Part 16 (1/2)
The fire sulked and smoked a trifle with its brands apart. Doctor Fleming leaned forward upon his knees and regarded it thoughtfully. The colonel sat fondling the tongs. In a deep chair Mrs. Creve lay back and shaded her face with the end of her lace scarf. By her manner she might have been alone in the room, yet she was keenly observant of the men, for she felt that developments were taking place.
”What is the matter with your patient upstairs, Doctor?” the colonel began his cross-examination. Doctor Fleming raised his eyebrows.
”He's had nothing to eat to speak of for six weeks, at an alt.i.tude”--
”Yes; we know all that. But he's twenty-four years old. They made an easy trip back, and he has been here a week, nearly. He's not as strong as he was when they brought him in, is he?”
”That was excitement. You have to allow for the reaction. He has had a shock to the entire system,--nerves, digestion,--must give him time.
Very nervous temperament too much controlled.”
”Make it as you like. But I'm disappointed in his rallying powers, unless you are keeping something back. A boy with the grit to do what he did, and stand it as he did--why isn't he standing it better now?”
”We are all suffering from reaction, I think,” said Mrs. Creve diplomatically; ”and we show it by making too much of little things.
Tom, we oughtn't to keep the doctor up here talking nonsense. He wants to go to bed.”
”_I_'m not talking nonsense,” said the doctor. ”I should be if I pretended there was anything mysterious about that boy's case upstairs.
He has had a tremendous experience, say what you will; and it's pulled him down nervously, and every other way. He isn't ready or able to talk of it yet. And he knows as soon as he comes down there'll be forty people waiting to congratulate him and ask him how it was. I don't wonder he fights shy. If he could take his bride by the hand and walk out of the house with her I believe he could start to-morrow; but if there must be a wedding and a lot of fuss”--
Mrs. Creve nodded her head approvingly. The three had risen and stood around the hearth, while the colonel put the brands delicately together with the skill of an old campaigner. The flames breathed again.
”I don't offer this as a professional opinion,” said the doctor. ”But a case like his is not a disease, it's a condition”--
”Of the mind, perhaps?” the colonel added significantly. He glanced at Mrs. Creve. ”You've thought about that, Doctor? The letter his mother consulted you about?”
”Have you been worrying about that, Colonel? Why didn't you say so?
There is nothing in it whatever. Why, it's so plain a case the other way--any one can see where the animus comes from!”
”Now you _are_ getting mysterious, and I'm going to bed!” said Mrs.
Creve.
”No; we're coming to the point now,” said the colonel.
”What is it you want Bogardus to do?” asked Doctor Fleming. ”Want him to get up and walk out of the house as my patient did at the hospital? Dare say he could do it, but what then? Will you let me speak out, Colonel?
No regard to anybody's feelings? Now, this may be gossip, but I think it has a bearing on the case upstairs. I'm going to have it off my mind anyhow! When Mrs. Bogardus came to see the guide,--Packer John,--day before yesterday, was it?--he asked to see her alone. Said he had something particular to say to her about her son. We thought it a queer start, but she was willing to humor him. Well, she wasn't in there above ten minutes, but in that time something pa.s.sed between them that hit her very hard, no doubt of that! Now, Bogardus holds his tongue like a gentleman as to what happened in the woods. He doesn't mention his comrades' names. And the packer has disappeared; so he can't be questioned. Seems to me a little bird told me there was an attachment between one of those Bowen boys and Miss Christine?
”Now we, who know what brutes brute fear will make of men, are not going to deny that those boys behaved badly. There are some things that can't be acknowledged among men, you know, if there is a hole to crawl out of.
Cowardice is one of them. Well then, they lied, that's the whole of it. The little boys lied. They wrote Mrs. Bogardus a long letter from Lemhi,”--the doctor was reviewing now for Mrs. Creve's benefit,--”when they first got out. They probably judged, by the time they had had, that Paul and the packer would never tell their own story. Very well: it couldn't hurt Paul, it might be the saving of them, if they could show that something had queered him in the woods. They asked his mother if she had heard of the effects of alt.i.tude upon highly sensitive organizations. They recounted some instances--I will mention them later.
One of the boys is a lawyer, isn't he? They are a pair of ingenious youths. Bogardus, they claim, avoided them almost from the time they entered the woods,--almost lived with the packer, behaved like a crank about the shooting. Whereas they had gone there to kill things, he made it a personal matter whenever they pursued this intention in a natural and undisguised manner. He had pangs, like a girl, when the creatures expired. He hated the carcases, the blood--forgive me, Mrs. Creve. In short, he called the whole business butchery.”
”Do you make _that_ a sign of lunacy?” Mrs. Creve flung in.
”I am quoting, you know.” The doctor smiled indulgently. ”They declare that they offered--even begged--to stay behind with him, one of them, at least, but he rejected their company in a manner so unpleasant that they saw it would only be courting a quarrel to remain. And so, treating him perforce like a child _or_ a lunatic _pro tem._, and having but little time to decide in, they cut loose and hurried back for help. This is the tale, composed on reflection. They said nothing of this to Winslow--to save publicity, of course! Mrs. Bogardus's lips are doubly sealed, for her son's sake and for the sake of the young scamp who is to be her son, by and by! I saw she winced at my opinion, which I gave her plainly--brutally, perhaps. And she asked me particularly to say nothing, which I am particularly not doing.
”This, I think, you will find is the bitter drop in the cup of rejoicing upstairs. And they are swallowing it in silence, those two, for the sake of the little girl and the old friends in New York. Of course she has kept from Paul that last shot in the back from those sweet boys! The packer had some unruly testimony he was bursting with, which he had sense enough to keep for her alone, and she doesn't want the case to spread. It is singular how a man in his condition could get out of the way as suddenly as he did. You might think he'd been taken up in a cloud.”
”Doctor, what do you mean by such an insinuation as that?”