It did not take Anstice long to discover that the accusation against him--an accusation all the more difficult to refute because of the half-truth on which it was based--had been disseminated throughout Littlefield with a thoroughness which implied a determination on the part of the anonymous writer to leave no prominent resident in the neighbourhood in ignorance of Anstice's supposed cowardice on that bygone day in India.
He could not help noticing as he went here and there on his daily business that some of his patients looked askance at him, although they did their best to hide their new and rather disconcerting interest in him. So far as he knew, none of his patients forsook him for another and less notorious doctor, but he was keenly alive to the altered manner of some of those whom he attended, and although at present it was evident that he was not yet condemned--after all, no fair-minded person condemns another solely on the evidence of a tale-bearer who is ashamed to put his name to the stories he relates--yet Anstice felt with a quick galling of his pride that he was on probation, as it were, that those with whom he came in contact were considering what verdict they should pass upon him. And although his indifference to that verdict equalled Mrs. Carstairs' former indifference to the opinion of these same neighbours, his soul was seared with the thought that his unhappy story--or rather a garbled version of it--was common property among those men and women whom he had served faithfully to the best of his ability during the eighteen months he had spent in Littlefield.
On one thing he was fully determined. So soon as this mystery should be solved--and he fancied a solution was no longer impossible--he would leave the place, resign the position which had become tedious, unbearably tedious in its cramped monotony, and seek some other place, in England or abroad, where he might have leisure to pursue those studies in research which had been so ruthlessly cut short by his own most unhappy miscalculation.
True, he no longer cared for fame. The possibility of some renown crowning his toil no longer danced before his eyes with alluring promises. The part of him which had craved success, recognition, the youthful, vital part of him was dead, slain by the same bullet which had ended poor Hilda Ryder's happy life; and although he was beginning to look forward to a new and less cramped career than this which now shackled him, the joyous, optimistic anticipation of youth was sadly missing.
It was impossible that once at work the old interest in his subject might awake; but now he would work for the work's sake only, for the sake of the distraction it might afford him; and though through all his troubles he had preserved, at bottom, the quick humanity which had led him to choose medicine as his career, he was thinking less now of his old ambition to find a means of alleviation for one of the greatest ills of mankind than of the zest which the renewed study of the subject might restore to his own overshadowed life.