CHAPTER III

THE greater part of the ensuing afternoon was spent by Dr. Dearing in his musty little office on the ground-floor of a building in the central square of the town which was devoted to lawyers’ quarters, the rooms of the sheriff of the county, and the council-chamber where the mayor held his court. He received a few patients, made some examinations, wrote several prescriptions, and, considering that it was Sunday, he felt that he was fairly well occupied. His mind, however, was constantly on the topic of the morning and the disagreeable task confronting him. Finally he turned over the placard on the door till the word “out” was exposed to view, and went home to supper. Here, however, he met only General Sylvester, who, a dejected picture of offended loneliness, sat on the veranda, a dry cigar between his lips.

“Where is Madge?” Dearing asked, half standing, half sitting on the balustrade in front of the old gentleman, and assuming a casual tone which was far from natural.

“She hasn’t been down at all to-day,” the General answered, pettishly. “I wouldn’t send for her. She knew I wouldn’t knuckle like that, but she knows I always expect to walk with her Sunday afternoons, and she stayed pouting in her room. She resents what has been said about that blackleg gambler, and wants to show it as plainly as possible, so there won’t be any mistake between her view and mine. She knows I don’t intend to leave any property to her if she keeps this up, but she doesn’t care a rap. She’s dead in love with the scamp, and, bad as he is, she glories in the opportunity to show her contempt for me and all that pertains to me. She can’t toss me about like a ball, my boy! This thing has got to end right here and now, or I’ll see my lawyer to-morrow and put something on paper that may never be wiped out while I am alive.”

“Well, give her till to-morrow, then,” Dearing said, with strange, suppressed calmness. “Her very sullenness now may be a sign that she is about to give him up. I’ve talked to her, and, while I am not certain what she’ll do, I have an idea that she may respect your wishes and abide by your judgment.”

“I don’t think so,” the old man said, with an anxious look into the face of his nephew; “that is, not so long as the rascal holds her to whatever understanding they may have between them. When I was a young man”—Sylvester clinched his fist and pounded his knee, as if to emphasize his words—“things like this did not hang fire. A man who could make no showing as to his being a proper suitor for a girl under age was given orders from her family to desist in his harmful attentions, and if he refused he was promptly dealt with—that’s all: dealt with!”

“Nowadays it’s different, Uncle Tom,” Dearing said, with the tone of an older man. “Shooting or threatening to shoot about a young woman is sure to cast a blight on her reputation, and there generally is some other method to—”

“You learned that up among those Yankees!” the General said, alluding to the period his nephew had spent in a New York medical college. “But I am miserable enough as it is without wanting you to stain your hands with blood and have us all brought into court to justify your course. He is a coward, I’m sure; no man has any pride or backbone who will cling on to a respectable family, under the pretext of being in love, when his own people have cut him off. His mother belonged to a good family, but he hasn’t inherited any refinement of feeling from that side of the house.”

“I don’t think, to do Fred full justice,” Dearing gently urged, “that he quite realizes the seriousness of your objections to him. I really believe, when he is told of the step you are about to take, that he will act sensibly. He has a good side to him when he is thoroughly himself, and I am going to look him up after supper and lay the whole thing fairly before him.”

“Does Margaret know you—” The General’s voice failed to carry further.

“Yes; I’ve told her what I intend to do, and I think that is one reason she has remained in her room. She is hard hit, Uncle Tom. Girls never can understand things of this sort. Their sympathies always go with the unfortunate, and Madge knows Fred is down, and that most people are against him.”

“Well, I hope you will accomplish something,” General Sylvester said, hopefully. “You can straighten it out if any one can. I can trust you, Wynn, and I am proud of you—proud of you in every way. I never regret the loss of the old order of things when I think of what you are and what you are bound to become as a leader of young men of your period.”

“We are certainly sharp enough to pull the wool over kind old eyes like yours, Uncle Tom.” Dearing laughed as he leaned forward and laid his hand on the old man’s shoulder. “In your day young blades boasted of what they did under cover of the night, but we thank the darkness for its shelter and don’t talk of our acts. Why, you old-timers didn’t know the first principles of devilment! If it were not giving away professional secrets, I’d tell you things that would make your hair stand on end. You’ve heard me say I believe in the good old-time, psalm-singing, God-fearing religion—well, I do. The longer I live the more I think we need it. Look what modern thought has done for Kenneth Galt. He has read so much on science and philosophy that he has reduced us all—good, bad, and indifferent—to mere cosmic dust. According to him, we are simply mud babies energized by planetary force, and living on the pap of graft. Ask him to account for good spiritual impulses, and he will—if he admits there are any—show you conclusively that good conduct is the mere evolutionary result of communal self-interest; men came to believe murder was wrong only because they didn’t want their own throats cut.”

“I have always wondered what Kenneth does believe,” Sylvester said, with his first smile. “He certainly is an interesting man; and he’s rich, and growing more so.”

“Yes; he was well provided for at the start,” responded Dearing, “and he has invested wisely.”

“I have seen him talking to Margaret several times of late,” Sylvester remarked. “That is one thing that irritates me. I don’t care a red cent about his cranky religious views; they will take care of themselves, for he is a straight, safe, and honorable man; and if this harum-scarum Fred Walton had not been taking up so much of her time, why—”

“You old match-maker!” Dearing laughed. “I’m going to stir up Aunt Diana and get something to eat. I am as hungry as a bear.”

While he and his uncle sat together at the long table in the big dining-room, Dearing asked the cook if she had notified his sister that supper was served.

“Yesser, Marse Wynn,” the woman answered over the coffee-tray she was putting down, “I sent Lindy up dar to her room, and she say young miss didn’t want er bite. I reckon she sho’ is sick. She haint tetch er mouthful since ‘er breakfast.”

“Well, let her alone,” Dearing said, as his eyes met the wavering glance of his uncle across the table. “She will be all right in the morning.”

The gloomy meal over, the General strode back to the veranda, and Wynn went up to his room. He did not light the gas, as he intended doing, for it occurred to him that there was really no need for it, and he sat down in the darkness. He could see one of the windows of Margaret’s room in the ell of the building, across the open court. A dim light was burning there, and the curtains were drawn.

“Poor child!” he muttered; “that fellow has hit her hard. Women have a wonderful amount of sympathy for him. It may be that Mrs. Barry is correct in her fears, and that Dora may be in love with him, too. Beautiful, trusting Dora—even she is suffering on his account. Yes, I must see him. There is no other way.” Dearing stood up and went to his bureau to get a fresh handkerchief, and while his hand was fumbling collars, cuffs, and neckties, it touched the cool, smooth handle of a revolver. He picked it up and held it for a moment reflectively, and then laid it down.

“No, I’ll not go to see him even with the thought that I may have to use force,” he said. “My mission in life is to cure men, not to spill their blood. They say he sometimes goes armed, and if we met on that sort of level there might be trouble.”

He closed the drawer, stood for a moment looking at the light in the window of Margaret’s room, and then, shrugging his broad shoulders, he turned away. He met no one on the stairs, but as he passed out at the front door he saw the flare of his uncle’s cigar and the wrinkled, brooding face and gray head and beard at the end of the veranda. Going down the wide brick walk, which was edged by rows of well-trimmed boxwood, he descried, near the gate, a willowy figure in white. It was Margaret. She looked up as he approached, and in the piteous lines of her face he read her final desperate appeal.

“I thought you were in your room,” he said, in an effort at gentle deception. “Madge, old girl, I’ll have to take you in hand.” He passed his fingers playfully under her cold chin. “You are on a direct road to a thirty-day course of that very tonic you despised so much last spring. No dinner to-day and no supper to-night. I don’t get any fee for doctoring you, but I’m going to keep you in good shape as an advertisement, if for nothing else. I don’t intend to have my patients throwing it in my face that they won’t believe in me until I cure my own family.”

She did not return his smile, and drew back from his caress as if she half resented it.

“Are you really going to see Fred?” she asked, falteringly, her eyes fixed coldly, half fearfully, on his through the dim, vague starlight.

“Yes, Madge,” he answered, simply. “I’ve thought it over deliberately and calmly, with no feeling of ill-will toward him, and I can’t see my duty in any other way.”

“To-night?” She breathed hard, her hand on her breast.

“Right away, sister; that is, if he is in town.”

She moved a little nearer to him. He saw the hand which started toward his arm tremble, as it diverted its course to one of the palings of the fence, which it clutched in visible desperation.

“Do you realize,” she asked, “that to—to tell him what Uncle Tom intends to do in case he and I don’t give each other up may insult him? He is not a man to care about a girl’s fortune; he hasn’t shown that he wants his father’s money. He knows that I don’t let such things weigh with me. What you are now starting out to do may be the immediate cause of—of our both defying you!”

“Oh, I see,” Dearing said. “Well, in that case I shall have done all in my power to protect your interests. I’ll tell you one thing, though, Madge, little girl: the matter looks black enough as it stands; but, really, if I felt that you were going absolutely penniless to a man who has shown himself as reckless of his own interests as Fred Walton has, I’d be blue in earnest, and—and I don’t know that I’d be quite able to restrain my temper if such a reckless spendthrift were to thrust himself between you and your natural rights, boldly robbing you, blind as you now are, of what you ought to have, and which later in life you will sadly need. I am not a fighting man, but—well, he’d better not interfere with your material interests, that’s all.”

She shrank back before the force and suppressed fury in his face and voice, and now, her last hope gone, she simply stared, speechless. He had put his hand upon the iron latch of the gate when she caught his arm and clung to it convulsively.

“Oh, brother, you don’t know Fred as I do!” she wailed. “He has some faults, I’ll admit; but he is true and noble at heart. You see, I’ve heard him talk in a confidential way and you haven’t. The last time I met him he almost cried in telling me of his troubles. He does try very hard to please his father. You see, I am convinced that he has just reached a sort of turning-point, and I am afraid this very thing may make him more desperate.”

“If he is sincere,” Wynn retorted, “and is any sort of man, he will be glad of being warned against impoverishing the girl he professes to love. You leave it all to me, sister. I am not going to be harsh with him. I don’t really dislike him, and he has nothing against me.” From the expression of utter despair in her eyes he knew that she intended to resist no longer. She lowered her head to the top of the fence, and without looking at him, she asked, in a smothered voice: “What time do you think you will—will be back?”

“I can’t tell, Madge. I may not find him at once, you know.”

“I shall wait up for you,” she gulped. “I couldn’t close my eyes until I see you and know what he says. Oh, brother, I am afraid—”

“Afraid of w’hat?” he demanded, quickly.

“I hardly know how to express it.” She looked up, and on her cheeks lay the damp traces of the tears she had wiped away on her sleeve. “But he is desperate. I am actually afraid he may try to—to do himself harm. It looked, the other evening, as if he were constantly on the point of telling me something about some crisis or other in his affairs which has just come up. He would start out as if about to make a disclosure of some horrible kind, and then he would stop and say: ‘But I can’t worry you by telling you everything. It won’t help matters to talk about my trouble.”

“Poor chap,” Dearing said. “I will not be hard on him, sister; I promise you that. I may find him at church; he sometimes goes to take Dora Barry.”

“Yes; they are good friends,” Margaret said. “That is one thing I admire in him. She is poor, and doesn’t receive much attention. Fred takes her to places and goes to see her out of pure kindness of heart.”

“Well, I’m off,” Dearing said, as he turned to leave. “Now you go to bed, young lady, and forget about this disagreeable mess for to-night, anyway. It may be all for the best.”