CHAPTER XI.MERCEDES.
For the first time in his life Dr. Paull felt that he had considerably lost in his respect for himself, and he set himself to inquire into his mental and moral condition.
“I have lowered myself in some way,” he thought. (He was thinking of self in a strictly professional sense, be it understood.) “It has been the doctor running after the patient, not the patient seeking the doctor. It must not occur again. I know Imeantwell—but it must not occur again.”
After this neat little compromise with his conscience, which perhaps was rusty for want of work and therefore not equal to the occasion, he as it were shook hands with himself, and set to work again, ignoring the question of unhappy young princesses with neglectful husbands and doubtful counts in dangerous proximity.
It was the old life again. Patients at home in the morning, hospital work later, later still consultations or sudden calls. Then evenings spent quietly with Ralph, talking over his late tour with the geologist and helping him to arrange his specimens.
The boy was never so happy as when his father was sharing his life, thus. But he loved him unselfishly,and the seed of doubt whether that father was as well or as happy as he should be was sown, and had already fructified.
“Father,” he said suddenly, one evening, “why have you given up going out?”
“My dear boy, I cannot give up what I never began,” said Dr. Paull, startled so that his pale face flushed.
“You went to the opera and to parties,” persisted Ralph. “And you looked so jolly then. You don’t now. You are quite different.”
“Don’t let us talk nonsense,” said Hugh, annoyed.
Could it be true that he looked brighter after mixing with a crowd of silly people, who lived to waste time in amusing themselves?
The very next morning he was down to breakfast somewhat earlier, to keep an appointment with a patient, when Ralph came in, all eagerness. A letter was in his hand.
“From the princess, father,” he said. “A footman brought it, and is waiting for an answer.”
“Well, let him wait,” said Hugh, once more flushing with annoyance. (Why his son’sempressement?)
“He says one word will do,” said Ralph, pleadingly.
“What is the matter with you?” asked his father, with an embarrassed laugh, taking up the dainty little note addressed to “Monsieur le Docteur Paull,” in a weak but pretty handwriting. “There,” he said, suddenly, by some curious impulse handing the open note to the lad. “I don’t know what to do. You shall decide.”
The note contained but a few words:
“Cher Monsieur,—I will ask you as a great kindness to me to give me your advice, when and how it pleases you. Receive my compliments.
“Mercedes(Princess Andriocchi).”
“Mercedes(Princess Andriocchi).”
“Mercedes(Princess Andriocchi).”
“Mercedes(Princess Andriocchi).”
“Decide?” Ralph stared at his father.
“Shall I go, or not?” said Hugh.
“What else would you do, father?” said his son, astonished.
He scarcely understood—he had never known his father refuse advice to a patient.
“Look here,” said Dr. Paull, throwing himself back in his chair. “This is a fashionable, selfish woman, who has really nothing the matter with her. If I go, it is merely truckling to her position and wealth.”
“Has she consulted you before, then?” said the boy, seriously.
He was naturally serious, and in the most minor matters, which had any reference to his father, he was preternaturally so.
“No, I have not seen her professionally, exactly,” admitted Hugh.
“You once told me, father, that no man, however gifted in diagnosis, should pronounce upon a patient without making an—what was the word?—an exhaustive examination.”
“Does that mean I ought to go?”
“Why not?”
Hugh looked into the earnest blue eyes which, despite the lad’s years, had still an almost infantine expression.
“Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings one often hears the truth,” he thought.
“I suppose I must go, then,” he said, “although it is most inconvenient,” and abruptly rising he went intothe hall, spoke to the man, and returned pledged to see the princess.
He was set down for a clinical lecture at noon. At eleven he started in his brougham and drove to one of the new roads in South Kensington where the Prince Andriocchi rented a furnished house for the season.
An English groom of the chambers came forward as the door opened.
The princess was at home.
Hugh followed the man, who wore a dress something akin to ordinary levée costume, up the wide staircase, through the large, silent drawing-rooms which were furnished in the Parisian style rather than according to British taste, into a boudoir where he left him.
It was a circular room lighted from above. The ceiling was a dome draped in a peculiar fashion with some soft white stuff in cloud-like puffings; the narrow windows were of pink glass. The carpet was rose-pink with a white flower pattern, the walls were lined with puffings of white and pale pink satin, while the furniture was of pink and white brocade and gilded wood. A few engravings of celebrated pictures stood about on easels; and everywhere, wherever he looked, Hugh saw the choicest flowers; cut flowers in bowls, plants in jardinières. It was a room which was unlike all other rooms he remembered, yet, as he looked around, it struck him that he had seen some room like it somewhere, once. When? How? In a dream?
The sound of a door opening behind him made him turn round, and he saw the princess coming towards him through a conservatory which lay beyond a curtained arch opposite the door by which he had entered.
She was dressed in some floating girlish dress ofsoftly tinted stuffs: she seemed lost in thought—Hugh fancied she was unaware that he was there: she walked slowly and wearily, her eyes cast down—then paused to pick off a dying blossom as she passed between the banks of bloom.
But—she knew! For as she came in she raised her eyes, and the colour rising to her pale cheek she said:
“Ah, I knew you would come!”
It was a strange thing to say; but it was said simply, earnestly, without the slightest tinge of vanity. As for coquetry, no man, looking at that sad, beautiful young face, would have been so lost to all sense of chivalry as to dream of the detestable quality in the presence of this gentle, modest woman.
She did not offer Hugh her hand. She seated herself on a settee, and motioned him to occupy an easy-chair opposite.
“My husband is away,” she said, in her foreign English, looking wistfully at Dr. Paull. “He sent to me the count late last night, to say it was impossible that he should return.”
She was evidently watching for the effect of her communication. But Dr. Paull maintained his professional sphinx-like calm.
“Indeed!” he said. “But you have friends staying with you? You are not alone?”
“I am quite alone,” she said. “But I have always been alone, so that is nothing.”
There was an awkward pause. Hugh hardly knew how to meet these naïve confidences.
“You sent for me?” he began, suggestively.
She looked at him with a peculiar, scrutinising glance for quite half a minute. Then she said:
“Lady Forwood told me you are agoodman.”
This was somewhat disconcerting.
“Lady Forwood is a charming, kind woman,” he said, warmly; “and I am glad that you are such friends.”
“She told me I should tell you everything!” said the girl, clasping her jewelled hands nervously.
“Naturally, of course,” said Hugh, who had rapidly determined to treat the princess’ case, whatever it might prove to be, with bare matter-of-fact common sense: and, as in the case of hysterical subjects, to be unsympathetic—even, if necessary, rough. “A doctor should hear the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, from a patient. Otherwise, he is working in the dark, and might do more harm than good.”
The princess was evidently in earnest about herself. She fixed her eyes intently upon Hugh as he was speaking, listened with all her ears, and when he had ended his somewhat didactic little speech, sighed a little sigh of relief.
“It is a long story,” she began, apologetically.
“We medical men are accustomed to long stories,” said Hugh, “especially from ladies.”
“You do not like ladies?” said the princess, with a smile. (She seemed rather pleased than otherwise.) “I did not like the ladies of my country when I was a child. My mother and father were every day at the Court. Their own palace was a little Court. I was very unhappy. It was there I began todream.”
She hesitated and gave a nervous glance around before she said the word, which, indeed, she spoke with bated breath.
“To dream?” said Dr. Paull, beginning to set downhis new patient among the hysterical category. (When his hysterical patients could find nothing else to complain of, they invariably grumbled about their bad dreams, which were beyond anyone’s power to verify.) “Why, dreams are only imagination. Everyone has bad dreams. Dreams are nothing.”
“Do you think so?” asked the girl, with intense anxiety, with a strained look in her big eyes. “Tell me that again! Tell me dreams arenothing!”
“I do not exactly mean that they arenothing, that is merely an expression to be taken for what it is worth,” said he, impressed by her intensity. “But come, tell me all about these dreams; I am interested in dreams. I wish I could have met you when I was writing a little book about the brain. Your experiences might have been of great use to me. They still will be, if you will tell me all about them.”
She knitted her brow, considered for some moments, then said, with evident effort:
“Tell me, doctor, tell me truly. Do you think there could be two souls in one body, and one soul could be awake when the other was asleep?”
“Is such a wild, horrible idea allowed by your Catholic religion?” asked Hugh, somewhat brusquely. “Do you know, princess, that allowing yourself to think of such things probably causes you these bad dreams?”
She looked at him with a sad smile, and shook her head slowly.
“Ah! you do not know!” she said. He had heard that plaintive tone of voice before from patients suffering acute anguish from deadly disease. “But you are right, monsieur le docteur, I am wrong to say such a thing. It is against my holy faith.”
Her proud humility touched him.
“And I was wrong to ask you such a question,” he said. Then he coaxed her to speak freely to him.
“You dreamt these dreams as a child?” he began. “They ought to be forgotten—dead.”
Then she told him simply, in her imperfect English, what her trouble really was. As a young child, she had been much like other children, without their life and cheerfulness when awake. But no sooner did she sleep than she felt herself surrounded by terrors, vague but horrible; a sense of impending doom seemed to suffocate her, yet some interior feeling made her believe that the doom was just. She heard weeping and lamenting among the dark shadows that surrounded her; and sometimes great eyes, with an expression of frantic appeal, appeared amid the gloom, and haunted her waking thoughts.
“I did think the souls in Purgatory were near me,” she said. “I told the Reverend Mother of the Convent. We children could any of us go to her when we liked, just as to a real mother. Oh, much more! I could never have talked to my mother, the Marquesa, like that.”
“And what did the Reverend Mother say?” asked Hugh, with a suggestion of sarcasm, for he had a good honest British distaste for the conventual system.
“Oh! she laughed at me, and said little children had nothing to do with Purgatory; and she showed me a picture-book,The Cats’ Tea Party, and when a lay sister brought her somebouillon, I had some in a pretty cup.”
“Altogether the bad dreams were rather a good thing than otherwise?” suggested Hugh, almost banteringly,thinking that at least that nun had some common sense, whatever dreamers the rest may have been.
“I had holidays, and the doctor came, and I had more things to eat,” said Mercedes; “and everyone was so kind to me.”
“Did not all that send away the bad dreams?” asked Hugh, still speaking lightly.
“No,” she said, sadly. “Nothing has ever altered them. It is so—always. And I cannot care for my life!”
She spoke with such despair that Hugh was touched. His determination to be harsh wavered, although he was unaware of the fact.
“But, for instance, lately,” he said, thinking of Lady Forwood’s account of a cheery letter, “you have been away in the country, I understand. How did you sleep there?”
“Not at all,” she said. “And it was beautiful! First came the quiet, dark night, with the scent of roses coming in with the cool air, and just a little rustle of the trees outside. Then a grey light, and the young birds twitting (is that the word?) little questions to their parents. Then the old birds began to sing sweet, happy songs, and the day came, first with blue light, then white, then pale rose. Then I got up, and from my window saw the rise of the glorious sun—ah! that waking is better than the sleep you doctors say is good. It isnotgood, to be asleep!”
Her eyes sparkled; her dejection had lifted.
“I cannot agree with you,” said Hugh. “And sleep—good sleep, mind—you must have. But last night—here, in London,—you had no rest?”
“I had my worst-of-all dream!” she said, bitterly. “It has come to me these last years: at first—years back—I waked up crying and miserable, but could not remember. Then I remembered something aboutpistolets. I do not know your English word.”
“Pistols?” said Hugh. He never used the word, or thought of the weapon, without a shudder.
“That is it,” she assented.
“Were you ever frightened by firearms, do you think?” asked Dr. Paull, resolutely suppressing the commencement of the hopelessly wretched mood which inevitably succeeded any suggestion of that past terrible experience. “Sometimes a fright in infancy will reproduce unpleasant impressions.... Do you understand me?”
“I never saw pistolets before that dream,” she said, slowly and solemnly. “I could swear it to you before thebon Dieu, monsieur!”
“I quite believe you,” said Hugh, hurriedly. “There are strange incidents in the lives of young children, and they have curious ideas—science is yet in the dark about these things. But——” He paused and looked almost tenderly at the great, childish, anxious eyes raised to his. “I want to help you,” he said; “but, frankly, it is difficult.”
Then he questioned her as to the drugs physicians had ordered her, and she brought him a pile of prescriptions which proved to him how futile the greatest scientists’ efforts had been to alleviate the torture suffered by this envied, but in reality most pitiable young creature.
She looked so lovely, such a rare blossom of sweet womanhood; and, glancing at her amid her luxurioussurroundings, anyone would have derided the idea of pitying her. But, as Hugh looked at her a strong belief arose in his mind that she was not, in some way, like other people; and that—how or why, he dared not imagine—some blight was upon that fair young head. Possibly some ante-natal occurrence, however remote, might have produced her morbid condition.
As he sat looking at her, thinking deeply, casting about how he could help her, she was watching him hopefully. At their first meeting she had felt a calmed sensation, an access of strength, while talking to him, and since—even when merely remembering or speaking of him.
“Well, monsieur?” she asked at last, with a smile.
He sighed, almost impatiently.
“You expect me to give you medicine?” he asked.
“If you do,monsieur le docteur, I think I could not take it,” she said. “I have had so muchmédécine, and never, never did it take away one dream; no, not one!”
“Then what am I to do for you?” asked Hugh, in his perplexed mood unaware how strange a question this was from an eminent physician to a patient.
She looked at him earnestly, and leaning forward she said, slowly:
“See me—every—day!”
Hugh started. Then he laughed, then checked himself. Was she mad, or only eccentric?
“Why?” he asked. “Why see you every day, especially as you tell me that if I prescribe for you, you will not take my medicine?”
She opened her lips; evidently she would have toldhim—had not some secondary thought arisen to check her confidence, whatever it might be.
“Will you see me every day for one week? then I will tell you,” she said, imploringly. “Lady Forwood said you would be my good friend. Be my good friend, monsieur, and do this!”
It was an embarrassing position; and although Hugh was deeply moved by the girl’s pathetic tone of entreaty, by this almost desperate appeal to him—for that was really what it seemed to be,—he wondered what was behind this strange request. Was Mercedes in the power of one of those two men—the prince and the count,—and unconsciously aiding in some bet or frivolous conspiracy? Or was she herself whimsical and capricious—“hysterical”? No! Those last ideas were treason. Having harboured them for an instant brought back his instinctive faith in the simple young creature.
“I would do what you ask, but really it is not possible, princess,” he said, gently, respectfully. Then he explained how his time was occupied, and gave her a list, jotted down hastily upon a leaf torn out of his pocket-book, of the engagements for the next few days, which could not be cancelled.
She took the list and went over it carefully, in a practical manner, quite unlike that of a hysterical woman.
“I see,” she said. “But, monsieur, the evenings? There is nothing for the evenings.”
Hugh told her that his evenings were sacred to his son.
“I am all that he has,” he said, “both mother and father. His mother died when he was born.”
She asked his age, and Hugh told her.
“Nineteen!” she said, with a little laugh of surprise. “How funny! That is my age. But your son, when is he nineteen? You say, a few days ago? Why, he is older than I am, monsieur? You could be my father.”
“Certainly,” said Hugh, relieved, somehow, of part of the uneasy sensation excited by the situation by this suggestion. “But I confess I thought you older.”
“I was eighteen last March,” she said, gravely. “And my friend, Lady Forwood, was twenty-four.”
Eighteen—and a wife! Hugh looked pityingly at her. It seemed to him that parents who could wed a child of seventeen to a youngrouéof twenty-six were almost criminal in their rashness—or worse than rashness.
“But, your son, he would like to go out?” said the princess. “Monsieur, you and he, can you not come sometimes to Lady Forwood—to Lady Boisville? Then I could see you.”
“Impossible,” said Hugh, suddenly rising. This curious interview had lasted long enough.
“You willnot?”
She sat back on the settee, and to his astonishment, a deathlike pallor spread over her face. A shrunken look aged her sweet youthful features, her eyes seemed to harden and recede beneath her dark eyebrows. His conscience smote him.
“I will try and see you again soon,” he said, lamely.
She raised her eyes languidly. He could not bear to see such abject misery on so young a face.... Young? This girl was younger than Ralph, more than young enough to be his own child. And so alone—and hecould help her; he saw, he felt that there was some strong bond of sympathy between them.
Without further thought, he almost flung himself down upon the settee at her side.
“Suppose I were to see you every day for five days,” he said, with an affectation of amusement, “what good would that do you?”
“You shall see,” she said, reviving somewhat; “I promise you, you shall be astonished.”
“Pleasantly astonished?” he asked. He determined to treat her in a fatherly, indulgent way, as a spoilt child.
“You will see,” she said, nodding her head. “But,”—she seized his hand in hers in a familiar, innocent way which took his breath away for the moment—“youpromise?”
“Promise! What?” he asked, uneasily. Something in the clinging touch of those slender fingers moved him deeply, recalled—what? Sensations long passed and gone, almost forgotten; sensations that stirred his heart to feel the pain of loss.
“Promise to accept the invitations you will receive this week,” she said.
“But where?” he asked.
“Here, to Lady Forwood, to Lady Boisville,” she said.
“Nowhere else?” he asked, gazing wonderingly into her upturned eyes. Had there ever been such beautiful dark eyes in this world before? He believed not. In any case, if such existed, he had never seen them.
“Nowhere else,” she said, earnestly.
“I do not quite understand, but I promise,” he said, rising. “And nowau revoir, princess.”
He bowed low, and hurried away without looking back. He felt shamefaced and guilty: running downstairs more actively than he had run for years past, he came full tilt against the count, who was standing at the foot of the staircase.
Bows, apologies. Then the count asked tenderly about the princess.
“We may hope, now that you have seen her, that our beautiful lady will be better, docteur,” he said, obsequiously. “But how, how do you find her?”
“There is nothing much the matter,” said Hugh, dryly. Then, wondering where the prince was, and how he could “let that fellow come hanging about at all hours,” he hurried out to his carriage.
“Where to, sir?” asked the coachman, leaning over as he came up.
“Where to? The hospital, of course,” said Hugh, getting into his brougham and pulling the door to. What did Fuller, his coachman, mean? He knew his hours well enough. And what was the matter? He was tapping at the glass. Hugh let down a front window, impatiently.
“Did you say to the hospital, sir?”
“Of course!” shouted Hugh.
“It’s half-past twelve, sir,” said the coachman, reproachfully. Had he not sat on his box wondering what had become of his master for five mortal quarters-of-an hour?
“Half-past eleven, you mean!” said Dr. Paull, sternly.
For reply, Fuller pulled out a turnip silver watch.
“It don’t never vary a second, sir,itdon’t,” he said, conclusively.
A glance at his own watch, and Hugh, saying, “You’re right,home,” drew up the window, and threw himself back in consternation.
“Am I mad, or dreaming?” he asked himself. He had missed a lecture for the first time since his appointment ten years ago!