These merry companions of his youth, who thought they knew Edward Trudeau better than he knew himself, loved him well; for he ever had the gift of friendship with man and beast. Dogs and horses at once felt his comprehending hand and heart. And as for the human kind--were they great masters of finance like Edward H. Harriman, gay young men about town like the Livingstons, or sturdy mountain guides like Paul Smith and Fitz-Greene Halleck--all and each were not only boon companions when the opportunity served, but lifelong friends whom neither time nor circumstance could change. When Dr. Trudeau used to say with feeling, “No one ever had better friends than I have,” we always thought, as we looked into his kindly eyes, so alive with understanding sympathy and ready cheer, “How true it is that the best way to win a friend is to be one.”
The best friend of all from beginning to end, however, was Miss Charlotte Beare, who became his wife as soon as he had graduated from the medical school and had spent six months as
house physician in The Strangers’ Hospital. When he wrote, toward the close of his life, a record of what his experiences had meant, he gave the book this dedication:
TO MY DEAR WIFE EVER AT MY SIDE EVER CHEERFUL AND HOPEFUL AND HELPFUL THROUGH THESE LONG YEARS DURING WHICH “PLEASURE AND PAIN HAVE FOLLOWED EACH OTHER LIKE SUNSHINE AND RAIN.”
It was through his love for her, he said, that he was able to keep steadily at work during his college days, when close application to study and the confinement of city life were telling not only upon his health but also wearing away the inner soul that ever craved, with a deeper and more poignant longing, the freedom of open spaces and the breath of the life-giving woods.
It was a very different story from those light-hearted, familiar ones where “they married and lived happily ever after.” The rain followed the sunshine very soon after the young doctor had returned from his wedding-trip and settled down to practice in New York. After months of struggle against what he thought was a sort of stubborn malaria, together with the old rebellion against a shut-in life, the doctor who had worked so bravely to fit himself to cure others came face to face with the truth that he himself had a disease which no doctor could cure. The world seemed dark indeed when he thought he must soon leave his loved wife, the little Charlotte and baby Ned, and all that he had hoped to accomplish in the future.