University of Virginia Library

8. CHAPTER VIII.
THE DOCTOR DOWNSTAIRS.

“And madame has no friends in Paris?”

“Not one, good Madame Ponsard, unless you will let
me call you by that name.”

The flexible, tender, pathetic voice found its way to
Madame Ponsard's heart, and a tear in her eye answered

it before her words, — “I think madame may take that
for granted.”

“I think I may, for you have been very kind to me.”

Elizabeth had just come home from giving an English
lesson. She had five pupils already, though she had
been in Paris scarcely a month. Madame Ponsard had
procured them for her; and though they were bourgeois,
they paid very well, and she considered herself
in quite comfortable circumstances.

She felt a sense of freedom, of expansion, which exhilarated
her like wine. She changed her habits with
her mood. She was no longer studious. The books
which had been at once the solace and the occupation
of her past life, were left with that past behind her.
She spent her leisure hours in wandering round the old
Faubourg St. Germain, in the midst of which was the
Rue Jacob; and taking in all the strange sights and
sounds which everywhere met eye and ear.

Sometimes she went to Notre Dame, and idled an
hour away pleasantly looking at the wonderful stone
carvings on the exterior of the church, wondering
whether the carver, fashioning here a saint, and hard
by a devil leading some doomed band to endless woe,
here a bird and there an evil beast, had builded with
some pious purpose of making every thing that hath
breath praise the Lord; or whether he had laughed a
wicked laugh as he cut the incongruous shapes.

She developed, too, quite a love for harmless gossip.
She liked to hear Madame Ponsard's voluble chatter
about Monsieur Grey, the artist, who used to occupy

her rooms; the charming widow on the first floor; the
American doctor, whose apartment was just underneath
them, and who used to come upstairs so often to see
the artist, his compatriot, — such a clever man, madame
said. Why, he had given her a tisane once for
herself, and her throat had never been sore since.

It is possible that Elizabeth wanted to hear some of
these often-told stories over again on this particular afternoon,
late in January, when she took her work and went
into madame's little sitting-room. But somehow the
talk drifted first to her own affairs. There was a space
of silence after Madame Ponsard had asked whether
Elizabeth had any friends in Paris, — a space of silence
which the French woman broke rather hesitatingly.

“And, — I beg pardon, but madame's face is so
young, and her mourning so fresh, — I suppose Monsieur
Nugent cannot have been long dead?”

“I lost my husband the week before I started for
Paris,” Elizabeth replied, in a tone which made her voluble
companion feel that no more questions were to be
asked. She bent over her sewing again, while Elizabeth
looked idly down the street; for madame's sitting-room
was on the front. At last she said, with a little
color in her cheeks, — “I met a new face this afternoon
as I came up the stairs.”

“What sort of face?” madame inquired, with eager
interest.

“A very good face, I should think. A man with
kind-looking gray eyes, brown hair, and strong, resolute
features, — not handsome, and not young.”

Madame laughed, and patted softly together her
pudgy little hands. “Good! good! That is the doctor
downstairs. I know him from what you say. But
he is not old, — not forty yet. Madame Nugent is so
young, that what seems youth to me is like old age to
her. Oh, but Dr. Erskine is not ill-looking, either.”

“No,” Elizabeth answered, musingly. “I said he
was not handsome; but I think he is better than that.
It is a face one can trust. How happens it I have
never seen him before?”

“Some of the time he was away. For the rest, his
hours for going out and coming in have been different
from yours. But I am glad you like his looks. He is
your countryman, and if you should be ill, that would
be one grand comfort.”

“For what is he here?”

“To study in the hospitals. Monsieur Grey said he
was a great doctor in his own country; but he wanted
to see some practice here; you know our surgeons are
the most skilful in the world. It was last fall he came,
and he said he might stay a year.”

Elizabeth was ready to laugh at herself for the absurd
interest and curiosity she experienced about this stranger,
whom she had just met on the stairs; but then, in
apology for her weakness, she thought how few human
interests she had. And, after all, the face was that of
a countryman. She began to think that there might be
more in that tie than she had quite realized.

After this day she met Dr. Erskine frequently. Of
course it is not to be supposed that he changed his

hours of going and coming. A grave doctor of almost
forty could not be suspected of watching from his window
for the passing along the street of a slight, swift
shape in black, and then of snatching hat and gloves,
just for the sake of meeting on the stairs a white,
young face, framed in by a widow's cap, and making to
this, his neighbor, a silent bow. But somehow these
interviews happened so often that this doctor, with
whom she had never exchanged a word, but yet who
was her countryman, grew to seem more closely her
friend than any one else she had met in Paris. Some
sure instinct told her that he was a man to be trusted
all in all. How happy his wife must be, if he had one,
— or his mother and sisters, — for she could not quite
fancy him a man to have left a wife behind him.

Before February was over, an intuition told her that
the American doctor, with his good, reliable face, might
be destined to be more of a blessing to her than she
had as yet fancied.

She had been married so long, with never a child to
lay its bright head on her bosom, that she had ceased
to think of this among the possibilities. And now,
gradually, but surely, the knowledge came to her that
before midsummer her baby, hers, would be numbered
among the world's little children. At first she trembled
with emotion, — half bliss, half a fear too exquisite
for pain. Then another thought smote her like a blow.
She had said in her passionate pride, that she would
bring away nothing belonging to Elliott Le Roy. And
now this child who was to come would be as much his

as hers. Had she, then, sinned in coming away? Had
she taken from him something which might have
changed his life, wrought out his salvation, — something,
at any rate, which it was his right to have?
Must she go back? Was it her duty?

Then, with the ready sophistry which comes so
easily to us all in the cause of our dearest wishes, she
persuaded herself that he would have given the child
no welcome, — that, if he knew all, he would very
likely be thankful to her for taking it out of his way,
— that, at any rate, it was hers, as it never could
be his, and she was ready to pay the price for its
possession. Now, indeed, she would have something to
love, — something to be her very own, and fill heart
and arms both full. Surely God knew just how much
loneliness and solitude of soul she could bear, and had
tempered His winds to her uses.

No more wanderings now round the old Faubourg,
or in the galleries looking at carven stone or painted
virgins. She had told her secret to Madame Ponsard;
and the two women had bought, with real feminine
delight, a store of lace and cambric and fine linen.
Elizabeth kept on with her English lessons; for she
was more ambitious than ever to make money, and
add to her provision for the future. But all the time
she was at home she was sewing away at the dainty
little garments mothers have fashioned between tears
and smiles since ever the world began.

She thought she was at last happy; but it would
have seemed to a looker on the saddest thing in life to

see her bending over her task in those deep mourning
robes of hers; so young, so solitary, and yet so full of
womanly hope and courage.

One April day, Madame Ponsard paid a secret visit
to Dr. Erskine, and told him privately all which she
herself knew of her boarder's history.

“Of course,” she said, “you will be the one to attend
her when her trial comes; and I thought it might be
better if you should see her now and then beforehand,
and get to seem not quite a stranger to her. I will
open the way by being sick to-night or to-morrow, —
and, indeed, I am troubled by a fearful indigestion.”

Madame drew out a long sigh, and Dr. Erskine
smiled as he looked at her black, bead-like eyes, and
her fat, rosy, unromantically healthy face.

“I will come the moment you send for me,” he said.
“So, Madame Nugent started for Paris the week after
she lost her husband?”

“Yes. She told me that much, one day. It was in
answer to some question of mine; and there was
something in her manner that made me think it would
be just as well not to ask her any thing more, — though,
indeed, as monsieur knows, I am the least curious of
women.”

Dr. Erskine looked smilingly after the good-natured
little gossip as she trotted away. Then he turned
back into his room and shut the door.

“At last!” he said to himself; and then he laughed,
as a third person might, at grave, thirty-eight-years-old
Dr. John Erskine being as eager as a boy about a new
acquaintance.

“No wonder. The truth is, I have so few things here
to think of,” he said, apologizing to himself as Elizabeth
had done before. Then he sat down at his window
and looked out. It was about time for his neighbor to
return from giving her English lessons.

That evening the bonne from the floor above knocked
at his door. Madame Ponsard was very ill, — had sent
for him, — would he come quickly?

He put a little case of bottles in his pocket, and,
assuming an expression of grave interest, hurried upstairs.
Madame Ponsard was lying on a horse-hair
sofa, and Madame Nugent was bending over her anxiously,
with fan and sal volatile. A humorous twinkle
in Madame Ponsard's eye, as she began the woful tale
of her sufferings, nearly upset Dr. Erskine's composure;
but he maintained his gravity with a struggle,
and at once mixed and administered a portion of medicine,
— not very hard to take, as madame's satisfied
expression sufficiently indicated, — and then sat down
to await its effects.

They were almost immediate. In fifteen minutes
madame sat up, declaring that she felt as well as ever,
and that Dr. Erskine was a man the most remarkable
she had ever seen. Then she introduced him in due
form to Madame Nugent; and he lingered a half hour
longer to express his delight at meeting a countrywoman,
and to pave the way for future visits.

After that he spent an hour, as often as once a week,
in Madame Ponsard's sitting-room, and Elizabeth was
usually present. She tasted a pleasure in these interviews,

which she did not attempt to analyze. For the
first time in her life she was brought into close
relations with a man whose intellect satisfied her, at
the same time that she could entirely respect his moral
qualities. He had two distinguishing traits, as was
before very long made clear to her, — a will sovereign
over himself as over others, and a tenderness which
took into its shelter every living thing which was more
helpless or more desolate than he, and which, she
thought, must hold and cherish whatever was his very
own with a devotion exceeding the love of woman.

Perhaps you are reading these lines without half
comprehending how noble and how dangerous a man
Dr. John Erskine was. Count over the men whom you
know, and tell me how many you find who have
inflexible wills, without being grasping, selfish, firm
for themselves rather than for others, — or how many
who are delicately sensitive and tender, and yet have
strength to stand up grandly, and are not blown about
by every wind. When you have counted this beadroll
of saints, you will know better whether I have
given John Erskine rare praise when I have said that
his will was as firm as his heart was tender. I called
him not only noble, but dangerous; for he was such a
man, it seems to me, as a woman like Elizabeth, who
had been wounded so cruelly by the absence of the
very qualities which he so largely possessed could
hardly know intimately with safety to her own peace
of mind. Just now, however, it appeared that she
wore proof of mail, her whole heart was so full of

yearning tenderness for the little being, her very own,
whom the summer was to lay in her arms. It is possible
that, after all, the chief danger may have been for
Dr. Erskine.