by Grant Allen
‘I’m glad they get on well,’ the Duke murmured by way of relieving himself from the embarrassment of such personal allusions.
‘Oh yes, I always said that’d be a very good match,’ Mrs. Bouverie-Barton ran on, with glib readiness, ‘though I confess I never thought the girl would take him. Old Affability had trained up his child in the way she should go, as these heiresses are trained up nowadays, to sell herself in the open market to the highest bidder, for position, title, an old name, a coronet; and I thought at first she wouldn’t depart from it. I thought she’d do as they all do — marry a marquis — and then run away from him. I remember saying one day at Hurst Croft to that young Maclaine ——
The Duke’s eyes started into sudden interest.
‘To whom?’ he asked quickly, half doubting if he’d caught the name aright.
‘To young Maclaine, of the Board of Trade,’ his companion went on, without pretending to notice his start. ‘Your Duchess’s friend, you know. He says he used to see a great deal of her at one time — before she married. And, indeed, after too, for the matter of that; for he’s been a constant caller at Onslow Gardens, I am told, all the while you’ve been beguiling the wily salmon, that we spoke about, in Norway. Well, I remember saying to him one day at Hurst Croft that that girl Sabine would marry as they all do — and at the end of six months run away with Hubert.’
‘Six months is a precious short time to give a man for domestic felicity,’ the Duke interposed bitterly.
‘No doubt. But it is as much as the women give their husbands nowadays,’ Mrs. Bouverie-Barton responded, with the smart joy of the scandalmonger. ‘Look at Lady Geldart, of Nigg, for example, that pretty brunette that I strongly recommended to you before you went on the war-path to America — there’s a fine contrast to the Harrisons for you! Sabine Venables marries the man she loves, wise girl; and they’ll be happy for a lifetime. Gwendoline Mackay, of the Southwark beer-bottling place, marries Lord Geldart, of Nigg, a dissipated young rake who only wants her name at the back of his bills at three, six, nine months. And what’s the consequence? Before the bills have matured the poor girl’s had enough of it, and runs away from him.’
‘You don’t mean to say Lady Geldart’s run away!’ the Duke exclaimed, with a sinister interest.
‘Yes, I do,’ the lady replied. ‘Bolted! Just bolted! Haven’t you seen the papers? She’s gone off with a cornet in the 8th Hussars — I forget his name this moment, but you remember the man: that fellow with the smooth dark hair and the small black moustache — Mr. Maclaine’s cut to a T — that she used always to talk with so much before she was married.’
The Duke clapped his hand to his head mechanically.
‘Run away from him?’ he cried. ‘And only six months married!’
‘Oh dear yes; and that’s a long way better, too, than if she’d stopped with him at Brook Street, and made a silent scandal by her relations with the cornet,’ Mrs. Bouverie-Barton went on, all unconscious (to do her justice) of the way her every word was burning into the Duke’s brain. ‘She couldn’t stand Lord Geldart’s constant drain upon her purse. Who could, I’d like to know? The man has gambled away a quarter of her vast fortune already. Now, for very shame he’ll have to get a divorce — his honour demands it; and then the poor girl’ll come into her own again.’
‘And keep the title he gave her!’ the Duke said savagely. ‘Be still Lady Geldart! That’s the way with these women. They marry a man for what they can get out of him; and then, having secured his name and his rank, they go their own way and break the rest of their bargain.’
‘Oh, she can’t keep the title, of course,’ Mrs. Bouverie-Barton ran on smoothly. ‘She’ll have to give up that, you know, if she gets divorced from Lord Geldart. But Gwendoline won’t mind for a title, I’ll venture to bet, if only she can have her own true love. A woman soon finds out that titles are hollow; and then she’s sorry she didn’t do at first what her own heart prompted her to do, like Sabine Venables. Why, do you remember, Duke, I offered to lay you two to one in dozens of gloves, at the Eton and Harrow match one year, that if you married Sabine yourself she wouldn’t stop twelve months with you; and you refused to take me?’
The Duke smiled an ominous smile.
‘I was wise in my generation,’ he said grimly. ‘Wiser then, perhaps, than now. But no matter. It’s no use being cynical. What a perfect Court Guide you are to be sure, Mrs. Bouverie-Barton! You’ve always got the very latest society scandal at your fingers’ ends. You’re just the right woman for a man to meet after six weeks’ solitude among the pine woods of Norway.’
For ten minutes longer Mrs. Bouverie-Barton kept her victim engaged with similar converse, all on her pet theme, the unhappy outcome of the modern mercenary marriage, till the Duke was fairly wincing under her graduated dose of slowly-dropping vitriol. At last he could stand it no longer. This was too much for any man. That fellow Maclaine again! He rose to go; and as he did so he felt himself stagger slightly. His head swam. He hardly knew what was the matter. Still, he held out his hand with his courteous society smile — for in externals he was always a polished gentleman — to say good-bye to his guileless tormentor. Mrs. Bouverie-Barton took it in her own plump and white ungloved palm. As their fingers met, she started back in surprise.
‘Why, you’re feverish, Duke!’ she exclaimed, in a very frightened tone. ‘You’re in a high fever!’
‘Am I?’ the Duke answered, with the recklessness of despair. ‘I dare say I am. Ever since I left home I’ve been sickening, sickening somehow. I seemed to keep it under in the open air among the pines in Norway; but since I got back to England last night it’s come over me again in full force. I fancy I’m going to be ill. I can feel it in my bones. And a jolly good job too, as things go at present.’
He sank down, reeling, in the corner of the seat. Mrs. Bouverie-Barton, now thoroughly alarmed, hailed a passing hansom. With her aid, the cabman lifted the helpless Duke and placed him, a heavy burden, on the seat of his cab. The last of the Montgomeries had rightly diagnosed his own case. He was sickening for fever — a long-suppressed fever; in point of fact, an attack of typhoid, delayed beyond its time by the fresh air of the forests, but arising from the very same local causes in the house at Onslow Gardens as Elizabeth Woodward’s.
‘Where shall I drive, ma’am?’ the cabman asked, touching his hat respectfully, for Mrs. Bouverie-Barton had confided to him in an undertone how exalted a personage it was the good fortune of his spavined mare to carry.
‘To the Duke’s own place,’ Mrs. Bouverie-Barton answered, with prompt decision; ‘Onslow Gardens.’
The Duke fell back on the padded seat, and nodded a drowsy assent. An awful idea held possession of his mind. Chance had decided his fate, then. The lady had chosen for him. Heads, a divorce; tails, the other thing. He would go home ill to Linda now, and let destiny work out the rest, as he himself foreshadowed it.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
TAILS WIN.
Linda was musing, alone and disconsolate, in the big garish drawing-room at Onslow Gardens. They had taken the house furnished while their own was being prepared for them, and Linda hadn’t attempted to rectify any room in it to her private taste, except her special little boudoir on the second floor. So she was sitting there, brooding, with her eyes on the ugly wall, nursing her grief and loneliness as best she might, when a footman of the usual gorgeous ducal pattern (to which she had long grown accustomed) flung open the door hurriedly, with the air of a man who has great news to announce, and blurted out in one breath the alarming tidings:
‘His grace has come back by himself in a cab, without his luggage or anything, and he’s waiting downstairs in the hall now, if your grace will please to step down and see him — very ill with the fever.’
In a second, at those terrible words, Linda had forgotten everything — save that Bertie was her husband and had come home ill to her. She rushed downstairs to him with beating heart and outstretched arms, as if the episode of h
is disappearance and the cruel watch he had set upon her movements had never existed.
He was sitting, or rather crouching, on one of the high-backed Chippendale chairs that flanked the hall table. Linda flung herself upon him with a dozen kisses, in a wild outbreak of emotion, very rare in her temperament.
‘Oh, Bertie, Bertie!’ she cried in an agony of suspense, ‘then you’ve come back to me at last. What is it? What is it? Oh, how horribly hot your forehead feels! It was kind of you, when you found yourself so ill, to think of coming home to me!’
The Duke, for his part, didn’t exactly repel her. That was not his cue now. He had left the arbitrament of fate to Mrs. Bouverie-Barton; and Mrs. Bouverie-Barton, as Goddess of Heads and Tails, had decided the toss-up in the sense that he was to come back to her. He accepted that decision in a blind, fatalistic way, as marking out his course for him. But he had a definite plan in his mind as well, to which that course was but the blank prelude; and he meant to carry out the plan, as it rose dim in his head a week ago on the Hamar Fjeld, and still more clearly that afternoon on the bench on the Embankment — ay, even to its uttermost jot and tittle. So he merely accepted Linda’s kisses in a passive, mechanical, undemonstrative, high, aristocratic way, and whispered coldly in her ear:
‘Not before the servants, please. No scenes, I beg of you. If there have been differences between us, let us keep them to ourselves. Don’t let us go washing our dirty linen in public before the butler and the lady’s-maid.’
For in all these matters, Adalbert Montgomery flattered himself, his manners still preserved that famous repose which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere.
Linda drew back as if she had been stung; but she never forgot her duty for all that. No, nor her tenderness either, harshly as he had greeted her. She could see in him, in spite of everything, only her husband, returned home to her ill — seriously ill; and her one thought now was for his comfort and safety. In less than half an hour they had moved the Duke upstairs and put him quietly in bed, and Sir Frederick Weston himself, the great specialist on typhoid, hastily summoned by special messenger from his house in Harley Street, was already in attendance.
It was a terrible time. Whatever the Duke’s own plan might have been, this unexpected attack intervened to postpone or delay it. For a week or two he continued dangerously ill; and for a week or two Linda, already wearied out with her constant care for Elizabeth Woodward, nursed him assiduously, with very little intermission. His attitude puzzled her. She couldn’t quite make out what Bertie meant. At times, indeed, it almost seemed as if he relented for awhile; he spoke to her so kindly, not to say affectionately, and Linda half began to hope the breach between them would be bridged over in part by this unexpected illness. But gradually it dawned upon her that these gentler moods were most frequently displayed before the doctor or the nurses. Whenever for a few minutes she was left quite alone with him, her husband relapsed at once into moody and gloomy silence. Not that he spoke harshly to her; she fancied he seemed almost of set purpose to avoid such conduct as that; but he hardened himself like adamant, as one who could neither hear nor see her. Often he lay, with closed mouth and feverish lips hard pressed, for whole hours at a time, revolving in his own mind she knew not what bitter thoughts about her.
To Linda, this silent mood of his was inexpressibly terrible. Womanly above everything, she felt his illness had suddenly endeared him to her once more; and it froze the very marrow in her bones to see him thus chilly and irresponsive to all her wifely attentions. At times she half ventured to hope it might be nothing more than the lethargy of fever; when Bertie began to mend again, perhaps he would smile as of old upon her. But, strange to say, the Duke did not begin to mend. Even when the crisis was fairly over, as Sir Frederick himself declared, curious symptoms set in, which that experienced specialist, in spite of all his vast knowledge, failed entirely to comprehend.
‘Never saw a case in all my practice quite like this one,’ he said, mumbling. True, the long suppression of the fever under the influence of the Norwegian climate might have something to do with its abnormal development; quite possible — quite possible; but the Duke’s strange drowsiness certainly surprised him. ‘It forms a most unexpected symptom of some unusual and dangerous secondary evolution,’ he remarked to Linda. ‘It’s a sequela of typhoid, like the one that followed the late epidemic of influenza, never before, to my knowledge, so clearly indicated. The patient’s condition at times may be described as nothing short of absolutely comatose.’
All this never interfered for a moment with Linda’s care in nursing him. She did everything possible to make him well, and even insisted on washing the parqueted floor all round the edges with Condy’s fluid with her own hands, lest infection should linger in casual corners. That parqueted floor she had had put down herself while Bertie was away, in case of illness; she was so grateful now to her own good genius for ever thinking of it.
One afternoon, as the Duke lay on his bed in a semi-conscious state, with Linda by his side, George the footman came up, bringing a card on a salver, one among dozens of similar cards of inquiry left each day at the door; but this one, George observed, with a malicious smile, the gentleman had particularly requested might be carried upstairs direct to the Duchess. In a moment the dozing patient was wide awake and restless.
‘Whose card is that, Linda?’ he asked, quite briskly, calling her by her Christian name outright for the very first time since his return from Norway.
Linda shrank back. The stars in their courses were fighting against her. With a terrible sinking at her heart she held it up before him. Her husband read it unmoved:
‘Mr. Basil Maclaine;’ and then below, in manuscript, ‘With very kind inquiries for the Duchess of Powysland.’
‘I see,’ the Duke murmured, with a groan, turning his face towards the wall. ‘His kind inquiries are all for you, Linda.’
The unhappy wife could answer nothing. She bent her head low, and burst into a silent flood of tears. Coincidence and occasion were dealing very hardly by her. She cried long and bitterly, but Bertie lay still, with his face turned away, and took no further notice of her. It was a terrible position; but, such as it was, she was bound to face it all through unaided.
For two long hours she sat there, with her head in her hands, and still her husband never spoke a word, nor moved a finger, except to turn from time to time on his side restlessly. Yet now and again Linda fancied he was fumbling with something unseen beneath the bed-clothes. But he was ill, oh, so ill! — how ill Linda hardly dared confess to herself, and that made things all the worse. For if Bertie were to die, feeling towards her like this, she didn’t know how on earth she could ever look up again.
At five o’clock that evening Sir Frederick called again. He was a little dried-up old man, with parched yellow skin, and small ferret eyes that seemed to pierce one through and through every time he looked at one. The moment he saw the Duke, his round pursed lips and puckered forehead proclaimed at once to Linda’s observant gaze that he found his patient much worse than he left him.
‘What have you been giving him, Duchess?’ he asked, in a very low tone. ‘No quackery, I hope; no nostrums, no hypnotism. This comatose condition is simply inexplicable. Did you let him have his tonic, as I told you, at three?’ He shook his head, much puzzled. ‘I can’t at all understand it,’ he mumbled once more below his gray moustache. ‘Most singular; mo-st sin-gular.’
‘Yes,’ Linda faltered out; ‘I gave him the medicine myself, as you directed. Nobody else has fed him with anything to-day or yesterday. I was so afraid, from what you said, the nurse might have made some stupid mistake, that I’ve measured each dose out carefully in a minim glass, and held it to his lips with my own hands. I’m sure he’s had everything exactly as you prescribed it.’
‘And after every dose,’ the professional nurse put in, coming forward from behind, and folding her hands demurely, ‘the Duke has seemed to get drowsier and drowsier.’
‘Curious,�
� the doctor said, stroking his chin reflectively. ‘Most curious. Most cu-rious. There’s a dose due now. Temperature, one hundred and four and one-tenth. Let me look at the bottle.’
Linda moved hurriedly across to the table before the nurse could anticipate her. Sir Frederick followed her with keen little pursed-up eyes of silent inquiry. She handed him the medicine. He took out the cork, sniffed at it, turned it upside down with one finger on the mouth, and tasted a drop on the end of his finger.
‘Very odd,’ he said once more, smacking his lips critically. ‘It’s bitterer than it ought to be. I can’t make it out. Unsatisfactory, very. I’ll take this bottle away with me, if you’ll allow me, Duchess, and get my own chemist to send you another.’
‘But it’s time for a dose now,’ Linda faltered out timorously. ‘Shall I give it him or not? He seems so terribly weak and faint just this minute.’
The doctor glanced at her once more with those keen small eyes of his.
‘Certainly not,’ he answered, in a very decisive voice. ‘It can do him no good. There’s some mistake of somebody’s. I’ll call round in my carriage and get another lot of this mixture made up under my own eyes. It won’t take ten minutes, and I’ll bring it round myself. The case is urgent. I must see to it at once.’ He eyed her hard. ‘There’s something very odd,’ he said, with slow deliberation, ‘going on somewhere.’
As he spoke, the Duke lifted up his head drowsily from the pillow, and stared around him with a blank, open-mouthed stare of surprise and wonder. His look was idiotic. Presently, with a start, he seemed to recollect himself.
‘Linda,’ he murmured, in a very feeble voice, ‘will you leave me for a minute, please? And you, too, nurse. I’ve something I want to speak to Sir Frederick ... alone ... about.’
With a ghastly misgiving in her breast, Linda staggered from the room, hardly knowing what she did, and tottered into her boudoir next door in an agony of horror. Two minutes later she heard Sir Frederick open the bedroom door and call in the nurse in a very low voice. His tone was most mysterious. Then came sounds of whispering, and a short consultation. When it ended, he knocked at her boudoir lightly.
