VII
He could do nothing more to help her.
In the restless preoccupation that filled him, forty-eight hours later, Lucian went round to see the old pawnbroker in Ovington Street.
Felix Menebees opened the door, his face paler than ever and his hair all standing up on end. “How is she, doctor?” he inquired hoarsely.
“Very brave, Felix,” said the doctor kindly. “She’s gone to the country—to Squires, you know.”
“Yes, I know. Please to come in, doctor. The old man—Mr. Smith, I mean—he’s in a terrible way. It seems to have all broken him up, like. This and the war, coming together, like. Mr. Millar’s gone, doctor. He’s enlisted.”
“That’s fine. What about you?”
“They wouldn’t pass me,” said Felix, his face suffused by a strange, yellowish blush.
The doctor, looking at the slender, narrow-shouldered youth with his prominent eyes and pallid face, was not surprised to hear it.
“You tried, did you?”
“Oh, yes, doctor. I tried a good many places, but they all turned me down. One gentleman was very kind and said they’d very likely be glad of me later on, if the war lasts.”
“Meanwhile,” said Lucian, “they’re very glad of you here, no doubt. Shall I go up to Mr. Smith?”
“I’ll ask the servant-girl to tell him you’ve come,” said Felix.
He disappeared into the basement and then came back to say that “the servant-girl” had gone to see if Mr. Smith was able to receive him.
“It’ll buck him up like, I daresay, if you can give him the latest news. He seems to have taken a norror of the idea of—prison.”
“I’ll tell him it’s all right. There’s no danger of that now, thanks to this war.”
“There didn’t ever ought to have been,” said Felix warmly. “I remember Mr. Cecil from when he was a little boy, and he never was bad. He was a—a nice little boy, doctor. I remember him like it was yesterday, and how he’d play Halma, and I’d let him win, most times, just to please him, like. And he always said, ‘That was a good game, Felix. Thank you for playing with me.’ His mother taught him that, you know. And to think of sending her boy to prison—why, it’s just wicked, doctor.”
“I think it is,” said the doctor sadly.
“You’re sure he’s safe now?”
“Quite safe from that, Felix.”
The young man drew a long breath. “I’m glad and thankful to hear it, I’m sure. There was all sorts of notions going through my mind, like, at one time, though I expect you’d think it was all moonshine and madness on my part.”
“I don’t suppose I should think it anything of the sort. What were the notions?”
“I thought perhaps there’d be some way I might offer myself to serve the sentence instead of him,” said Felix, with such simplicity that Lucian scarcely saw the strange appearance that he made as protagonist of Sydney Carton. “It’s a situation that I’ve read of, and I thought there might be something in it—that it might be worked. It would have been nothing to me, doctor, to serve three months’ imprisonment for Mr. Cecil, if I could have done it for her. I daresay you’d laugh, if I told you the number of times I’ve planned out similar situations, as you might say, ever since I was quite a lad. The saving her from a runaway horse, or carrying her out of the building when it caught fire, or giving my life to save Mr. Cecil’s and never letting her know.
“Sometimes, though, I’ve planned out the situation so that she did know, just before the end, and was with me at the last, like.
“It’s all been nonsense, I daresay, but if the opportunity had ever really come, I’d have taken it, doctor.”
“I know you would.”
“It seems funny, in a way, that when you’d always planned dying for someone, or—or being persecuted on their account, or imprisoned, like in a revolution, you shouldn’t ever really do anything better than call cabs for them or take their letters to the post. But I let myself fancy those things, doctor, although I know it was silly like, because the way I’ve argued it is this: that if the thought’s always there, some day the opportunity may come, unexpected like, and then it’ll be a sort of second nature to act promptly, if you take my meaning.”
Felix looked wistfully at the doctor, his hair erect and his bony frame seeming to collapse upon itself from very weakness. His proportions, more especially by comparison with those of Rose Aviolet herself, added indeed an element of the grotesque to his outlined programme of action.
But Lucian felt no inclination to smile. “You’re a good fellow, Felix,” he said. “The picturesque opportunities don’t often come along in real life, as you say, but it’s the other things that really count.”
“Thank you, doctor,” said Felix, blinking his pale eyelashes rapidly. “I should never have said all this, I don’t suppose, only that I’m wrought-up like. Don’t mention it to any one else, please!”
The doctor gave his promise as a breathless young woman in cap and apron came to summon him upstairs.
“Good-night, Felix.”
“I shall be here when you come down, doctor.”
Felix, characteristically, would always be there, the doctor reflected. In all the years during which the doctor had come to Ovington Street, the many times that he had brought Rose there, or taken her away, Felix had always been there, unbolting the door for her, fetching the cab for her, breathlessly echoing her greeting or her farewell, gazing upon her with faithful adoration, and going back to his dark corner of the shop to dream his wild, cinematographic day-dreams of unlikely prowess on her behalf.
“Where is the line of demarcation?” Lucian wondered sadly to himself. “This lad’s fancies may be foolish enough, but it’s a rather sublime sort of folly, and unspeakably pathetic; and that other poor boy, who dragged his day-dreams into everyday life—it’s only a step further, after all.... And yet one’s something of a hero, and the other——”
He would not supply the word, even to himself.
On the way upstairs, a very odd sound, familiar in an elusive sort of way, perplexed him for an instant. He opened the door of the sitting-room.
The frail, fatuous, tinkling sound was intensified. It was an air, the air called “Rousseau’s Dream,” played by an old-fashioned musical box.
It stood on the round table in the middle of the room, where a space had been cleared for it beside the aspidistra and the big Bible. Over the gas-fire, Alfred Smith was sitting, looking strangely chilled and old.
“Rousseau’s Dream” died away in a little blur of sound as the mechanism ran down, and old Smith looked up.
“So you’ve come to see me. It’s kind of you. Sit down by the fire, doctor, and warm yourself.”
Lucian complied with the invitation silently.
“Well, she’s gone down to the country, has she?”
“Yes. You know Cecil has enlisted?”
“I know. They’ll—they’ll send him out there, I suppose?”
“I believe so. He’ll have to go through his training first, of course. Perhaps the whole thing will be over before he gets out there.”
“I hope not,” said the old man sombrely, “I hope not, doctor.”
The old pawnbroker seemed disinclined for conversation, and they sat in silence on either side of the hearth.
At last the old man made a gesture. “You heard that old musical box of mine, as you came in? He—the boy—used to be very fond of it, when he was little. That time when he and his mother first stayed here after they came back from abroad, he was ill once. And when he first came downstairs I let him have the musical box for a treat, and Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ to amuse him. The reason I started it playing just now, was that my heart might be softened towards him. I thought if I could think of him again as a little fellow, I might be better able to forgive him. We are all of us conceived in iniquity, but there is something about a child——”
He broke off.
“Do you remember Cecil Aviolet as a child?”
“Yes, very well indeed.”
“That it should have come to this!” said the old man.
His tone was one of amazement, rather than grief.
“A common thief.”
“No!” said Lucian.
“Yes, that’s all he was. A thief. How can you say he was anything else? That cup was valued at thirty pounds, and he tried to steal the honour and glory of it, too. The Aviolets tried to make out that he was mad, didn’t they? But he wasn’t. I know that very well. He’s a thief and a rogue.”
The doctor was silenced before the sheer weight of the old man’s implacable conviction. Nothing would shake him. Where the Aviolets had seen stark, incomprehensible insanity, where the law had seen wilful depravity, where he himself saw a hundred thousand subtleties of pathology, Uncle Alfred saw the crude fact of a theft.
He would never see anything else.
“It’s my duty to forgive as I hope to be forgiven,” he presently said, very earnestly and loudly. “And I will forgive. I will not let the sun go down upon my wrath. But it’s very hard: Father, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.”
“Amen,” said Dr. Lucian.
Uncle Alfred nodded his head slowly. “I hope that may be taken as it was meant,” he cryptically remarked. “How’s Rose?”
“She’s wonderful.”
“Rose is a good girl. She has her faults, but she’s a good girl. I’ve been sorry for Rose, over this business. It wasn’t her fault, the boy turning out like this. Don’t you let any one persuade her that it was, either.”
“Not if I can help it.”
“You can help it, all right. She thinks a lot of you, doctor.”
The doctor gazed into the fire.
“I wish,” said Uncle Alfred with sudden fretfulness, “that you’d take and marry her. I’ve never held with Paul on the subject of marriage. No doubt you remember his epistle on the subject? It reads to me like the writing of a disappointed man, you mark my words. People don’t lash out in that way for nothing. Marriage was ordained by God, Paul or no Paul.”
“You haven’t married yourself, Mr. Smith.”
“My loss was another man’s gain,” said Mr. Smith austerely. “And so you’ll find yours will be, my fine sir, if you don’t strike while the iron’s hot. Do you want Rose?”
“Yes.”
“Then, in my opinion, it’s now or never. You’re the person she’s turned to in all this—though I could wish she’d known better than to lean upon an arm of flesh in the day of tribulation—and it’s my belief that if you went to her now, she’d take you.”
“I wish to God I thought so too.”
“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,” said Uncle Alfred.
He seemed cheered by his own admonitions, and presently Dr. Lucian rose to leave him.
“Are you going to follow my advice?” the old man demanded inquisitively.
“Perhaps I shall. Anyway, I’m very grateful to you for the advice, because I hope it means that you wish me success.”
“I’ve already told you that I wish you success,” Uncle Alfred remarked testily, “but God helps those that help themselves.”
Dr. Lucian went away with the conviction strong upon him that civil speeches were wasted on Mr. Smith.
Within the next two days came the letters that he had known would come.
He opened one from Rose, in her sprawling handwriting that yet held character, and smiled a little, as he always did, at the strange stilted phraseology that he knew her to evolve with so much difficulty whenever she imposed upon herself the uncongenial task of letter-writing.
My dear Maurice,
Ces has been sent off to the barracks and he’ll be in uniform by this time.
They mean to be kind, here, but of course they don’t understand. Sir Thomas says Cecil must come here for the leave they all get before being sent off to fight. I think Ces wants to, really, because he’s always been fond of Squires, and he asked me to stay on here for a bit, till he goes out. I’ve told the hospital I’m not going back for the present. They’ll understand, knowing what’s happened.
I haven’t seen Henrietta yet, but I’ll go soon, and I’ll write and tell you how she is. I had a very nice letter from her.
It wouldn’t be any good me trying to thank you, dear Maurice, for all you did. I can’t say what I feel about it, and never can. There never was any one like you, and I’ll never forget it to my dying day. But I can’t write things, as you know.
It isn’t too bad here. Ford and Diana aren’t here, thank goodness, and I don’t mind anything except Ces, now.
Please go and see Uncle A. if not too busy. I expect he’s down on his luck, and he likes you. Give him my love, and Felix Menebees too.
Yours ever,
Rose Aviolet.
The doctor carefully folded up the sheet of paper and put it into his pocket-book before he opened the other letter.
It was from Cecil, dated from the barracks.
My dear Dr. Lucian,
You will have heard from my mother, and she will thank you better than I can for all you’ve done for us both. Of course, I know that what you did for me was for her sake.
I was sent here this morning. It’s all very strange at present, but I’m thankful to be here, and all the men say we shall be sent to the trenches almost at once. I hope we will be, and I hope that I shan’t ever come back from there. This isn’t just swank, but true.
Very, very gratefully
Cecil Aviolet.
And after he had read that letter, the doctor very deliberately sat down, took out his fountain pen and unscrewed it, and then and there wrote his reply:
My dear Cecil,
Thanks for writing; it was very good of you to find time. I will do everything I can for your mother, for her sake and for yours too, while you’re away, and send you a line with news of her from time to time.
I expect you’ve been through hell, in these last few weeks, and I wish there was anything one could do to help, but it’s the isolation of these things that makes them what they are. I’d like to add, if you won’t think me impertinent, that from a purely professional point of view I should say you’ve turned the corner. But it takes a good deal of pluck to go on, after that, as you’re finding.
My sister asked me in her last letter to give you her love—a message she’s chary with, as a rule, but you’re an old favourite of hers.
The doctor hesitated for some time over the subscription to his letter, and finally, he wrote:
Your old friend,
Maurice Lucian.
A week later he was sent for to Ovington Street.
The small maid-servant who came for him was breathless. “Felix Menebees, ’im as is the assistant, sent me,” she explained, obedient to the fate which decreed that Felix should invariably be denied any ceremonious prefix to his peculiar name. “The old gentleman, he don’t know nothing about you being sent for.”
“Is he ill?”
“M’m,” she nodded hard.
“Do you know what’s the matter with him?”
“The influenza,” she glibly asserted.
“How long has he been bad?”
“About a week, but ’e didn’t let on.”
That Dr. Lucian could believe. He went to the familiar building over the shop at once.
Felix Menebees was at the door, watching for him, and mysteriously beckoned him inside.
“Thank you very much, Gladys. You can go downstairs,” he said to the small servant, who obediently disappeared.
“Doctor, it’s like as if it had to be,” said Felix impressively, when she was no longer within earshot.
“What?”
“More trouble for poor Mrs. Aviolet. You’d have thought she’d had enough to bear without any more being put upon her. But I’m afraid the governor is very ill.”
“Shall I go up?”
“As a friend, yes. As a physician, not on any account,” said Felix earnestly.
“So that’s it, is it? I suppose he doesn’t know you’ve sent for me?”
“I wouldn’t have him know for the world.”
“Very well.”
Dr. Lucian went upstairs.
The pawnbroker was sitting at the round table in the middle of the room, and he was reading in the very large Bible that had always lain there.
“I’m glad you’ve come,” he observed to Dr. Lucian without preamble. “I was going to send you a message.”
“I’m afraid you’re a sick man, Mr. Smith.”
“Maybe, maybe. But it’s your signature I want. I’ve made my will. I’ll tell you what’s in it, if you like.”
“That’s not necessary, unless you wish it. Do you want me to sign it now?”
“‘Work while it is day for the night cometh when no man can work.’ Unless I am greatly mistaken—and let me tell you that I am scarcely ever mistaken—that night is not very far away now. Call the lad Felix, and tell him to send the girl here. She can witness with you.”
The doctor obediently went to the head of the stairs, and after delivering his message, delayed his return into the room until all sounds resembling the careful extraction of papers from a secret place by an aged and determined person had ceased.
An immense length of foolscap lay on the table, all but a strip of which was covered with pink blotting paper.
“Here,” said Uncle Alfred to Gladys, who wrote a large, round-hand signature, and went away again looking awed.
“Now you can order me to bed if you like,” said the old man indifferently. “I doubt I shall ever rise from it again, but that boy of poor Rose’s, and this war, between them, have done for me.”
After a very brief examination, Dr. Lucian spoke: “You’re quite right, I’m going to order you into bed. And I want you to let me send round a nurse, who’ll take all trouble off your hands and do just what you tell her.”
“She’ll be the first one of her calling who ever did any such thing, then,” Uncle Alfred disbelievingly remarked. “No, no, I don’t want strange hussies at my bedside; I’ve got no money to throw away on that sort of rubbish.”
“Then send for your niece.” The doctor neatly made the point at which he had been aiming.
“That would be less expensive, by a great deal. Only her keep, though Rose always did have a very hearty appetite. But she’s a good girl—I’m fond of Rose. She can come if she likes. It’ll give her something to think about, now the boy’s gone.”
The doctor wrote that night to Rose. When he came the following evening to see his patient, she met him on the threshold of Uncle Alfred’s room. He took her hand in silence, looking at the tiny lines round her mouth that the last few weeks had traced there.
“Is he very bad?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Going to die?” Rose whispered. “He says himself that he won’t get well again.”
“I’m afraid he won’t, my dear. Shall you be able to stay?”
“Oh, yes. Cecil and I can’t be together now, and I’d rather be here than at Squires, though they’re kind enough in their way. If Ces is sent abroad, he’ll get leave first, and I should have to be free for that, but it won’t be yet.”
Lucian thought, although he did not say so, that she would be free before that.
The old pawnbroker sank very gradually.
The day before his death he remarked to his niece: “Flowers are a very foolish and extravagant custom. You will be so good as to put ‘No flowers, by request.’”
Rose knew better than to protest at the implication. “Very well, Uncle A.”
Presently he said: “You may tell your son that I am not the man to allow the sun to go down upon my wrath. I know my duty as a Christian, and I forgive him. But if you had brought him up in the fear of the Lord, this would never have come to pass.”
That night a change came over him that even to Rose’s eyes was unmistakable, and she sent a message to Lucian early in the following day.
Alfred Smith, his face very grey, lay propped up against his pillows, his fingers plucking at the sheet, his mouth oddly fallen in, and only his shrewd, indomitable old eyes seeming strangely alive still.
“It’s getting very dark,” he said.
The clear light of morning filled the room.
“Now don’t go lighting the gas, Rose,” said Uncle Alfred sharply. “That’s you all over, that is: always in a hurry. There’ll be no need of the light yet awhile. Where’s Felix?”
“In the shop. Do you want him?”
“Certainly not. He’s there to look after the business, not to come upstairs. But mind, there’s to be no philandering with young Millar, my girl. I know you.”
Rose looked pitifully down at the shrunken form. Her strong white fingers closed over his restless ones. Uncle Alfred looked down at their joined hands with a faint, detached air of surprise.
“Is Lucian there?”
“Yes,” said the doctor, low and clearly.
“I am obliged to you for all the attention that you have shown me. Human skill can avail little against ... against the Lord. The Lord——”
His voice wandered into a maze of garbled texts and devotional phrases. But the last words that were wholly intelligible Uncle Alfred spoke with his unfaltering gaze fixed upon Rose.
“You’ll find I’ve remembered you. But you can’t touch the capital.” His tone was triumphant. “I’ve done well, with the Lord’s help, and a good business training. There’s nothing like sound investments to build upon—and unless the Lord build the house, how shall it stand?”
Then he shut his eyes, and, late in the day, passed imperceptibly from sleep into the greater repose.
“He was always kind to Mother and me, in his way, and it meant more coming from him, having always been on the near side, poor Uncle A.,” said Rose, child-like, effortless tears running down her face.
But she wept no more when Felix Menebees, having taken his last leave of his old employer, broke down pitifully, after a night and two days spent upon his feet. Instead, she put a kettle on to the gas-ring and boiled water and made tea and then prosaically said to the doctor and to Felix:
“Let’s have tea. I’m sure it’s much the best thing we can do.”
“Let me....” said Felix incoherently. “I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Aviolet——”
“Why? I’m sure if any one is entitled to cry, Felix, it’s you, after being on the go a whole night and all you’ve done in the day-time as well. I cry myself, when I’m tired—I roar. I’m sure it does one good sometimes,” said Mrs. Aviolet reflectively.
The funeral was a large one, with few relatives and personal friends present, but many representatives of minor public bodies, and charities. Young Millar had obtained leave for attendance, and afterwards came back to Ovington Street with Rose and Felix.
It was found that Uncle Alfred’s will, a lengthy and elaborately worded document, appointed Artie Millar as his successor in the pawnbroking business, which was left to him outright, together with a capital sum of three thousand pounds. Innumerable small legacies went to as many mission societies, one thousand pounds to Felix Menebees, and Uncle A.’s savings, amounting to nearly five thousand pounds, and invested in gilt-edged securities, was charged with a life-interest for Rose’s benefit, to revert eventually to the business.
“He’s cut Cecil out,” was Rose’s first thought.
Her next, inevitably, was that of the new freedom conferred upon her.
Both she and Lucian congratulated Felix Menebees.
“Thank you very much,” said the youth, in a dazed way. “It was a great surprise to me. It was very good of him.”
Long afterwards he said to the doctor: “I wish Mr. Cecil had had it, doctor—I do indeed.”
“I know what you mean, Felix, but you know Cecil Aviolet will be a rich man one of these days. He’ll be glad that you’ve got some recognition of your loyal service to the old man.”
“It’s a fortune, you know,” Felix said simply. “I’ve no parents, and I’m not clever. I should never have had any money at all, except I earned it, and I’m not clever or strong or educated, to be fit for much.”
“It’s not too late, with this money behind you, to do something in the way of training. What do you fancy?”
Felix gave a curious, shy smile. “I’m going to learn to drive a car, first thing. I’ve arranged about the lessons already.”
“Why, Felix?”
“So as to get to the war. I want to drive a field ambulance.”
The doctor was silent from sheer astonishment.
“Me and Mr. Millar have talked it over. He was most kind. He might have put on airs, in a manner of speaking, seeing as he’s the boss now, but he didn’t at all. He has a relative who’s going to keep the business going for him while he’s at the war, and he offered to make me acting manager at once. It was most gratifying, doctor. But I said that, much as I appreciated the compliment, I must beg to decline owing to other calls. And then I told him what I’d planned. And he’s going to keep the offer open against the time I come back again. Though, of course, as I pointed out, I may never come back again at all, but die fighting my country’s foe, the same as another.”
“Of course you must come back,” said Dr. Lucian vigorously. “We can’t spare your sort, Felix. Good luck to you. Come and see me before you go.”
When Felix Menebees eventually took advantage of the invitation he was in blue uniform, with a Red Cross brassard. His face was radiant.
“We’re off on Monday, doctor. I can’t hardly believe in my own good luck. Me that thought I should never have any adventures at all as long as I lived, but only stand behind a counter all my days! Not that I wouldn’t have done it gladly, for the old gentleman’s sake, and of course for Mrs. Aviolet’s.”
“Have you seen her?”
The pallid face of Felix became even more suffused and transfigured. “Doctor, if you’ll believe me, I wrote and told her how it was my great wish to be allowed to say good-bye to her before I went, and she asked me to take her out to luncheon! She did, indeed. Of course I know, it’s all different when a chap’s in uniform, but I looked upon it, and I always shall, as the very proudest moment of my life. And she’s going to write to me. And I had a note from Mr. Cecil, doctor, to wish me good luck—ever such a nice note. I wish I could have seen him again.”
“You may meet out there.”
“You’d laugh if you knew how often I’d planned getting some chance of saving Mr. Cecil’s life under fire,” said Felix wistfully. “I’d like to do something for her, you know. But the way I look at it, doctor, is that I can be doing my job as though it was for her, like. I daresay you’ve guessed, doctor, knowing both her and me as you do—I daresay you’ve guessed,” said Felix Menebees with a naïveté almost superb, “that I think the whole world, and more, of Mrs. Aviolet.”