There were moments when he had thought that perhaps he was destined to die early; and he had made his will carefully, after much consultation with Mr. Mervyn, who was always, as it were, ready to hand during his short married life. Never, never once did he think he was to lose his beautiful tormentor, and so tragically.
At first he was prostrate. No one could rouse him. His father came to him and stayed. Dr. Hildyard spent his Sundays at the Pinewood. But efforts to coax and even startle him out of his gloom were fruitless. For a whole year he could not shake off the vivid recollection of what none but himself knew—the crowning horror of Lilia’s death-bed, her awful request, and his promise.
But through all this darkness of soul his faith did not waver. He reproached himself bitterly that he had not insisted more, struggled more, to help Lilia in her uncertainty, her unbelief. He blamed himself for her dying blasphemy, and for what he considered his cowardice in promising to kill himself. He went through their short life together over and over again, telling himself that at this juncture he ought to have said and done this thing, at such another that. He spent his days in listless wanderings about the Pinewood; his nights, or the best part of them, in feverish study, which availed him little or nothing. Thus passed the first year of his widowerhood.
Then came another sharp shock—the death of his good, kind friend, Dr. Hildyard, after a short illness of ten days.
During those ten days of close attendance upon his patron, Hugh’s eyes were opened. He saw that, the existence of which in a human being he had never suspected, never believed possible, a lofty soul.
Doctors are proverbially the worst patients. Dr. Hildyard, well aware that this was the end of his career, was a little impatient, perhaps, as to remedies which could not possibly reverse the fiat. In a few days his soul would be required of him, he knew that. He bore his physical agony with stoicism; his anxiety to leave his affairs in perfect order was so intense, it was a greater soporific than any narcotic. He talked much and often, between the paroxysms, to the young man in whose genius his faith had never wavered. He told his life—the difficulties he had successfully fought against and overcome, the awful temptations he had struggled with to the bitter end, the enmities which had dogged his footsteps and poisoned his simplest enjoyments—to Hugh. Each day of Dr. Hildyard’s existence, each day of that man who was supposed to be one of the most enviable beings in creation, who was in receipt of splendid fees, courted by all classes, the much-lauded hero of the medical press and the secretly hated of all the unsuccessful of the faculty (and their name is legion), was a miniature martyrdom; and he was awaiting his release with eager joy—a joy only damped by remorse that he had not done better, had not been a more faithful servant of the Giver of All.
“The miserable way in which I have crawled through my difficulties!” he wailed to his protégé. “Paull, never, never, fly low! Soar over your temptations and troubles, or when you come to die you will be ashamed of yourself, like I am!”
It was Dr. Hildyard’s exalted opinion of what a man should be, that first abashed, then roused, Hugh to cast aside self and live a new life.
Very soon after his friend’s death he set himself resolutely to a fresh beginning.
He had been strongly recommended by Dr. Hildyard to the influential men who came to shake his hand for the last time; and his start in practice as a specialist in nerve cases was made easy to him.