Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  ‘I believe that, madam,’ he said, kindly; ‘and you shall have my best assistance, depend upon it.’

  ‘Why should a young man bring upon himself such an affliction as this?’

  Ida asked, wonderingly. ‘Ours is counted a sober era.’

  ‘Why, indeed? After-dinner boozing and three-bottle men are a tradition of the dark ages; and yet there are dozens of young men in London — gifted young men some of them — who are doing this thing every year. Half the untimely deaths you hear of might be traced home to the brandy bottle, if a man had only the curiosity to look into first causes. One man dies of congestion of the lungs. Yes, but he had burnt up his lungs first with perpetual alcohol. Another is a victim to liver. Why, madam, a temperate man may work thirty years under an Indian sun, and hardly know that he has a liver. Another is said to have died of too much brain work. Yes, work done by a brain steeped in alcohol — not a brain, but a preparation in spirits. They all do the same thing — pegging — pegging — pegging — from breakfast to bed-time; and most of them would deny that they are drunkards.’

  ‘Do you think that if my husband drank it was because he was not happy — because he had something on his mind?’

  ‘Much more likely that it was because he had nothing on his mind, my dear madam. These briefless barristers in the Temple — men with private means, not obliged to hunt for work, with a little fancy for literature, and a little taste for the drama — these idle youths, whose only idea of social intercourse is to be gossiping and drinking in one another’s rooms all day long, living an undomestic life in chambers, without the public interests or athletic sports of a university — these are the chosen victims of alcohol. Of course, I don’t pretend for a moment that they all drink; but where the tendency to drink exists this is the kind of life to foster it.’

  ‘My husband was not obliged to live in chambers — he had a home here.’

  ‘Yes; but young men, unless they are sportsmen, hate the country; and then, once in the London vortex, a man can’t easily escape. And now, I suppose, I had better go and see the patient. Does he know I have been sent for?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then perhaps we shall have a scene. He may be angry.’

  ‘I must risk that,’ said Ida, firmly. ‘He refused to be treated by our family doctor, and I felt that things could not go on any longer as they were going on.’

  She led the way to Brian’s room. He was lounging by the open window, smoking; his books and papers were scattered about the tables in reckless disorder.

  ‘Dr. Mallison has come to see you, Brian,’ said Ida, quietly, as the physician followed her into the room.

  ‘You sent for him, then!’ exclaimed Brian, starting up angrily.

  ‘There was no alternative; you refused to be attended by Mr. Fosbroke.’

  ‘Fosbroke — a village apothecary, the parish doctor, who would have poisoned me. Yes, I should think so. How dare you send for anyone? How dare you treat me like a child?’

  ‘I dare do anything which I believe to be for your good,’ Ida answered, unflinchingly.

  He quailed before her, and changed his tone in a moment. ‘Well, if it gratifies you to spend your money upon physicians — How do you do, Dr. Mallison? Of course, I am very glad to see you, as a friend; but I want no doctoring.’

  ‘I’m afraid you do,’ said the physician. ‘You have not done what I told you when I saw you in London.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘To give up all stimulants.’

  ‘Oh, that was impossible! It’s just like asking a man to shut his mouth, and breathe only through his nostrils, when he has lived all his life with his mouth open. No man can change his habits all at once, at the fiat of a physician. But I have been very moderate ever since I saw you.’

  ‘And yet you have had another attack?’

  ‘Who told you that?’ asked Brian, with an angry glance at his wife.

  ‘Your own appearance tells me — yes, and your pulse. You have been indulging in the old habits — nipping all day long; and you have been sleeping badly.’

  ‘Sleeping badly!’ muttered Brian moodily; ‘I wish to Heaven I could sleep anyhow. I have forgotten the sensation of being asleep — I don’t know what it means. Just as I fancy myself dropping off there comes a flash of light in my eyes, and I am broad awake again. The other night I thought it lightened perpetually, but my wife said there was no lightning.’

  ‘A case of shattered nerves, and all your own doing,’ said Dr. Mallison.

  ‘You must leave off brandy.’

  ‘Brandy has left me off,’ retorted Brian. ‘My wife and her step-mother have gone in for strict economy. I am not allowed a spoonful of cognac, although I tell them it is the only thing that staves off racking neuralgic pains.

  ‘You must endure neuralgia rather than go on poisoning yourself with brandy. For you alcohol is rank poison — you are suffering now from the cumulative effect of all you have taken within the last twelve months. There are men who can drink with impunity — go on drinking hard through a long life; but you are not one of those. Drink for you means death.’

  ‘A man can die but once,’ grumbled Brian; ‘and an early death is better than an aimless life.’

  ‘For shame!’ said the physician. ‘If I had such a wife as you have, the aim of my life would be to make myself worthy of her, and to win distinction for her sake.’

  ‘Ah, there was a time when I thought the same,’ answered Brian; ‘but that’s over and done with.’

  Ida left the doctor and his patient together, and walked up and down the corridor outside her husband’s room, waiting to hear Dr. Mallison’s final directions. He remained closeted with Brian for about a quarter of an hour.

  ‘I have said all I could, and I have written a prescription which may do some good,’ he told Ida. ‘This is a case for moral suasion rather than medical treatment. If you can exercise a good influence over your husband, and keep all stimulants away from him, he will recover. But his constitution has been undermined by bad habits — an indolent unhealthy life — a life spent in hot rooms, by artificial light. Get him out of doors as much as you can, without exposing him to bad weather or undue fatigue. He is very weak, and altogether out of gear; and you mustn’t expect much improvement until he recovers tone and appetite; but if you can ward off any return of the delirium, that will be something gained.’

  ‘Indeed it will. The delirium was too terrible.’

  ‘Well, keep all drink away from him.’

  ‘Even if he seems to suffer for want of it?’

  ‘Yes. The old-fashioned idea was that stopping a man’s drink suddenly would bring on an attack of delirium tremens; but we know better than that now. We know that the delirium is only a consequence of alcoholic poisoning, and inevitable where that goes on.’

  Ida went back to the drawing-room with the doctor. The tea-table was ready, and there were decanters and sandwiches on another table. Dr. Mallison took a cup of tea and a sandwich, while he gave Ida minute directions as to the treatment of the patient. And then he accepted the handsome cheque which had been written for him, with Mr. Fosbroke’s advice as to amount, and took his departure, promising to send a skilled attendant within the next twelve hours.

  Ida felt happier after she had seen Dr. Mallison. There was very little that could be done for her husband. He had sown his wild oats, and that light scattering of the seeds of folly had been pleasant enough, no doubt, in the time of sowing; and this was the unanticipated result — a bitter harvest of care and pain which had to be endured somehow.

  And now came for that household at Wimperfield a period of agonising trouble and fear. The boy’s illness developed into an acute attack of rheumatic fever, and for three dreadful days and nights his life trembled in the balance. Not once did Ida enter her husband’s room during that awful period of fear. She could not steel herself to look upon the man whose sin, or whose folly, had brought this evil on her beloved one. ‘My murdered boy,’ s
he kept repeating to herself. Even on her knees, when she tried to pray, humbly and meekly appealing to the Fountain of mercy and grace — even then, while she knelt with bowed head and folded hands, those awful words flashed into her mind. Her murdered boy.

  If he were to die, who could doubt that his death would lie at Brian’s door? who could put away the dark suspicion that Brian had wantonly, and with murderous intent, exposed the delicate child to bad weather and long hours of fasting and fatigue?

  CHAPTER XXVI.

  ‘AND, IF I DIE, NO SOUL WILL PITY ME.’

  At last their long watchings, their tender care, directed by one of the most famous men in London — who was summoned to Wimperfield at Mr. Fosbroke’s suggestion within a week of Dr. Mallison’s visit — and attended twice or thrice a day by the clever apothecary, were rewarded by the assurance that the time of immediate danger was over, and that now a slow and gradual recovery might fairly be anticipated. It was only then that Ida could bring herself to face Brian again, and even then she met him with an icy look, as if the life within her were frozen by grief and care, and those rigid lips of hers could never again melt into smiles.

  Brian had been leading a fitful and wandering life during the boy’s illness, watched and waited upon by Towler, the man from London, with whom he quarrelled twenty times a day, and who needed his long experience of the “ways” of alcoholic victims to enable him to endure the fitfulness and freakishness of his present charge.

  Warned by Dr. Mallison that he must spend as much of his life in the open air as possible, Brian had taken to going in and out of the house fifty times a day, now wandering for five or ten minutes in the garden, anon rambling as far as the edge of the park, then running into the stable yard, and ordering a horse to be saddled instantly, but never mounting the horse. After seeing the animal led up and down the yard once or twice, he would always find some excuse for not riding; the fact being that he had no longer courage enough to get into the saddle. His riding days were over. Even the stable mastiff, an old favourite with Brian, gave him a painful shock when the great tawny brute leapt out of his kennel, straining at his chain, and baying deep-mouthed thunder by way of friendly greeting.

  Towler had a hard time of it, following his charge here and there, waiting upon him, bearing his abuse; but Towler had a peculiar gift, a faculty for getting on with patients of this kind. He knew how to dodge, and follow, and circumvent them; how to take liberties with them, and scold them, without too deeply wounding their amour-propre; how to humour and manage them; and although Mr. Wendover quarrelled with his attendant fifty times a day, he yet liked the man, and tolerated his presence; and had already come to lean upon him, and to be angry when Towler absented himself.

  ‘Well,’ said Brian, looking up as Ida entered his room on that happy morning on which she had been told that her brother was out of danger—’the boy is better, I hear?’

  These things are quickly known in a household, when there has been general anxiety about the issue of an illness.

  ‘Yes, he is better. By God’s grace, he will live; but his life has trembled in the balance. Brian, it would have been your fault if he had died.’

  ‘Would it? Yes, I suppose indirectly I should have been the cause. I was a fool to take him out that morning; but,’ shrugging his shoulders, ‘I wanted a ramble, and I wanted company. Who could tell there would be such a diabolical storm, or that we should lose our way? Thank God he is out of danger. Poor little beggar! Did you think I wanted to put him out of the way?’ he asked, suddenly, looking at her with a keen flash of interrogation.

  ‘To think that would be to think you a murderer,’ she answered, coldly. ‘I have thought that you had little affection for him or for me when you exposed him to that danger; and then I schooled myself to think better of you — to remember that, perhaps, on that day you were hardly responsible for your actions.’

  ‘In fact, that I was a lunatic,’ said Brian.

  ‘I would rather think you mad than wicked.’

  ‘Perhaps I am neither. Why have you put that man as a spy upon me?’

  The discreet Towler had retired into the adjacent bedroom during this conversation.

  ‘He is not a spy. Dr. Mallison said you ought to have a servant specially to wait upon you, that in your sleepless nights you might not be left alone.’

  ‘No, they are a trial, those long nights. Towler is not a bad fellow, but he irritates me sometimes. Last night he let a black-muzzled gipsy brute hide behind my curtains, and then told me it was my “delusions.” Delusions! when I saw the fellow as plain as I see you now.’

  Ida was silent. She had hoped that the patient had passed this stage, and was on the road to recovery of health and reason. She interrogated Towler by-and-by, and he assured her that Mr. Wendover had taken no stimulants since he had been attending upon him.

  ‘Are you sure he cannot get any without your knowledge?’ Ida asked. ‘Dr. Mallison told me that in this malady a patient is terribly artful — that he will contrive to evade the closest watchfulness, if it is any way possible to get drink.’

  ‘Ah, that’s true enough, ma’am,’ sighed the man; ‘there’s no getting to the bottom of their artfulness: but I’m an old hand, and I know all the ins and outs of the complaint. It isn’t possible for Mr. Wendover to get any drink in this house, and he never goes out of it without me. Every drop of wine and spirits is under lock and key, and all the servants are warned against giving him anything.’

  Ida sighed, full of shame at the thought that her husband, the man whom it was her duty to honour and obey, should be degraded by such humiliating precautions; and yet there was no help for it. He had brought himself to this pass. This is the end of ambrosial nights, the feast of reason, the flow of soul, wit drowned in whisky, satire stimulated by brandy and soda.

  Ida went back to her brother’s room. It was there her love, her fears, her cares were all concentrated. Duty might make her careful and thoughtful for her husband, but here love was paramount. To sit by his pillow, to talk to him, or read to him, or pray for him, to minister to him, jealous of the skilled nurse who had been hired to perform these offices, — these things were her delight. Lady Palliser, worn out with watching and anxiety, had now broken down altogether, and had consented to take a long day’s rest; but Ida’s more energetic nature could do with much less rest — half an hour’s delicious sleep now and then, with her head on her darling’s pillow, was all-sufficient to restore her.

  And so the blessed days of hope went on, and every morning and every afternoon Mr. Fosbroke’s report was more favourable. It was a tedious recovery from a cruel disease, happily shortened by at least two-thirds of its old-fashioned length by modern treatment; but all was going well, and the hearts of the watchers were at ease. The boy lay swathed in cotton wool, very helpless, very languid, fed and petted from morning till night, like a young bird brought up by hand: and Ida and her stepmother had to be patient and thankful.

  Ida had often thought during the boy’s illness of the man who had found him, and brought him safely home to them on that anxious day; and she wished much to testify her gratitude to the misanthropic dweller in the gamekeeper’s cottage; but she hesitated as to her manner of approaching him. To go herself would be futile, when he had so obdurately shut his door against her. Then she had Vernon’s assurance that this Bohemian hated women. She might have sent a servant with a message; but she had reason to know, from Vernon’s description of the man, that he was altogether above the servant class, and would be likely to resent such a form of approach. She might have written to him; but her pride recoiled from that course, remembering his cavalier treatment of her. And so she let the days slip by, until Vernon began to recover strength and good spirits, and to inquire about his friend.

  ‘I want Jack to come and see me, and sit with me,’ said the boy; ‘he could come to tea couldn’t he, mother? You wouldn’t mind, would you?’

  ‘My dear, he is not a proper person for you to associate wi
th,’ replied Lady Palliser. ‘You oughtn’t to bemean yourself by associating with your inferiors.’

  ‘Bemean fiddlesticks!’ cried Vernie; ‘I don’t believe there is such a word. Jack is the cleverest man I know — cleverer than Mr. Jardine, and that’s saying a great deal.’

  Vainly did the widow endeavour to awaken her son’s mind to the great gulf which divides a baronet from a hawker — a gulf not to be bridged over by the genius of a Dalton or a Whewell — and to those nice distinctions which obtain between a casual out-of-door intercourse with a man of this class, and a deliberate invitation to tea.

  ‘When I’m well enough to go out I can go to him,’ answered Vernon, doggedly; ‘but now I’m ill he must come to me; and it’s very unkind of you not to let him come. Blow his station in life! If he was a duke I shouldn’t want him.’

  ‘I can’t think what you can want with this low person, when Ida and I are always doing everything to amuse you,’ moaned Lady Palliser.

  ‘Ida’s a darling, and you too, mother,’ said the boy, putting his thin little arms round his mother’s neck. He was now just able to move those poor arms, which had been so racked with pain a little while ago. ‘But I get tired of everything — Shakespeare, Dickens, even. It’s so long to stay in bed; and I think Jack would amuse me more than anyone, if you’d let him come.’

  ‘He shall come, darling. Is there anything I could refuse you?’ said the mother, eagerly, moved by the sight of tears in Vernon’s innocent blue eyes.

  ‘Ask him to come to tea this afternoon.’

  ‘Yes, love; I’ll go and see about it this minute.’

  Lady Palliser went in quest of Ida, who was sitting in Brian’s study reading, while her husband wrote, or made believe to write, at a table in the window piled with books of reference, which he consulted every now and then, lolling back in his chair and reading listlessly — altogether a mere show and pretence of study, never likely to result in anything — a weary dawdling away of the long summer morning.