An Imperative Duty. William Dean Howells

      V

       Olney did not go to see Mrs. Meredith until noon, the next day. He thought that if she were worse, or no better, she would send for him, and that if she did not send, he might very well delay seeing her. He found her alone. Miss Aldgate, she said, had gone to drive with their friends at the Vendome, and was to lunch with them. Olney bore her absence as politely as he could, and hoped Mrs. Meredith had slept.

       "Yes, I slept," she said, with a kind of suppressed sigh, "but I'm not sure that I'm very much the better for it."

       "I'm sure you are," said Olney, with resolute cheerfulness; and he began to go through with the usual touching of the pulse, and looking at the tongue, and the questions that accompany this business.

       Mrs. Meredith broke abruptly away from it all. "It's useless for us to go on! I've no doubt you can drug me to sleep whenever you will. But if I'm to wake up, when I wake, to the trouble that's on my mind, the sleep will do me no good."

       She looked wistfully at him, as if she longed to have him ask her what the matter was; but Olney did not feel authorized to do this. He had known, almost from the first moment he met Mrs. Meredith, the night before, that she had something on her mind, or believed so, and that if she could tell him of her trouble, she would probably need no medicine; but he had to proceed, as the physician often must, upon the theory that only her body was out of order, and try to quiet her spirit through her nerves, when the true way was from the other direction. It went through his mind that it might be well for the nervous specialist hereafter to combine the functions of the priest and the leech, especially in the case of nervous ladies, and confess his patients before he began to prescribe for them.

       But he could not help feeling glad that things had not come to this millennial pass; for he did not at all wish to know what Mrs. Meredith had on her mind. So much impression of her character had been left from their different meetings in Florence that he had already theorized her as one of those women, commoner; amongst us than any other people, perhaps, to whom life, in spite of all experience, remains a sealed book, and who are always trying to unlock its mysteries with the keys furnished them by fiction. They judge the world by the novels they have read, and their acquaintance in the flesh by characters in stories, instead of judging these by the real people they have met, and more or less lived with. Such women get a tone of mind that is very tiresome to every one but other women like them, and that is peculiarly repulsive to such men as Olney, or, if not repulsive, then very ridiculous. In Mrs. Meredith's case he did not, so much accuse her of wishing to pose as a character with a problem to work out; there was nothing histrionic about the poor woman; but he fancied her hopelessly muddled as to her plain, every-day obligations, by a morbid sympathy with the duty-ridden creatures of the novelist's brain. He remembered from that first talk of the winter before--it had been a long talk, an exhaustive talk, covering many cases of conscience in fiction besides that of Tito Malema--that she had shown herself incapable of sinking the sense of obligation in the sense of responsibility, and that she apparently conceived of what she called living up to the truth as something that might be done singly; that right affected her as a body of positive color, sharply distinguished from wrong, and not shading into and out of it by gradations of tint, as we find it doing in reality. Such a woman, he had vaguely reflected, when he came to sum up his impressions, would be capable of an atrocious cruelty in speaking or acting the truth, and would consider herself an exemplary person for having done her duty at any cost of suffering to herself and others. But she would exaggerate as well as idealize, and he tried to find comfort now in thinking that what she had on her mind was very likely a thing of bulk out of all proportion to its weight. Very likely it was something with reference to her niece; some waywardness of affection or ambition in the girl. She might be wanting to study medicine, or law, or divinity; perhaps she wanted to go on the stage. More probably, it was a question of whom she should marry, and Mrs. Meredith was wrestling with the problem of how far in this age of intense individualization a girl's inclinations might be forced for her good, and how far let go for her evil. Such a problem would be quite enough to destroy Mrs. Meredith's peace, if that was what she had on her mind; and Olney could not help relating his conjecture to these people at the Vendome, whom Miss Aldgate had gone to drive with and lunch with to-day, after having, been to drive with them yesterday. Those people in turn he related to the young clergyman she had spent the evening in talking with in Florence, when he was himself only partially engaged in exploring her aunt's conscience. He wondered whether Mrs. Meredith favored or opposed the young clergyman, and what was just the form of the trouble that was on her mind, but still without the intention to inquire it out.

       "Well, perhaps," he suggested, half jocosely," the trouble will disappear when you've had sleep enough."

       "You know very well," she answered, "that it won't--that what you say is simply impossible. I remember some things, you said that night when we talked so long together, and I know that you are inclined to confound the moral and the physical, as all doctors are."

       Olney would have liked to say, "I wish, my dear lady, you wouldn't confound the sane and insane in the way you do." But he silently submitted, and let her go on.

       "That made me dislike you; but I can't say it made me distrust you. I think that if you had been an untruthful person you would have concealed your point of view from me."

       Olney could not say he might not have thought it worth while to do that. On the contrary, he had a sort of compassion for the lofty superiority of a woman who so obviously felt her dependence upon him, and was arming herself in all her pride for her abasement before him. He knew that she was longing to tell him what was on her mind, and would probably not end till she had done it. He did not feel that he had the right to prevent her doing that, and he smiled passively in saying, "I couldn't advise you to trust me too far."