CHAPTER IV.

‘O WORLD, HOW APT THE POOR ARE TO BE PROUD!’

Lucius thought much of his friend after that frank confession at the Cosmopolitan. Geoffrey had dined none the less well because of his passion. He had eaten oysters, and bisque soup, and stewed calves’ head with truffles, and mutton, and wild duck, with the appetite that had been educated in an American pine-forest; had drunk Château d’Yquem, and Chambertin, and wound up with curaçoa, and had waxed merry to riotousness as the evening grew late,—Lucius taking but a moderate share in the revel, yet enjoying it. Was it not a glimpse of a new life, after the Shadrack-road, where pleasure had a universal flavour of gin-and-water?

They parted after midnight with warm protestations of friendship. They were to see each other again. Geoffrey was to look his friend up in the Shadrack district as soon as his engagements permitted. But wherever _she_ went, he would follow her, were it to that possible continent or archipelago at the southern pole.

So Lucius went back to the region of many spars and much rigging, and solaced his lonely evenings with the pensive strains of his violin, and pondered long and gravely upon that wondrous mystery of love which could befool even so healthy a nature as that of honest, open-hearted, plain-spoken Geoffrey Hossack. Love allied with music! ‘Yes,’ he thought, as he sighed over the long-drawn chords of an adagio, ‘_that_ is the fatal witchcraft.’

Anon came February, season of sleet and east winds, the month in which winter—after seeming, towards the end of January, to have grown genial and temperate, with even faint whispers of coming spring—generally undergoes a serious relapse, and plunges anew into hyperborean darkness, fog, tempest, snow. Lucius had passed the old house in the Shadrack-road almost every day since November (even when it lay out of his beat he contrived to walk that way), but had seen no more sign of human life about that dismal mansion than if it had been in Chancery; not even the old woman in a bonnet—not even a baker’s barrow delivering the daily loaf—not so much as a postman. He might almost have beguiled himself into the belief that the whole experience of that November evening—the old man—the pale poetic-looking girl—the marvellous collection of art treasures seen by the flickering light of a single candle—were the mere phantasmagoria of an overworked brain, a waking dream, the inchoate vision of a disordered fancy.

He went twice every Sunday to a church that stood midway between his own house and the once regal mansion; a new church of the Pugin-Gothic order, with open seats, a painted window, other windows which awaited the piety of the congregation to be also painted, and a very young incumbent of the advanced type, deeply read in the lives of the saints, and given to early services. This temple was so small that Lucius fancied he could scarcely have failed to see Miss Sivewright were she a worshipper there. Sunday after Sunday, during the hymns, ancient and modern, he looked with anxious gaze round the fane, hoping to see that one interesting face among the crowd of uninteresting faces. Four out of five of the congregation were women, but Lucille Sivewright was not one of them. He began to resign himself to the dreary truth that they two were doomed never to meet again.

Hope, in its last agony, was suddenly recalled to new life. He came home from his daily drudgery one evening, thoroughly tired, even a little disheartened; ‘discouraged,’ as the American lady described herself, when she confessed to poisoning eight of her relations, simply because she began to regard them as encumbrances, and feared that, if permitted to live, they might reduce her to poverty. On this particular evening the star of science—that grand and ever-sustaining idea that he was to sow the seed of some new truth in the broad field of scientific progress—waxed paler than usual, and Lucius also was discouraged. He came home bodily and mentally tired. He had been tramping to and fro all day under a drizzling rain, and in a leaden atmosphere laden with London smoke.

Even in that shabby ill-built domicile which he called home, sorry comfort awaited him. His ancient serving-woman, Mrs. Babb, had let the parlour fire go out. The kettle, which, singing on the hob above a cheerful blaze, seemed almost a sentient thing, now leaned on one side disconsolately against a craggy heap of black coal, like a vessel aground upon a coral reef. The tray of tea-things—the neat white cloth indicative of chop or steak—adorned not his small round table. Mrs. Babb, absorbed in the feminine delights of a weekly cleaning, had suffered herself to become unconscious of the lapse of time.

He gave the loose, ill-hung bell-wire an angry jerk, flung himself into his accustomed arm-chair, and stretched out his hand haphazard in search of a book. Plato, Montaigne, Sterne, any philosopher who should teach him how to hear the petty stings of the scorpion—daily life.

But before his hand touched the volumes, its motion was arrested. He beheld something more interesting than Plato, since in all probability it concerned himself, namely, a letter, at a corner of the mantelpiece, just on a level with his eye. Egotism triumphed over philosophy. The letter, were it even a bill, was more vital to him for the moment than all the wisdom of Socrates.

He snatched the envelope, which was directed in a rugged uncompromising caligraphy, unfamiliar to him. He tore it open eagerly, and looked at the signature, ‘Homer Sivewright.’

‘Dear Sir,—When you obliged me with your assistance the other day, I believe I made some profane remark about your profession, which you took in good part. One forgives such gibes from a testy old man. You told me that when I found myself ill, my thoughts would naturally tend towards Savile-row. There you were wrong. I do find something out of gear in my constitution—possibly liver—or perhaps general break-up. But instead of thinking of the high-flyers of the West-end, with their big fees and pompous pretensions, I think of you.

‘I told you the other night that I liked your face. This is not all. My housekeeper, who has kindred in this district, informs me that you have worked some marvellous cure upon her husband’s brother’s second cousin’s wife’s sister. The relationship is remote, but the rumour of your skill has reached my servant. Will you come this way at your convenience? Don’t come out of your way on purpose to see me. My means, as I informed you, and as you might see for yourself in all my surroundings, are scanty, and I can afford to pay very little more than the poorest among your patients. I state the case thus plainly that there may be no future disagreement.—Truly yours,

‘HOMER SIVEWRIGHT.’

‘Is the old man a miser; or an enthusiast, who has sacrificed himself and his granddaughter to his love of art? Equally hard upon the granddaughter in either case,’ reflected Lucius, trying to contemplate the business in the chilly light of common sense, wondering at and half-ashamed of the sudden delight which had moved him when he found that Mr. Sivewright’s letter was nothing less than a passport to Lucille Sivewright’s home.

‘I’ll go the instant I’ve dined,’ he said to himself, giving another tug at the loose bell-wire. ‘Yet who knows whether the old churl will let me see his interesting granddaughter? Perhaps he’ll put me on a strictly professional footing; have me shown up to his den by that old woman, and shown down again without so much as a glimpse of Lucille’s pensive face. Yet he can hardly pay me badly and treat me badly too. I’ll ask permission to attend him as a friend; and then perhaps he’ll melt a little, and admit me to his hearth. I like the look of that old wainscoted room, with its bare floor and clean-swept hearth, and handful of bright fire. It seemed to breathe the poetry of poverty.’

Mrs. Babb came clattering in with the tea-things and chop all together, profuse in apologies for having forgotten to wind up the kitchen clock, and thus become oblivious as to time.

‘On a clear day I can see the clock at the public round the corner by stretching my head out of the back-attic window,’ she said; ‘but being thick to-day I couldn’t, and I must have been an hour behind ever since dinner. And the fire gone out too!’

The fire was quickly lighted; the kettle carried off to boil down-stairs; but Lucius didn’t wait for his tea. That gentle decoction, which was, in a general way, the very support of his life, to-night was almost indifferent to him. He ate his chop, ran up to his narrow dressing-room, where the weekly cleansing process had left a healthy odour of mottled soap and a refreshing dampness, washed away the smoke and grime of the day with much cold water, changed all his garments, lest he should carry the taint of fever-dens whither he was going, and went forth as gaily as to a festival.

‘Am I as great a fool as dear old Geoffrey?’ he asked himself during that rapid walk. ‘No; at least I know something of my goddess. I could read the story of her patient self-sacrificing life even in that one hour. Besides, I am by no means in love with her. I am only interested.’

It was a new feeling for him to approach the gate with the certainty of admission. He tugged resolutely at the iron ring, and heard the rusty wires creak their objection to such disturbance. Then came a shuffling slipshod step across the barren forecourt, which, with different tenants, might have been a garden. This footstep announced the old woman in the bonnet, who seemed to him the twin sister of his own housekeeper, so closely do old women in that sphere of life resemble each other—like babies. She mumbled something, and admitted him to the sacred precincts. The same half-light glimmered in the hall as when he had seen it first; the whole treasury of art wrapped in shadow. The same brighter glow streamed from the panelled parlour as the old woman opened the door and announced ‘Dr. Davory.’ Homer Sivewright was sitting in his high-backed arm-chair by the hearth, getting all the heat he could out of the contracted fire. His granddaughter sat opposite him, knitting with four needles, which flashed like electric wires under the guidance of the soft white hands. The tea-tray—with its quaint old teapot in buff and black Wedgewood—adorned the table.

‘I thought you’d come,’ said the old man, ‘though my letter was not very inviting, if you cultivate wealthy patients.’

‘I do not,’ answered Lucius, taking the chair indicated to him, after receiving a stately foreign curtsy from Miss Sivewright, an unfamiliar recognition which seemed to place him at an ineffable distance. ‘I was very glad to get your note, and to respond to it promptly. I shall be still more glad if you will place my medical services upon a friendly footing. At your age a man requires the constant attendance of a doctor who knows his constitution. There may be very little treatment wanted, only the supervision of an experienced eye. Let me be your friend as well as your medical adviser, and drop in whenever I am wanted, without question of payment.’

The old man shot a keen glance from his cold gray eyes; eyes which looked as if they had been in the habit of prying into men’s thoughts. ‘Why should you be so generous?’ he asked; ‘I have no claim upon you, not even that hollow pretence which the world calls friendship. You have nothing to gain from me. My will, disposing of my collection—which is all I have to bequeath—was made ten years ago; and nothing would ever tempt me to alter it by so much as a ten-pound legacy. You see there’s nothing to be gained by showing me kindness.’

‘Grandfather!’ remonstrated the girl, in her low serious voice.

‘I am sorry you should impute to me any such sordid motive,’ said Lucius quietly. ‘My reason for offering my services gratis is plain and above board. There is no fireside at this end of the town at which I care to sit, no society congenial to me. I spend all my evenings alone, generally in hard study, sometimes with the books I love, or with my violin for my companion. This kind of life suits me well enough on the whole. Yet there are intervals of depression in which I feel its exceeding loneliness. No man is all-sufficient to himself. Give me the privilege of spending an evening here now and then—I will not wear out my welcome—and let me watch your case as a labour of love. You say that the recompense you can offer me will be small. Better for both your dignity and mine that there should be none at all.’

‘You speak fair,’ answered Sivewright, ‘but that’s a common qualification. I have a granddaughter there whom you may imagine to be my heiress. If she is, she is heiress only to my collection; and even my judgment may be mistaken as to the value of that. In any case, consider her disposed of—put her put of the question.’

‘Grandfather!’ remonstrated the girl again, this time blushing indignantly.

‘Better to speak plainly, Lucille.’

‘Since you cannot see me in any character except that of a fortune-hunter, sir,’ said Lucius, rising, ‘we had better put an end to the discussion. There are plenty of medical men in this neighbourhood. You can find an adviser among them. I wish you good-evening.’

‘Stop,’ exclaimed Sivewright, as the surgeon walked straight to the door, wounded inexpressibly, ‘I didn’t mean to offend you. But you offered me your friendship, and it was best you should know upon what footing I could accept the offer. You now know that I have no money to leave any one—don’t suppose me a miser because I live poorly; that’s a common error—and that my granddaughter is disposed of. Knowing this, do you still offer me your professional services for nothing? do you still wish for a place beside my hearth?’

‘I do,’ said the young man eagerly, and with one swift involuntary glance at Lucille, who sat motionless, except for the dexterous hands that plied those shining wires. He thought of the humiliation of Hercules, and how well it would have pleased him to sit at her feet and hold the worsted that she wound.

‘So be it then; you are henceforth free of this house. My door, which so seldom opens to a stranger, shall offer no barrier to you. If you discover circumstances in our lives that puzzle you, do not trouble yourself to wonder about them. You will know all in good time. Be a brother to Lucille.’ She held out her hand to the visitor frankly at these words. He took it far more shyly than it was given. ‘And be a son,’ with a long regretful sigh, ‘if you can, to me. I told you the other day that I liked your voice, that I liked your face. I will go farther to-night and say, I like you.’

‘Thank you,’ answered Lucius gravely, ‘that is just what I want. I doubt if I have a near relation in the world, and I know but one man whom I count my friend. Friendship with me, therefore, means something very real. It is not a hackneyed sentiment, worn threadbare by long usage. But now that we have arranged things pleasantly, let us have our medical inspection.’

‘Not to-night,’ said Mr. Sivewright. ‘Come to me to-morrow, if you can spare me the time. My symptoms are not of a pressing kind. I only feel the wheels of life somewhat clogged; the mainspring weaker than it used to be. Let us give to-night to friendship.’

‘Willingly,’ answered Lucius. ‘I will be with you at ten o’clock to-morrow morning.’

He drew his chair nearer to the hearth, feeling that he was now really admitted to the charmed circle. To most young men it would have been far from an attractive house; for him it possessed an almost mysterious fascination. Indeed, it was perhaps the element of mystery which made Lucille Sivewright so interesting in his eyes. He had seen plenty of women who were as pretty—some who were more beautiful—but not one who had ever filled his thoughts as she did.

‘Pour out the tea, child,’ said Mr. Sivewright, and that fragrant beverage was dispensed by Lucille’s white hands. It was one of the few details of housekeeping in which the old man permitted extravagance. The tea was of the choicest, brewed without stint, and the small antique silver jug, adorned with elaborate _repoussé_ work, contained cream. Lucius thought he had never tasted anything so exquisite as that cup of tea. They sat round the fire, and the old man talked well and freely—talked of the struggles of his youth, his art-worship, those wonderful strokes of fortune to which the dealer in bric-à-brac is ever liable—talked of everything connected with his career, except his domestic life. On that one subject he was dumb.

Lucius thought of the castaway, the son who was of no more account to his father than one of the wooden images in the crowded storehouse across the hall. What had been his crime? Perhaps never to have been loved at all. This old man’s nature seemed of a hard-grained wood, which could scarcely put forth tender shoots and blossoms of affection—a man who would consider his son his natural enemy.

‘You spoke of your violin some time ago,’ Lucille said, by and by, in a pause of the conversation. Mr. Sivewright, having talked about himself to his heart’s content, leaned back in his chair and contemplated the fire. ‘Do you really play? I am so fond of the violin.’

‘Are you, indeed?’ cried Lucius, enraptured. ‘I’ll bring it some night, and—’

‘Don’t!’ ejaculated the old man decisively. ‘I am something of Chesterfield’s opinion, that fiddling is beneath a gentleman. If I hear you scraping catgut I shall lose all confidence in your medicines.’

‘Then you shall not hear me,’ said Lucius, with perfect good humour. He was determined to make friends with this grim old bric-à-brac dealer if he could, just as one resolves to overcome the prejudices of an unfriendly dog, believing that beneath his superficial savagery there must be a substratum of nobility. ‘I only thought a little quiet music might amuse Miss Sivewright, since she says she is fond of the violin.’

‘She doesn’t know what she is fond of,’ replied Sivewright testily; ‘she is full of fancies and whims, and likes everything that I abhor. There, no tears, child,’ as those dark gentle eyes filled; ‘you know I hate those most of all.’

Lucius came to the rescue, and began to talk with renewed vivacity, thus covering Lucille’s confusion. He spoke of himself, giving all those details of his childhood and youth, the knowledge of which between new acquaintances at once establishes the familiarity that is half-way towards friendship.

He left early, fearful of outstaying his welcome; left with a sense of perfect content in this quiet domestic evening, although the old man had certainly not gone out of his way to conciliate his visitor. Lucille had talked very little, but even her silence had been interesting to Lucius. It seemed to him the indication, not of dulness, but of a gentle melancholy; a mind overshadowed by some olden sorrow, and perhaps depressed by the solitude of that dreary mansion. He was not satisfied with a continental curtsy at parting, but offered Lucille his hand, which she took as frankly as if she had fully accepted him in the character of an adopted brother.