The first sign of waning popularity noted by Dinty was a diminution of cash receipts in ratio to barter. Several prominent names were crossed off her books. The Dillards and Fairlies now canalled to Rochester or coached to Canandaigua for their ordinary doctoring. George W. Woodcock belched his dyspeptic complaints in the sympathetic ear of Old Murch. Mrs. Van Wie bore her fourth baby with the aid of a midwife. L. St. John had his neck-boils lanced by L. Brooks, M.D., the barber.
In all this the hand of Genter Latham was patent. It did not extend to the brotherhood of the smithy, which stuck staunchly to Dr. Amlie. His canal and backwoods practice increased steadily. This was somewhat less remunerative than the best of the village patronage. Though total receipts were less, the little financier was still able to set aside a substantial sum toward the satisfaction of the note at the bank. When the fight should come into the open, she did not want her Horace beholden to the great man in any degree.
Mr. Latham no longer spoke to her when they met on the street, but restricted his acknowledgment of her existence to a dour jerk of the head. After two or three repetitions, Dinty went him one better by haughtily gazing over his head. With Wealthia, however, her relations remained affectionate. The two chums visited back and forth freely, though both chose hours when the men-folk would be absent. By mutual and tacit consent, the matter of the quarrel was avoided.
It was still a mystery to Dinty. Her mother’s theory failed to satisfy her.
Further elucidation, if such it could be called, came from Mrs. Jerrold who stopped in, market basket on arm, for another chat. Two visits within a fortnight! Was it an overture for family peace? At the expression of petty triumph on her visitor’s face, Dinty dismissed that idea and set herself on guard. Something unpleasant was coming.
The conversation opened with conventional housewifely complaints as to the dearness of market staples. Eggs had gone to a penny apiece. One could not be sure of good salted butter at less than fifteen cents a pound. A rise in butcher’s meat was threatened; presently they would all be reduced to living on venison and wildfowl like penniless woodcutters.
“You’ll feel the pinch, my poor child, in your straitened circumstances,” prophesied the mother.
Dinty’s eyebrows elevated themselves delicately, a manifestation which could be relied upon to annoy Mrs. Jerrold. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Ma.”
“You’re not going to tell me that your husband isn’t losing all his patients!”
Dinty chose to present her own interpretation. “People do die, naturally,” she said. “We’ve lost a few. But new patients come in to fill their places.”
Mrs. Jerrold sniffed. “If Dr. Amlie lost them only by death! Having them quit him is so much worse. Though I’m sure I don’t know what else he could expect.”
“Pa’s asthma is improving, isn’t it?” said the daughter brightly if inconsecutively. “Horace has always been so successful with respiratory complaints.”
Mrs. Jerrold’s eyes snapped. “I suppose he was treating Wealthia Latham for asthma.”
“Perhaps I forgot to tell you, Ma, that the Doctor doesn’t discuss his patients with me.”
“Then you don’t know what’s being freighted about?”
“I don’t want to,” valiantly lied Dinty.
“It’s high time you did, for your own sake. People are saying that your precious husband told Mr. Latham that Wealthy is in the family way.”
Dinty flushed furiously. “It’s a lie. How could she be? I mean, Horace would never make such a vile accusation.”
“Ask him.”
“I won’t.”
“You’re afraid to. Or you’re so dozened on him still that you wouldn’t, anyway.”
“I never heard anything so wicked and silly in my life,” said Dinty, recovering her poise. “Wealthy have a baby! Why, she isn’t even married yet.”
“Did I say she was going to have one? Nobody says that but your husband. Dr. Murchison, when he was called in, exposed the pretensions of ignorance finely.”
“I suppose the old blab-mouth breached it to you,” said the wife contemptuously.
“Never mind where I learned it,” retorted Mrs. Jerrold, who did not care to admit that she had been listening to servant-maid’s gossip. “Now you know what sort of a man you’ve married.”
“I don’t believe a single word of it,” declared Dinty stoutly. “And you can just tell whoever told you that if she doesn’t stop her mouth, we’ll have the law of her.”
“There’ll be lawing before all’s said and done maybe,” returned the matron darkly. “But it won’t be you that calls for it.”
In spite of her doughty disclaimer, Dinty’s heart quavered. Could Horace have committed himself to so disastrous an error? Something deadly serious had arisen between him and Mr. Latham. The quality of the autocrat’s fury attested to that. With sickening realization, she admitted to herself that her mother’s version would go far toward explaining the crisis; the sudden violence of the feud; Genter Latham’s silent vengefulness; Horace’s secrecy. If the thought flashed to her mind that Wealthy might, indeed, be “in the family way,” she dismissed it instantly as being against the evidence. For, whatever had ailed the girl, she was quite plainly getting better, not worse. If the old insolent charm and careless gayety had not wholly returned, at least she was improved and steadily improving both in spirit and body. How could that be if she were carrying an illegitimate child? It was absurd. And Horace must know it. The whole thing was foul gossip and idle malice.
Nevertheless, she meditated long as to going to her husband about it. What good would it do? If she tried to lead up to the subject, she would only lay herself open to being told, tartly or indulgently according to his mood of the moment, to mind her own business. Tartly, in all probability. Horace’s temper had been growing more and more uncertain lately.
On his part, Horace had marked with incredulous astonishment, that betterment on the part of his ex-patient which had so impressed his wife. The improved ease of body he could account for readily enough. This would be, by his reckoning the fifth month. Normally the physique should by now have adjusted itself to the new demands. But only by enlargement. The puzzling, the inexplicable feature was that while Wealthia’s gravidity had been evident enough to his expert eye a month or so earlier, it now seemed to be lessening or, at worst, stationary.
Naturally he lacked opportunity of satisfactory observation, since the girl shunned him. Such casual encounters as those of the public streets, however, convinced him that there was something abnormal about the case; it was not apparently taking the course which he had so confidently forecast. Over-confidence? He refused to admit that possibility. It added nothing to his comfort to mark Dr. Murchison’s smug smile when they met. On one such occasion, the hirsute physician brought the matter to speech.
“Do you still maintain your diagnosis in a certain case of mutual interest, Doctor?” he inquired slyly.
“I do.”
“The symptoms hardly bear you out.”
“Depends on who interprets ’em,” growled Horace.
“You will admit that I am in better position to judge of my patient’s state than you are.”
“I don’t count your judgment for that.” He rudely illustrated with a finger-and-thumb snap.
The old fellow was unperturbed. “The growth is abating under my medication.”
Horace snorted and passed on. Abating, was it? A very gradual, almost imperceptible abatement. Too gradual for a miscarriage. Besides, Wealthia had not been bedridden for so much as a day. The Human Teapot’s watchfulness assured him of that.
For further evidence, he fell in back of the girl when next he saw her on Main Street, and followed unobtrusively noting her figure and gait. There could be no doubt on one point; the slender grace of her form had thickened; not to the point of incipient unwieldiness, but still unmistakably to an eye familiar with her earlier outlines. His uneasy cogitations were interrupted by a small hand, slipped through his arm.
“What are you glooming about, Doc?”
“Oh! Hello, Dinty. Coming home?”
“No. I’m meeting Wealthy at Miss Blombright’s.”
“The dressmaker’s?”
“Don’t look so dumbstruck. Why not?”
“Is Wealthia interested in new clothes?”
“Isn’t every girl?”
“She must be feeling better.”
“Oh, she is! Heaps,” replied his wife with enthusiasm.
Horace became Machiavellian—or so he considered himself. He drew his wife aside. “I’m still interested in Wealthia as a case,” said he. “Could you get me her waist and bust measurements? Then I’d like to know what they were—well, say last winter. Miss Blombright keeps her patterns, I suppose. Could you find out without Wealthia’s knowing? Pretend that you’re going to knit a sickroom jacket for her.”
Dinty eyed him sorrowfully. “Oh, Doc!” she murmured. “Are you still nursing that crazy idea?”
His chin jerked up. “What crazy idea?”
“Nothing,” said she hastily.
“What have you been hearing?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” It was a sadly feeble disclaimer.
“This is no place to talk. Come home.”
Dinty pulled away from him. “I can’t. I’ve got an agreement for three o’clock with Wealthy.”
“It can wait. Come with me.”
Miserable and scared, she trotted along beside him. She was in for it now! He held the office door open for her, and closed it behind them.
“Now, Araminta,” said he.
“Are you going to be mean to me?” she asked doubtfully.
“I’m going to have the truth out of you.”
“Because if you’re horrid, I’ll run away.”
“What is this crazy idea you accuse me of harboring?”
She drew a long breath. “That Wealthy was going to have a baby.”
“So she is.”
“Doc! I don’t believe it.”
“Don’t you? Where are your eyes? And you, a doctor’s wife.”
“It can’t be true. It must be something else.”
“So she told her father. He believed her lies. That is why I was turned off.”
“But—but—but, I don’t understand. How could she be …?”
“In the usual course of nature,” was the grim reply. “It began when Kinsey Hayne was here in April.”
“Oh, no! Not Kinsey!” she cried.
“Who else would you suspect?” he asked sardonically.
“No one,” she hastened to assure him. “But—but if it were so, wouldn’t he know?”
“He does know. He’s run away from it.”
“Never!” exclaimed Dinty. “Not Kin. He’d never do that.”
“I wouldn’t have believed it of him, myself,” Horace admitted.
“But Wealthia is here and he’s in South Carolina. What else can you make of it?”
“That you’re wrong,” she said solemnly. “Oh, Doc, I can’t help it if you hate me for it; I know you’re wrong. Why, look at her now.”
“I don’t hate you for it, Puss,” he said more gently. “Suppose I told you that she as much as admitted her condition to me? She told Hayne about it, too. He wrote me.”
“Is that the letter you burned?”
“Yes. I’ve no right to be telling you these things, Dinty. But I want you to understand. I can have the whole village against me and stand up to it. But I can’t have my own wife against me.”
“I could never be against you, darling. You know that, don’t you? No matter how wrong and pigheaded you were.”
“If I’m wrong in this, I’ll never believe in myself again. Now, Dinty, where did you get this precious bit of gossip?”
She shook her head. “Please don’t ask me, Doc.”
“I can guess. Has it gone far, do you think?”
“I—I’m afraid so.”
“If it reaches Genter Latham there will be hell to pay.”
“Are you having the Lathams watched still, Doc?”
“Yes. Dad Hinch reports to me every day.”
“What for?”
“To let me know of any preparation for their going away.”
“Why shouldn’t they go away if they want to?”
“Try to get it through your mind, Dinty. I’m fighting for my professional honor; for everything in the world that I’ve got. You can see how it will work out. If Kinsey Hayne won’t marry her …”
“She doesn’t want to marry him,” broke in his wife.
“Did she tell you that?”
“No-o-o. Not exactly. She’s been peskily queer about him.”
“It’s possible that she’s turned against him,” reflected Horace. “Pregnant women sometimes take strange fancies. Whatever the reason, if marriage isn’t in the offing, there is only one recourse left her. If she leaves Palmyra now, it will be to have a criminal operation performed. That I am determined to prevent if I have to follow her to the world’s end.”
“Horace! You scare me when you look that way.”
“Nobody is readier to admit it when he’s in the wrong than I am. What did you say, Dinty?”
“Nothing. I coughed. Can’t I cough if I have to?”
He glared at her, then continued, “But I’m right on this. And you’re going to be forced to admit it.”
Saturday morning’s mail was a heavy one. Horace stuffed a medical journal, two newspapers and a half dozen letters beneath the cushions of the gig, and went on about his professional duties. Several cases of special interest so absorbed him that when he reached home, he had quite forgotten everything else. When he came in empty-handed, his wife asked,
“Didn’t the post come in today?”
“Eh? Why, yes. Yes, of course it did.”
“Nothing for us?”
His brow wrinkled. “I’m sure there was. Now, what did I do with it?”
“Doc, do you realize how absent-minded you’re growing?”
“Am I?” He passed his hand across his forehead. “I suppose I am.”
“You’re brooding. You mustn’t, darling. I can’t bear to have you worried.”
He shook his shoulders as if disburdening himself. “I remember about the post now. It’s in the gig.”
“Sit still.” She pushed him back into his chair. “I’ll get it. I’ll fetch you a nice refreshing drink, too. There’s a jar of shrub cooling in the well.”
She gathered the mail, carefully drew up the bucket, spiced the innocuous shrub with a lacing of elderberry cordial and a handful of mint sprays, and made him drink a tall glassful before she would give him his letters. One of the papers she held up.
“Dr. and Mrs. Amlie,” she read. “Why, it’s from Kin! How nice!” Her expression clouded as she opened the copy of the Charleston Courier. “Doc, you don’t suppose he’s gotten married?”
“Probably,” grunted her husband, tossing aside a Literature Lottery solicitation sent him from college.
“I don’t see anything marked,” she said, running her eye down the columns. A moment later she added disgustedly, “It must be this medical article on the front page. You and your old fevers!”
She tossed it to him and he dipped into it. “Interesting. Very interesting,” he remarked. “They’ve appointed a committee to investigate the new outbreak of agues along the Santee Canal.”
“I don’t believe that’s it, at all,” declared Dinty. “What does Kinsey Hayne care about the shakes? And why should he address it to me? I’ll warrant there’s something else. Let me look again when you’re through.”
He returned the weekly to her and lost himself in the pages of the Medical Repository. His reading was interrupted by a choking sound. He looked up. Dinty’s face was pale and convulsed. Tears coursed down her cheeks. The hand holding the journal shook so that the paper rattled.
“Oh, Doc! Oh, Doc!” she gasped.
He jumped up, ran to her, caught her in his arms. “What is it, darling?”
“Kin. He’s dead. It’s in the paper.”
She could scarcely control her hand to point to a small paragraph without caption, on an inner page. He read it.
As we go to press we learn of the tragic death of Kinsey Hayne, Esq. of Beaulieu Plantation, Beaufort County. Mr. Hayne was hunting wild turkey when his fowling-piece was accidently discharged. Death was instantaneous. A wide circle of friends will mourn this highly esteemed young gentleman, scion of our state’s proudest old aristocracy …
He let the paper fall. Dinty was moaning, “Oh, poor Kin! Poor Wealthy!” Her eyes widened; her jaw dropped. “Doc! It was in his handwriting. How could he send us the paper when he is dead?”
“Are you sure it was his?”
Both examined the cover. There was no room for doubt. Horace’s face became stern. His logical mind had reached the solution.
“It was no accident, Dinty,” he said slowly. “It was suicide.”
“How do you know? Why should he?”
“I suspected that he had it in mind, from his last letter. He must have laid his plans to kill himself and left directions that the next issue of the Courier, which he knew would report his death, should be mailed to us. With the directions, he wrote out the address. His agent pasted the address on the paper and mailed it. It’s perfectly clear.”
“Yes, so far. But, Doc, why should he kill himself?”
“You don’t know what those old plantation families are, my dear. To marry a pregnant girl and bring her home would have meant ostracism for both of them. He couldn’t face it. Wealthia had kept it from him as long as she dared. When she gave up hope finally and faced her condition, she wrote him, probably begging him to come back and marry her. This is his answer, poor devil!”
Dinty’s lower lip, still tremulous, nevertheless protruded in the familiar aspect of obstinacy. “I don’t believe it and I won’t believe it. Nothing shall persuade me but what Kin Hayne was brave and true and honorable.”
“And you still don’t believe that Wealthia is pregnant?”
At this Dinty broke completely. “Oh, poor Wealthy!” she wailed. “What’s to become of her?”
“God knows!”
“Darling, you’ve got to save her.”
“How?”
“There’s a way. You know there’s a way.”
“Not for me.”
“How can you be so hard!”
“Would you rather have me a criminal?”
“Yes,” said Dinty defiantly.
“Women have no moral sense.” He regarded her with a sort of awe.
“What good will it do you to let her be disgraced? What good will it do anybody?”
He sat down heavily, leaned his elbows on the table, and put his head in his hands. “The old, old argument,” said he wearily.
“I suppose you want her to kill herself now.”
He was silent.
“If she does, you’ll hate yourself forever.”
Still silent.
“And I’ll hate you,” she whispered.
He lifted his head and stared at her. She ran to him, sobbing. “I won’t. I couldn’t. You know I couldn’t. But, oh, darling, give her a chance!”
“What kind of chance?”
“Let her go away. She can find someone, do something. I know she can.”
“I’m beginning to think that you know too much.”
“I’m not asking you to do anything, yourself. Only give her a chance,” she pleaded.
“And if she dies, taking that chance?”
“That would be better than the other.”
“Have you thought that, if she has the operation and comes back here, clear, I shall be made to look a criminal fool in the eyes of Genter Latham? It’s ruin for both of us, my girl.”
“I’ve considered that, too,” said Dinty. “You must get a signed paper from Wealthia admitting the truth. That will fix Mr. Latham.”
Horace gave in. “It’s wrong, wrong, wrong. But I can’t stand out against you.”
Dinty hugged him. “Bless your heart, darling! I’d have died if you had refused me.”
“It’s for you to tell Wealthia about Kinsey.”
Dinty shrank. “Don’t you think she knows?”
“I doubt it. Kinsey had the paper sent to us so that we could break it to her.”
“I’ll do anything you want,” said Dinty, “now that you’re so good. Shall I go there now?”
“Yes. And bring her back here with you. Don’t say anything about the—the other matter. I’ll attend to that.”
The two girls came to his office by the back paths in the first darkness. Wealthia displayed a frozen immobility. To Horace’s expressions of sympathy on the death of her lover she returned a dull acknowledgment. Upon a silent signal from her husband, Dinty left the two together. Horace said, “Wealthia, if for any reason you wish to leave town, I shall make no objections and ask no questions.”
“Why should I leave town?” she returned defiantly.
“I think there is no need of my answering that question,” said he with dignity. “At the same time, I am bound to warn you that there is grave danger in the course which you are contemplating.”
“I am not contemplating anything.”
“Then you intend going through with your pregnancy here?”
At the word, she winced. A faint touch of color stained the pallid face. “I am not pregnant. I swear it.”
“Stand up,” he commanded. As she hesitated, he repeated more sharply, “Stand up.”
The confidence of professional authority brought her to her feet.
“Lift your arms.”
Again she obeyed.
He said, “Have you been taking drugs?”
“No.”
“There may have been some arrestation. It has that appearance. The phenomenon is not without precedent. But there can be no reasonable doubt of your condition.” More gently, he added, “As long as poor Kinsey was alive, you could still hope for honorable marriage.”
Still in the same deadened accents she said, “There has never been anything of that kind between Kinsey Hayne and me. I swear it.”
He ignored the denial. “What are you going to do?” he inquired.
“Nothing.” With sudden savagery, she added, “You’re the one that must leave town, Horace Amlie. And in disgrace. Good evening to you.”
Dinty, waiting, heard the outer door close. Wealthia had left. But Horace did not emerge. She went in. He sat, sprawled in his chair, his face upturned.
“What did she say?” she demanded eagerly.
“Nothing.”
Dinty stamped her foot. “Horace Amlie! Tell me.”
“Very good. If you will have it, she as good as notified me that the Lathams are going to drive me out of town.”
Dinty’s soft mouth set to an uncompromisingly grim level. “She’s siding with her father?”
“What would you expect?”
She said steadily, “Wealthy is my best friend. But you are my husband and my love. I’m never going to speak to her again.”
The anger died out of his face. He shook his head. “No, Dinty. I don’t want that. She’s going to need you. You can’t quit her that way in her need.”
“Now you’re being a noble Christian,” retorted Dinty, her lips taking a disdainful quirk. “Well, I’m not noble. And I’m not that Christian.”
“Neither am I, altogether,” he returned and, as she gazed at him questioningly, added, “It’s partly a matter of policy. I don’t ask you to spy on Wealthia, but if you stay on friendly terms with her, you may pick up something that will be useful to me.”
“How can I stay on friendly terms with her when she hates you?” said Dinty hotly.
“She doesn’t. Poor child—she isn’t herself. Try to keep that in mind, Puss. No pregnant woman is quite normal. And consider what poor Wealthia has on her mind.”
Once more she ventured to express the doubt that still gnawed her. “Doc, are you certain, live-or-die sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then I believe it. When is she going away?”
His face changed. “She isn’t going.”
“Doc! Not going? What else can she do? What does it all mean?”
“God knows,” he answered dully. “God only knows.”