Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector

by Lillian de la Torre

  The lawyer nodded.

  “As to parting the money, the loss will be extream, the blow to my credit worse, if in the present precarious state of affairs I must suddenly realize the funds of the tontine. Pray what is the urgent reason for this unreasonable request?”

  “The curse—the curse on the tontine—”

  “Tschah,” said Breed Hosyer in disgust. “Who has started up this old wives’ tale? I’ll not be a party to breaking the tontine for so foolish a reason. Be content, brother; Sally may one day have all, if—” he offered his wrist to his lady, and smiled back over his shoulder as they withdrew, “—if she lives so long.”

  Hiram Hosyer, purple, turned to Lawyer Sedge to expostulate; but the lawyer was looking at his watch, and in another minute he was gone.

  We found ourselves in the footway before Lloyd’s Coffeehouse with the Hosyers. I was ready to be off; but Johnson lingered.

  “Ma’am,” says he, “this is a dire tale, and a powerful argument against leaky row-boats and summer victuals. But why, when it happened in July, is this a reason to break the tontine suddenly in November? What has happened since, to rouze your apprehensions?”

  The Hosyers exchanged glances. The brewer bit his lip.

  “Last night,” said Mrs. Hosyer in a low voice, “we had like to lost Sally with the gripes and the flux.”

  “And it not being summer,” said Hosyer, his eyes on his shoes, “and Sally being new-returned from a sojourn with my Lady her Aunt Hosyer—sir, I’m at my wits’ end. I cannot afford to break with my brother. What shall I do?”

  Johnson was frowning now.

  “The gripes and the flux are no uncommon ail. We must proceed with caution. I must know more of the summer tragedies. Who set the children on to so perilous a voyage? Who supped in the nursery, and upon what dish? I must talk with Sally at once.”

  “Sir, ’tis impossible. Dr. Catnach gave us powders to make a draught to quiet her, and now she sleeps like the dead …”

  The last words seemed to linger on the air. The buxom wife turned pale. Her eyes and her husband’s met in a like apprehension, and by common consent they urgently beckoned a passing hackney-coach. Johnson mounted without demur, and I followed.

  As the Jehu plied his whip, a dishevelled dame clacked up on hurried pattens. She stood on the footway gesticulating after us.

  “Cicely Macklin,” said Mrs. Hosyer; and for all her drawn face she laughed.

  Sally was sleeping unharmed. We looked down upon her in the shadow of the tester. She was a beautiful child, budding to a seductive sixteen. I admired her peaches-and-snow complection, her perfect form beneath the counterpane. As we gazed the blue-veined lids fluttered and rose. Brilliant blue eyes scanned our faces, and for a flash a dimple shewed beside the pale, perfect lips.

  Though not impervious to the appeal of femininity, Dr. Johnson dared not spare her. He questioned her gently.

  “I found the boat launched,” she whispered, “and when I could not disswade the children from embarking, I went along for the preventing of mischief.”

  Her eyes darkened; she closed them.

  “I do not know who set them on.”

  “We must ask Susan Macklin, who alone of that unlucky boatload survives,” said I.

  Nor did Sally know aught of that misfortunate supper in the nursery, for she and Susan, bedded, had had posset from the nurse’s own hand.

  “We must ask the nurse,” said I.

  “The nurse is dead,” whispered Sally. “Save for Clem, every soul who ate at that table died.”

  “And what did you eat yesterday, my dear, at your Aunt Hosyer’s?”

  “What the rest ate.”

  “No comfits?”

  “I had a comfit of fat little Clem Sedge—but he ate thrice as many.”

  “No bit of marrow-fat for yourself, no posset to sleep on?”

  “No, sir, Bob gets the tid-bits at my uncle’s. Stay, there was milk brought to my bedside by the serving-wench.”

  “Well, my dear, be a good girl, and rest, and all will be well.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The girl turned her face to the wall, and tears began to stream from her eyes.

  “I’m afraid.”

  The brewer’s wife smoothed the wide brow. The blue eyes closed.

  “Ma’am,” says Johnson, “I’ll talk with Susan in the morning.”

  “’Tis Lord Mayor’s Day,” said Mrs. Hosyer. “Come the next day. Come to Mrs. Macklin’s in the Poultry.”

  So the rendezvous was concerted.

  The Lord Mayor’s Show, and the humours of the mob, engrossed our interest on the morrow, and Sally Hosyer’s no less, putting the rendezvous, for the nonce, from our minds.

  Nevertheless we kept our rendezvous, and betimes. Dr. Johnson himself rouzed me at my lodgings. His face shocked me.

  “We are summoned too late. Susan Macklin is dead, and Sally Hosyer despaired of.”

  We hastened down to the antient street called the Poultry. In the dark old house of the widow Macklin a dreadful sight met our eyes. Smothered under the bed’s fallen tester lay Susan Macklin. When the tangle of cloth and wooden frame was pushed aside, I gazed with pity on a peaked little face and half-open skinny hands.

  Cicely Macklin had no gestures left. She stood like a snow statue by her daughter’s bed and spoke without expression.

  “Many’s the time I’ve warned her and Sally, and her brother that’s dead in the millpond, many’s the time I’ve bade them swarm up the appletree if they must play at sailors, and not up the canopy, for all my gear’s old and rotten—”

  Dr. Johnson regarded the heavy frame where it had splintered away. The edge of the crack dated from the days of the sailor-play, it was old and grey, but the rest was white and fresh, where it had parted and fallen in the night. Dr. Johnson regarded it with a grave face.

  “Who lay in the house last night?”

  Widow Macklin brought her remote eyes to fasten on him.

  “Susan that’s dead, and Sally that’s dying, and Brother and Sister Hosyer, and I. We were all here for the Lord Mayor’s Show, for this house commands it, and after it I gave them a bed, and Sally loves to share Susan’s. ’Twas an ill hour for Sister Hosyer when she yielded to Sally’s entreaties, scarce recovered as she was from her indisposition.”

  “Who knew of the plan?”

  “Why, all here. Mr. Sedge said ’twas indulging the chits, but my Lady bade us humour the child for God’s sake—”

  “Mr. Sedge? My Lady? Were they here?”

  “I said so. They were all here for the Lord Mayor’s Show.”

  “Pray, ma’am, who was here?” Dr. Johnson asked.

  “Mr. Sedge and Clem—Mr. Breed Hosyer and my Lady and Bob—Brother Hiram Hosyer and his wife and daughter—I and Susan; no one else, for the wench was off making holiday.”

  Her gaze slid away again; she straightened a lock on her daughter’s ice-cold brow.

  “Sally?”

  “Sally?-Sally. Sally lies in my bed.”

  She gestured down the passage, and we left her.

  Sally Hosyer lay in such another canopied bed in such another dark chamber, as still and as white as her cousin; but a shallow thread of pulse gave hope of her recovery. Her mother was chafing her cold hands, her father setting hot bricks to her icy feet.

  “We found her prone by the bedside in a tangle of bed-furniture,” said the father sadly, “half-dead as you now see her. The crack of the breaking frame must have rouzed her, and she rolled aside an instant too late to be safe.”

  The purple-veined lids pulsed, and the mother renewed her endeavours. She was rewarded a moment later; the lids slowly lifted, and closed again.

  But though a languid consciousness returned, it brought only the scantiest of memories.

  “I heard a crack,” whispered the white lips at Dr. Johnson’s ear, “and felt a blow, and I knew no more.”

  I thought Dr. Johnson looked mighty grim. He sent me, with strictest
orders to be on my guard, to the ordinary for broth, and he fed it to the child with his own hand. When she fell into a fitful sleep, he spoke sternly to Brewer Hosyer.

  “The tontine must end.”

  “It shall end, sir. But I own I’m loath to give up the money; I’m pinched, and that’s cold truth. My wife shall carry the wench into the country out of reach; and I’ll do what I can to get the tontine parted orderly.”

  Johnson shook his head.

  “’Tis your child’s life. Pray be on your guard. If there’s a human agent behind these accidents, be sure I’ll be a mill-stone round his neck!”

  The tontine was long a-breaking. I at last perswaded Sedge that the tontine might be broken by consent; though he could never be brought to think that the mortality among its members was other than a strange series of strokes of fate. Of Hiram Hosyer’s importunities, and his brother’s procrastinations, I only heard by indirection. Meanwhile, Sally Hosyer was gone out of London; Clem Sedge was at school and Bob Hosyer at the University. To all my enquiries after Breed Hosyer’s affairs, I could have only one answer: that his credit stood high, his affairs were sound; men praised his prudence, that preserved his fortune in these adverse times, and the liberality of his lady, who had the spending of it.

  The matter of the tontine was still in abeyance when Dr. Johnson and I went down to take the waters at Bath.

  The well-known watering-place was thronged for the holidays. On every hand the Mall was crowded with gay duchesses, pretty pump-room girls, grande dames painted to the nines, and many a mincing maccaroni with a nosegay as big as a broom.

  “Is not this pure, sir?” I addressed Dr. Johnson, unwontedly gay in mulberry and a new large grizzle wig. “Does not your heart bound to see so many pretty faces? Pray observe the fair sisters who approach us, attended by their court of beaux, and their duenna behind.”

  “I observe them,” returned Dr. Johnson in a very particular voice. “They are not sisters, neither is she behind their duenna.”

  I looked again as they came closer. What was my surprize to see, handed each by an ogling gallant, Miss Sally Hosyer and my Lady her Aunt Hosyer! Stout Mrs. Hosyer scowled in the background.

  It was the first time I had seen Miss Sally Hosyer on her feet. The girl was a raving beauty. Her towering head, picked out with plumes, was a replica of her Aunt’s; her ruffles, like the older woman’s, were edged with silver lace. Her skin was milk-white and transparent, and the warm colour came and went at every whisper in her ear. She carried her slim form proudly.

  We bent low before the ladies, and they curtsied in a froth of taffety under-coats.

  “La, Dr. Johnson,” drawled my Lady, bringing her lace fan into play, “welcome indeed to Bath. Pray, sir, lend me your influence to bend this stiff sister-in-law of mine. Never doubt me, sir, she keeps this radiant creature penned up in lodgings, though I have begged her upon my knees, I vow upon my very knees, to come to us at the Priory.”

  “Nay, sister—” began Mrs. Hosyer.

  “Now pray, dear creature, let’s hear no more of the millpond. Do but be perswaded, and bring my pretty niece to the Priory. Here’s Bob down for the holidays, he affects her prodigiously, I vow; do pray have mercy upon his transports.”

  “I don’t hold,” said plain Mrs. Hosyer bluntly, “with making a match between cousins.”

  “Dear joy, a match, sister? A match with a dowerless wench? Zut, sister, who spoke of a match?”

  Mrs. Hosyer turned a dusky pink, but Sally only tittered.

  “Ah, well, let it pass, sister. You’ll come before the holidays are out. Only think, Dr. Johnson, that stubborn husband of mine has been brought to heel at last, and the tontine will be broke as fast as Lawyer Sedge can bring Clem to set his fat fist to it. But I daresay you will be by for the signing.”

  “At your service, my Lady.”

  “Your most oblig’d, sir. Do now, perswade my sister to bring her charmer to the Priory without delay. I vow Bob languishes; and cousins, you know, should love one another.”

  I regarded the painted blush on this unblushing creature with aversion.

  “What is this painted bawd about,” I cried angrily as the trio sailed off, “if it be not procuring for her own son in her own house! I never heard so infamous a proposal more plainly put.”

  “Infamous indeed,” said Johnson, “and I could almost find it in my heart to wish her no worse than a procuress. But in two respects you wrong her—the boy is not her own son, and save for the crimson spots she is not painted.”

  “That white skin, not painted?”

  “No, sir; this sunlight makes it plain, ’tis not white lead, but a substance even more noxious, to which the lady owes the whiteness of her swan-like neck.”

  I stared after the three ill-assorted Hosyer ladies. A bejewelled young rake had his arm about Sally’s waist, the while he pinched her aunt’s hand under her fall; Mrs. Hosyer’s very back breathed helpless anger.

  Who so willing as Miss Sally to compassionate a swain’s transports? Some nights later I was wandering in the Spring Gardens with—but with whom forms no part of this history—suffice it to say, I was wandering in the Gardens at moon-rise. We were in shadow—I was in shadow as I rounded the hedge, and saw in the bright moonlight Sally Hosyer clasped in a close embrace by a tall young man. Unwilling to put them out of countenance, I stood silent. The embrace ended, the figures parted a little; when I saw that Miss Sally’s inamorato was not only well-formed, but handsome and sentimental of face, richly cloathed, and in his first youth. For a moon-struck moment he stared into her lovely lifted face, and suddenly his grasp tightened.

  “Sally,” he said thickly; caught his breath, and spoke clearly: “Sally, my charmer, come away with me and make me the happiest of men.”

  Sally spoke in a small voice; her aunt’s barbs had gone home:

  “Without a dowry?”

  “Without a shift,” cried the young man passionately. “No one need know; ’tis no one’s affair.”

  As to that he was certainly right. I slipped back the way I had come.

  Whatever favours Miss Sally bestowed upon her young Adonis, she forebore to flee with him. I saw her upon the Parade the next day, mantling in a storm of compliments, and the favoured swain was no more than one of many.

  Mrs. Hosyer, Lady Rivers that was, proved to be right about the tontine. Lawyer Sedge at last came down. He carried us to the Priory in his coach, and I for the first time beheld young Master Sedge, whom in Mrs. Hosyer’s opinion nothing could kill.

  There was reason for her estimate. I assessed Master Sedge as he sat opposite me in the coach, eating a gilded tart from a hamper. He had a large red face, and arms and legs like blood-puddings. He was not improved by having jam on his chin. He was six years old; his mental powers seemed to be less than the age would warrant.

  At the Priory we found Hosyer and his wife and Sally already established, and a high tea on the table. They were making marchpane below-stairs; you could smell the ground almonds all over the house. Sally was munching on a piece. Clem Sedge, with a look of dumb determination on his fat face, snatched the dainty from her very lips, and bolted it. Sally just shrugged.

  As tea was pouring, I looked about the richly appointed chamber at the group who sat there. Present in the room, with one exception, were all the surviving members of the Hosyer tontine, backed by their parents. I looked at Breed Hosyer, tight-mouthed and suave, his poison-white wife, Lawyer Sedge, bland and smiling, Hiram Hosyer, wary and ill at ease, his wife tense, Sally like a child, flushed and laughing, sharing the marchpane in her pockets with Clem Sedge. I thought of the millpond and the flux and the fallen tester, and a ripple ran along my nerve-ends. Where was Bob Hosyer?

  Before I could ask the question, the door opened, and a beautiful youth in faultless buckskins strolled into the room. I had seen him before. ’Twas the importunate suitor of the Spring Gardens. Gracefully he saluted the company. A look of his eye, a private smile, brought the blood
mantling to Sally’s cheek.

  Our number was complete. Lawyer Sedge proceeded to open the scheam for the breaking of the tontine. In brief ’twas thus: the tontine to be broken, and each member and his heirs after him to take his fair third of the sum; but the capital still to be in the hands of Mr. Breed Hosyer, and to be withdrawn only upon long warning. How this was to advantage Mr. Hiram Hosyer in his present need I could not see; but of all then present, he was most eager that the thing be done. My Lady was languidly willing, Lawyer Sedge not contrary-minded, Mr. Breed Hosyer wishing to have done with the matter. Sally and Bob, whispering in the corner, smiled assent, while Clem Sedge, his mouth full of marchpane, nodded dumbly. Lawyer Sedge pocketed his notes, from which to draw up the agreement fair, and we parted, agreeing to sign on the morrow. The last I saw of Clem Sedge, he was still stuffing his mouth with marchpane.…

  The marchpane was the death of Clem Sedge. This time the gripes and the flux did his business. Mrs. Hosyer did her utmost, but in a frighteningly short time the child was dead.

  Dr. Johnson strode angrily into my Lady’s chamber. He found her eating marchpane while her maid did her head.

  “Ma’am,” says he without preamble, “you’ve poison on your toilette-table, and I beg you’ll destroy it instanter.”

  She put down the marchpane hastily.

  “I don’t refer to the marchpane, ma’am, though indeed it serves as a handy disguise for a deadly dose; I refer to your complection-water.”

  She did not pretend to misunderstand him, but handed him a little box of white powder.

  “Let it be destroyed,” she said, adding with a sigh, “though never had I had so many compliments on my white skin, till by the advice of my apothecary I began the use of arsenick—”

  “Your apothecary!” cried Dr. Johnson. “Many a Borgia passes under this guise today, witting or unwitting!”

  “I have had qualms,” said my Lady calmly, “for sure I sometimes think it was at the bottom of the ill supper in the nursery; and sure Sally got a dose of it when she was here in November. It goes down fast; I think Sally uses it on the sly, or Hepzibah here—don’t yank so, Hepzibah, you clumsy thing!”