and the glance he now gave him was piercing. "Say that last again," he demanded.

"I have some pride," replied the other haughtily, but his eyes would not meet Burns's.

"So I see. Pride is a good thing. So is love. Tell me you don't love her and I'll--No, don't tell me that. I don't want to hear you perjure yourself. And I shouldn't believe you. You may as well own up"--his voice was gentle now--"that you're suffering--and not only with hurt pride." There was silence for a little. Then Burns began again, in a very low and quiet tone: "Have you anything against her, Cooly?"

The man before him, who was still standing, turned upon him. "How can you ask me such a question?" he said fiercely.

"It's a question that has to be asked, just to get it out of the way. Has she anything against you?"

"For heaven's sake--no! You know us both."

Coolidge shook his head. "You're mistaken there. I have plenty to do."

"But nothing you couldn't be spared from--unless things have changed since the days when we all envied you. You're still writing your name on the backs of dividend drafts, I suppose?"

"Red, you are something of a brute," said Coolidge, biting his lip. But he had taken the chair again.

"I know," admitted Red Pepper Burns. "I don't really mean to be, but the only way I can find out the things I need to know is to ask straight questions. I never could stand circumlocution. If you want that, Cooly; if you want what are called 'tactful' methods, you'll have to go to some other man. What I mean by asking you that one is to prove to you that though you may have something to do, you have no job to work at. As it happens you haven't even what most other rich men have, the trouble of looking after your income--and as long as your father lives you won't have it. I understand that; he won't let you. But there's a man with a job--your father. And he likes it so well he won't share it with you. It isn't the money he values, it's the job. And collecting books or curios or coins can never be made to take the place of good, downright hard work."

"That may be all true," acknowledged Coolidge, "but it has nothing to do with my present trouble. My leisure was not what--" He paused, as if he could not bear to discuss the subject of his marital unhappiness.

The telephone bell in the outer office rang sharply. An instant later Miss Mathewson knocked, and gave a message to Burns. He read it, nodded, said "Right away," and turned back to his friend.

"I have to leave you for a bit," he said. "Come in and meet my wife and one of the kiddies. The other's away just now. I'll be back in time for dinner. Meanwhile, we'll let the finish of this talk wait over for an hour or two. I want to think about it."

He exchanged his white linen office-jacket for a street coat, splashing about with soap and water just out of sight for a little while before he did so, and reappeared looking as if he had washed away the fatigue of his afternoon's work with the physical process. He led Gardner Coolidge out of the offices into a wide separating hall, and the moment the door closed behind him the visitor felt as if he had entered a different world.

Could this part of the house, he thought, as Burns ushered him into the living room on the other side of the hall and left him there while he went to seek his wife, possibly be contained within the old brick walls of the exterior? He had not dreamed of finding such refinement of beauty and charm in connection with the office of the village doctor. In half a dozen glances to right and left Gardner Coolidge, experienced in appraising the belongings of the rich and travelled of superior taste and breeding, admitted to himself that the genius of the place must be such a woman as he would not have imagined Redfield Pepper Burns able to marry.

He had not long to wait for the confirmation of his insight. Burns shortly returned, a two-year-old boy on his shoulder, his wife following, drawn along by the child's hand. Coolidge looked, and liked that which he saw. And he understood, with one glance into the dark eyes which met his, one look at the firm sweetness of the lovely mouth, that the heart of the husband must safely trust in this woman.

Burns went away at once, leaving Coolidge in the company of Ellen, and the guest, eager though he was for the professional advice he had come to seek, could not regret the necessity which gave him this hour with a woman who seemed to him very unusual. Charm she possessed in full measure, beauty in no less, but neither of these terms nor both together could wholly describe Ellen Burns. There was something about her which seemed to glow, so that he soon felt that her presence in the quietly rich and restful living room completed its furnishing, and that once having seen her there the place could never be quite at its best without her.

Burns came back, and the three went out to dinner. The small boy, a handsome, auburn-haired, brown-eyed composite of his parents, had been sent away, the embraces of both father and mother consoling him for his banishment to the arms of a coloured mammy. Coolidge thoroughly enjoyed the simple but appetizing dinner, of the sort he had known he should have as soon as he had met the mistress of the house. And after it he was borne away by Burns to the office.

"I have to go out again at once," the physician announced. "I'm going to take you with me. I suppose you have a distaste for the sight of illness, but that doesn't matter seriously. I want you to see this patient of mine."

"Thank you, but I don't believe that's necessary," responded Coolidge with a frown. "If Mrs. Burns is too busy to keep me company I'll sit here and read while you're out."

"No, you won't. If you consult a man you're bound to take his prescriptions. I'm telling you frankly, for you'd see through me if I pretended to take you out for a walk and then pulled you into a house. Be a sport, Cooly."

"Very well," replied the other man, suppressing his irritation. He was almost, but not quite, wishing he had not yielded to the unexplainable impulse which had brought him here to see a man who, as he should have known from past experience in college days, was as sure to be eccentric in his methods of practising his profession as he had been in the conduct of his life as a student.

The two went out into the winter night together, Coolidge remarking that the call must be a brief one, for his train would leave in a little more than an hour.

"It'll be brief," Burns promised. "It's practically a friendly call only, for there's nothing more I can do for the patient--except to see him on his way."

Coolidge looked more than ever reluctant. "I hope he's not just leaving the world?"

"What if he were--would that frighten you? Don't be worried; he'll not go to-night."

Something in Burns's tone closed his companion's lips. Coolidge resented it, and at the same time he felt constrained to let the other have his way. And after all there proved to be nothing in the sight he presently found himself witnessing to shock the most delicate sensibilities.

It was a little house to which Burns conducted his friend and latest patient; it was a low-ceiled, homely room, warm with lamplight and comfortable with the accumulations of a lifetime carefully preserved. In the worn, old, red-cushioned armchair by a glowing stove sat an aged figure of a certain dignity and attractiveness in spite of the lines and hues plainly showing serious illness. The man was a man of education and experience, as was evident from his first words in response to Burns's greeting.

"It was kind of you to come again to-night, Doctor. I suspect you know how it shortens the nights to have this visit from you in the evening."

"Of course I know," Burns responded, his hand resting gently on the frail shoulder, his voice as tender as that of a son's to a father whom he knows he is not long to see.

There was a woman in the room, an old woman with a pathetic face and eyes like a mourning dog's as they rested on her husband. But her voice was cheerful and full of quiet courage as she answered Burns's questions. The pair received Gardner Coolidge as simply as if they were accustomed to meet strangers every day, spoke with him a little, and showed him the courtesy of genuine interest when he tried to entertain them with a brief account of an incident which had happened on his train that day. Altogether, there was nothing about the visit which he could have characterized as painful from the point of view of the layman who accompanies the physician to a room where it is clear that the great transition is soon to take place. And yet there was everything about it to make it painful--acutely painful--to any man whose discernment was naturally as keen as Coolidge's.

That the parting so near at hand was to be one between lovers of long standing could be read in every word and glance the two gave each other. That they were making the most of these last days was equally apparent, though not a word was said to suggest it. And that the man who was conducting them through the fast-diminishing time was dear to them as a son could have been read by the very blind.

"It's so good of you--so good of you, Doctor," they said again as Burns rose to go, and when he responded: "It's good to myself I am, my dears, when I come to look at you," the smiles they gave him and each other were very eloquent.

Outside there was silence between the two men for a little as they walked briskly along, then Coolidge said reluctantly: "Of course I should have a heart of stone if I were not touched by that scene--as you knew I would be."

"Yes, I knew," said Burns simply; and Coolidge saw him lift his hand and dash away a tear. "It gets me, twice a day regularly, just as if I hadn't seen it before. And when I go back and look at the woman I love I say to myself that I'll never let anything but the last enemy come between us if I have to crawl on my knees before her."

Suddenly Coolidge's throat contracted. His resentment against his friend was gone. Surely it was a wise physician who had given him that heartbreaking little scene to remember when he should be tempted to harden his heart against the woman he had chosen.

"Red," he said bye and bye, when the two were alone together for a few minutes again in the consulting room before he should leave for his train, "is that all the prescription you're going to give me--a trip to California? Suppose I'm not successful?"

Coolidge looked at him and shook his head. His face dropped back into melancholy. He opened his lips and closed them again. Red Pepper Burns opened his own lips--and closed them again. When he did speak it was to say, more gently than he had yet spoken:

"Old fellow, life isn't in ruins before you. Make up your mind to that. You'll sleep again, and laugh again--and cry again, too,--because life is like that, and you wouldn't want it any other way."

It was time for Coolidge to go, and the two men went in to permit the guest to take leave of Mrs. Burns. When they left the house Coolidge told his friend briefly what he thought of his friend's wife, and Burns smiled in the darkness as he heard.

"She affects most people that way," he answered with a proud little ring in his voice. But he did not go on to talk about her; that would have been brutal indeed in Coolidge's unhappy circumstances.

At the train Coolidge turned suddenly to his physician. "You haven't given me anything for my sleeplessness," he said.

"Think you must have a prescription?" Burns inquired, getting out his blank and pen.

"It will take some time for your advice to work out, if it ever does," Coolidge said. "Meanwhile, the more good sleep I get the fitter I shall be for the effort."

"True enough. All right, you shall have the prescription."

The two shook hands, gripping tightly and looking straight into each other's eyes.

"Thank you, Red, for it all," said Gardner Coolidge. "There have been minutes when I felt differently, but I understand you better now. And I see why your waiting room is full of patients even on a stormy day."

"No, you don't," denied Red Pepper Burns stoutly. "If you saw me take their heads off you'd wonder that they ever came again. Plenty of them don't--and I don't blame them--when I've cooled off."

Coolidge smiled. "You never lie awake thinking over what you've said or done, do you, Red? Bygones are bygones with a man like you. You couldn't do your work if they weren't!"

A peculiar look leaped into Burns's eyes. "That's what the outsiders always think," he answered briefly.

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