We went to the convent the day before yesterday. It is a curious old place, and was once a stately château, the habitation of a noble family. A little portress, in the black robes of a lay sister, admitted us, and conducted us to the parlour, a fine old room, decorated with pictures of a religious character, painted by members of the sisterhood. Here Gustave and I were received by the superioress, an elderly woman, with a mild holy face, and a quiet grace of manner which might become a duchess. She sent for the demoiselles Lenoble, and after a delay of a quarter of an hour—you remember the toilet the girls at Hyde Lodge were obliged to make before they went to the drawing-room, Lotta—Mademoiselle Lenoble came, a tall, slim, lovely and lovable girl, who reminded me of the dearest friend I have in this world. She ran to her papa first, and saluted him with an enthusiastic hug; and then she stood for a moment looking shyly at me, confused and doubtful. It was only for a moment she was left in doubt. Gustave bent down to whisper something in her ear—something for which his letters had in some manner prepared her. The fair young face brightened, the clear grey eyes looked up at me with a sweet affectionate gaze, and she came to me and kissed me. "I shall love you very much," she whispered. "And I love you very much already," I answered, in the same confidential manner. And I think these few words, that one pretty confiding look in her innocent eyes, made a tie between us that it would take much to loosen. Ah, Lotta, what a wide gulf between the Diana Paget who landed alone at St. Katharine's Wharf, in the dim cheerless dawn, and uncertain where to find a shelter in all that busy city, and the same creature redeemed by your affection, and exalted by the love and trust of Gustave Lenoble!
After this my second daughter appeared—a pretty young hoyden, with lovable clinging ways; and then the superioress asked if I would like to see the garden. Of course I said yes; and we were taken through the long corridors, out into a fine old garden, where the pupils, who looked like the Hyde Lodge girls translated into French, were prancing and scampering about in the usual style. After the garden we went to the chapel, where there were more pictures, and flower-bedecked altars, and pale twinkling tapers burning here and there in the chill sunlight. Here there were damsels engaged in pious meditation, from five years old upwards. They send even the little ones to meditate, Clarice tells me; and there are these infants kneeling before the flower-bedecked altars, rapt in religious contemplation, like so many Thomas à Kempises. The young meditators glanced shyly at us as we passed. When they had shown me everything of special interest in the pleasant old place, Clarice and Madelon ran off to dress for walking, in order to accompany us to Côtenoir, where we were to dine.
It was quite a family party. Mademoiselle Lenoble was there, and papa. He arrived at the château while Gustave and I were paying our visit to the convent. He is in the highest spirits, and treats me with an amount of affection and courtesy I have not been accustomed to receive at his hands. Of course I know the cause of this change; the future mistress of Côtenoir is a very different person from that wretched girl who was nothing to him but a burden and an encumbrance. But even while I despise him I cannot refuse to pity him. One forgives anything in old age. In this, at least, it is a second childhood; and my father is very old, Lotta. I saw the look of age in his face more plainly at Côtenoir, where he assumed his usualdebonnaireman-of-the-world tone and manner, than I had seen it in London, when he was a professed invalid. He is much changed since I was with him at Forêtdechêne. It seems as if he had kept Time at bay very long, and now at last, the common enemy will be held at arm's-length no longer. He still braces himself up in the old military manner, still holds himself more erect than many men of half his age; but, in spite of all this, I can see that he is very feeble; shaken and worn by a long life of difficulty. I am glad to think that there will be a haven for him at last; and if I did not thank Gustave with my whole heart for giving me a home and a place in the world, I should thank him for giving a shelter to my father.
And now, dear, as I hope to be with you so very soon, I shall say no more. I am to spend a day in Rouen before we come back—papa and I, that is to say; Gustave stays in Normandy to make some arrangements before he comes back to England. I cannot comprehend the business relations between him and papa; but there is some business going on—law business, as it seems to me—about which papa is very important and elated.
I am to see the cathedral and churches at Rouen, and I shall contrive to see the shops, and to bring you something pretty. Papa has given me money—the first he ever gave me unasked. I have very little doubt it comes from Gustave; but I have no sense of shame in accepting it. M. Lenoble's seems to me a royal nature, formed to bestow benefits and bounties on every side.
Tell Mrs. Sheldon that I shall bring her the prettiest cap I can find inRouen; and,
with all love, believe me ever your affectionate DIANA.
Who heeds the cloud no bigger than a man's hand amidst a broad expanse of blue ether? The faint, scarce perceptible menace of that one little cloud is lost in the wide brightness of a summer sky. The traveller jogs on contented and unthinking, till the hoarse roar of stormy winds, or the first big drops of the thunder-shower, startle him with a sudden consciousness of the coming storm.
It was early May, and the young leaves were green in the avenues of Kensington Gardens; Bayswater was bright and gay with fashionable people; and Mrs. Sheldon found herself strong enough to enjoy her afternoon drive in Hyde Park, where the contemplation of the bonnets afforded her perennial delight.
"I think they are actually smaller than ever this year," she remarked every season; and every season the headgear of fashionable London did indeed seem to shrink and dwindle, "fine by degrees, and beautifully less." The coalscuttle-shaped headdress of our grandmothers had not yet resolved itself into a string of beads and a rosebud in these days, but was obviously tending thitherward.
Charlotte and Diana accompanied Mrs. Sheldon in her drives. The rapture of contemplating the bonnets was not complete unless the lady had some sympathising spirit to share her delight. The two girls were very well pleased to mingle in that brilliant crowd, and to go back to their own quiet life when the mystic hour came, and that bright vision of colour and beauty melted into the twilight loneliness. It had seemed just lately, however, as if Charlotte was growing a little weary of the gorgeous spectacle—the ever-changing, ever-splendid diorama of West End life. She no longer exclaimed at the sight of each exceptional toilette; she no longer smiled admiringly on the thoroughbred horses champing their bits in the immediate neighbourhood of her bonnet; she no longer gave a little cry of delight when the big drags came slowly along the crowded ranks, the steel bars shining as they swung loosely in the low afternoon sunlight, the driver, conscious of his glory, grave and tranquil, with the pride that apes humility.
"See, Lotta," said Miss Paget, upon an especially bright May evening, as one of these gorgeous equipages went past Mr. Sheldon's landau, "there's another drag. Did you see it?"
"Yes, dear, I saw it."
"And are you tired of four-in-hands? You used to admire them so much."
"I admire them as much as ever, dear."
"And yet you scarcely gave those four splendid roans a glance."
"No," Charlotte answered, with a faint sigh.
"Are you tired, Lotta?" Miss Paget asked, rather anxiously. There was something in Charlotte's manner of late that had inspired her with a vague sense of anxiety; some change which she could scarcely define—a change so gradual that it was only by comparing the Charlotte of some months ago with the Charlotte of the present that she perceived how real a change it was. The buoyancy and freshness, the girlish vivacity of Miss Halliday's manner, were rapidly giving place to habitual listlessness. "Are you tired, dear?" she repeated, anxiously; and Mrs. Sheldon looked round from her contemplation of the bonnets.
"No, Di, dearest, not tired; but—I don't feel very well this afternoon."
This was the first confession which Charlotte Halliday made of a sense of weakness and languor that had been creeping upon her during the last two months, so slowly, so gradually, that the change seemed too insignificant for notice.
"You feel ill, Lotta dear?" Diana asked.
"Well, no, not exactly ill. I can scarcely call it illness; I feel rather weak—that is really all."
At this point Mrs. Sheldon chimed in, with her eyes on a passing bonnet as she spoke.
"You see, you are so dreadfully neglectful of your papa's advice, Lotta," she said, in a complaining tone. "Doyoulike pink roses with mauve areophane, Diana? I do not. Look at that primrose tulle, with dead ivy-leaves and scarlet berries, in the barouche. I dare say you have not taken your glass of old port this morning, Charlotte, and have only yourself to thank if you feel weak."
"I did take a glass of port this morning, mamma. I don't like it; but I take it every morning."
"Don't like old tawny port, that your papa bought at the sale of a bishop of somewhere? It's perfectly absurd of you, Lotta, to talk of not liking wine that cost fifteen shillings a bottle, and which your papa's friends declare to be worth five-and-thirty."
"I am sorry it is so expensive, mamma; but I can't teach myself to think it nice," answered Charlotte, with a smile that sadly lacked the brightness of a few weeks ago. "I think one requires to go into the City, and become a merchant or a stockbroker, before one can like that sort of wine. What was it Valentine quoted in theCheapside, about some lady whom somebody loved?—'To love her was a liberal education.' I think to like old port is a commercial education."
"I am sure such wineoughtto do you good," said Georgy, almost querulously. She thought this bright blooming creature had no right to be ill. The headaches, and little weaknesses and languors and ladylike ailments, were things for which she (Georgy) had taken out a patent; and this indisposition of her daughter's was an infringement of copyright.
"I dare say the port will do me good, mamma, in time. No doubt I shall be as strong as that person who strangled lions and snakes and dogs with incalculable heads, and all that kind of thing."
"I really wish you would not talk in that absurd manner, my dear," said Mrs. Sheldon with offended dignity. "I think you really cannot be too grateful for your papa's kind thoughtfulness and anxiety about you. I am sure I myself am not so anxious as he is; but of course his medical knowledge makes him doubly careful. Six weeks ago he noticed that you wanted strength—tone is what he calls it. 'Georgina,' he said to me, 'Charlotte wants tone. She is beginning to stoop in a really lamentable manner: we must make her take port or bark, or something of a strengthening kind.' And then a day or two afterwards he decided on port, and gave me the key of the cellar—which is a thing he rarely gives out of his own hands—and told me the number of the bin from which I was to take the wine—some old wine that he had laid by on purpose for some special occasion; and no one is to have it but you, and you are to take a glass daily at eleven o'clock. Mr. Sheldon is most particular about the hour. The regularity of the thing is half the battle in these cases, he says; and I am sure if you do not observe his wishes and mine, Charlotte, it will be really ungrateful of you."
"But, dear mamma, I do observe Mr.—papa's wishes. I take my glass of port every morning at eleven. I go to your cupboard in the breakfast-room and take out my special decanter, and my special glass, in the most punctiliously precise manner. I don't like the wine, and I don't like the trouble involved in the ceremony of drinking it; but I go through it most religiously, to please you and papa."
"And do you mean to say that you do not feel stronger after taking that expensive old port regularly for nearly six weeks.
"I am sorry to say that I do not, mamma. I think if there is any change, it is that I am weaker."
"Dear, dear me!" exclaimed Mrs. Sheldon captiously, "you are really a most extraordinary girl."
Mrs. Sheldon could almost have found it in her heart to say, a most ungrateful girl. There did seem a kind of ingratitude in this futile consumption of old port at fifteen shillings a bottle.
"I'll tell you what it is, Lotta," she said presently, "I am convinced that your illness—or your weakness—is all fancy."
"Why so, mamma?"
"Because, if it were real weakness, that old port must have made you stronger. And the fact that the port does you no good, is a proof that your weakness is only fancy. Girls of your age are so full of fancies. Look at me, and the martyrdom I go through with my nervous headaches, which perfectly prostrate me, after the least worry or excitement. The nerves of my head, after going into the butcher's book, are perfect agony. When you come to have a house to look after, and find what it is to have the same saddle of mutton charged for twice over, with the most daring impudence—or to have capers and currie-powder, that youknowyou've never had, staring at you from every page of your grocer's book, and nothing but your memory between you and utter ruin—you'll discover what it is to be really ill."
In this easy manner did Mrs. Sheldon dismiss the subject of her daughter's illness. But it was not so easily dismissed by Diana Paget, who loved her friend with a profound and pure affection, than which no sister's love was ever warmer or stronger. Even Valentine's preference for this happy rival had not lessened Diana's love for her friend and benefactress. She had been jealous of Charlotte's happier fate: but in the hour when this jealousy was most bitter there had been no wavering in her attachment to this one true and generous friend.
Miss Paget was very silent during the homeward drive. She understood now what that change had been in her friend which until now had so perplexed her. It was a decay of physical strength which had robbed Lotta's smile of its brightness, her laugh of its merry music. It was physical languor that made her so indifferent to the things which had once awakened her girlish enthusiasm. The discovery was a very painful one. Diana remembered her experience of Hyde Lodge: the girls who had grown day by day more listless, now in the doctor's hands for a day or two, now well again and toiling at the old treadmill round of study, now sinking into confirmed invalids; until the bitter hour in which parents are summoned, and the doctor urges rest, and the fond mother carries her darling home, assured that home comfort and tenderness will, speedily restore her. Her schoolfellows cluster round the carriage to bid her "good-bye until next half," full of hopeful talk about her swift recovery. But when the vacation is over, and Black Monday comes, she is not amongst the returning scholars. Has she not gone up to the higher school, and answeredAdsumto the call of the Great Master?
Diana remembered these old experiences with cruel pain.
"Girls, as bright and lovable as she is, have drooped and faded away, just when they seem brightest and happiest," she thought as she watched Charlotte, and perceived to-day for the first time that the outline of her fair young cheek had lost its perfect roundness.
But in such a case love can do nothing except watch and wait. That night, in the course of that girlish talk in Charlotte's bedroom, which had become a habit with the two girls, Diana extorted from her friend a full account of the symptoms which had affected her within the last few weeks.
"Pray don't look so anxious, dear Di," she said gaily; "it is really nothing worth talking of; and I knew that if I confessed to feeling ill you and mamma would straightway begin to worry yourselves about me. I have felt a little sick and faint sometimes; and now and then a sudden dizziness has come over me. It is nothing of any consequence, and it passes away very quickly. Sometimes I have a kind of torpid languid feeling, which is scarcely unpleasant, only strange, you know. But what does it all amount to, except that I am nervous?"
"You must have change of air, Lotta," said Diana resolutely, "and change of scene. Yes, no doubt you are nervous. You have been kept almost a prisoner in the house through Mr. Sheldon's punctilious nonsense. You miss our brisk morning walks in the Gardens, I dare say. If you were to go to Yorkshire, now, to your friends at Newhall, you would like that change, dear, wouldn't you?"
"Yes, I should dearly like to see Aunt Dorothy and uncle Joe; but—"
"But what, darling?"
"I should scarcely like being at Newhall, unless—you'll think me very foolish, Di—unless Valentine was with me. We were so happy there, you see, dear; and it was there he first told me he loved me. No, Di, I couldn't bear Newhall without him."
"Poor Aunt Dorothy, poor uncle Joe! feathers when weighed in the scale against a young man whom their niece has known less than a twelvemonth!"
No more was said about Charlotte's illness; Diana was too prudent to alarm her friend by any expression of uneasiness. She adopted a cheering tone, and the conversation drifted into other channels.
While Diana's concern for her friend's altered health was yet a new feeling, she found herself called upon to attend her father once more in the character of a ministering angel. And this time Captain Paget's illness was something more than gout. It was, according to his doctors—he had on this occasion two medical attendants—a general breaking up of the system. The poor old wanderer,—the weary Odysseus, hero of so many trickeries, such varied adventures,—laid himself down to rest, within view of the Promised Land for which his soul yearned.
He was very ill. Gustave Lenoble, who came back to London, did not conceal from Diana that the illness threatened to end fatally. At his instigation the Captain had been removed from Omega Street to pleasant lodgings at the back of Knightsbridge Road, overlooking Hyde Park. This was nearer Bayswater, and it was very pleasant for the fading old worldling. He could see the stream of fashion flowing past as he sat in his easy-chair, propped up with pillows, with the western sunlight on his face. He pointed out the liveries and armorial bearings; and told many scandalous and entertaining anecdotes of their past and present owners to Gustave Lenoble, who devoted much of his time to the solacement of the invalid. Everything that affection could do to smooth this dreary time was done for the tired Ulysses. Pleasant books were read to him; earnest thoughts were suggested by earnest words; hothouse flowers adorned his cheerful sitting-room; hothouse fruits gladdened his eye by their rich warmth of colour, and invited his parched lips to taste their cool ripeness. Gustave had a piano brought in, so that Diana might sing to her father in the dusky May evenings, when it should please him to hear her. Upon the last feeble footsteps of this old man, whose life had been very selfish and wicked, pity waited with a carefulness so fond and tender that he might well mistake it for love. Was it fair that his last days should be so peaceful and luxurious, when many a good man falls down to die in the streets, worn out with the life-long effort to bear the burden laid upon his weary shoulders? In the traditions of the Rabbins it is written that those are the elect of God who suffer His chastisement in the flesh. For the others, for those who on earth drain the goblet of pleasure, and riot in the raptures of sin, for them comes the dread retribution after death. They are plunged in the fire, and driven before the wind; they take the shape of loathsome reptiles, and ascend by infinitesimal degrees through all the grades of creation, until their storm-tost wearied degraded souls re-enter human semblance once more. But even then their old stand-point is not yet regained; their dread penance not yet performed. As men they are the lowest and worst of men; slaves toiling in the desert; dirt to be trampled under the feet of their prosperous brethren. Inch by inch the wretched soul regains its lost inheritance; cycles must elapse before the awful sentence is fulfilled.
Our Christian faith knows no such horrors. Even for the penitent of the eleventh hour there is promise of pardon. The most earnest desire of Diana's heart was that her father should enroll himself amongst those late penitents—those last among the last who crowd in to the marriage feast, half afraid to show their shame-darkened faces in that glorious company.
If we forgive all things to old age, so much the more surely do we forgive all injuries to the fading enemy. That she had suffered much cruelty and neglect at the hands of her father, was a fact that Diana could not forget, any more than she could forget the name which he had given her. It was a part of her life not to be put off or done away with. But in these last days, with all her heart she forgave and pitied him. She pitied him for the crooked paths into which his feet had wandered at the very outset of life, and from which so weak a soul could find no issue. She pitied him for that moral blindness which had kept him pleasantly unconscious of the supreme depth of his degradation—a social Laplander, who never having seen a western summer, had no knowledge that his own land was dark and benighted.
Happily for Diana and her generous lover, the Captain was not a difficult penitent. He was indeed a man who, having lost the capacity and the need for sin, took very kindly to penitence, as a species of sentimental luxury.
"Yes, my dear," he said complacently—for even in the hour of his penitence he insisted on regarding himself as a social martyr—"my life has been a very hard one. Fortune has not been kind to me. In the words of the immortal bard, my lines havenotbeen set in pleasant places. I should have been glad if Providence had allowed me to be a better father to you, a better husband to your poor mother—a better Christian, in fact—and had spared me the repeated humiliation of going through the Insolvent Debtors' Court. It is not always easy to understand the justice of these things: and it has often appeared to me that something of the favouritism which is the bane of our governments on earth must needs obtain at a higher tribunal. One man enters life with an entailed estate worth seventy thousand a-year, while another finds himself in the hands of the Jews before he is twenty years of age. 'There's something in this world amiss shall be unriddled by-and-by,' as the poet observes. The circumstances of my own existence I have ever regarded as dark and enigmatic. And, indeed, the events of this life are altogether inexplicable, my love. There is that fellow Sheldon, now, who began life as a country dentist, a man without family or connections, who—well, I will not repine. If I am spared to behold my daughter mistress of a fine estate, although in a foreign country, I can depart in peace. But you must have a house in town, my dear. Yes, London must be your head-quarters. You must not be buried alive in Normandy. There is no place like London. Take the word of a man who has seen the finest Continental cities, and lived in them—that is the point, my love—lived in them. For a fine afternoon in the beginning of May, an apartment in the Champs Elysées, or the Boulevard, is an earthly paradise; but the Champs Elysées in a wet December—the Boulevard in a sweltering August! London is the only spot upon earth that is never intolerable. And your husband will be a rich man, my dear girl, a really wealthy man; and you must see that he makes a fitting use of his wealth, and does his duty to society. The parable of the Talents, which you were reading to me this afternoon, is a moral lesson your husband must not forget."
After this fashion did the invalid discourse. Gustave and Diana perceived that he still hoped to have his share in their future life, still looked to pleasant days to come in a world which he had loved, not wisely, but too well. Nor could they find it in their hearts to tell him that his journey was drawing to a close, and that on the very threshold of the peaceful home which his diplomatic arts had helped to secure, he was to abandon life's weary race.
They indulged his hopes a little, in order to win him the more easily to serious thoughts; but though at times quite ready to abandon himself to a penitential mood that was almost maudlin, there were other times when the old Adam asserted himself, and the Captain resented this intrusion of serious subjects as a kind of impertinence.
"I am not aware that I am at my last gasp, Diana," he said with dignity, on one of these occasions; "or that I need to be talked to by my own daughter as if I were on my deathbed. I can show you men some years my senior driving their phætons-and-pairs in that Park. The Gospel is all very well in its place—during Sunday-morning service, and after morning prayers, in your good old county families, where the household is large enough to make a fair show at the end of the dining-room, without bringing in hulking lads who smell of the stables: but I consider that when a man is ill, there is a considerable want of tact in bringing the subject of religion before him in any obtrusive manner."
Thus the Captain alternated from sentimental penitence to captious worldliness, during many days and weeks. The business of the Haygarthian inheritance was progressing slowly, but surely. Documents were being prepared, attested copies of certificates of marriages, births, baptisms, and burials were being procured, and all was tending towards the grand result. Once, and sometimes twice a week, M. Fleurus came to see Captain Paget, and discussed the great affair with that invalid diplomatist. The Captain had long ago been aware that in entering upon an alliance with that gentleman, he had invoked the aid of a coadjutor likely to prove too strong for him. The event had justified his fears. M. Fleurus had something of Victor Hugo's famousPoulpein his nature. Powerful as flexible were the arms he stretched forth to grasp all prizes in the way of heirs-at-law and disputed heritages, unclaimed railway-stock, and forgotten consols. If the Captain had not played his cards very cleverly, and contrived to obtain a personal influence over Gustave Lenoble, he might have found himself thrust entirely out of the business by one of the Frenchman's gelatinous arms. Happily for his own success, however, the Captain did obtain a strong hold upon Gustave. This enabled him to protect his own interests throughout the negotiation, and to keep the insidious Fleurus at bay.
"My good friend," he said, in his grand Carlton-House manner, "I am bound to protect the interests of my friend M. Lenoble, in any agreement to be entered upon in this matter. I cannot permit M. Lenoble's generosity or M. Lenoble's inexperience to be imposed upon. My own interests are of secondary importance. That I expect to profit by the extraordinary discovery made by me—by ME—alone and unaided, I do not affect to deny. But I will not profit at the expense of a too generous friend."
"And what recompense am I to have for my work—a work at once painful and impoverishing?" asked the little Frenchman, with an angry and suspicious look. "Do you believe that I do that to amuse me? To run the streets, to go by here, by there, in hunting the papers of that marriage, or this baptism? Believe you that is so agreeable, Monsieur the Captain? No; I desire to be paid for my work. I must have my part in the heritage which I have help to win."
"It is not won yet. We will talk of your recompense by-and-by."
"We will talk of it this instant—upon the field. It must that I comprehend where I am in this affair. I will not of mystifications, of prevarications, of lies—"
"M. Fleurus!" cried the Captain, with a hand stretched towards the bell.
"You will sound—you will chase me! Ah, but no!—you cannot afford to chase me yet. I have to find more papers of baptisms and burials. Go, then, we will talk of this affair as friends."
This friendly talk ended in Captain Paget's complete victory. M. Fleurus consented to accept his costs out of pocket in the present, and three per cent, of the heritage in the future. It was further agreed that the Captain should select the English attorney who should conduct M. Lenoble's case in the Court of Chancery.
This conversation occurred at Rouen, and a day or two afterwards the necessary document was drawn up. Gustave pledged himself to pay over a fourth share of the Haygarthian fortune to Horatio Paget, and three per cent, upon the whole amount to Jean François Fleurus. The document was very formal, very complete; but whether such an agreement would hold water, if Gustave Lenoble should choose to contest it, was open to question.
The solicitor to whom Horatio Paget introduced M. Lenoble was a Mr. Dashwood, of the firm of Dashwood and Vernon; a man whom the Captain had known in the past, and from whom he had received good service in some of the most difficult crises of his difficult career. To this gentleman he confided the conduct of the case; and explained his apprehensions with regard to the two Sheldons.
"You see, as the case now stands, they think they have the claimant to this money in Miss Halliday—Sheldon's stepdaughter. But if they got an inkling of Susan Meynell's marriage—and, in point of fact—the actual state of the case—they might try to get hold of my friend, Gustave Lenoble. They couldnotget hold of him, mind you, Dashwood, but they would try it on, and I don't want trying on of that kind."
"Of course not. I know Sheldon, of Gray's Inn. He is rather—well, sayshady. That's hardly an actionable epithet, and it expresses what I mean. Your friend's case seems to me tolerably clear. That little Frenchman is useful, but officious. It is not a speculative affair, I suppose? There is money to meet the current expenses of the business?"
"Yes, there is money. Within reasonable limits my friend is prepared to pay for the advancement of his claims."
After this the Haygarthian business progressed, slowly, quietly. The work was up to this point underground work. There were still papers wanting—final links of the chain to be fitted together; and to the fitting of these links Messrs. Dashwood and Vernon devoted themselves, in conjunction with M. Fleurus.
This was how matters stood when Captain Paget drooped and languished, and was fain to abandon all active share in the struggle.
While the invalid in the pleasant lodgings overlooking Hyde Park grew day by day weaker, there was a change as marked in the bright young creature whose loving spirit had first brought the influence of affection to bear upon Diana Paget's character. Charlotte Halliday was ill—very ill. It was with everyday increasing anxiety that Diana watched the slow change—slow in its progress, but awfully rapid to look back upon. The pain, the regret, with which she noted her father's decay were little indeed compared with the sharp agony which rent her heart as she perceived the alteration in this dear friend, the blighting of this fair young flower.
That the withered leaves of autumn should fall is sad, but natural, and we submit to the gloomy inevitable fact of decay and death. But to see our rose of roses, the pride and glory of the garden, fade and perish in its midsummer prime, is a calamity inexplicable and mysterious. Diana watched her father's decline with a sense of natural sorrow and pity; but there was neither surprise nor horror in the thought that for him the end of all things was drawing nigh. How different was it with Charlotte—with that happy soul for whom life and love wore their brightest smile, before whose light joyous footsteps stretched so fair a pathway!
The illness, whatever it was—and neither Mr. Sheldon nor the portly and venerable physician whom he called in could find a name for it—crept upon the patient with stealthy and insidious steps. Dizziness, trembling, faintness; trembling, faintness, dizziness; the symptoms alternated day by day. Sometimes there was a respite of a few days; and Charlotte—the youthful, the sanguine, the happy—declared that her enemy had left her.
"I am sure mamma is right, Di," she said on these occasions. "My nerves are the beginning and end of the mischief; and if I could get the better of my nerves, I should be as well as ever. I don't wonder that the idea of my symptoms makes mamma almost cross. You see, she has been accustomed to have the symptoms all to herself; and for me to plagiarise them, as it were, must seem quite an impertinence. For a strong young thing like me, you know, Di dear—who have only just broken myself of plunging downstairs two and three steps at a time, and plunging upstairs in the same vulgar manner—to intrude on mamma's shattered nerves, and pirate mamma's low spirits, is utterly absurd and abominable; so I have resolved to look my nerves straight in the face, and get the better of them."
"My darling, you will get the better of them if you try," said Diana, who did at times beguile herself with the hope that her friend's ailments were mental rather than bodily. "I dare say your monotonous life has something to do with your altered health; you want change of scene, dear."
"Change of scene, when I have you and Valentine! No, Di. It would certainly be very nice to have the background shifted now and then; to see Capability Brown's prim gardens melt into Alpine heights or southern vineyards, or even into Russian steppes or Hungarian forests. One does get a little tired oftoujoursBayswater; and Mr. Sheldon; and crimped skate; and sirloin of beef, and the inevitable discussion as to whether it is in a cannibal state of rawness or burnt to a cinder; and the glasses of pale sherry; and the red worsted doyleys and blue finger-glasses; and the almonds and raisins, and crisp biscuits, that nobody ever eats; and the dreary, dreary funereal business of dinner, when we all talk vapid nonsense, with an ever-present consciousness of the parlourmaid. I am tired of the dull dinners, and of mamma's peevish complaints about Ann Woolper's ascendancy downstairs; and of Mr. Sheldon's perpetual newspapers, that crackle, crackle, crackle all the evening through; andsuchpapers!—Money Market Monitor, Stockholder's Vade-Mecum, and all sorts of dreadful things of that kind, with not so much as an interesting advertisement in one of them. I used never to feel these things an annoyance, you know, dear, till I made the acquaintance of my nerves; but from the moment I allowed my nerves to get the better of me, all these trifles have worried and excruciated me. But I am happy with you, darling; and I am happy with Valentine. Poor Valentine!"
She pronounced his name with a sigh; and then, after a pause, repeated mournfully, "Poor Valentine!"
"Why do you speak of him so sadly, dear?" asked Diana, very pale.
"Because—because we have planned such a happy life together, dear, and—"
"Is that a thing to be sad about, darling?"
"And—if it should happen, after all, that we have to part, and he go on alone, the world may seem so sad and lonely to him."
"Charlotte!" cried Diana, with a laugh that was almost choked by a sob, "is this looking your nerves in the face? Why, my dear one, this is indeed plagiarism of your mamma's low spirits. Lotta, you shall have change of air; yes, I am determined on that. The stately physician who came in his carriage the other day, and who looked at your tongue, and said 'Ah!' and then felt your pulse and said 'Ah!' again, and then called for pen-and-ink and wrote a little prescription, is not the doctor we want for you. We want Dr. Yorkshire; we want the breezes from the Yorkshire moors, and the smell of the farmyard, and our dear Aunt Dorothy's sillabubs, and our uncle Joe to take us for long walks across his clover-fields."
"I don't want to go to Newhall, Di. I couldn't bear to leave—him."
"But what is to prevent your meetinghimat the white gate this time, as you met him last October? Might not accident takehimto Huxter's Cross again? The archæological work—of which we have heard no more, by the bye—might necessitate further investigations in that district. If you will go to Newhall, Lotta, I will pledge myself for Mr. Hawkehurst's speedy appearance at the white gate you have so often described to me."
"My dearest Di, you are all kindness; but even if I were inclined to go to Newhall, I doubt if mamma or Mr. Sheldon would like me to go."
"I am sure they would be pleased with any arrangement that was likely to benefit your health. But I will talk to your mamma about it. I have set my heart on your going to Newhall."
Miss Paget lost no time in carrying out her idea. She took possession of Georgy that afternoon, while teaching her a new stitch intricot, and succeeded in impressing her with the conviction that change of air was necessary for Charlotte.
"But you don't think Lotta really ill?" asked Mrs. Sheldon, nervously.
"I trust she is not really ill, dear Mrs. Sheldon; but I am sure she is much changed. In talking to her, I affect to think that her illness is only an affair of the nerves; but I sadly fear that it is something more than that."
"But what is the matter with her?" exclaimed Georgy, with a piteous air of perplexity; "that is the question which I am always asking. People can't be ill, you know, Diana, without having something the matter with them; and that is what I can't make out in Charlotte's case. Mr. Sheldon says she wants tone; the physician who came in a carriage and pair, and ought to know what he is talking about, says there is a lack of vigour. But what does that all amount to? I'm sure I've wanted tone all my life. Perhaps there never was a creature so devoid of tone as I am; and the internal sinking I feel just before luncheon is something that no one but myself can realize. I dare say Lotta is not so strong as she might be; but I do not see that she can be ill, unless her illness is something definite. My poor first husband's illness, now, was the kind of thing that any one could understand—bilious fever. The merest child knows what it is to be bilious, and the merest child knows what it is to be feverish. There can be nothing mysterious in bilious fever."
"But, dear Mrs. Sheldon," said Diana, gravely, "don't you think that the weakness of constitution which rendered Charlotte's father liable to be taken off in the prime of life by a fever is a weakness that Charlotte may possibly have inherited?"
"Good heavens, Diana!" cried Georgy, with sudden terror; "you don't mean to say that you think my Charlotte is going to die?"
It was but one step with Mrs. Sheldon from peevish incredulity to frantic alarm; and Diana found it as difficult to tranquillise her newly-awakened fears as it had been to rouse her from absolute apathy.
Change of air—yes, of course—Charlotte must have change of air that instant. Let a cab be sent for immediately to take them to the terminus. Change of air, of course. To Newhall—to Nice—to the Isle of Wight—to Malta; Mrs. Sheldon had heard of people going to Malta. Where should they go? Would Diana advise, and send for a cab, and pack a travelling bag without an instant's delay? The rest of the things could be sent afterwards. What did luggage matter, when Charlotte's life was at stake?
At this point a flood of tears happily relieved poor Georgy's excited feelings, and then common sense and Diana Paget came to the rescue.
"My dear Mrs. Sheldon," she said, with a quiet cheerful tone that went far to reassure the excited lady, "in the first place we must, above all things, refrain from any appearance of alarm. Her illness may, after all, be only an affair of the nerves; and there is certainly no cause for immediate fear."
Georgy was tranquillised, and agreed to take matters quietly. She promised to arrange Charlotte's departure for Newhall, with Mr. Sheldon, that evening.
"Of course, you know, my dear, I like to consult him about everything," she said, apologetically. "It is a duty which one owes one's husband, you know, and a duty which, as a young woman about to marry, I cannot too much impress upon you; but in this case it is quite a matter of form: Mr. Sheldon never has objected to Charlotte's going to Newhall, and he is not likely to object now."
The event proved Mrs. Sheldon mistaken as to this matter. Georgy proposed the visit to Newhall that evening, while the two girls were strolling listlessly in the dusky garden, and Mr. Sheldon most decidedly rejected the proposition.
"If she wants change of air—and Dr. Doddleson recommended nothing of the kind—Newhall is not the place for her."
"Why not, dear?"
"It is too cold. Northerly aspect—no shelter—three hundred feet aboveYork minster."
"But Dorothy Mercer is such a kind motherly creature; she'd delight in nursing Lotta."
"Yes," answered Mr. Sheldon, with a laugh, "and in quacking her. I know what those good motherly creatures are when they get an excuse for dosing some unhappy victim with their quack nostrums. If Charlotte went to Newhall, Mrs. Mercer would poi—would make her ten times worse than she is with old woman's remedies. Besides, as I said before, the place is too cold. That is a conclusive argument, I suppose?"
He said this with some impatience of tone and manner. There was a haggard look in his face, a hurried harassed manner pervading him this evening, which had been growing upon him of late. Georgy was too slow of perception to remark this; but Diana Paget had remarked it, and had attributed the change in the stockbroker's manner to a blending of two anxieties.
"He is anxious about money matters," she had said to herself, "and he is anxious about Charlotte's health. His lips, moving in whispered calculations, as he sits brooding by the fire, tell me of the first anxiety; his eyes, wandering furtively to his step-daughter's face every now and then, tell me of the second."
This furtive anxiety of Mr. Sheldon's increased Diana Paget's anxiety. This man, who had a certain amount of medical knowledge, could no doubt read the diagnostics of that strange insidious illness, which had, as yet, no name. Diana, furtively watching his furtive looks, told herself that he read of danger.
"If Charlotte wants change of air, let her go to Hastings," he said; "that is the kind of place for an invalid. I want rest myself; and there's such utter stagnation in the City nowadays that I can very well afford to give myself a holiday. We'll run down to Hastings, or the immediate neighbourhood of Hastings, for a week or two."
"O Philip, how kind and considerate you are! I am sure, as I was observing to Miss Paget only today, you—"
"Ah, by the bye, there's Miss Paget. Is it absolutely necessary that MissPaget should go to Hastings with us?"
"Well, dear, you see she has so kindly desired to remain with me for the quarter, so as to give me time to turn round, you know, with regard to caps and summer things, and so on—for, really, she has such taste, and does strike out such excellent ideas about turning, and dipping, and dyeing, that I don't know what will become of me when she leaves us; and it would look so pointed to—"
"Yes; she had better go with us. But why all this fuss about Charlotte?Who put it into your head that she wants change of air?"
Mr. Sheldon evidently considered it an established fact that any idea in his wife's head must needs have been put there by someone or other.
"Well, you see, Diana and I were talking of Lotta this afternoon, andDiana quite alarmed me."
"How so?" asked Mr. Sheldon, with a quick frown.
"Why, she said it was evident, by the fact of poor dear Tom's dying of a fever, that his constitution must have been originally weak. And she said that perhaps Charlotte had inherited Tom's weak constitution—and frightened me dreadfully."
"There is no occasion for you to be frightened; Charlotte will get on very well, I dare say, with care. But Miss Paget is a very sensible young woman, and is right in what she says. Charlotte's constitution is not strong."
"O Philip!" said Georgy, in a faint wailing voice.
"I dare say she will live to follow you and me to our graves," said Mr.Sheldon, with a hard laugh. "Ah, here she is!"
Here she was, coming towards the open window near which her stepfather sat. Here she was, pale and tired, with her sauntering walk, dressed in white, and spectral in the gloaming. To the sad eyes of her mother she looked like a ghost. To the eyes of Philip Sheldon, a man not prone to poetic fancies, she looked even more ghostlike.
Since the beginning of her illness, Charlotte Halliday had been the object and subject of many anxious thoughts in the minds of several people. That her stepfather had his anxieties about her—anxieties which he tried to hide—was obvious to the one person in the Bayswater villa who noted his looks, and tried to read the thoughts they indicated.
Mrs. Sheldon's alarm, once fairly awakened, was not to be lulled to rest. And in Valentine Hawkehurst's heart there was an aching pain—a dull dead load of care, which had never been lightened from the hour when he first perceived the change in his dear one's face.
There was one other person, an inhabitant of the Bayswater villa, who watched Charlotte Halliday at this time with a care as unresting as the care of mother or stepfather, bosom friend or plighted lover. This person was Ann Woolper. Mrs. Woolper had come to the villa prepared to find in Miss Halliday a frivolous self-satisfied young person, between whom and an old broken-down woman like herself there could be no sympathy. She had expected to be contemptuously—or, at the best, indifferently—entreated by the prosperous well-placed young lady, whom Mr. Sheldon had spoken of as a good girl, as girls go; a vague species of commendation, which, to the mind of Mrs. Woolper, promised very little.
As clearly as Philip Sheldon dared express his wishes with regard to Charlotte Halliday, he had expressed them to Ann Woolper. What he would fain have said, was, "Watch my stepdaughter, and keep me well acquainted with every step she takes." Thus much he dared not say; but by insinuating that Tom Halliday's daughter was frivolous and reckless, and that her lover was not to be trusted, he had contrived to put Mrs. Woolper on thequi vive.
"Mr. Philip's afraid she may go and marry this young man on the sly, before he's got the means to support a wife," she said to herself, as she meditated upon the meaning of her master's injunctions; "and well he may be. There's no knowing what young women are up to nowadays; and the more innocent and inexperienced a young woman is, the more she wants looking after. And Miss Georgy Craddock always was a poor fondy, up to naught but dressing herself fine, and streaming up and down Barlingford High Street with her old schoolfellows. Such as she ain't fit to be trusted with a daughter; and Mr. Philip knows that. He always was a deep one. But I'm glad he looks after Missy: there's many men, having got fast hold of th' father's brass, would let th' daughter marry Old Scratch, for the sake of gettin' rid of her."
This is how Mrs. Woolper argued the matter. She came of a prudent race; and anything like prudence seemed to her a commendable virtue. She wished to think well of her master; for her he had been a Providence in the hour of calamity and old age. Where else could she look, if not to him? And to suspect him, or think ill of him, was to reject the one refuge offered to her distress. A magnanimous independence of spirit is not an easy virtue for the old and friendless and poor. The drowning wretch will scarcely question the soundness of the plank that sustains him upon the storm-tossed billows; nor was Mrs. Woolper inclined to question the motives of the man to whom she now owed her daily bread.
It is possible that before invoking Mrs. Woolper from the ashes of the past to take her seat by the hearthstone of the present, Mr. Sheldon may have contemplated the question of her return in all its bearings, and may have assured himself that she was his own, by a tie not easily broken—his bond-slave, fettered hand and foot by the bondage of necessity.
"What choice can she have, except the choice between my house and the workhouse?" he may naturally have asked himself; "and is it likely she will quarrel with her bread-and-butter in order to fall back upon dry bread?" Mr. Sheldon, contemplating this and all other questions from his one unchanging standpoint, may reasonably have concluded that Mrs. Woolper would do nothing opposed to her own interests; and that so long as it suited her interest to remain at the Lawn, and to serve him, she would there remain, his docile and unquestioning slave.
The influence of affection, the force of generous impulse, were qualities that did not come into Mr. Sheldon's calculations upon this subject. His addition and subtraction, division and multiplication, were all based on one system.
That happy and unconscious art by which Charlotte Halliday made herself dear to all who knew her had a speedy effect upon the old housekeeper. The girl's amiable consideration for her age and infirmities; the pretty affectionate familiarity with which she treated this countrywoman, who had known her father, and who could talk to her of Yorkshire and Yorkshire people, soon made their way to Nancy Woolper's heart of hearts. For Miss Halliday to come to the housekeeper's room with some message from her mother, and to linger for a few minutes' chat, was a delight to Mrs. Woolper. She would have detained the bright young visitant for hours instead of minutes, if she could have found any excuse for so doing. Nor was there any treason against Mr. Sheldon in her growing attachment to his stepdaughter. Whenever Nancy spoke of that master and benefactor, she spoke with unfeigned gratitude and affection.
"I nursed your step-papa as a baby, Miss Halliday," she said very often on these occasions. "You wouldn't think, to look at him now, that he ever wasthat, would you? But he was one of the finest babies you could wish to see—tall, and strong, and with eyes that pierced one through, they were so bright and big and black. He was rather stubborn-spirited with his teething; but what baby isn't trying at such times? I had rare work with him, I can tell you, Miss, walking him about of nights, and jogging him till there wasn't a jog left in me, as you may say, from sleepiness. I often wonder if he thinks of this now, when I see him looking so grave and stern. But, you see, being jogged doesn't impress the mind like having to jog; and though I can bring that time back as plain as if it was yesterday, with the very nursery I slept in at Barlingford, and the rushlight in a tall iron cage on the floor, and the shadow of the cage on the bare whitewashed walls—it's clean gone out of his mind, I dare say."
"I'm afraid it has, Nancy."
"But, O, I was fond of him, Miss Halliday; and what I went through with him about his teeth made me only the fonder of him. He was the first baby I ever nursed, you see, and the last; for before Master George came to town I'd taken to the cooking, and Mrs. Sheldon hired another girl as nurse; a regular softyshewas, and it isn't her fault that Master George has got anything christian-like in the way of a back, for the way she carried that blessed child used to make my blood run cold."
Thus would Mrs. Woolper discourse whenever she had a fair excuse for detaining Miss Halliday in her comfortable apartment. Charlotte did not perceive much interest in these reminiscences of Mr. Sheldon's infancy, but she was much too kind to bring them abruptly to a close by any show of impatience. When she could get Nancy to talk of Barlingford and Hyley, and the people whom Charlotte herself had known as a child, the conversation was really interesting; and these recollections formed a link between the old woman and the fair young damsel.
When the change arose in Charlotte's health and spirits, Mrs. Woolper was one of the first to perceive it. She was skilled in those old woman's remedies which Mr. Sheldon held in such supreme contempt, and she would fain have dosed the invalid with nauseous decoctions of hops, or home-brewed quinine. Charlotte appreciated the kindness of the intent, but she rebelled against the home-brewed medicines, and pinned her faith to the more scientific and less obnoxious preparations procured from the chemist's.
For some time Nancy made light of the girl's ailments, though she watched her with unfailing attention.
"You ain't a-done growing yet, miss, I'll lay," she said.
"But I'm more than twenty-one, Nancy. People don't grow after they're of age, do they?"
"I've known them as have, miss; I don't say it's common, but it has been done. And then there's the weakness that comes after you've done growing. Girls of your age are apt to be faint and lollopy-like, as you may say; especially when they're stived up in a smoky place like London. You ought to go to Hyley, miss, where you was born; that's the place to set you up."
The time had come when the change was no longer matter for doubt. Day by day Charlotte grew weaker and paler; day by day that bright and joyous creature, whose presence had made an atmosphere of youth and gladness even in that prim dwelling-place, receded farther into the dimness of the past; until to think of what she had been seemed like recalling the image of the dead. Nancy marked the alteration with a strange pain, so sharp, so bitter, that its sharpness and bitterness were a perpetual perplexity to her.
"If the poor dear young thing is meant to go, there's no need for me to fret about it all day long, and wake up sudden in the night with cold water standing out upon my forehead at the thought of it. I haven't known her six months; and if she is pretty and sweet-spoken, it's not my place to give way at the thoughts of losing her. She's not my own flesh and blood; and I've sat by to watch them go, times and often, without feeling as I do when I see the change in her day after day. Why should it seem so dreadful to me?"
Why indeed? This was a question for which Mrs. Woolper could find no answer. She knew that the pain and horror which she felt were something more than natural, but beyond this point her thoughts refused to travel. A superstitious feeling arose at this point, to usurp the office of reason, and she accounted for the strangeness of Miss Halliday's illness as she might have done had she lived in the sixteenth century, and been liable to the suspicion of nocturnal careerings on broomsticks.
"I'm sorry Mr. Philip's house should be unlucky to that sweet young creature," she said to herself. "It was unlucky to the father; and now it seems as if it was going to be unlucky to the daughter. And Mr. Philip won't be any richer for her death. Mrs. Sheldon has told me times and often that all Tom Halliday's money went to my master when she married him, and he has doubled and trebled it by his cleverness. Miss Charlotte's death wouldn't bring him a sixpence."
This was the gist of Mrs. Woolper's meditations very often nowadays. But the strange sense of perplexity, the nameless fear, the vague horror, were not to be banished from her mind. A sense of some shapeless presence for ever at her side haunted her by day and night. What was it? What did its presence portend? It was as if a figure, shrouded from head to foot, was there, dark and terrible, at her elbow, and she would not turn to meet the horror face to face. Sometimes the phantom hand lifted a corner of the veil, and the shade said, "Look at me! See who and what I am! You have seen me before. I am here again! and this time you shall not refuse to meet me face to face! I am the shadow of the horror you suspected in the past!"
The shadowy fears which oppressed Mrs. Woolper during this period did not in any way lessen her practical usefulness. From the commencement of Charlotte's slow decline she had shown herself attentive, and even officious, in all matters relating to the invalid. With her own hands she decanted the famous port which Georgy fetched from the particular bin in Mr. Sheldon's carefully arranged cellar. When the physician was called in, and wrote his harmless little prescription, it was Mrs. Woolper who carried the document to the dispensing chemist, and brought back the innocent potion, which might, peradventure, effect some slight good, and was too feeble a decoction to do any harm. Charlotte duly appreciated all this kindness; but she repeatedly assured the housekeeper that her ailments were not worthy of so much care.
It was Mrs. Woolper whom Mr. Sheldon employed to get lodgings for the family, when it had been ultimately decided that a change to the seaside was the best cure for Miss Halliday.
"I am too busy to go to Hastings myself this week," he said; "but I shall be prepared to spend a fortnight there after next Monday. What I want you to do, Nancy, is to slip down tomorrow, with a second-class return-ticket, and look about for a nice place for us. I don't care about being in Hastings; there's too much cockneyism in the place at this time of year. There's a little village called Harold's Hill, within a mile or so of St. Leonard's—a dull, out-of-the-way place, but rustic and picturesque, and all that kind of thing—the sort of place that women like. Now, I'd rather stay at that place than at Hastings. So you can take a fly at the station, drive straight to Harold's Hill, and secure the best lodgings you can get."
"You think as the change of air will do Miss Halliday good?" asked Mrs. Woolper anxiously, after she had promised to do all her kind master required of her.
"Do I think it will do her good? Of course I do. Sea-air and sea-bathing will set her up in no time; there's nothing particular the matter with her."
"No, Mr. Philip; that's what bothers me about the whole thing. There's nothing particular the matter with her; and yet she pines and dwindles, and dwindles and pines, till it makes one's heart ache to see her."
Philip Sheldon's face darkened, and he threw himself back in his chair with an impatient movement. If he had chosen to do so, he could have prevented that darkening of his face; but he did not consider Mrs. Woolper a person of sufficient importance to necessitate the regulation of his countenance. What was she but an ignorant, obstinate old woman, who would most probably perish in the streets if he chose to turn her out of doors? There are men who consider their clerks and retainers such very dirt, that they would continue the forging of a bill of exchange, or complete the final touches of a murder, with a junior clerk putting coals on the fire, or an errand-boy standing cap in hand on the threshold of the door. They cannot realize the fact that dirt such as this is flesh and blood, and may denounce them by-and-by in a witness-box.
Of all contingencies Mr. Sheldon least expected that this old woman could prove troublesome to him—this abject wretch, whose daily bread depended on his will. He could not imagine that there are circumstances under which such abject creatures will renounce their daily bread, and die of hunger, rather than accept the means of life from one hateful hand.
"If you want to know anything about Miss Halliday's illness," he said in his hardest voice, and with his hardest look, "you had better apply to Dr. Doddleson, the physician who has prescribed for her. I do not attend her, you see, and I am in no way responsible for her health. When I was attending her father you favoured me by doubting my skill, if I judged rightly as to your tone and manner on one occasion. I don't want to be brought to book by you, Mrs. Woolper, about Miss Halliday's altered looks or Miss Halliday's illness; I have nothing to do with either."
"How should I think you had, sir? Don't be angry with me, or hard upon me, Mr. Phil. I nursed you when you was but a baby, and you're nearer and dearer to me than any other master could be. Why, I have but to shut my eyes now, and I can feel your little hand upon my neck, as it used to lie there, so soft and dear. And then I look down at the hand on the table, strong and dark, and clenched so firm, and I ask myself, Can it be the same? For the sake of that time, Mr. Phil, don't be hard upon me. There's nothing I wouldn't do to serve you; there's nothing you could do that would turn me from you. There's no man living in this world, sir, that oughtn't to be glad to know of one person that nothing can turn from him."
"That's a very fine sentiment, my good soul," replied Mr. Sheldon coolly; "but, you see, it's only anex partestatement; and as the case stands there is no opportunity for the display of those fine feelings you talk about. You happen to want a home in your old age, and I happen to be able to give you a home. Under such circumstances, your own good sense will show you that all sentimental talk about standing by me, and not turning away from me, is absolute bosh."
The old woman sighed heavily. She had offered her master a fidelity which involved the abnegation of all impulses of her own heart and mind, and he rejected her love and her service. And then, after the first dreary sense of his coldness, she felt better pleased that it should be so. The man who spoke to her in this harsh uncompromising way could have no cause to fear her. In the mind of such a man there could surely be no secret chamber within which she had, with his knowledge, almost penetrated.
"I won't trouble you any more, sir," she said mournfully. "I dare say I'm a foolish old woman."
"You are, Nancy. We don't get wiser as we grow older, you see; and when we let our tongues wag, we're apt to talk nonsense. The quieter you keep your tongue, the better for yourself, in more ways than one. To a useful old woman about the place I've no objection; but a chattering old woman I will not have at any price."
After this everything was settled in the most agreeable manner. Nancy Woolper's journey to Hastings was fully arranged; and early the next morning she started, brisk and active, in spite of her sixty-eight years of age. She returned at night, having secured very pleasant lodgings at the village of Harold's Hill.
"And a very sweet place it is, my dear Miss Lotta," she said to Charlotte the next day, when she described her adventures. "The apartments are at a farmhouse overlooking the sea; and the smell of the cows under your windows, and the sea-breezes blowing across the farmyard, can't fail to bring the colour back to your pretty cheeks, and the brightness back to your pretty eyes."
The idea of this visit to the Sussex village by the sea seemed delightful to every one except Gustave Lenoble, who was still in town, and who thought it a hard thing that he should be deprived of Diana's society during an entire fortnight, for the sake of this sickly Miss Halliday.
For the rest, there was hope and gladness in the thought of this change of dwelling. Charlotte languished for fresher breezes and more rustic prospects than the breezes and prospects of Bayswater; Diana looked to the sea-air as the doctor of doctors for her fading friend; and Valentine cherished the same hope.
On Valentine Hawkehurst the burden of an unlooked-for sorrow had weighed very heavily. To see this dear girl, who was the beginning, middle, and end of all his hopes, slowly fading before his eyes, was, of all agonies that could have fallen to his lot, the sharpest and most bitter. Not Ugolino sitting silent amidst his famishing children—not Helen, when she would fain that the tempest had swept her from earth's surface on that evil day when she was born—not Penelope, when she cried on Diana, the high-priestess of death, to release her from the weariness of her days—not Agamemnon, when the fatal edict had gone forth, and his fair young daughter looked into his face, and asked him if it was true that she was to die—not one of these typical mourners could have suffered a keener torture than that which rent this young man's heart, as he marked the stealthy steps of the Destroyer drawing nearer and nearer the woman he loved. Of all possible calamities, this was the last he had ever contemplated. Sometimes, in moments of doubt or despondency, he had thought it possible that poverty, the advice of friends, caprice or inconstancy on the part of Charlotte herself, should sever them. But among the possible enemies to his happiness he had never counted Death. What had Death to do with so fair and happy a creature as Charlotte Halliday? she who, until some two months before this time, might have been the divine Hygieia in person—so fresh was her youthful bloom, so buoyant her step, so bright her glances. Valentine's hardest penance was the necessity for the concealment of his anxiety. The idea that Charlotte's illness might be—nay, must be—for the greater part an affair of the nerves was always paramount in his mind. He and Diana had talked of the subject together whenever they found an opportunity for so doing, and had comforted themselves with the assurance that the nerves alone were to blame; and they were the more inclined to think this from the conduct of Dr. Doddleson, on that physician's visits to Miss Halliday. Mrs. Sheldon had been present on each occasion, and to Mrs. Sheldon alone had the physician given utterance to his opinion of the case. That opinion, though expressed with a certain amount of professional dignity, amounted to very little. "Our dear young friend wanted strength; and what we had to do was to give our dear young friend strength—vital power. Yes—er—um, that was the chief point. And what kind of diet might our dear young friend take now? Was it a light diet, a little roast mutton—not too much done, but not underdone? O dear, no. And a light pudding? what he would call—if he might be permitted to have his little joke—a nursery pudding." And then the old gentleman had indulged in a senile chuckle, and patted Charlotte's head with his fat old fingers. "And our dear young friend's room, now, was it a large room?—good! and what was the aspect now, south?—good again! nothing better, unless, perhaps, south-west; but, of course, everyone's rooms can't look south-west. A little tonic draught, and gentle daily exercise in that nice garden, will set our dear young friend right again. Our temperament is nervous we are a sensitive plant, and want care." And then the respectable septuagenarian took his fee, and shuffled off to his carriage. And this was all that Mrs. Sheldon could tell Diana, or Nancy Woolper, both of whom questioned her closely about her interview with the doctor. To Diana and to Valentine there was hope to be gathered from the very vagueness of the physician's opinion. If there had been anything serious the matter, the medical adviser must needs have spoken more seriously. He came again and again. He found the pulse a little weaker, the patient a little more nervous, with a slight tendency to hysteria, and so on; but he still declared that there were no traces of organic disease, and he still talked of Miss Halliday's ailments with a cheery easy-going manner that was very reassuring.
In his moments of depression Valentine pinned his faith upon Dr. Doddleson. Without organic disease, he told himself, his darling could not perish. He looked for Dr. Doddleson's name in the Directory, and took comfort from the fact of that physician's residence in a fashionable West End square. He took further comfort from the splendour of the doctor's equipage, as depicted to him by Mrs. Sheldon; and from the doctor's age and experience, as copiously described by the same lady.
"There is only one fact that I have ever reproached myself with in relation to my poor Tom," said Georgy, who, in talking to strangers of her first husband, was apt to impress them with the idea that she was talking of a favourite cat; "and that is, the youthfulness of the doctor Mr. Sheldon employed. Of course I am well aware that Mr. Sheldon would not have consulted the young man if he had not thought him clever; but I could lay my head upon my pillow at night with a clearer conscience if poor Tom's doctor had been an older and more experienced person. Now, that's what I like about Dr. Doddleson. There's a gravity—a weight—about a man of that age which inspires one with immediate confidence. I'm sure the serious manner with which he questioned me about Lotta's diet, and the aspect of her room, was quite delightful."
In Dr. Doddleson, under Providence, Valentine was fain to put his trust. He did not know that the worthy doctor was one of those harmless inanities who, by the aid of money and powerful connections, are sometimes forced into a position which nature never intended them to occupy. Among the real working men of that great and admirable brotherhood, the medical profession, Dr. Doddleson had no rank; but he was the pet physician of fashionable dowagers suffering from chronic laziness or periodical attacks of ill-humour. For the spleen or the vapours no one was a better adviser than Dr. Doddleson. He could afford to waste half an hour upon the asking of questions which the fair patient's maid might as well have asked, and the suggestions of remedies which any intelligent abigail could as easily have suggested. Elderly ladies believed in him because he was pompous and ponderous, lived in an expensive neighbourhood, and drove a handsome equipage. He wore mourning-rings left him by patients who never had anything particular the matter with them, and who, dying of sheer old age, or sheer over-eating, declared with their final gasp that Dr. Doddleson had been the guardian angel of their frail lives during the last twenty years.
This was the man who, of all the medical profession resident in London, Mr. Sheldon had selected as his stepdaughter's medical adviser in a case so beyond common experience, that a man of wide practice and keen perception was especially needed for its treatment.