"I never heard of anyone by the name of Florence Campbell, so far as I can recall. I certainly never had a patient by that name. Some months ago I gave the letter you enclose--which I certainly did write--to a patient of mine who was on her way to Europe and expected to stay some time in New York on her way through.
"She, however, was in no way like the lady you describe. Her name was Kittie Hatfield, and she was small, with dreamy blue eyes and flaxen hair--a _perfect_ woman, in fact." Oh! Tom! Tom! thought I--true to your record, to the last! I had long since ceased to wonder at the lapse, however, for Florence Campbell herself was surely sufficient explanation of all that. "I understood"--the letter went on--"that Kittie did not stop but a few days in New York, when she was joined by the party with which she was to travel. She stayed at the F------ Avenue Hotel, I have learned, and became intimate with some queer people there--much to the indignation of her brother, when he learned of it."
I laid the letter down and put my head on my arms, folded as they were on the desk. I was dizzy and tired. When I raised my head it was dark.
I got up, lighted the gas, and found myself stiff and as if I had been long in a forced and unnatural position. I recalled that I had been indignant.
This brother of the silly-pated, blue-eyed girl had not liked her to know Florence Campbell, indeed! He was, no doubt, a precious fool--naturally would be, with such a sister, I commented mentally.
What else, I wondered, had Griswold found out? Was the rest of this old fool"s letter about her? I began where I had left off.
"I have since learned from him that the man--whose name _was_ Campbell--was a foreigner of some kind, with a decidedly vague, not to say, hazy reputation, and that his wife, who was supposed to be an invalid, and an American of good family, never appeared in public, and so was never seen by him--that is by Will Hatfield--but was only known to him through Kittie"s enraptured eyes. She was said to be bright and pretty. Kittie is the most generous child alive in her estimate of other women; however, he thinks it possible that Kittie either gave her the letter from me to you, and asked her to have proper medical care, or else that the woman, or her husband, got hold of it in a less legitimate way; which I think quite likely. Kittie thought the Campbell woman was charming." The "Campbell woman," indeed! I felt like a thief, even to read such rubbish, and I should have enjoyed throttling the whole ill-natured gossipping set--not omitting flaxen-haired Kittie herself.
I determined to finish the letter, however.
"Hatfield is so ashamed of his sister"s friendship for the woman that I had the utmost difficulty in making him tell me the whole truth, but, from what I gathered yesterday, he thinks them most likely the head of a gang of counterfeiters or forgers and--"
I read no further, or, if I did, I can recall only that. It was burned into my brain, and when a loud pounding on my office-door aroused me, I found the letter twisted and torn into a hundred pieces, the Vichy and wine-bottles at my side half-empty, and the hands of the clock pointing to half-past ten.
"Doctor, doctor," called my lackey; "oh, doctor! Oh, lord, I"m afraid something"s wrong with the doctor, but I"m afraid to break in the door."
I went to the door to prevent a scene. One of my best patients stood there, with Morgan, the man. Both of them were pale and full of suppressed excitement.
"Heavens and earth, doctor, we were afraid you were dead. I"ve been waiting here a good hour for you to come home. No one knew you were in, till Morgan peeped over the transom. What in the devil is the matter?"
said my patient.
"Tired out, went to sleep," said I; but I did not know my own voice as I spoke. It sounded distant, and its tones were strange.
They both looked at me suspiciously, and with evident anxiety as to my mental condition. I caught at the means of escape.
"I am too tired to see anyone to-night. In fact, I am not well. You will have to let me off this time. Get Dr. Talbott, next door, if anyone is sick; I am going to bed. Good-night."
There was a long pause. Then he said, wearily: "You are a young man, doctor. You have taken the chair I left vacant at the college. I would never have told the story to you, perhaps, only I wanted you to know why I left the cla.s.s in your care so suddenly this morning, when I uncovered the beautiful face of the "subject" you had brought from the morgue for me to give my closing lecture upon. That cla.s.s of shallow-pated fellows have not learned yet that doctors--even old fellows like me--know a good deal less than they think they do about the human race--themselves included."
I stammered some explanation of the circ.u.mstances, and again there was a long silence.
Then he said:
"Found drowned, was she? Poor girl! Do you believe, with that face, she was ever a bad woman? Or that she had anything to do with the rascality of her husband, even if he were consciously a rascal? and who is to judge of that, knowing so little of him? Did I ever recover the five thousand dollars? Did I attempt to recover it? Oh, no. All this happened nearly ten years ago now; and if that were all it had cost me I should not mind. The hotel people never knew. Why should they? This is the first time I have told the story. You think I am an old fool? Well, well, perhaps I am--perhaps I am; who can say what any of us are, or what we are not? Thirty years ago I knew that I understood myself and everybody else perfectly. To-day I know equally well that I understand neither the one nor the other. We learn that fact, and then we die--and that is about all we do learn. You wonder, after what I tell you, if the beautiful face at the demonstration cla.s.s this morning was really hers, or whether a strong likeness led my eyes and nerves astray You wonder if she drowned herself, and why? Was it an accident? Did _he_ do it? This last will be decided by each one according as he judges of Florence Campbell and her husband--of who and what they were. Perhaps I shall try to find him now. Not for the money, but to learn why she married the man he seemed to be. It is hard to tell what I should learn. It is not even easy to know just what I should _like_ to learn; and perhaps, after all, it is better not to know more--who shall say?"
And the doctor bade me good-night and bowed himself out to his carriage with his old courtesy, and left me alone with the strange, sad story of the beautiful girl whose lifeless form had furnished the subject of my first lecture to a cla.s.s of medical students.
MY PATIENTS STORY.
_"Things are cruel and blind; their strength detains and deforms: And the wearying wings of the mind still beat up the stream of their storms.
Still, as one swimming up stream, they strike out blind in the blast.
In thunders of vision and dream, and lightning of future and past.
We are baffled and caught in the current, and bruised upon edges of shoals; As weeds or as reeds in the torrent of things are the wind-shaken souls."_
Algernon Charles Swinburne.
I.
Perhaps I may have told you before, that at the time of which I speak, my Summer home--where I preferred to spend much more than half of the year--was on a sandy beach a few miles out of New York, and also that I had retired from active practice as a physician, even when I was in the city.
Notwithstanding these two facts, I was often called in consultation, both in and out of the city; and was occasionally compelled to take a case entirely into my own hands, through some accident or unforeseen circ.u.mstance.
It was one of these accidents which brought the patient whose story I am about to tell you, under my care.
I can hardly say now, why I retained the case instead of turning it over to some brother pract.i.tioner, as was my almost invariable habit; but for some reason I kept it in my own hands, and, as it was the only one for which I was solely responsible at the time, I naturally took more than ordinary interest in and paid more than usual attention to all that seemed to me to bear upon it.
As you know I am an "old school" or "regular" physician, although that did not prevent me from consulting with, and appreciating the strong points of many of those who were of other, and younger branches of the profession.
This peculiarity had subjected me, in times gone by, to much adverse criticism from some of my colleagues who belonged to that rigidly orthodox faction which appears to feel that it is a much better thing to allow a patient to die "regularly"--as it were--than it is to join forces with one, who, being of us, is still not with us in theory and practice.
Recognizing that we were all purblind at best, and that there was and still is, much to learn in every department of medicine, it did not always seem to me that it was absolutely necessary to reject, without due consideration, the guesses of other earnest and careful men, even though they might differ from me in the prefix to the "pathy" which forms the basis of the conjecture.
We are all wrong so often that it has never appeared to be a matter of the first importance--it does not present itself to my mind as absolutely imperative--that it should be invariably the same wrong, or that all of the mistakes should necessarily follow the beaten track of the "old school."
I had arrived at that state of beat.i.tude where I was not unwilling for a life to be saved--or even for pain to be alleviated, by other methods than my own.
I do not pretend that this exalted ethical status came to me all at once, nor at a very early stage of my career; but it came, and I had reaped the whirlwind of wrath, as I have just hinted to you.
So when my patient let me know, after a time, that he had been used to homeopathic treatment, I at once suggested that he send for some one of that school to take charge of his case.
He declined--somewhat reluctantly, I thought, still, quite positively.
But, in the course of events, when I felt that a consultation was due to him as well as to myself, I asked him if he would not prefer that the consulting physician should be of that school.
He admitted that he would, and I a.s.sured him that I should be pleased to send for any one he might name.
He knew no doctor here, he said, and left it to me to send for the one in whom I had the greatest confidence.
It is at this point my story really begins.
I stopped on my way uptown to arrange, with Dr. Hamilton, of Madison Avenue, a consultation that afternoon, at three o"clock. I told the doctor all that I, myself, knew at that time, of my patient"s history.
Three weeks before I had been in a Fifth Avenue stage; a gentleman had politely arisen to offer his seat to a lady at the moment that the stage gave a sudden lurch which threw them both violently against each other and against the end of the stage.
He broke the fall for her; but he received a blow on the head, which member came in contact with the money-box, with a sharp crack.
Accustomed to the sight of pain and suffering as I was, the sound of the blow and his suddenly livid face gave me a feeling of sickness which did not wholly leave me for an hour afterward. Involuntarily I caught him in my arms--he was a slightly built man--and directed the driver to stop at the first hotel.
The gentleman was unconscious and I feared he had sustained a serious fracture of the skull. He was evidently a man of culture, and I thought not an American. I therefore wished, if possible, to save him a police or hospital experience.
By taking him into the first hotel I reasoned, we could examine him; learn who and what he was, where he lived, and, after reviving him, send him home in a carriage.