“Have no fear. I am no Balzac or Musset. I have no Byronic fire consuming me; and be assured I mean to husband my life — for the sake of the years to come — which should be very happy.”
He took up the hand lying loose in her lap, the beautiful, carefully cherished baud which the winds of heaven never visited too roughly, and bent down to kiss it, just as the Moonlight Sonata came to a close.
“Oh, do go on, Rosa. Some more Mendelssohn, please.”
With perhaps the faintest touch of malice Mrs. Gresham attacked the Wedding March, with a crash that made the lamp glasses shiver.
“Do you know of any clever physician?” asked Edith.
“I have never needed a physician since I was eleven years old, and the only famous doctor I know is the man who saved my life then, Doctor South, the children’s doctor. I have half a mind to go to him.”
“A child’s doctor!” said Edith, shrugging her shoulders.
“Children have hearts, and brains, and lungs. I dare say Dr. South knows something about those organs, even in adults.”
“You will go to him to-morrow morning, then — and if he is not satisfied he will advise another opinion. I should have preferred the new German doctor, whom everybody is consulting, and who does such wonders with hypnotism — Dr. Geistrauber. They say he is a most wonderful man.”
“‘They’ are an authority not always to be relied upon. I would rather go to Dr. South, who saved my life when I was in knickerbockers.”
“Were you so very ill then?” asked Mrs. Champion, tenderly interested even in a crisis of seventeen years ago.
“Yes; I believe I was as bad as a little lad can be, and yet live. When I try to remember my illness it seems only a troubled dream, through which Dr. South’s kindly face looms large and distinct. My complaint was inflammation of the lungs, a malady which Dr.
South said most children take rather kindly; but in my case there were complications. I was like Mrs. Gummidge, and the disease was worse for me than for other children. I was as near death’s door as any one can go without crossing the threshold; and my people believe to this day that but for Dr. South I should have entered at that fatal door. It was a pull for a man of my father’s means to bring down the famous children’s doctor, but the dear old dad never regretted the heavy fee; and here I am to tell the story, of which I knew very little at the time, for I was off my head all through the worst of my illness, and I believe there was one stage of delirium during which I associated Dr. South’s fine grey head — prematurely grey — with a great white elephant of Siam of which I had been reading in ‘Peter Parley’s Annual.’”
“Poor dear little fellow!” sighed Edith Champion, with retrospective affection.
“How sweet of you to pity me! I find myself pitying my own small image in that dim and troubled time, as if it were anybody’s child. The complications were dreadful — pleurisy, pneumonia; I believe the local doctor found a new name for my complaint nearly every day, till Dr. South gave his decisive verdict, and then pulled me through by his heroic treatment. Yes, I will go to him to-morrow; not because I want medical advice, but because I should like to see my old friend again.”
“Go to him; pray go to him,” urged Edith, “and tell him everything about yourself.”
“My dear Edith, I have no medical confession to make. I am not ill.”
Mrs. Gresham had played herself out, for the time being, and came into the front drawing-room as the footman appeared with tea à la Française — tea that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care, tired Nature’s nurse, for Duchesses as well as for washerwomen.
The talk became general, or became, rather, a lively monologue on the part of Rosa Gresham, who loved her own interpretation of Chopin or Charvenka, but loved the sound of her own voice better than any music that ever was composed.
Mr. Champion reappeared a few minutes after eleven, looking tired and white after an hour and a half at the whist club, and Hillersdon went out as his host came in — went out, but not home. He walked eastward, and looked in at two late clubs, chiefly impelled by his desire to meet Justin Jermyn, but there was no sign of the Fate-reader either at the Petunia or the Small-Hours, and no one whom Hillersdon questioned about him had seen him since Lady Fridoline’s party.
“He has gone to some Bad in Bohemia,” said Larose; “a Bad with a crackjaw name. I believe he invents a name and a Bad every summer, and then goes quietly and lives up the country between Broadstairs and Birchington, and basks all day upon some solitary stretch of sand, or on the edge of some lonely cliff, where the North Sea breezes blow above the rippling ripeness of the wheat; and lies in the sunshine, and plans fresh impostures for the winter season. No one will see him or hear of him any more till November, and then he will come back and tell us what a marvellous place Rumpelstiltzkinbad is for shattered nerves; and ho will describe the scenery, and the hotel, and the hot springs, and the people — ay, almost as picturesquely as I could myself,” concluded Larose, with his low, unctuous chuckle, which was quite different from Jermyn’s elfin laughter, and as characteristic of the man himself.
Hillersdon stayed late at the Small Hours, and drank just a little more dry champagne than his mother or Mrs. Champion would have approved, women having narrow notions about the men they love, notions which seem hardly ever to pass the restrictions of the nursery. He did not drink because he liked the wine, nor even for joviality’s sake; but from a desire to get away from himself and from a sense of irritation which had been caused by Mrs. Champion’s suggestions of ill-health.
“I shall be hypnotised into an invalid if people persist in telling me I am ill,” he said to himself, dwelling needlessly upon Edith Champion’s anxieties.
The market carts were lumbering into Covent Garden when he went home, and as the natural result of a late night and an unusual amount of champagne, he slept ill and woke with a headache. He breakfasted upon a devilled biscuit and a cup of green tea, and was in Harley Street before eleven o’clock.
Having made no appointment, Mr. Hillersdon had to undergo the purgatory of the waiting-room, where an anxious and somewhat dowdy mother was trying to beguile the impatience of a rickety son with picture books, and, in her gentle solicitude, offering a curious contrast to a much smarter mother, whoso thoughts seemed to be rather with an absent dressmaker than with her sickly, overgrown girl, to whom she spoke occasionally in accents of reproof, or in lachrymose complaint at having to wait so long for Dr. South, while Madame Viola was no doubt waiting for her—” and when I do get to Bruton Street very likely she won’t see me,” lamented the lady, in an undertone. “It’s all your fault, Clara, for catching cold. You are so idiotic about yourself. I dare say you will be ordered off to some expensive place in Switzerland. Doctors have no consideration for one.”
The girl’s only reply to this maternal wailing was a little hacking cough, which recurred as often as a comma. Her wan face and rather shabby frock contrasted with the mother’s artistic bloom and perfect tailor gown. Hillersdon felt a sense of relief when the man in black looked in at the door, and summoned mother and daughter with a mysterious nod, which seemed pregnant with mournful augury, although it meant nothing but “your turn.”
The anxious lady impressed him so much more pleasantly that, as time hung heavy, he made friends with the boy, helped to entertain him by presenting the illustrations of a zoological book in a new light for the next quarter of an hour; and then the rickety boy and his mother were summoned, and more patients came in, and Hillersdon tried to lose his consciousness of the passing moments in the pages of a stale Saturday Review, — moments too distinctly measured by the ticking of a very fine Sherraton clock, which stood sentinel in a niche by the sideboard.
The man in black came for him at last, as it were the fatal ferryman ready for a new passenger, and he was ushered into the presence of Dr. South, whom he found in a spacious room at the back of the house, lighted by a large window, which commanded a metropolitan garden, shut in by ivy-covered
walls.
The grey hair and genial smile brought back a vision of a little bed near a sunny window, and summer breezes blowing over a head that seemed to scorch the pillow where it lay.
He recalled the childish illness and the Devonian Rectory to Dr. South, who remembered his journey by the night mail, and his arrival at daybreak in the stillness of a summer Sabbath morning — no labourer going out to the fields, only the song of the lark high up in the infinite blue above the ripening wheat. Dr. South had not forgotten that long summer day, in which, like many another medical Alcides, he had fought with death, wrestled with and thrown the grisly shade, and had gone back to his hospital and his London patients, leaving hope and comfort behind him.
“I know I was very much interested in the case,” he said. “Your mother was such a sweet woman. She has been spared to you, I hope.”
“Yes, thank God, she is in excellent health — a young woman still in mind and habits.”
And then he told Dr. South how, being just a little uneasy about his own constitution — though with no consciousness of any evil — he had come to be overhauled by the physician whose skill he knew by experience.
“Please consider me a little lad again,” he said lightly, “and knock my chest about as you did when I was lying in a troubled dream, making nonsense-pictures of all my surroundings.”
“We shall not find much amiss, I hope,” replied the doctor, with his kindly smile. “Take off your coat and waistcoat, if you please.”
The auscultation was careful and prolonged. There was none of that pleasantly perfunctory air with which the physician dismisses a good case. Dr. South seemed bent upon exploring every square inch of that well set-up frame, from shoulders to waist, with bent head and stethoscope at his ears. He concluded his examination with a faint sigh, which might mean only fatigue.
“Do you find anything amiss?” asked the patient, rather anxiously.
“I cannot detect absolute organic mischief, but there is a certain amount of weakness in both heart and lungs. You have had some painful shock very lately, have you not? Your nerves have been greatly shaken.”
“I have had a great surprise, but it was pleasant rather than painful.”
“I rejoice to hear it, but the fact that a pleasant surprise should have so unhinged you is in itself a warning.”
“How so?”
“It denotes highly strung nerves and a certain want of stamina. To be frank with you, Mr. Hillersdon, yours is not what we call a good life; but many men of your constitution live to old age. It is a question of husbanding your resources. With care, and a studious avoidance of all excesses, moral or physical, you may live long.”
Gerard thought of the peau de chagrin. A studious avoidance of excess — in other words, a constant watch upon that red line upon the sheet of white paper which showed the shrinking of the talisman. Little by little, with every hour of agitated existence, with every passionate heart-throb, and every eager wish, the sum total of his days would dwindle.
“I have just come into a large fortune, and am only beginning to live,” he said fretfully. “It is hard to be told at this juncture that I have not a good life.”
“I cannot prophesy smooth things, Mr. Hillersdon. You come to me for the truth?”
“Yes, yes, I know; and I am grateful to you for your candour; but still it is hard lines, you must allow.”
“It would be harder if you were a struggling professional man, and saw your career blighted at the outset. I am very glad to hear of your good fortune. With the resources and expedients of modern science — which are all at the command of wealth — you ought to live to be eighty.”
“Yes, but at the price of an unemotional life. I am to vegetate, not to live!”
He slipped the neatly papered guineas into the doctor’s hand, and then turning on the threshold he asked nervously —
“Do you forbid me to marry, lest I should become the father of a consumptive progeny?”
“By no means. I find no organic mischief, as I told you. I would strongly advise you to marry. In a happy domestic life you would find the best possible environment for a man of your somewhat fragile physique and highly nervous temperament.”
“Thanks; that is encouraging, at any rate. Good day.”
After leaving the doctor Hillersdon strolled across Portland Place and into the Portland Road, where he made an exploration of the second-hand furniture shops, in search of certain objects which were to assist in realising his idea as to those two rooms in his Italian villa which he had taken upon himself to furnish.
An hour’s peregrination from shop to shop resulted only in the purchase of one piece of furniture — a black oak cabinet, ostensibly of the sixteenth century, possibly a clever piece of patchwork put together last year. It satisfied Gerard Hillersdon because it closely resembled another black oak cabinet which he had seen lately.
He had taken it into his head to reproduce for his own private den those two rooms in which he had sat at supper with Justin Jermyn, and where he had seen the vision of Hester Davenport; rooms which perhaps had no tangible existence, dream-rooms, the shadow-pictures of a hypnotic trance. It pleased him to think that he could reproduce in solid oak and brass, in old Venetian glass and quaint Dutch pottery, the scene which might have been made up of shadows, since his failure to discover the house or the locality of the house where he had supped with Jermyn had given a tinge of unreality to all his memories of that eventful night.
CHAPTER IX. “I BUILT MY SOUL A LORDLY PLEASURE-HOUSE.”
FOR those who were not bound by their doctors to some constraining regimen of bathing and self-denial, life at Mont Oriol was one perpetual holiday. Such visitors as Edith Champion lived only to amuse themselves — to drive to distant ruins — ride in the early morning when the sun-baked grass was cooled with dew, play cards or billiards, and dance in the evening. For Mr. Champion Mont Oriol meant daily baths, a severe regimen as to meat and drink, and a strict avoidance of all business transactions, such transactions being the very delight of his life, the salt which gave life its savour, and without which the man felt himself already dead.
“There are men who are dead from the waist downwards,” he said one day, “and who have to be dragged about in bath chairs, or lifted in and out of a carriage. I don’t pity them, as long as they are allowed to write their own business letters. I am dead from the waist upwards.”
He had his secretary with him at Mont Oriol, and in spite of all prohibitions, that falcon eye of his was never off the changes of the money market. He had telegrams from the Stock Exchange daily, in his own particular cypher, which was at once secret and economical. There were days when tens of thousands trembled in the balance, while he sat taking his sun-bath on the terrace in front of the hotel, and when the going down of the sun interested him only because it was to bring him tidings of loss or gain.
“Would you like a set of opals, Edith?” he asked one day at afternoon tea, crumpling up the little bit of blue paper which had just been brought to him. “I have made some money by a rise in Patagonian Street Railways.”
“A thousand thanks, but you forget the opals you gave me two years ago. I don’t think you could improve upon those.”
“Yes, I had forgotten them. They belonged to a Russian Princess. I got them for about half their value. Then I suppose there is nothing I can give you?” he asked, with a faint sigh, as if her indifference had suggested the impotence of riches.
“You are too good. I think not. I have everything in the world I care for.”
Mr. Champion and his wife had the handsomest suite of rooms in the hotel, and Gerard had taken the next best. Between them they absorbed an entire floor in one wing of the great white barrack. They were thus in a manner secluded from the vulgar herd, and Gerard seemed as if staying on a visit with the Champions, since he was invited to use their salon as freely as his own, while he dined with them five days out of seven. He had his own servants with him, valet and groom, and he began to t
hink that he too wanted a secretary, if it were only to write every day to architect or builder, urging them to expedite their work. He was eager to be installed in his own house — eager to accumulate pictures and statuary, curios, books, plate — to taste the feverish rapture of spending his money. If, as Dr. South had hinted, his life was likely to be shorter than the average life, there was all the more reason why he should spend his money freely, why he should crowd into a few years all the enjoyment that wealth can buy. Yet even here there was peril. He had been warned against all fierce emotions. To prolong that feeble life of his he must live temperately, and never pass the limits of tranquil domestic life.
It seemed to him that with this view he could hardly have done better for himself than in that compact which he had made with Edith Champion. In his relations with her there was no fiery agitation, no passionate impatience. He loved her, and had loved her long — perhaps a little more passionately when his love was a new thing, but not, he assured himself, more devotedly than he loved her now. He was secure of her love, secure also of her virtue, for had she not known how to maintain her self-respect during this long apprenticeship to platonic affection? Their lives would glide smoothly on, till James Champion, cared for and kindly treated to the last hour of his existence, should drop gently into the grave, decently mourned for such space of time and in such manner as the world exacts of well-bred widows. And then Edith and he would be married, and would assume that commanding position in London and continental society which only a husband and wife whose views and culture exactly harmonise can ever attain. The prospect was in every way agreeable, and he could look forward to it without any quickened throbbing of his tired heart. Dr. South had called it a tired heart — a heart with which there was nothing organically wrong, only the languor left by the strain of over-work. He could sit in the hotel garden taking his sun-bath, and placidly admiring the perfection of Edith’s profile, shadowed by the broadleaved Leghorn hat, or the delicate arch of her instep in the high-heeled Parisian shoe, so eminently adapted for sitting still.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 901
