CHAPTER VIII.

GEOFFREY INCLINES TO SUSPICION.

Towards morning self-indulgent habits triumphed over anxious love. After tossing all night in feverish unrest, Mr. Hossack slept soundly till noon; but not a commonplace slumber, for the visions of his head upon his bed were made beautiful to him by the image of his beloved. She was with him in that dream-world where all is smooth and fair as the wide bosom of Danube when no storm-wind ruffles his waters; a world where there were neither sick children nor concerts—nothing but happiness and love.

He awakened himself reluctantly from so sweet a delusion, dressed and breakfasted hurriedly, and went straight to the little draper’s shop at the fag end of Stillmington. After Mrs. Bertram’s gentler manner last night, he felt as if he might venture to approach her. Sorrow had brought them nearer to each other; she who had so sternly repulsed his love had not rejected his sympathy. She had thanked him, even, for his proffered aid, in that thrilling voice which in speech as in song went straight to his heart.

The young woman was behind the counter when he went in, reading a number of the _London Journal_ in pensive solitude.

‘How is the little girl this morning?’ he asked eagerly.

‘O, sir, I’m sorry to say she’s not so well. She was light-headed last night, and her poor mar sat up, and looks as pale as a ghost to-day, and the doctor seemed more serious like. But as mother tells Mrs. Bertram, it’s only scarlatina; it isn’t as if it was scarlet fever, you know.’

The little door of communication between the shop and the staircase opened at this moment, and Jane Bertram’s pale face appeared—how pale and wan! He could not have thought one night’s suffering would have worked such a change.

‘She is worse,’ she said, looking at the girl with haggard eyes that hardly seemed to have sight in them. ‘For God’s sake run for the doctor.’

‘She can’t be so bad as all that. Come, bear up, Mrs. Bertram, that’s a dear,’ answered the girl kindly. ‘You’re so nervous, and you’re not used to illness. I’ll run and fetch Mr. Vincent if you like, but I daresay there’s no need.’

She shuffled on her bonnet as she spoke.

‘I don’t know,’ Mrs. Bertram said helplessly; ‘I don’t know what I ought to do; she was never so ill before.’

She went up-stairs, Geoffrey following, emboldened by pity. He stood by the open door of the little bedroom—commonly furnished, but neat and spotless in its pure drapery of white dimity, its well-scrubbed floor, and freshly-papered wall. The sick child lay with her golden hair spread loosely on the pillow, her blue eyes bright with fever. The landlady sat by the bed, sharing the mother’s watch.

Mrs. Bertram bent over the child, kissed her with fond passionate kisses, and murmured broken words of love, then turned towards the door, surprised to see the intruder.

‘You here!’ she exclaimed, seeing Geoffrey, but with no anger in the sorrowful face.

‘Yes, I want so much to be of use to you. Will you spare me two minutes, in here?’ he asked, pointing to the sitting-room, the door of which stood open. ‘The little girl is safe with our good friend.’

‘Yes,’ the mother answered piteously. ‘I can do nothing for her. Only God can help us—only He who pitied the sinful woman in her agony.’

The words struck strangely on his ear, but he let them pass unnoticed as the wild cry of an almost despairing soul. What should she have to do with sin? she in whose countenance reigned purity and a proud innocence none could dare impeach.

‘I spoke to you last night about getting farther advice,’ he said. ‘Mind, I don’t suppose it’s in the least degree necessary; your child’s recovery is no doubt merely a question of time. These childish fevers must run their course. But I can see that you are unduly anxious. It might be a comfort to you to see another doctor, a man especially experienced in the treatment of children. I knew just such a man—one who has been particularly successful with children; not an eminent man by any means, but one who has worked among the poor, whose heart is in his profession, whose work is really a labour of love. I can speak of him with perfect confidence, for he is my friend, and I know all this to be true. Let me telegraph for him; I am sure that he will come as quickly as an express train can bring him.’

Her eyes brightened a little, and she gave him a look full of gratitude.

‘How good of you to think of this!’ she said. ‘O yes, pray, pray send for him. Such a man as that might save my darling, even if she were in danger, and the doctor here says there is no danger. Pray send for this good man. I am not very rich, but I will gladly pay any fee within my means, and be his debtor for farther payment in the future.’

‘He will not want payment,’ answered Geoffrey, with a smile. ‘He is my friend, and would make a longer journey than from London here to serve me. Rely upon it, he will be with you before this evening. Good-bye, Mrs. Bertram, and try to be hopeful. If I thought there were a better man in all London than the man I am going to summon, rely upon it I would have that better man.’

He gave her his hand, which she did not refuse; at least, she let her feverish little hand rest in his for one brief delicious moment, perhaps unconsciously. But he felt that he had gained ground since that day in the garden. He had won the right to approach her.

He jumped into the first fly he met, told the man to drive his hardest to the railway station—it was before the days of postal telegraph offices—and dispatched his message, paying for both telegram and reply.

The message ran thus:

‘_From Geoffrey Hossack, Stillmington, Warwickshire, to Lucius Davoren, 103 Shadrack-road, London._

‘Come here at once to see a sick child. No time to be lost. Your coming quickly will be the greatest favour you can do me. The patient’s address is 15 Marlow-street, New-town, Stillmington. Answer paid for.’

The telegram handed over to the clerk, he began to speculate upon the probabilities of delay. After all, this telegraphic system, which would have seemed so miraculous to our ancestors, is not rapid enough for the impatience of Young England’s impetuous spirit.

It seems a slow business at the best. Science has made the matter swift as light, but clerkly sluggishness and slow-footed messengers clog electricity’s wings, and a message which takes a hundred seconds for its actual transmission from the operator to the dial may not be delivered for a couple of hours.

Geoffrey went back to Marlow-street to hear the last tidings of the little patient. She was sleeping peacefully, and her mother seemed more hopeful. This lightened his heart a good deal, and he went back to his hotel, smoked a cigar, played a game at pyramids with some officers from the Stillmington Barracks, and thus beguiled the time until a waiter brought him the answer to his telegram. It was brief and decisive:

‘I shall come to Stillmington by the last train. Must see patients before leaving.’

The last train! That meant considerable delay. It was now four o’clock, and the last train came into Stillmington at eleven. How coolly these doctors take things! Geoffrey felt as if his friend ought to have abandoned all his other patients to their fates for the sake of this sick child. The last train! Was this the measure of friendship?

Happily the latest report of the little girl was cheering. Doubtless all would be well. On the strength of this hope Geoffrey dined; and dined tolerably well, having asked the officers to share his meal. This hospitality prolonged the business of dining till after nine o’clock, when Geoffrey pleaded an engagement as an excuse for getting rid of his guests, and went for the third time that day to Marlow-street. He had drunk little or nothing at the social board, and had felt the exercise of hospitality somewhat irksome; but he was the kind of young man to whom dinner-giving is an absolute necessity.

The draper’s shop in Marlow-street had closed its shutters, but the door stood open, and the damsel in ringlets was airing herself on the threshold after the labours of a day which had brought her about half a dozen customers.

To Geoffrey’s question, which had become almost a formula, she answered hopefully. The child was better. She had sat up for a minute and had drunk a cup of milk, and had taken sundry spoonfuls of beef-tea, and had eaten three grapes, and had spoken ‘quite lively and sensible-like. Children are so soon down, and so soon up again,’ said the damsel. ‘It’s no good taking on about them, as I told Mrs. Bertram this morning.’

‘She is happier now, I suppose,’ said Geoffrey.

‘O dear, yes, quite herself again.’

‘Will you ask her if I may see her for a minute or two? I want to tell her about the doctor I have sent for.’

The girl went up-stairs and returned speedily.

‘Mrs. Bertram will be happy to see you,’ she said, ‘if you’ll please to walk up.’

If he would please to walk up! Would he please to enter paradise, did its gates stand open for him? To see her even in her grief was sweet as a foretaste of heaven. She received him this evening with a smile.

‘God has heard my prayer,’ she said; ‘my little darling is better. I really don’t think I need have troubled your kind friend to come down. I begin to feel more confidence in Mr. Vincent, now that my treasure is better.’

‘I am rejoiced to hear it. But my friend will be here to-night. He is one of the best of men. He saved my life once under circumstances of much hardship and danger. We have faced death together. I should not be here to tell you this but for Lucius Davoren.’

‘Lucius Davoren!’ She repeated the name with a wondering look, horror-stricken, her hand clutching the back of the chair from which she had risen. ‘Is your friend’s name Lucius Davoren?’

‘Yes. Can it be possible that you know him? That would be very strange.’

‘No,’ she said slowly; ‘I do not know this friend of yours. But his name is associated with a somewhat painful memory.’

‘Very painful, I fear, or you would hardly have grown so pale at the mention of his name,’ said Geoffrey, with a jealous horror of anything like a secret in his divinity’s past life.

‘I was foolish to be agitated by such a trifle. After all it’s only a coincidence. I daresay there are a good many Davorens in the world,’ she answered carelessly.

‘I doubt it. Davoren is not a common name.’

‘Has your friend, this Mr. Lucius Davoren, been successful in life?’

‘I can hardly say that. As I told you when I first spoke of him, he is by no means distinguished. He is indeed almost at the beginning of his professional career. Yet were I racked with the most obscure of diseases, I should laugh all your specialists to scorn and cry, “Send for Lucius Davoren.”’

‘He is poor, I suppose?’ she asked curiously.

‘Very likely; in the sense of having no money for luxury, splendour, or pleasure—things which he holds in sovereign contempt. He can afford to give the best years of his youth to patient labour among the poor. That is the education he has chosen for himself, rather than a West-end practice and a single brougham; and I believe he will find it the shortest road to everlasting fame.’

‘I am glad you believe in him,’ she said warmly, ‘since he is such a great man.’

‘But you have not yet recovered from the shock his name caused you just now.’

‘Not quite. My darling’s illness has made me nervous. If you think your friend will not be offended, I would rather avoid seeing him,’ she added, in a pleading tone. ‘I really don’t feel well enough to see a stranger. I have passed through such alternations of hope and fear during the last few days. Will your friend forgive me if I leave Mrs. Grabbit to receive his instructions? She is a good soul, and will forget nothing he tells her.’

‘Do just as you like,’ replied Geoffrey, mystified, and somewhat disturbed in mind by this proposition; ‘of course you needn’t see him unless you please. But he’s a very good fellow, and my truest friend. I should like you to have made his acquaintance. You’ll think me a selfish beg—fellow for saying so; but I really believe you’d have a better opinion of me if you knew Lucius Davoren. His friendship is a kind of certificate. But of course, if you’d rather not see him, there’s an end of it. I’ll tell him that you have unpleasant associations with his name, and that the very mention of it agitated you.’

‘No!’ she cried, with a vehemence that startled him. ‘For God’s sake say nothing, tell him nothing, except that I am too ill to see any one. I detest anything like fuss. And why make a mountain out of the veriest molehill? His name reminded me of past sorrow, that is all.’

‘Capricious,’ thought Geoffrey; ‘with a temper by no means as regular as the classic beauty of her face, I daresay. But were she as violent as Shakespeare’s shrew before Petruchio tamed her, I should not the less adore her. Past sorrow! Some doctor called Davoren may have attended her husband on his death-bed. She is just the kind of woman to lock her heart up in a tomb, and then go about the world luring mankind to their destruction by her calm passionless beauty, and answering all with the same dismal sentence, “My heart is with the dead.”’

He submitted to Mrs. Bertram’s decision. He promised to meet his friend at the station, bring him straight to the sick-room, and with his own hand carry Mr. Davoren’s prescription to the chief chemist of Stillmington.

And thus he left her; perplexed, but not all unhappy. Blessings on that sweet child for her timeous indisposition! It had opened the way to his acquaintance with the mother; an acquaintance which, beginning with service and sympathy, promised to ripen quickly into friendship.

The last train brought Lucius. The friends met with a strong hand-grasp, a few hearty words of greeting, and then walked swiftly from the station, which, after the manner of provincial stations, had been placed a good half mile from the town, for the advantage of local fly-drivers, no doubt, and the livery-stable interest.

‘And pray who is this small patient in whose welfare you are so concerned, Geoff?’ asked Lucius. ‘Has some piteous case of local distress awakened your dormant philanthropy? I know you’re a good fellow, but I didn’t know you went in for district-visiting.’

‘There’s no philanthropy in the question, Lucius. Only selfish, pig-headed love. I say pig-headed, because the lady doesn’t value my affection; scorns it, in fact. But I hold on with a bulldog pertinacity. After all, you see, an Englishman’s highest quality is his bulldoggedness.’

‘But what has your bulldog affection to do with a sick child?’

‘Heaven bless the little innocent! One would suppose she had fallen ill on purpose to bring about my acquaintance with her most unapproachable mother. Don’t you remember my telling you that Mrs. Bertram has a little girl—a red-legged angel, after Millais?’

‘O, yes, by the way, there was a child,’ said Lucius indifferently. Then warming as he contemplated the case in its professional aspect, ‘She is not very ill, I hope?’

‘Scarlatina,’ replied Geoffrey. ‘But she seems to be mending to-night.’

‘Scarlatina!’ exclaimed Lucius; ‘and you brought me down to Stillmington to see a case of scarlatina, which any local apothecary would understand just as well as I!’

‘You dear old fellow! don’t be angry. It wasn’t so much the scarlatina. I wanted you to see Mrs. Bertram. I wanted you to see with your own eyes that the woman I love is worthy of any man’s affection.’

‘And, you think I should be in a position to decide that question after half-an-hour’s acquaintance? A question which has taken some men a lifetime to solve, and which some have left unanswered at their death. No, Geoff, I don’t pretend to be wiser than other men where a woman’s character is in question. And if my instinct warned me against your enchantress, and if I should advise you speedily to forget her, how much do you think my counsel would influence you?’

‘Not much, I’m afraid, Lucius. It wouldn’t be very easy for me to cast off her thrall. I am her willing bondslave. Nothing less than the knowledge that she is unworthy of my love—that her past life holds some dishonourable secret—would change my purpose. She has left my letters unanswered, she has rejected my offered devotion, and with something like scorn; yet there has been a look in her face, more transient than an April sunbeam, that has given me hope. I mean to hold on—I mean to win her love—in spite of herself, if need be.’

He gave a brief sketch of that little scene in the garden, his audacity, her almost contemptuous indifference; and then explained how Fortune, or, as he put it, the scarlatina, had smiled upon him.

‘And you think, notwithstanding her affected indifference, that she loves you?’

‘Loves is too strong a word. What have I done to merit her love, except follow her as a collie follows a flock of sheep? What is there in me to deserve or attract her love? I am not ravishingly beautiful. I do not sing with a heart-penetrating voice. It is only natural I should worship her. It is the old story of the moon and the water brooks.’

‘But you talked about a look which gave you hope.’

‘A look! Yes, Davoren. Such a look—sorrow and tenderness, regret, despair, all blended in one swift glance from those divine eyes—a look that might madden a man. Such a look as Paris may have seen in Helen’s eyes before he planned the treason that ended in flaming Troy. But after all it may have meant nothing; it may have existed only in my wild imagining. When a man is as deep in love as I am, Heaven only knows to what hallucinations he may be subject.’

‘Well,’ said Lucius cheerily, with that practical spirit which men bring to bear upon other men’s passions, ‘I shall see the lady, and be able at least to form some opinion as to whether she loves you or not. Whether she be worthy of your love is a question I would not attempt to solve, but the other is easier. I think I shall discover if she loves you. What a pleasant smell of the country—newly-turned earth and budding hedgerows—there is about here! It refreshes my senses after the odours of the Shadrack-road, where we have a wonderful combination of bone-burning, tan-yard, and soap-caldron.’

‘I am glad you enjoy the country air,’ said Geoffrey, in a somewhat sheepish tone, ‘and I do hope you’ll be able to spare to-morrow for a dog-cart exploration of the neighbourhood, as that may atone for my having brought you here somewhat on a fool’s errand. The fact is, Mrs. Bertram would rather not see you.’

‘Rather not see the doctor who has come from London to attend her sick child! An odd kind of mother.’

‘You’re wrong, Lucius; she’s a most devoted mother. I never saw any one so broken down as she was this morning, before the little thing took a turn for the better. Don’t run away with any false notion of that kind; she idolises that child. Only she has knocked herself up with nursing; and she has been alarmed, and agitated, and, in short, isn’t in a fit state to see any one.’

‘Except you,’ said Lucius.

‘My dear fellow, in her distress about the child she has thought no more of me than if I were—a—a gingham umbrella,’ said Geoffrey, after casting about wildly for a comparison. ‘She thinks of nothing but that red-legged angel. And you can imagine that at such a moment she would shrink from seeing a stranger.’

‘Even the doctor who comes to see her child. She is the first mother I ever knew to act in such a manner. Don’t be angry with me, Geoff, if I say that this looks to me very much as if your divinity feared to trust herself to eyes less blind than yours—as if she knew there is that in herself, or in her life, which would not impress a dispassionate observer favourably. Your blind worship has made her a goddess. She doesn’t want to come down from her pedestal in the shadowy temple of your imagination into the broad glare of every-day life.’

Of course Geoffrey was angry. Was he a fool, or a schoolboy, to be caught by meretricious charms—to take tinsel for gold?

‘I have seen women enough in my time to know a good one when I meet one; and that this woman is good and true I will stake my life, my hope of winning her even, which is dearer to me than life.’

‘And if you found her less than you believe her, you would do what you said three months ago—pluck her out of your heart?’

‘Yes, though her jesses were my heartstrings.’

‘Good; that’s all I want to know. I tell you frankly, Geoff, I don’t like this wandering apprenticeship to your new divinity. I don’t like the idea of a life-passion picked up by the roadside—of all your hopes of future happiness being grounded upon a woman of whom you know absolutely nothing.’

‘Only that she is the noblest woman I ever met,’ said Geoffrey doggedly.

‘Which means that she has a handsome face,’ said the other.