 | CHAPTER XVII.
THE LITTLE DOCTOR. Hedged in |  |
17. CHAPTER XVII.
THE LITTLE DOCTOR.
“EUNICE!”
“Christina!”
“I 've done it!”
“What?”
“I — don't — quite know.”
“What is it like, — ink on your wrappers, or
grief to your squash-pies?”
“It is more like — getting engaged, I suppose,”
said Christina, thoughtfully, closing Eunice's door,
which she had held half open, and sitting down
upon the edge of the bed. Eunice laid down
the pile of compositions which she was correcting,
and repeated — in such a grave, peculiar
way, so unlike the way in which almost any
woman of her years would have said it — the
word, —
“Engaged — to be married, you mean?”
“Engaged to be married, I suppose I mean.”
“I never should have thought of such a
thing!” exclaimed Eunice, and she never would.
“Neither should I,” pursued Christina, shaking
her head very much as the doctor used to shake
his over a discouraging patient; “I never should
have thought of it in the world! I am sure I
don't see why he did. But then he did, and it
can't be helped, as I see.”
“Whom are you going to marry?” asked Eunice,
after a pause.
“Dyke Burtis, I suppose. Whom else should
I marry?”
“Very true. There is nobody else.”
Eunice made this remark with perfect gravity,
and Christina received it as gravely, except that
her eyes twinkled a little, that Eunice did not
notice how grave they both were about it. However
unusual a remark for one young woman to
make to another, it was, nevertheless, an eminently
sensible one.
Christina was about to do that extraordinary
and humiliating thing — which only the lovely
young women who do not get into the novels
ever do — called “taking up with your first
offer.” And Christina, sitting there, all pink and
stars in her eyes, was a very lovely young woman
indeed! She would have twinkled like her own
eyes, shone like her own hair, in any society
where chance had dropped her; was one of just
those winsome, heartsome creatures who would
set a man dreaming as sweetly and surely as
scarlet poppies, — a girl that your young fellows
would frame by their firesides forever (whether
she knew it or not), as young fellows nowadays
frame Miss Lunt's lovely lithographed “Future”
to expend their spare sentiment upon. That
picture, by the way, is a better portrait of
Christina, as she was in the days of which I
am writing, than any which the daguerreotyping
art of twenty-five years ago could secure
of her.
And yet, until Dr. Dyke Burtis that day, down
in the parlor, had asked her, gravely and abruptly,
as was the doctor's way, to marry him, Christina
had never had a “love-affair.” As Eunice
said, there “was nobody else” in Gower to have
a love-affair with.
“You love the doctor?” asked Eunice, slowly.
“As nearly as I can make out, I love the
to contradict him. He knows a great deal
more than I do. Now, I never should have
known that in the world, if I had n't been told
of it!”
“You love him enough to go away with him —
into his home?” continued Eunice.
“Considering mother has you, and he lives
across the street — on the whole — yes, I think
I should be a happier woman in Dr. Dyke Burtis's
home than anywhere outside of it. If he did
not live in Gower and across the street, I think
I might — if it could not possibly be helped —
go as far as Atlas with him,” said Christina, with
great gravity.
“This seems very strange!” mused Eunice.
It did seem to her strange beyond speaking.
She looked into Christina's straightforward,
proud young eyes — they had grown very proud
all in an hour! — till her own dimmed. The
sacredness of that white thing, a happy woman's
happy love, confused her like a new language.
She did not know any words to use in speaking
of it. It was something foreign, far, beyond seas
of things, from her life. She did not understand
distant, glimmering thing: —
Framed in purple spheres of sea.”
after a long silence, only, —
“Kiss me, dear.”
She felt glad — a little more glad, it seemed,
than she had ever felt before — that Christina
was willing to kiss her.
She held the girl's face down and touched her
ripe lips tremulously, — kissed her eyes, her hair,
her forehead.
Christina winked.
“Are you anointing Aaron, Eunice?” she
said.
Eunice felt that she would like to say something
to the doctor, but knew neither what nor
how. The next time that she saw him, she
somewhat hesitatingly, and in silence, held out
her hand. She did not feel sure that he would
care to be “congratulated” by a Thicket Street
charity patient, and that they both remembered
Thicket Street just then was evident in the
meeting eyes of both. Dyke Burtis esteemed
one can never count on a man when it comes to
the matter of “chesing hem a wif.” It would
not be unnatural if he should feel far more keenly
than Christina that there was something incongruous,
grating, in ever so slight an assumption
on the part of a woman with such a history as
Eunice Trent's that she — like any other woman
— had right and fitness to step into the holy
place where happiness like his abideth. She
might take the shoes from off her feet, but that
would rather reveal than conceal how scarred
and wayworn the sad feet were.
So at least she thought, and so she felt greatly
comforted when the little doctor, stopping only
to stroke his streaked beard, — which he would
have stopped to do if he were dying, — grasped
her hand like a man who had got something now
which he needed and had missed, — looked her
for a moment full in the eyes with that peculiar
deprecating reverence which newly happy people
(of a certain kind) are apt to carry in the presence
of a sad face, — coughed, and left her suddenly.
Eunice was comforted and surprised; so little
idea had she at that time, or indeed at any other
sacred place she was taking in Margaret Purcell's
household. She slipped, in her later years, into
its purest joys, griefs, hopes, fears, plans, and purposes
as quietly as the little nun in Miss Procter's
legend, for whom Blessed Mary “kept the
place” till she came back; none knowing, indeed,
that she had ever gone away — to carry
flowers every morning to the Virgin Mother at
her altar.
| CHAPTER XVII.
THE LITTLE DOCTOR. Hedged in | |