Volume Three—Chapter Seventeen.
The Family Doctor.
Being a matter-of-fact man, Dr Stonor had communicated with the police, and many hours had not elapsed before he learned from them that a gentleman, such as he described, with a letter bearing his name, had been found, seriously injured, on one of the Surrey commons in the neighbourhood of Ripley.
On running down, he found John Huish lying at a cottage, bandaged up, and very weak, but quite sensible, and ready to smile in welcome of his old friend.
“Why, my dear boy, how could you be so foolish as to leave me like this?” exclaimed the doctor, who had heard of the condition in which his patient had been found. “You might have known that all I did was for your good.”
“Yes, doctor, yes,” he whispered; and his visitor noticed how calm and sane were his looks and words; “but I could bear it no longer. I had that dreadful idea in my head that I was going mad.”
“And you know now that it was only a fancy?”
“I do,” said Huish. “Can you find my wife? Use every plan you can to rescue her from—”
“You had better not talk, my boy,” said the doctor, laying his cool hand upon the patient’s head, to find it, however, as cool. “She is quite safe—at her uncle’s.”
“Is—is this true?” said Huish eagerly. “You are not deceiving me?”
“My dear boy, I would not deceive you; but now be calm and quiet, or I will not answer for the consequences. You see, I do not even ask you about your encounter with the man that did this, although I am full of curiosity; for I have heard a strangely confused account.”
“Tell me one thing, doctor, and then I will ask no more,” said Huish faintly. “You knew my father before I was born. Had I ever a brother?”
The doctor’s brow knit, and then he nodded.
“Yes, I believe so; but it is a sad story. Don’t ask any more. He died in infancy: at birth, I believe.”
“No,” said Huish calmly; “he lived.”
Dr Stonor sat watching the injured man, to see him sink into a calm, easy slumber, and on repeating his visit next day found him very weak, but refreshed and perfectly calm, and ready to converse upon the subject of his brother, when, feeling bound, under the circumstances, he told the wounded man what he knew of the past—of the encounter between Robert Millet and the elder Huish, and the latter’s marriage to Mary Riversley, while Captain Millet, who was terribly injured by his fall, had taken to his peculiar life, and held to it ever since.
“But I was always given to understand that this child died,” said the doctor, musing. “Your father and mother always believed it dead. It’s a strange story, my dear boy, and it seems impossible that there could be such a resemblance.”
“Seems impossible, doctor, perhaps,” said Huish, smiling; “but I have looked him in the face. Thank God,” he said fervently; “the knowledge of his existence sweeps away the strange horror that has troubled me, and accounts for all the past. Doctor, it must have been he who applied to you that day while I was abroad.”
Dr Stonor’s answer was to lay his hand upon his patient’s forehead again, and John Huish smiled.
“My dear boy, it is absurd,” he exclaimed pettishly. “I could not have made such a mistake. There; I must get back to town.”
“Come and see me to-morrow,” said Huish earnestly, “and bring me back some news of—”
The doctor nodded and left; and by that time next day he had come to the conclusion that there were strange lives in this world, for he had had such information as took him to an old house in a City lane, where he had gazed upon the face of the dead semblance of the man he knew to be lying ill in the Surrey cottage. Moreover, he had found with the dead a thin, harsh-spoken woman, red-eyed and passionate with weeping, and ready on the slightest encouragement to burst into a torrent of grief and adulation of “her boy,” as she called him.
“So handsome and so brave as he was, and such a gent as he could make himself, and live with swells,” she sobbed, “though he wouldn’t know me sometimes in the street.”
“Did you know his father and mother?” said the doctor, hazarding a shot.
“I am his mother,” said the woman sharply. “Poor, brave, handsome boy! The times I’ve found him in money, and warned him about danger, and watched for him when he wanted it done. I am his mother.”
“Nonsense!” said the doctor. “You don’t know me. I attended Captain Millet after his fall in the gravel-pit near the Dingle.”
“He was the gent that come to see Miss Ruth two years before, wasn’t he?”
“To be sure,” said the doctor. “You see, I am an old friend. Stop a moment,” said the doctor, referring to some notes he had made that morning in Wimpole Street. “Why, let me see, you must be Jane Glyne.”
“Which I ain’t ashamed to own it,” said the woman, pushing back her thin grey hair.
“Of course not,” said the doctor. “You were Mrs Riversley’s servant. You heard, of course, of the struggle between the two young men?”
“I heard of it after,” said the woman sharply; “and what’s more, I heard one of them shriek out at the time. It was when I was going away to where I had left the child.”
“To be sure,” said the doctor quietly; “but Miss Riversley thought it was dead.”
“Yes,” said the woman, “that was missus’s doings. She said no one must know it was alive. That’s why I took pity on the poor little thing, and brought him up.”
“That, and the allowance,” said the doctor significantly.
“Well, thirty pounds a year wasn’t such a deal,” said the woman; “but I somehow got fond of him, because he grew so clever. My! how he used to hate everybody of the name after he got to know who he was. I’ve known him to curse everybody who belonged to him, saying the bite of the dog I saved him from had given him a dog’s nature. It was his going down to the Dingle when he was fifteen and threatening an exposure that gave Mrs Riversley the illness she died of; but I’d made her settle my money on me,” chuckled the hag; “and it’s safe enough as long as I live. He’ll never want now what I saved for him, poor dear! nor me neither. My poor boy—dead!”
The doctor drove back to Wimpole Street, where he had a long talk at the panel with Robert Millet, and the result was that they were both satisfied as to the identity of the elder natural brother of John Huish, whose aim through life seemed to have been to take advantage of his extraordinary resemblance, and to improve it by copying Huish’s dress, carriage, very habits in fact, and using them to the injury of the younger brother, whom he bitterly hated for occupying the position that should have been his.
Miles away in the pleasant Surrey lane John Huish lay in happy ignorance of the fate of the man who had been his bitterest foe. He was very weak; but an awful load had been taken from his brain—the dread of insanity—and beside his bed knelt Gertrude, holding his hand with both of hers, and humbly asking his forgiveness for the doubts she had had.
“My darling!” he whispered, as he laid his other hand upon her soft, fair hair. “I am so happy, and life seems so bright before me that I cannot bear for you to lay one cloud upon its sunshine. Why, Gertrude, you might easily be deceived, when his presence, and the knowledge of such an existence, nearly drove me mad. There, little one, try and nurse me back to strength, for I have the hope now that nothing can take away. But if I die—” he said sadly, as he gazed out of the window.
“John—husband!”
“Yes, sweet,” he sighed, “if I die, remember I have been yours, and yours alone. Let no other hand touch me after death.”
“Husband!” cried Gertrude, in an agonised voice. “But no; you shall not die. John, darling, live for my sake—for the sake of our little child.”