MR. GUILDFORD OF SOTHERNBAY.
Angelina. Can he speak, sir?
Miramont. Faith, yes, but not to women.
His language is to heaven and heavenly wonders,
To Nature and her dark and secret causes.
Beaumont and Fletcher.
DOWN in the smiling south, spring had come even earlier than its wont this year, but in England things had been very different. Since January, the weather had been unusually severe; severe enough to lay low many even of the healthy and strong, to snap asunder the last thread of fragile lives, that for long had been quivering like withered leaves ready at the first stormy blast to drop from the tree.
Even in usually mild and sheltered spots, winter this year had cruelly asserted his power. Many a poor invalid, who had left a comfortable home in search of warmth and sunshine, wished himself back again, where at least, if he died, it would be among his own people, or resolved if he lived another year, never again to trust to English climate even at its best. There was illness everywhere; doctors were worn out; people began to talk of not facing winter again without artificial defences against the cold, double windows, Russian stoves, and other devices not often suggested by our modern experiences of weather.
At Sothernbay—a favourite little winter watering-place, as a rule exempt from frost and snow, north winds or east, from cold, in short, in any form—it was just as bad as everywhere else; in the opinion of the Sothernbay visitors naturally very much worse. It was no use telling all these unhappy people that their sufferings were no greater than those of their neighbours in every other part of England; they had no present personal experience of the climate of every other part of England, and they had of that of Sothernbay. It was no use assuring everybody that such a winter had not been known since the year of the famous whole-ox roasting on the Thames; former winters were past and gone, this one was unmistakably and most disagreeably a matter of now, not of then.
In all the seven or eight years during which Mr. Guildford, one of the younger surgeons of Sothernbay, had been settled there, he had never felt so tired and dispirited as on one wretched February evening, when the thermometer had sunk to unknown depths, and there was not the very faintest sign of thaw or break in the pitiless black frost which had reigned remorselessly for many weeks. Personally, Mr. Guildford, who had never been ill in his life, had no fault to find with the frost. As a boy he had never been so happy as during a good old fashioned winter; but his boyhood had been spent in a more invigorating atmosphere, mental and physical, than that of consumptive, hypochondrical Sothernbay; and there were many times when he seriously doubted if he had done well in choosing it for his home. His love for his profession was deep and ardent, and his faith in its possibilities almost boundless. He realized with unusual vividness, for one comparatively young and untried, the great, sad facts of human suffering, and longed for increased power of relieving it. But the peculiar phase of suffering to be met with at Sothernbay was of all kinds the most depressing to see. It was usually so hopeless. What could a doctor do in nine cases out of ten, for blighted lives, whose knell in many instances may be almost said to have sounded before they were born? How even could he cheer them, when the only comfort they craved lay in assurances and promises he could not bring himself to utter? Or the still more trying class of patients—the crowd of hypochondriacs, young and old, who season after season followed each other to the little watering-place, vainly hoping to recover there, as if by magic, the vigour of mind and body they would take no rational means to obtain—what could an honest, intelligent man do for such but tell them the truth, and risk instant dismissal for his pains? Where the physical suffering was genuine, however hopeless, there was certainly the occasional satisfaction of mitigating or temporarily alleviating it; but such satisfaction was poor and meagre to a man so energetic and enthusiastic as Edmond Guildford, Then, as will happen where the power is genuine and steady—a deep, calm flowing river, not a fitful mountain torrent at one time overwhelming in its impetuosity, at another dwindled to a thread—his pent up energies found for themselves a new channel. They turned naturally to study—study and research bearing indirectly upon his own profession. As a youth he had worked fairly, displaying an intelligence above the average, and some originality; as a man he threw his whole soul into these voluntary labours. And gradually this pursuit of truth—
“Truth tangible and palpable,”
this
“patient searching after bidden lore,”
developed in him a definite, practical ambition—the ambition of doing something worth the doing to help forward the special branch of science to which he devoted himself.
“Let me feel before I die that I have advanced if only one step in practical knowledge—broken if but an inch or two of fresh ground for others to work in,” he said to himself.
And this, at eight-and-twenty, he believed in as the passion of his life. And with this he determined no other influence should be allowed sufficient dominion over him to interfere. He knew little of women, enough only to dread and deprecate their intrusion beyond a certain point into a man’s life. That a pure and noble love, of its very essence ennobles, of its very strength strengthens the whole powers—the whole “mingled and marvellous humanity” of him who is capable of it; that a less worthy influence needs not to be despotic to be insidious; that “thus far thou shalt come and no farther,” it is but seldom given to man to say—these were truths which had not entered into the dreams of his philosophy.
He was tired and dispirited this February evening, when at last after a long day’s work he stood upon the door-steps of his own house. He felt too tired even to look forward with his usual eagerness to his quiet evening of study. It was often so with him after a day of the kind—a day filled with visits to the regular Sothernbay invalids—a day in which, as he looked back upon it, he could not feel that he had done any good. And such days and such feelings had of late been on the increase. He even began sometimes to think seriously of throwing to the winds the position he had gained for himself, and trying his fate at a different kind of place. But, being on the whole a reasonable and cautious man, he restricted his dissatisfaction to grumbling to himself, or, when the desire for sympathy was unusually strong upon him, and failing a more responsive audience, to his sister Mrs. Crichton.
This evening, however, an unexpected diversion of his thoughts was in store for him.
“There’s a telegram waiting for you, sir,” said the servant who opened the door.
“A telegram! where? I don’t see it,” he exclaimed, glancing at the table where letters were usually laid for him.
“No, sir; it’s not there. Mrs. Crichton, if you please sir, took it into your room and put it on the chimbley-piece, for fear as I should forget it,” said the boy with a touch of malice in his tone.
Mr. Guildford smiled. “All right,” he said cheerfully, as he went into his room and shut the door. “All the same,” he added to himself; “I do wish Bessie would learn to leave my things alone.”
A telegram was an event. Mr. Guildford’s beat lay within a very small radius, being entirely confined to Sothernbay itself. Now and then, at long intervals, he had been summoned to town to a consultation with one of the great men who wanted his report on some case he had been watching, but this happened rarely, and he knew of nothing of the kind impending at present. So it was with some curiosity he opened the big envelope and glanced at its contents.
“Colonel Methvyn,
“Greystone Abbey.”
To Edmond Guildford, Esq.,
“Sothernbay.
“Pray come by first train. The case is very urgent. A carriage shall be at Haverstock Station. Dr. Farmer has given me your address.”
The summons was a very unusual one. Mr. Guildford had once met Dr. Farmer, but he had never been at Haverstock, except when passing through the station in the railway; he did not remember ever having heard of Colonel Methvyn, or of Greystone Abbey, for in the few years he had been at Sothernbay he had had no leisure for exploring the neighbourhood, and his rare holidays had been spent at a distance. No doubt the message came from some county family near Haverstock, but this did not render it the less surprising, for all the county families had their own country doctors for ordinary cases, and for extraordinary ones—when they were very ill indeed—they either went to town to consult one of the great authorities, or summoned him to come to them. For there was a very orthodox amount of ill feeling towards Sothernbay on the part of the county, which, to do the little watering-place justice, it entirely reciprocated.
Mr. Guildford looked about for a railway guide; there was one on his table, but it was not of recent date. Then he remembered that his sister, who had only arrived the week before, would probably have a newer one. He was just leaving his room in search of it, when the front door bell rang, and Mrs. Crichton came in; she had been at an evening service, and shivered with cold, notwithstanding her wraps.
“It is colder than ever, Edmond, I do believe,” she exclaimed, as she saw her brother.
“Yes, I almost think it is,” he answered absently. “Bessie, have you a Bradshaw for this month?”
Mrs. Crichton was obliged to consider for a minute or two how long it was since “this month” had begun.
“Let me see,” she said. “What day did I come? Yesterday? no; the day before yesterday week. And this is the 14th. February began on a Wednesday, didn’t it? Oh! yes; my Bradshaw must be for this month. But this is leap year, there are generally only twenty-eight days in February—will that make any difference about when the month came in? Oh! no, of course not; it isn’t as if we were in March. What do you want a Bradshaw for, Edmond? You’re not going away; it is far too cold for travelling?”
“Tell me first where the Bradshaw is to be found,” said Mr. Guildford good naturedly; he had served a very fair apprenticeship to his sister’s peculiar arrangement of reasoning powers, and was not easily affected by their eccentricity.
“It’s up in my bedroom. No, it’s in my travelling-bag, and that is in the drawing-room—at least it was there the day after I came. Oh! no, by the bye, it is in the pocket of my largest travelling-cloak. It’s here!” and the Bradshaw was triumphantly produced.
A moment’s consultation of the intricate little volume showed Mr. Guildford’s quick eyes that there was no train for Haverstock for an hour and a half. He glanced at the “sent out” date of the telegram; then looked again at the railway guide. “No,” he said, “I could not have caught an earlier train even if I had got the message at once. I am rather glad of that.”
“Glad of what?” said Mrs. Crichton, as her brother, still looking at the guide, followed her into the drawing-room.
“That I have lost no time. It is so terribly disappointing to find that some stupid, trivial little accident has delayed one in an urgent case—a case, I mean, in which there is anything to be done,” he answered, half forgetting he was speaking to his sister and not to himself.
“I don’t know what you are talking about. An urgent case! What urgent case?” said Mrs. Crichton, pricking up her ears in hopes of a little professional gossip. It was so very rarely she could get “Edmond” to talk about his “cases” at all. “Oh! by the bye, that must be what the telegram was about. I was so afraid you would not get it at once, I put it on the mantelpiece in your study, Edmond; did you see?”
“Yes,” he said mildly. “I saw it; but on the whole, my dear Bessie, I prefer all letters being left on the hall-table, then I catch sight of them at once when I come in, you see.”
“Very well,” said Bessie, looking a little snubbed; but she soon recovered herself. “Are you really going away to-night, Edmond?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said again; “I must start in about an hour. I want to see Brewer on my way to the station.”
“Then you are going by rail?”
“Of course; what else did you think I wanted the guide for?” he replied. “I have time for a cup of tea, Bessie, if you will have one ready for me in half an hour. I have one or two letters to write first,” he added, as he left the room without giving Mrs. Crichton time to ask any more questions.
“How absurdly mysterious Edmond is!” said Bessie to herself. “He seems quite to forget what I went through with poor dear Mr. Crichton.”
Half an hour later, when Mr. Guildford came back for his cup of tea, Mrs. Crichton tried him on another side.
“What shall I say to any one who calls or sends for you to-morrow, Edmond?” she asked meekly.
“Whatever you like,” said her brother boyishly, beginning to laugh as he spoke. “No, Bessie,” he went on, “it’s too bad of me to tease you. I shall be back before to-morrow, before your to-morrow begins any way, and I have left notes and directions with Sims, and I shall see Brewer on my way to the station. If you really care to know where I am going, I can only tell you it’s somewhere near Haverstock, but as to whom I am going to see or why I have been sent for, I know as little as you.”
Bessie was delighted; it sounded quite mysterious and romantic.
“I do hope for once you’ll tell me all about it when you come back to-morrow,” she said gushingly. “I am sure you must know how thoroughly I am to be trusted. Poor dear Mr. Crichton used to say—and you know a lawyer’s nearly as bad as a doctor that way, about family secrets and all that—he used constantly to say that he would quite as soon tell anything at the town cross as tell it to me—no, that’s not it, I mean the other way, that he would quite as soon tell it to me as to—what are you laughing at so, Edmond? Perhaps it wasn’t about secrets he said that. I daresay it was that I was as safe as the Bank of England. He had so many clever expressions that I confuse them, you see.”
“Yes, my dear Bessie, I see,” said Mr. Guildford gravely. “It is quite natural you should.”
“I do hope it’s nothing horrid they’ve sent for you for,” continued Mrs. Crichton, a new idea striking her. “A murder perhaps, or a suicide, and they may want you to help to hush it up! I do hope you will be careful, Edmond; you know I often tell you you are very rash sometimes. You forgot your comforter again this very morning, and you don’t know what you may get mixed up in if you are not careful.”
“I’ll be very careful,” he assured her. “But I wish I were not going, I am tired to-night.”
Mrs. Crichton looked up anxiously,
“You are so much oftener tired than you used to be, Edmond. I don’t think you can be as strong as you were. I am sure you want a change.”
“I am as strong as ever, I assure you, Bessie. “My tiredness is more mental than physical,” he replied.
“But change is good for every sort of complaint,” said Bessie vaguely.
“But suppose I can’t have a change, said Mr. Guildford carelessly.
“You can if you like. You make me very unhappy, Edmond, when you talk in that indifferent way,” said Mrs. Crichton plaintively. “I don’t believe you take a bit of care of yourself when I’m away, and I can’t be here always, you know. I do wish you were married. You have over and over again said to me you did intend to marry some time or other, and then it has all come to nothing, and everybody knows it’s the proper thing for a doctor to be married. It would double your practice.”
“I have quite as much practice as I want, thank you,” answered her brother; “and if I hadn’t, it wouldn’t at all suit my ideas to marry for the sake of increasing it; but I do still intend to marry some time or other, Bessie, whenever I come across the right person.”
“What do you call the right person?” inquired Mrs. Crichton, looking far from satisfied. “I dare say you expect all sorts of things you are sure never to find in any girl.”
“No, indeed I don’t,” replied Mr. Guildford. “I am most reasonable. I don’t expect much in my wife. She must be pretty—very pretty, I don’t care how pretty; she may be a little conceited if it amuses her, she must have some notion of house-keeping, and a perfectly good temper, that’s about all. Oh! no, by the bye, she must be fond of work—sewing, stitching, I mean—and I think, yes I think, she must not be able to play or sing. I’m not quite sure about singing.”
Bessie looked aghast. “Why, Edmond,” she exclaimed, “you mean to say you don’t want your wife to be clever, not even accomplished? I thought you admired clever women so, Miss Bertram and her sister for instance, though they are so plain-looking, and just think how you enjoy Mrs. Wendover’s playing.”
“So I do, but I never said I should like to marry either of the Bertrams, did I? For a friend, I think I would prefer Frances Bertram to any—man I was going to say—to any one I know. But a wife and a friend are different. A very wise person once said, ‘Descend a step in choosing a wife, mount a step in choosing a friend,’ and I quite agree with him,” replied Mr. Guildford.
“It’s a very nasty, mean, spiteful saying, whoever said it,” said Bessie wrathfully. “It’s just that men are so jealous that they can’t bear their wives to be thought more of than themselves. Who said it, Edmond?” she went on looking rather frightened as an idea struck her. “It wasn’t Solomon, it isn’t in the Bible, is it?”
Her brother looked mischievous. “Not quite, but very nearly,” he said. “It is not in our Bible, but in some other people’s bible. It’s in the Talmud, I believe. Solomon may have said it originally; and, as he had fifty wives, he should surely be an authority on the subject.”
“You shouldn’t joke about such things, Edmond,” said his sister reproachfully, looking nevertheless relieved at hearing where the proverb was to be found. “I don’t know anything about the Talmud; it’s the book those silly hair-dressers in the Arabian Nights’ were always saying verses out of, isn’t it? I remember that story when I was a child. But I wonder at you taking up those Turkish ideas about wives, Edmond.”
“About a wife you mean, I suppose?” he answered. “I don’t intend to have more than one. But you don’t understand me quite, Bessie. I should never be jealous of my wife in the way you mean, whatever she was, only—”
“What?” inquired the sister.
“Only,” he went on, “those grand women would come in the way of other things in a man’s life. A smaller sort of person would be more comfortable and less intrusive. The noblest woman that ever was made would be at best a frail bark to risk a man’s all in,” he added reflectively.
He almost forgot to whom he was speaking, till Mrs. Crichton’s next observation reminded him of her presence.
“You are very funny, Edmond,” she said, “I suppose it’s with being so clever and studying so much and all that. But I don’t believe you have it in you to care much for any woman.”
She gave a gentle sigh as she recalled to herself the days of poor dear Mr. Crichton’s devotion to pretty little Bessie Guildford, twenty years younger than himself. She remembered how some of her friends had laughed at her for choosing to be an “old man’s darling.” “But we were very happy,” she murmured to herself.
“Perhaps not,” said her brother, as he rose to go. “And if so, all the better, I dare say. Good night, Bessie.”
“Good night, and don’t forget your comforter. And remember you are to tell me all your adventures when you come back,” she called after him.
“We’ll see,” he put his head in again at the door to say, and then he was gone.
It was dull sitting there alone, duller somehow than if Edmond had been busy at work in his own room on the other side of the wall. Bessie soon got tired of it and went to bed early. She got up rather before her usual hour the next morning in hopes of her brother’s returning to breakfast with her. But ten, eleven o’clock passed, he did not come. Mrs. Crichton succeeded in remembering a little piece of shopping to be done—a skein of silk was wanting for her fancy work; it would give her an object for a walk. So she went out for an hour, and when she came in was met by little Sims with the information that “Master had come in as soon as she had gone out. He had asked wasn’t Mrs. Crichton in, and he had left word he wouldn’t be back till late.”
Bessie was very much disappointed. She had been so anxious to hear the history of the mysterious journey. “And now,” she thought, “when Edmond comes in, he’ll be tired and thinking about other things, and I shall not hear about his adventures at all.”
It was not very late after all when Mr. Guildford came in, but as his sister had expected would be the case, he looked tired and preoccupied. They dined together, but during dinner he said little. Afterwards, contrary to his general custom, he followed Bessie into the little drawing-room and settled himself in a comfortable easy-chair near the fire.
“I am too sleepy to work to-night,” he said. “It is no use attempting it. But it is a pity, as I did nothing last night either, and I was in the middle of something rather particular.”
“You do look very tired,” said Mrs. Crichton sympathisingly.
“I was up all night,” he said shortly. And then they were silent for a few minutes—Bessie all the while burning with curiosity.
“What poor creatures even the strongest of us are, after all!” said Mr. Guildford suddenly.
“Do you mean about feeling tired?” said Bessie. “Being up all night is enough to knock up any one.”
“It was not that only I was thinking of,” he replied. “I did not think I was still so impressionable. I wish Dr. Farmer had not suggested my being sent for.”
“Why?” asked Mrs. Crichton with surprise and curiosity.
“There was nothing to be done. I was called in too late—but, indeed, I strongly suspect nothing could have been done from the beginning. I see so many hopeless cases in my regular round, that it is depressing to be summoned to another outside it. No, I am sure nothing could have been done.”
“Perhaps it is that you are so much cleverer than other doctors that you see sooner when there is nothing to be done,” suggested his sister.
But Mr. Guildford hardly seemed to hear what she said. “He must always have been exceedingly fragile,” he went on as if thinking aloud.
“Was the person dead before you got there?” asked Bessie.
“No, not till early this morning,” said her brother. “It was very painful—no, not exactly painful, sad and pitiful rather.”
“Was he a young man?”
“Not a man at all—only a child, a little boy,” answered Mr. Guildford, but the “only” seemed to reproach him as he uttered it. “Just at the very first I had faint hopes, but they soon died away. He had often been ill before, had had frightful attacks of croup every now and then. But this was bronchitis. There wasn’t a chance for him. Poor little chap!”
“How old was he?” asked Bessie, her bright blue eyes filling with tears.
“Above five, I think, barely as much. Dr. Farmer sent for me when they got very much alarmed, late yesterday. There wasn’t time to send to town, and they wanted a second opinion. Dr. Farmer is getting old now and easily upset—he was glad to have some one else for his own sake too. He could not have watched it to the end; he had quite broken down before I got there.”
“Was he an only child? How will his mother bear it, poor thing!” said Mrs. Crichton.
“She is not there. She is abroad somewhere—in India, I think,” answered Mr. Guildford.
He was silent for a moment or two and sat gazing into the fire. “What strange creatures women are!” he exclaimed suddenly. “What mixtures of strength and weakness! I wonder if it is at moments of intense feeling that one sees the true nature of women—or is it that feeling ennobles them temporarily, makes shallow ones seem deep, and selfish ones heroic, and cold-hearted ones devoted?”
Bessie felt curious to know what had called forth these remarks. It was not often that her brother troubled himself with speculations concerning her sex.
“What has put that into your head, Edmond?” she asked. “Are you thinking of any one in particular?”
“Oh! no—it was just a reflection on women in general,” he said carelessly.
Then he took up a book and began to read, and Bessie heard no more particulars of his visit to Greystone. Her curiosity was, however, satisfied that there was nothing very exciting to hear; it was only a sad little every-day story. She was very sorry for the little boy’s friends, and she said to herself she was glad that she had no children.