CHAPTER XXIX
Sleepwas like laudanum in RoBards’ tired soul and he stumbled drunkenly after his wife.
They found old Jessamine sprawled along the floor, his scrawny legs thrust stiffly out of his nightgown, his toes turned up in all awkwardness. His ropy neck seemed to have released the head rolled aside on one cheek. Near an outspread hand lay the bottle of soothing lotion. The cork was gone, but nothing poured from the bottle. It had been drained. The cupboard door stood open.
Patty and her mother flung themselves down and implored a word from the suddenly re-beloved saint. But RoBards knew that they called to death-deafened ears. He could not feel frantic. A dull calm possessed him.
The women’s screams woke the farmer and he was heard pounding for admission. RoBards’ first thought was one of caution. He bent down by Patty and said:
“We must get the poor old boy back in his bed. We mustn’t let anybody know that he—that he——”
Patty looked up at him in amazement and he felt a certain rebuke of him for being so cold-hearted as to be discreet at such a time. But she nodded and helped him lift the unresisting, unassisting frame to the bed and dispose its unruled members orderly.
Then he went down and unlatching the door confronted the Albesons with a lie of convenience:
“Mr. Jessamine has been taken very ill—very ill. Saddle me a horse and I’ll go for a doctor.”
There was a tonic in the privilege of action. He flung into his clothes, and kissing Patty good-by, ran down the stairs and out into the starlit deeps. He stepped from the porch right into the saddle, and the horse launched out like a sea gull.
Startled from sleep, it was wild with the unusual call to action and ran with fury along the black miles. RoBards’ hat flew back at the first rush of wind but he did not pause to hunt it. The air was edged with cold and watery with mist. Now and then the road dipped into pools of fog. Riding in such night was like being drawn through the depths of an ocean. RoBards swam as on the back of a sea horse. There was no sound except the snorting of his nag and thediddirum-diddirumof hoofs that made no question of the road, but smoothed it all with speed.
The doctor they always summoned at night was Dr. Matson, a fierce wizard who would never have been invoked if there had been a more gracious physician available. Dr. Matson horrified ladies by asking them blunt questions about the insides they were not supposed to have, and by telling them things in horrible Anglo Saxon simples instead of decent Latinity. He cursed outrageously, too. But he never let rain or sleet or flood or ice or any other impoliteness of circumstances keep him from a patient. He was not often entirely sober and now and then he was ugly drunk. But he never fell off his horse; his hands never hesitated, his knives rarely slipped, even though the patients leaped and yelped. Though he battled death with oaths and herbs and loud defiances, he fought. He fought like a swimmer trying to bring ashore some swooning soul about to drown.
He was just putting up his horse after a long ride in the opposite direction when RoBards reined in. Dr. Matson did not wait to be invited, but slapped the saddle on the dripping back of his puffing nag, climbed aboard and was on the way before he asked, “Well, what’s the matter with who this time?”
Doctors and lawyers have a right to the truth in a crisis and RoBards was glad of the dark when he confessed the shame of self-murder that had stained the old house.
It was evident to Dr. Matson that he could be of no use as a physician, and another might have turned back, but he knew there would still be need of him. RoBards finally managed to say:
“Is there any way to—must we—have you got to let everybody know that the poor old gentleman—that he—did it himself?”
Matson did not answer for half a mile. Then he laughed aloud:
“I get what you’re driving at. I guess I can fix it.”
RoBards explained: “You see, the blow of his death is enough for his poor wife and my poor wife, and the—the disgrace would be too much for them to bear.”
This did not please the doctor so well:
“Disgrace, did you say? Well, I suppose it would be, in the eyes of the damned fools that folks are. But I say the old man did the brave thing—the right thing. He died like a Roman. But it’s the fashion to call such courage cowardice or crime, so I’ll fix it up. Down in the city now, the undertakers have blank certificates already signed by the doctors so the undertakers can fill in the favorite form of death—anything their customers ask for. We ought to do as well up here. All the modern conveniences!”
His sardonic cackle made RoBards shudder, but when the harsh brute stood by the bedside and by laying on of hands verified the permanent retirement of the old merchant he spoke with a strange gentleness:
“It was heart failure, Mrs. Jessamine. Your husband had strained his heart by overwork and overanxiety for you. His big heart just broke. That bottle had nothin’ to do with it.” He sniffed it again. “It’s only an adulteration anyway. You can’t even buy honest poison nowadays. That’s just bitters and water—wouldn’t harm a fly. Grand old man, Mr. Jessamine. They don’t make merchants like him any more. It wa’n’t his fault he wa’n’t the biggest man in New York. He fought hard and died like a soldier. And now you get some sleep or I’ll give you some real sleeping drops.”
He began to bluster again and they were grateful to be bullied. RoBards regarded him with awe, this great strong man breaking the withes of truth for the rescue of others.
Dr. Matson made out a certificate of heart failure, andnobody questioned it. When Dr. Chirnside came up to preach the funeral sermon, he said that the Lord had called a good man home to well-earned rest. This old preacher was better than his creed. He would have lied, too, if he had known the truth; for human sympathy is so much more divine than the acrid theologies men concoct, that he would have told the sweetest falsehoods he could frame above the white body of his parishioner, for the sake of the aching hearts that still lived.
And this is the saving grace and glory of humanity at its best: that in a crisis of agony it proves false to the false gods and inhuman creeds it has invented in colder moods.