CHAPTER XXXVIII
DOCTOR SHAW'S VERDICT
Dr. Shaw, at whose house door Hanbury had left Oscar Leigh, was a fresh-coloured, light haired, baldheaded, energetic man of about fifty-five. He was always in a state of astonishment, and the spectacles he wore over his green grey eyes seemed ever on the point of being thrust forward out of their position by the large round prominent dancing eyes of their wearer. He was a bachelor and had a poor practice, but one which he preferred to hold in undisputed ownership, rather than increase at the sacrifice of liberty in taking a wife.
He had just come back from his round of morning visits and was sitting down to his simple early dinner, as Leigh knocked. When he heard who the visitor was he rose instantly and went into the small bare surgery, the front ground-floor room.
"Bless my soul, Mr. Leigh, what's the matter?"
Leigh was sitting in a wooden elbow chair breathing heavily, noisily, irregularly. "I have come," he said in gasps and snatches, "I have come to die."
"Eh! Bless my soul, what are you saying?" cried the doctor approaching the clockmaker so as to get the light upon his own back.
"I have come to die, I tell you."
"But that is an opinion, and it is I that am to give the opinion-not you. You are to state the facts, I am to lay down the law. What's the matter?"
"In this case, I am judge and jury. The facts and the law are all against me. I have had another seizure a few minutes ago," he laid his hand on his chest. "In the excitement I kept up, but I know 'tis all over. You will remember your promise about the quicklime. I never let anyone pry into the machinery of my clock, and I won't have any foolish young jackanapes prying into the works of this old carcase. You will fill up the box with quicklime?"
"Not yet anyway. What happened. Where do you feel queer?"
Leigh pointed to his chest a little at the left of the middle line.
"Shock?"
"Yes."
"What?"
"My clock, the work of seven years, has been burned, destroyed."
"Burned! That was hard. I'm very sorry to hear it. We'll have your coat off. Yes, I'll lock the door. You need not be afraid. No one comes at this time. Yes, I'll pull the blind down too. Stand up… That will do. Put on your coat. Let me help you. Drink this. Sit down now and rest yourself."
"Rest myself? Rest myself! After standing for that half a minute?"
"Yes."
"Did I not tell you facts and law were against me?"
"You are not well."
"I am dying."
"You are very ill."
"I had better go to bed?"
"You would be more rested there."
"Would it be safe for me to go to Millway, about sixty miles?"
"No."
"How long do you think I shall last?"
"It is quite impossible to say."
"Hours?"
"Oh, yes."
"Days?"
"Yes."
"Weeks?"
"With care."
"Months?"
"The best thing you can do now is to go to bed. I'll see the room got ready. You feel very weak, weaker even than when you came in here."
"I feel I cannot walk."
"The excitement has kept you up so far. You are now suffering from reaction. After you have rested a while you will be better."
"Very good. Shaw, will you send for your solicitor, I want to make my will."
The doctor left the surgery for a few minutes to give the necessary orders about the room for Leigh and to send for the solicitor. Half an hour ago he had felt very hungry, and when the clockmaker knocked he had been thinking of nothing but his dinner. His dinner still lay untasted. He had forgotten all about it. He was the most kind-hearted of men, and the sight of Leigh in his present condition, and the fatal story he had heard through the stethoscope had filled him with pity and solicitude.
"The room will be ready in a few minutes," he said, in a cheerful voice and with an encouraging smile, when he again came into the surgery. "We shall try to make you as comfortable as ever we can. I am sorry for your sake I haven't a wife to look after you."
"If you had a wife I shouldn't be here."
"What! You! Why, that is the only ungallant thing I ever heard you say in all my life."
"I should envy you and be jealous of you."
"Then, my dear fellow, I am very glad we are by ourselves. I suppose your mother would not like to come up to nurse you?"
"She cannot move about now, except in her wheeled chair."
"Is there anyone you would wish to come to see you? This house you will, of course, consider as your own."
"Thank you, there is no one. I do not know anyone in the world, except my mother, so long as I know you. The only friend likely to call I saw to-day. There is no need for me to send for him to-day, is there?"
"Need, no. You will be much better when you have rested a while. You know cheerful company is always very useful to us doctors, and we like to have all the help we can. But I daresay we shall get on famously as we are." He would like to have heard all about the fire and the destruction of the clock, but he refrained from asking because he feared the excitement for his patient.
It happened that Dr. Shaw's solicitor lived near, and was at home, so that he came back with the boy before the room was ready. Shaw withdrew from the surgery, and for half-an-hour the lawyer and the clockmaker were alone. Then Leigh was carried upstairs and went to bed, and felt, as Shaw said he would, better and easier for lying down.
"I have no trouble on my mind now, Shaw, and my body cannot be a trouble to me or anybody else long. I never say thanks or make pretty speeches, but I am not ungrateful all the same. I don't think we have ever shaken hands yet, Shaw. Will you shake hands now?"
"With the greatest pleasure, my dear fellow," said Shaw, grasping the hand of the little man, and displaying his greatest pleasure by allowing his large dancing green-grey eyes to fill up with tears behind his unemotional spectacles.
"That clock would have made my fame. I don't know how the fire arose. I had the clock wound up last night by a mechanical contrivance, and before leaving for Millway I lit the faintest glimmer of gas. Some accident must have happened. Some accident which can now never be explained. I left the window open for the first time last night. I had put up a curtain for the first time last night. If any boy had thrown a stone, and the stone got through the curtain, there is no knowing what it might not do among the machinery; the works were so close and complicated, it might have brought something inflammable within reach of the flame of the gas, for the gas would not be quite out. At all events, the clock is gone. It was getting too much for me. Often of late, when I was away from it, the movements became reversed, and all the works went backwards, and I often thought that kind of thing would injure my brain."
"It was a sure sign injury was beginning, and I think it is a good thing for you the clock is burned," said Shaw soothingly.
"But the shock! The shock you will say, by-and-by, killed me. How, then, do you count the loss of the clock good?"
"I mean if you had told me there was no way of stopping this involuntary reversal of the movement I should have advised you to smash the clock rather than risk the brain."
"And I should have declined to take your advice."
Shaw laughed. "You would not be singular in that. I can get ten people to take my medicines for one who will take my advice."
"What an awful mortality there would be, Shaw, if people took both!"
"There now," said Shaw, with another laugh, "you will do now. You are your old self again. I must run away. I shall see you in an hour or two, and have my tea up here with you. If you want anything, ring."
So Leigh was left alone.
"The clothes," he thought, "of the figure must have in some way or other come in contact with the gas-jet. If they once caught fire the wax would burn-the wax of the head, and then there would be plenty of material for a blaze.
"Ah, me; the clock is gone! Even if that survived, I should not mind. I was so jealous of it. I never let anyone examine it, and the things it could do will not be credited when I am dead, for I often, very often, exaggerated, and even invented, a little.
"Ay, ay, ay, the clock is gone, and the Miracle Gold, too. I am glad I never had anything really to do with it. I am sorry I was not always of the mind I was yesterday-my last day at my bench. All the time I was burying in my own grave my own small capital of life, I was missing the real gold of existence. I sought to build up fame in my clock and in that gold. Fame is for the dead. What are the dead to us? What shall I be when they bury me to myself, who walked in the sunlight and saw the trees and the flowers, and the clouds and the sea, where there were no men to remind me of my own unshapeliness? Nothing. Why should a man care for fame among people he has never seen, among the dim myriads of faces yet to come out of the womb of time, when he could have had an abiding place in the heart's ingle among those whom he knows and whose hands he can touch? What good to us will the voices of the strange men of the hereafter be? What a fool I was to think of buying the applause of strange, unborn men out of gold rent from living men, whose friend I might have been.
"I told Hanbury I was making a dying confession to him. I suppose this is a death-bed repentance. Very well. But I sinned only in thought. In order to show other men I was better than they, I was willing to be worse. Shaw is right. I am much easier here. I feel rested. I feel quiet. I have really done nothing harmful to any man. It will be a relief to get out of this husk. I will try to sleep. My poor old mother! But we cannot be separated long. It is easier to die in a body like this than to live in it."
He was very weak, and life fluttered feebly in his veins. He closed his eyes and ceased to think. The calm that comes with the knowledge that one is near the end was upon him. He did not think, he did not sleep. He lay simply gathering quiet for the great sleep. He was learning how to rest, how to lie still, how to want not, how to wait the sliding aside of the mysterious panel that the flesh keeps shut against the eyes of the spirit while the two are partners in life.
CHAPTER XXXIX
PATIENT AND NURSE
Mrs. Hanbury was greatly shocked by the news her son had given her that day about his relations with Dora. She had a conviction that it would be to John's advantage to be married. She held that, all other things being reasonably taken care of, a young man of twenty-six ought to marry and settle down to face the world in the relations and surroundings which would govern the remainder of his life. There had never been any consideration of John's sowing wild oats. He had always been studious, serious, domestic. He was the very man to marry and, in the cheerful phrase of the story book, live happy ever after.
And where could he find a wife better suited to him than in Curzon Street? Dora had every single quality a most exacting mother could desire in the wife of an only son, and Mrs. Hanbury was anything but an exacting mother. Dora's family was excellent. She was one of the most beautiful girls in London, she was extremely clever, and although she and he did not seem fully in accord in their views of some things, they agreed in the main. She was extremely clever and accomplished, and amiable, and by-and-by she should be rich. In fact, Mrs. Hanbury might have doubled this list without nearly exhausting the advantages possessed by Miss Ashton, and now it was all over between the pair. This really was too bad.
She idolized her son, and thought there were few such good young men in the world; but she was no fool about him. She had watched his growth with yearning interest from infancy to this day. She knew as well, perhaps better than anyone, that he was not perfect. She knew he was too enthusiastic, that sometimes his temper was not to be relied on. She knew he was haughty, and at rare times even scornful. She knew he had no mean estimate of his own merits, and was restive under control. But what were these faults? Surely nothing to affright any gentle and skilful woman from uniting herself with him for life. Most of his faults were those of youth and inexperience. When he was properly launched, and met other men and measured himself against them, much of his haughty self-satisfaction would disappear. Most young men who had anything in them were discontented, for they had only vague premonitions of their powers, and they felt aggrieved that the world would not take them on their own mere word at their own estimate.
What Mr. and Mrs. Ashton would say she could not fancy. Perhaps they would imitate for once the example of younger people, and say nothing at all. They could not, however, help thinking of the matter, and they would be sure to form no favourable estimate of John's conduct in the affair. The rest of the world would be certain to say that John jilted the girl, and anyone who heard the true history of the Hanbury family, just come to light, would say that John kept back in the hope of making a more ambitious marriage.
He was, every one allowed, one of the most promising young men in England, and now the glamour of a throne was around him. All the philosophy in the world would not make him ever again the plain John Hanbury he was in the eyes of people a few days ago, in the eyes of every one outside this house still. Stanislaus II. may have been everything that was weak and contemptible, and been one of the chief reasons why his unfortunate country disappeared from the political map of the world, but John Hanbury was the descendant of King Stanislaus II. of Poland, and if that monarchy had been hereditary and the kingdom still existed, her son would be the legal sovereign, in spite of all the Republicans and revilers in Europe.
She herself set no store by these remote and shadowy kingly honours, but even in her own heart she felt a swelling of pride when she thought that the child she had borne and reared was the descendant of a king. A pretender to the throne of England would be put in a padded room and treated with indulgent humanity. But on the Continent it was not so. Sometimes they put him in prison, and sometimes they put him on the throne he claimed. She knew that her son would no more think of laying stress upon his descent from the Poniatowskis than of asking to be put in that padded room. But others would think of it and set value on it. Exclusive doors might be closed against the clever speaker, plain John Hanbury, son of an English gentleman, who for whim or greed went into trade, when he was rich enough to live without trade; but few doors would be closed against the gifted orator who was straight in descent and of the elder line of the Poniatowskis of Lithuania, and whose great grandfather's grandfather was the last King of Poland.
After all, upon looking more closely at the affair, the discovery was of some value. No one now could think him over ambitious for his years if he offered himself for Parliament. Younger men than he, sons of peers, got into Parliament merely by reason of a birth not nearly so illustrious as his, and with abilities it would be unfair to them to estimate against his.
There was something in it after all.
If now he chose to marry high, whom might he not marry? Putting out of view that corrupt, that forced election to the throne of Poland, he was a Poniatowski, _the_ Poniatowski, and few English families of to-day could show such a pedigree as her son's.
There was certainly no family in England that could refuse an alliance with him on account of birth.
And now vicious people would say he had been guilty, of the intolerable meanness of giving up Dora Ashton either in order that he might satisfy his ambition by a more distinguished marriage, or that he might be the freer to direct his public career towards some lofty goal. She knew her son too well to fancy for a moment any such unworthy thought could find a home in his breast; but all the world did not know him as she did, and no one would believe that the breaking-off came from Dora and the cause of it arose before the discovery of Stanislaus' secret English marriage.
When the doctor made his second visit, he pronounced Edith Grace progressing favourably. She was then fully conscious, but pitifully weak. There was not, the doctor said, the least cause for uneasiness so long as the patient was kept quite free from excitement, from even noise. A rude and racking noise might induce another period of semi-insensibility. Quiet, quiet, quiet was the watchword, and so he went away.
Mrs. Grace had protested against a hired nurse. She herself should sit up at night, and in the daytime the child would need no attendance. Mrs. Grace had, however, to go back to their lodgings to fetch some things needed, and to intimate that they were not returning for the present. Mrs. Hanbury volunteered to sit in Edith's room while the old woman was away. Protests were raised against this, but the hostess carried her point. "I told you," she said, with a smile, "that I am very positive. Let this be proof and a specimen."
So the old lady hastened off, and Mrs. Hanbury sat down to watch at the bedside of the young girl. Speaking was strictly forbidden. Mrs. Hanbury took a book to beguile the time, and sat with her face to the patient, so that she could see that all was right by merely lifting her eyes.
The young girl lay perfectly still, with her long dark hair spread out upon the pillow for coolness, and her white face lying in the midst of it as white as the linen of the sheet. Her breathing was very faint, the slight heaving of her breast barely moving the light counterpane. The lips were slightly open, and the eyes closed.
Edith was too weary and too weak to think. Before she had the fainting fit or attack of weakness (she had not quite fainted), she heard the story of the dwarfs misfortunes in a confused way through that sound of plashing water. She was quite content now to lie secure here without thought, in so far as thought is the result of voluntary mental act or the subject of successive processes. But the whole time she kept saying to herself in a way that did not weary her, "How strange that Leigh should lose everything and I gain so much, and that both should be lying ill, all in so short a time!" This went on in her mind over and over again, more like the sound of a melody that does not distress one and may be listened to or not at will, than an inherent suggestion of the brain. It was the result of the last strong effort of the brain at memory blending with the first awakening to full consciousness. "How strange that Leigh should lose everything and I gain so much, and that both should be lying ill in so short a time!"
Mrs. Hanbury raised her eyes from her book and gazed at the pallid face in the sea of dark hair. "She might be asleep or dead. How exquisitely beautiful she is, and how like Dora. How very like Dora, but she is more beautiful even than Dora. Dora owes a great deal to her trace of colour and her animation. This face is the most lovely one I ever saw, I think. How gentle she looks! I wonder was Kate Grace that Poniatowski married like her. If so I do not wonder. Who could help loving so exquisite a creature as this?"
Both of the girl's hands were stretched outside the counterpane.
Mrs. Hanbury leaned forward, bent and kissed the one near her, kissed it ever so lightly.
The lids of the girl trembled slightly but did not open.
Mrs. Hanbury drew back afraid. She had perhaps awakened her.
Gradually something began to shine at the end of the long lashes, and a tear rolled down the sweet young pale face.
"Have I awakened you?"
"No. I was awake."
"Are you in pain?"
"No. Oh, no!
"You are weeping."
"That," she moved slightly the hand Mrs. Hanbury had kissed, "that made me, oh, so happy."
"Thank you, dear."
No more words were uttered, but when Mrs. Hanbury looked down upon her book her own eyes were full.
The touch of the lips upon that hand had brought more quiet into the girl's heart than all the muffling in the house or the whispered orders to the servants or the doctor's drugs.
"She believed I was asleep and she kissed my hand," thought the girl. No quiet such as this had ever entered her bosom before.