CHAPTER IV.

THE MORLAND COUGH.

LAURENCE DESMOND heard the sublimely solemn service read above his old tutor’s coffin, and left Ventnor without seeing Lucy Alford. Again and again he told himself that with the orphan girl’s future fate he had no concern. He had given her a good friend--and a friend of her own sex--who would doubtless afford her help and protection, directly or indirectly, in the future.

“She has passed out of my life,” he said to himself; “poor little thing! Let me forget that I ever saw her.”

When Mr. Desmond paid his next visit to River Lawn he found Lucy comfortably installed there, and looking pale as the snowdrops in her simple mourning. She said a few tremulous words in answer to his gentle greeting, and then left the room.

“She does not like to talk of her father,” Mrs. Jerningham said, when she was gone; “and I dare say she has run away to escape your possible condolences. He seems on the whole to have been rather a worthless person, but she mourns him as if he had been a saint. ‘We were so happy together,’ she says; and then she tells me of his interest in her career, and the patience with which he would sit in the boxes night after night to see her act, and then would tell her the points in which she failed, and the points in which she succeeded, and lament the impossibility of her wearing a mask, with some dreadful pipe or mouthpiece, like the Greek actors; and she tells me of their cosy little suppers after the theatre, pettitoes--WHAT are pettitoes?--and baked potatoes, and sausages, and other dreadful things which it would be certain death for persons in society to eat; and so the poor child runs on. She is the most affectionate, grateful creature I ever met, and I think she is beginning to love me.”

“She has reason to do so,” replied Mr. Desmond. “I suppose she will be obliged to go on the stage again. I have a promise of an engagement for her from my friend Hartstone.”

“I hope she will not be obliged to accept it. Her father’s death has caused a complete change in her feelings with regard to the dramatic profession. The poor old man’s companionship seems to have supported and sustained her in all her petty trials--and now he has gone, she shrinks from encountering the difficulties of such a life. So, with my advice and such assistance as I can give her, she is trying to qualify herself for the position of governess. Her reading is more extensive than that of most girls, and she is working hard to supply the deficiencies of her education.”

“I am very glad to hear that,” Laurence answered, heartily; “I consider such a life much better suited to her than the uncertainties of a provincial theatre.”

And then he remembered that in the existence of a governess there were also uncertainties, trials, temptations, loneliness; and it seemed to him as if Lucy Alford’s destiny must be a care and a perplexity to him to the end of time.

“I shall keep Lucy with me for some weeks to come,” said Mrs. Jerningham; “for I find her a most devoted little companion, and she is exercising her powers as my reader and amanuensis, in order to prepare herself for the caprices of some valetudinarian dowager in the future.”

“You are very good, Emily.”

“Yes, because I am of some use to your Miss Alford;--that is my virtue in your eyes, Laurence.”

“If you are going to talk in that manner, I shall try to catch the next train.”

“It is very absurd, is it not?” cried Mrs. Jerningham, with a light laugh; “but you see it is natural to a woman to be jealous; and a woman who lives in such a place as this has nothing to do but cherish jealous fancies.”

“Let us understand each other once and for ever,” said Laurence, gravely. “To me Lucy Alford seems little more than a child: the time in which I used to see her frisking about with a hideous Scotch terrier, and dressed in a brown-holland pinafore, is not so very remote, you know. I found her in the most bitter need of a friend; and so far as I could befriend her, I did so, honestly, biding the time in which I could enlist a good woman’s sympathy in her behalf. Having done that, I have done all, and I wash my hands of the whole affair. If there is the least hazard of jealousy where Miss Alford is concerned, I will not re-enter this house while she inhabits it.”

“That would be to punish me for my philanthropy. No, Laurence, I am not jealous of this poor child, any more than I am jealous of every other woman to whom you speak. Jealousy is a chronic disease, you see, a kind of slow fever, and it has taken possession of me.”

“Emily!”

“I think it is only another name for nerves. Do not look at me with such consternation. What is it Mr. Kingsley says?--‘Men must work, and women must weep.’ They _must_, you see! It is the primary necessity of their existence; and if they have no real miseries, no husbands drifting over the harbour-bar to death, they invent sorrows, and weep over them.”

To this kind of talk Mr. Desmond was tolerably well accustomed. It is the kind of talk which a man whom fate, or his own folly, has placed in a false position is sure to hear. One can fancy that Paris must have had rather a heavy time of it with Helen; and that when he went forth prancing like a war-horse to meet Menelaus, his gaiety may have in some degree arisen from his sense of escaping an impending curtain-lecture from the divine Tyndarid.

For some weeks after this conversation the editor of the _Areopagus_ contrived to be more than usually occupied with the affairs of his paper. He sent Mrs. Jerningham tickets for concerts, and new books, and new music; but River Lawn he avoided. It was only upon a royal command from the lady that he appeared there one afternoon, about six weeks after the funeral at Ventnor.

He found Lucy looking better; but Lucy’s patroness was paler than usual, and was much disturbed by a dry, hacking cough, which somewhat alarmed Mr. Desmond.

Emily herself, however, made very light of the cough, nor did Mrs. Colton seem to consider it of any importance.

“It is only a winter cough,” said Mrs. Jerningham; “I have suffered from the same kind of thing every winter, if, indeed, you can call it suffering. I suppose one must pay some penalty for living by the river. But I would not exchange my Thames for the gift of exemption from cough.”

“It is quite a Morland cough,” said Mrs. Colton; “my sister, Emily’s mamma, had just the same kind of cough every winter.”

Morland was the name of Mrs. Jerningham’s maternal ancestry. Laurence bethought himself that Emily’s mother had died at thirty years of age, and he was not inclined to make light of the Morland cough.

“I wish you would come to town to-morrow and see Dr. Leonards,” he said, by and by, when he and Emily were out of earshot of Mrs. Colton; “I don’t see why you should go on coughing, or stay by the river, if Hampton disagrees with you.”

“Dr. Leonards is the great man for the chest, is he not?” asked Mrs. Jerningham. “It would be really too absurd for me to see him. I have nothing whatever the matter with my chest, except a little pain occasionally, which Mr. Canterham, the Hampton surgeon, calls indigestion. Dr. Leonards would laugh at me.”

“So much the better if he does,” answered Laurence. “But I should very much like you to see him. You will do so, won’t you, Emily, to oblige me?”

“To oblige you!” repeated Mrs. Jerningham, regarding him with a thoughtful gaze. “Why are you so anxious to consult the oracle? Is it to resolve a doubt, or to confirm a hope?”

“Emily!”

“Oh, forgive me!” she cried, holding out her hand. “I am always thinking or saying something wicked. The Calvinists must surely be right; for I feel as if I had been created a vile creature, ‘not born to be judged, but judged before I was born.’ I will go to see your Dr. Leonards. I will do anything in the world to please you!”

“My dear Emily! to please me you have only to be happy yourself,” he answered, with real affection.

“Ah! that is just the one thing that I cannot do. My life is all wrong somehow, and I cannot make it right. I have been trying to square the circle, ever since my marriage--with such unspeakable care and trouble--and the circle is no nearer being square. The impracticable, unmeasurable curves still remain, and are not to be squared by my power of calculation.”

“Ah, Emily, if you had only trusted in me, and waited!”

“Ah, Laurence, if you had only spoken a little sooner!”

“I would not speak till I had secured a certain income. I had been taught to believe that no woman in your position could exist without a certain expenditure.”

“Ah, that is the false philosophy of your modern school! A man tells himself that with such or such a woman he could live happily all the days of his life, but his friends warn him that the lady has been educated in a certain style, and must therefore be extravagant--so he keeps aloof from her; and some day, necessity, family ambition, weariness, pique, anger--Heaven knows what incomprehensible feminine impulse--tempts her to the utterance of the most fatal lie a woman’s lips can shape. She marries a man she can never love, and she has her equipage, and her servants, and her house in Mayfair, and all the splendours _he_ has been told she cannot live without: and she _does_ live--the life of the world, which is living death.”

“For God’s sake no more! You stab me to the heart.”

He covered his face with his hands, and thought of what she had been saying to him. Yes, it was all true! His worldly wisdom had blighted that fair young life. Because he had been prudent; because he had taken counsel with his long-headed friends of the world, and had believed them when they said that the horrors of Pandemonium were less horrid than the dismal, muddling torments of a pinched household--because of these things Emily Jerningham’s mind had been embittered, and her fair name sullied. And he could not undo the past. No. Strike Harold Jerningham from the roll of the living to-morrow, and leave those two free to wed, the haughty woman and the world-worn man who should stand side by side before God’s altar, would have little more than their names in common with the lovers who walked arm-in-arm ten years ago in the garden at Passy.

“Yes, Emily, my sin is heavier than yours!” he said, presently. “With both, want of faith was the root of evil. If you had trusted in me, if I had trusted in Providence, all would have been different. But it is worse than useless to bewail those old mistakes. Let us make the best of what happiness remains to us. The pleasures of a real friendship, and one of those rarest of all alliances--a friendship between man and woman on terms of intellectual equality.”

“There are wretched misogynists who say that kind of thing never has answered,” said Mrs. Jerningham; “but we will try to prove them miserable maligners. And you will never regret the loss of a wife, or feel the want of a home, eh, Laurence?”

“Never, while you abstain from foolish jealousies,” he answered boldly, and in all good faith.

Mrs. Jerningham drove into town next day, to see Dr. Leonards, in accordance with her promise to Laurence Desmond. She was accompanied by Mrs. Colton, who thought it rather absurd that any one should take so much trouble about a Morland cough; but who was not ill-pleased to spend an hour in the delightful diversion of shopping, and to visit one of the winter exhibitions of pictures, while the horses took their rest and refreshment.

Dr. Leonards said very little, except that Mrs. Jerningham’s chest was rather weak, and her nerves somewhat too highly strung. He asked her a few questions, wrote her a prescription, enjoined great care, and requested her to come to him again in a fortnight, or, better still, allow him to come to her.

“For now, really, you ought not to be out to-day,” he said, glancing at a thermometer. “There is the slightest appearance of fever; and altogether, a drive from Hampton is about the worst possible thing for you. You ought to be sitting in a warm room at home.”

“But look at my wraps,” exclaimed Mrs. Jerningham.

“My dear lady, do you really imagine that your sables can protect you from the air you breathe? An equable temperature of about sixty degrees is what you require; and here you are, on a bleak March day, riding thirty miles in a draughty carriage. I must beg you to be more careful.”

Mrs. Colton on this assured Dr. Leonards that the cough was only a family cough; but the physician repeated his injunction.

“Prevention is better than cure,” he said. “I can say nothing wiser than the old adage. Thanks. Good morning.”

This was the patient’s dismissal; the two ladies returned to their carriage.

“I hope Mr. Desmond will be satisfied,” said Mrs. Jerningham; “and now let us go to see the French pictures.”

At the French picture-gallery the ladies found Mr. Desmond, absorbed in the contemplation of a Meissonier.

“How good of you to be here!” exclaimed Mrs. Jerningham, brightening as she recognized him; “and so, for once in a way, you really have a leisure morning.”

“I never have a leisure morning; at this very moment I ought to be ‘sitting upon’ a sensational historian, who fancies himself something between Thucydides and Macaulay. But you told me you were coming here, and so I postpone my sensational historian’s annihilation until next week, and come to hear what Dr. Leonards says of your cough.”

“Dr. Leonards says very little. I am to take care of myself. That is all.”

“What does he mean by care?”

“Oh, I suppose I am to go on wearing furs, and that kind of thing. And I am to see all the pictures of the year; and you are to find plenty of leisure mornings; and so on.”

In this careless manner did the patient dismiss the subject; nor could Laurence extort any further information from her. He attacked Mrs. Colton next, but could obtain little intelligence from that lady; and beyond this point he was powerless to proceed. He, Laurence Desmond, could not interrogate Dr. Leonards upon the health of Harold Jerningham’s wife. If she had been dangerously ill, interference was no privilege of his. And as her illness was of a very slight and unalarming character, he was fain to content himself with the fact that she had placed herself under the direction of an eminent physician.

That day was one of the few happy days that had been granted of late to Emily Jerningham. Mr. Desmond was even more devoted and anxious than he had shown himself for a long time. He accompanied the two ladies to picture-galleries, and silk-mercers, florists, and librarians, and did not leave them till he saw them safely bestowed in their carriage for the homeward journey, banked-in with parcels, and in an atmosphere stifling with exotics.

“What, in the name of the Sphinx, do women do with their parcels?” he asked himself, as he went back to his chambers. “Mrs. Jerningham comes to town at least once a fortnight, and she never goes back to Hampton without the same heterogeneous collection of paper packages. What can be the fate of that mysterious mass? How does she make away with that mountain of frivolity, packed in whitey-brown paper? I never see any trace of the contents of those inexplicable packets. They never seem to develop into anything beyond their primeval form. To this day I know not what butterflies emerge from those paper chrysalids. And if she had been my wife, I must have found money to pay for all those frivolities. I must have battered my weary brains, and worked myself into a premature grave, to supply that perennial stream of parcels.”