The Lady Doc - Caroline Lockhart (ebook reader computer .txt) 📗

Dear Emmy:

I have just learned through the papers here that Ogden Van Lennop is "roughing it" in your country and I thought I'd write and give you a hint in case you come across him. Grab him, my dear, if you have the ghost of a show, for he is the most eligible man in seven states. Money, family, social position—it makes me green to think of your chance, it's the chance of a lifetime—for I'd never meet him in my humble sphere in a thousand years. He's an awfully decent sort, too, they say. He overworked after he came out of college and he's there getting his health back. Good luck to you and I hope you appreciate my tip.

Lovingly,

Adele

Dr. Harpe folded the letter and put it away.

"Don't I though?" she said grimly.

She frowned as Van Lennop's low, amused laugh, mingling with Essie Tisdale's merry trill, reached her through the open window.

"The presumptuous little upstart! The biscuit-shooter!" Dr. Harpe's face was not pleasant to see.

She took care to keep to herself what she had learned for when they met, as she was now determined that they should, she wished the friendship she meant to proffer to seem above all else disinterested. While she realized that she had his prejudice to overcome, she believed that she could overcome it and she would wait now with eagerness for the opportunity to insert the opening wedge.

Heretofore the dubious compliment "a good fellow," from the men with whom she smoked and drank, had pleased and satisfied her. She had no desire to appeal to them in any other way; but this was different because Ogden Van Lennop was different, being the first really eligible man who had ever come within the circle to which she had been limited by her always straitened circumstances. She looked upon Van Lennop in the light of an exceptional business chance, and with a conceit oddly at variance with her eminently practical nature, she believed she had only to set about exerting herself in earnest to arouse his interest and attach him to herself.

Van Lennop found himself still smiling at Essie Tisdale's sallies as he came up the stairs. Her droll originality amused him as he had not been amused in a long time, and he found himself unbending to a degree which often surprised himself; besides, with her frankness, her naturalness and perfect unconsciousness of any social barrier, she seemed to him a perfect western type. He prized the novel friendship, for it had become that, and would have regretted keenly anything which might have interrupted it.

Her realistic descriptions of the episodes of a small town were irresistible and Van Lennop never found himself more genuinely entertained than when after a certain set form of greeting which they went through daily with the greatest gravity, he would inquire—

"Well, Miss Tisdale, what are the developments in the world to-day?" And with her quick, dimpling smile she would respond with some item of local news which took its humor chiefly from the telling.

When a sign on the tar-paper shack which bore the legend "Warshing" was replaced by "Plane Sewing Done," she reported the change and, again, the fact that he was aware of Mrs. Abe Tutts's existence was due to Essie Tisdale's graphic account of the outburst of temper in which that erratic lady, while rehearsing the rôle of a duchess in an amateur production, kicked, not figuratively but literally, the duke—a rôle essayed by the talented plasterer—down the stairs of Odd Fellow's Hall over the General Merchandise Store. The girl enjoyed life and its small incidents with the zest of exuberant youth and Van Lennop often declared himself as anxious that Mrs. Percy Parrott should accumulate enough from the sale of milk to buy screens before flytime as that lady herself since Essie sustained his interest by daily account of the addition to the screen fund. He was still thinking of the combative Mrs. Tutts when he opened a book and sat down by the open window.

A murmur of voices which began shortly underneath his window did not disturb him, though subconsciously he was aware that one of them belonged to Essie Tisdale. It was not until he heard his own name that he lifted his eyes from the interesting pages before him.

"You lak him I t'ink—dat loafer—dat fellow Van Lennop?"

Van Lennop recognized the thick, gutteral voice of old Edouard Dubois.

"Like him? Of course I like him, and"—there was asperity in Essie's tone now—"he isn't a loafer."

"Hold-up, then," substituted Dubois.

"Nor a hold-up."

"What you t'ink he is?"

"Something you would never recognize," she answered sharply; "a gentleman."

Van Lennop smiled, for in his mind's eye he could see the tense aggressiveness of her slim figure.

"Chentleman!" was the contemptuous snort. "Chentleman—and never buy de drinks for nobody all de time he is in Crowheart. Fine chentleman dat!"

"When do you buy any?" was the pointed inquiry.

"I haf to work for my money; his comes easy," he replied significantly.

"You said that before." The voice was growing shriller. "How do you know?"

"Robbin's easy."

"I must believe it if you say so."

"Why you get mad? Why you stick up for him so hard?" persisted the Frenchman stubbornly.

"Why wouldn't I stick up for him? He's a friend of mine."

"Fine fren—dat lazy cheap-skate!" There was real venom in the voice.

Van Lennop heard the stamp of Essie Tisdale's small foot upon the hard-trodden dooryard.

"You needn't think you'll advance your own interests by calling him such names as that! Let me tell you I wouldn't marry you if you asked me a million, million times!"

Van Lennop started. So he was asking Essie Tisdale to marry him—this old Edouard Dubois with the bullet-shaped head and the brutal face that Van Lennop had found so objectionable upon each occasion that he had been his vis-a-vis in the dining-room?

"Oh, you wouldn't marry me?"—the guttural voice was ugly now—"I offer you good home, good clothes, ze chance to travel when you lak and hear ze good music zat you love and you wouldn't marry me if I ask you million times? Maybe some time, Mees Teesdale, you be glad to marry me when I ask you once!"

"Maybe I will," the angry young voice flung back, "but that time hasn't come yet, Mr. Dubois!"

"And God forbid that it ever should," breathed Van Lennop to himself at the window above. His eyes had grown a little moist at this exhibition of her loyalty and somehow the genuineness of it made him glow, the more perhaps that he was never without a lurking suspicion of the disinterestedness of women's friendship for the reasons which Dr. Harpe, for instance, knew.

What Van Lennop had learned through his unintentional eavesdropping was something of a revelation. In his mild conjectures as to Crowheart's opinion of him it never had occurred to him that it considered him anything more interesting than an impecunious semi-invalid or possibly a homeseeker taking his own time to locate. But a hold-up! a loafer! a lazy cheap-skate! Van Lennop shook with silent laughter. A skinflint too mean to buy a drink! He had no notion of enlightening Crowheart in regard to himself because of the illuminating conversation he had overheard. The situation afforded him too much amusement and since Essie Tisdale liked him for himself and trusted him in the face of what was evidently Crowheart's opinion, nothing else mattered. The only result then was to give him a more minute interest in his surroundings. Heretofore he had viewed the life about him in the impersonal fashion in which persons of large interests and wide experience regard unimportant people doing unimportant things. In the light of what he had learned he placed a new interpretation upon the curious stares, averted faces, frankly disapproving looks or challenging insolence of glances such as he received from Mr. Rhodes's bold eyes. He smiled often in keen enjoyment of his shady reputation and kept adding to his unpopularity by steadfastly refusing to be drawn into poker games which bore evidence of having been arranged for his benefit.

The experience of being avoided by the respectably inclined and sought after by those who had no respectability to lose was a new experience to Van Lennop, who had been accustomed from infancy to the deference which is tacitly accorded those of unusual wealth; but even had he found the antagonistic atmosphere which he encountered frequently now annoying, he would have felt more than compensated by the knowledge that he had discovered in the little belle of Crowheart a friend whose loyalty was strong enough to stand the difficult test of public opinion.

Essie Tisdale had no notion that Van Lennop had overheard her quarrel with the Frenchman, but her quick perceptions recognized an added friendliness in his manner—a kind of unbending gentleness which was new—and she needed it for she daily felt the growing lack of it in people whom she had called her friends.

In the days which followed, Van Lennop sometimes asked himself if anything had gone wrong with Essie Tisdale. Her shapely head had a proud uplift which was new and in unguarded moments her red, sensitive lips had a droop that he had not noticed before.

Essie Tisdale was not, in her feelings, unlike a frolicsome puppy that has received its first vicious kick. She was digesting the new knowledge that there were people who could hurt others deliberately, cruelly, and so far as she knew, without provocation; that there were people whom she had counted her friends that were capable of hurting her—who could wound her like enemies. And, like the puppy who runs from him who has inflicted his first pain and turns to look with bewilderment and reproach in his soft puppy eyes, Essie felt no resentment yet, only surprise and the pain of the blow together with a great and growing wonder as to what she had done.

The ordeal of the dinner had been greater even than she had anticipated. For the first time in her life she had been treated like an inferior—a situation which Essie Tisdale did not know how to meet. But it had remained for Andy P. Symes who but a few months previous had pressed her hand and called her the prettiest girl in Crowheart to inflict the blow that hurt most.

The guests were leaving when she had found a chance to whisper, "You look so well to-night, Gussie," and Andy P. Symes had interrupted coldly, "Mrs. Symes, if you please, Essie."

Her cheeks grew scarlet when she thought of it. She had meant to tell them in that way that the slight had not altered her friendship and Andy P. Symes had told her in his way that they did not want her friendship.

She did not understand yet, she only felt, and felt so keenly, that she could not bring herself to speak of it, even to Ogden Van Lennop, who still supposed that she had gone as an invited guest.