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The case, as a pathological no less than as a criminological curiosity, was unique. I will state a few particulars. The button lodged in the pancreas, in which it was presently detected, comfortably ensconced, by means of the Röntgen rays. And it is a fact that, from the moment it settled there—never apparently (I use the emphasis with a full sense of my responsibility) to be evicted—Mr. Hurley began to recover, and from recovering to thrive—on anything. Croton-oil—I give only one instance—was a very cream of nourishment to him. Galvanic batteries but shook him into the laughter which makes fat, but without stirring the button. It was ridiculous to suggest an operation, though the point was long considered. But in the meanwhile the button had continued piling up over itself such impenetrable defences of adipose tissue that its very locality had become conjectural. The question was dropped, only to give rise to another. How could one any longer detain this luxuriant man in hospital as an invalid? He was removed, therefore, beaming, to the police court; received, for some inexplicable reason, a nominal sentence, dating from the time of his arrest (everything, in fact, was henceforward to prosper with him), and trundled himself out into the world, where he disappeared. I have seen him occasionally since at years-long intervals. He grows ever more sleek and portly, till the shadows of the three dead Belmonts together would not suffice to make him a pair of breeches. He has a colossal fortune; he is respectable, and, of course, respected—a genial monster of benevolence; and he never fails to remind me, when we meet, of the time when I could pronounce his life not worth a button.
I have, can only have, one theory. The button, after many cross adventures, “got home” at last—fatally for Mrs. John Belmont, who fell into a vicious decline upon its loss, and, tenderly nursed by her sister-in-law, departed this sphere in an uncertain year of her life. And, unless the button itself comes to dissolve, Jim, I fear, is immortal.
DOG TRUST
There was no reason why Richard Le Shore should not have made a straightforward appeal for the hand of Miss Molly Tregarthen to her papa. His credentials—of fortune, condition, and character—were unexceptionable; the girl’s kind inclinations were confessed; the father himself was an unexacting, indulgent, and ease-loving Democritus. It was but a question of those two and of Mr. Dicky, their favoured, their intimately favoured, guest.
There was no reason, and for the reason that the spirit of Romance abhors reason; and that was why, without any reason, Richard persuaded Mollinda to a clandestine engagement, to stolen interviews, to a belief that love franked by authority was only the skim-milk of human kindness. At least he chose to persuade himself that he persuaded her, at all times when he could coax a certain bewildered honesty in her eyes from dumbly questioning the necessity of such tactics. In reality he loved that look, as the sweetest earnest of a sweet quality. It was not her he studied to deceive, but himself. Incurably eligible, he could never taste but through make-believe, like the “Marchioness,” the sweet stimulant of paternal interdiction.
At the end of the season he accompanied father and child to “Tregarthen.” Here, you may be sure, he had not been twenty-four hours without making choice for his love’s rendezvous of a little wood which, approached through a tangled shrubbery, covered the slopes which ran up from the back of the house to the high beeches above.
Now Dicky would himself have allowed that everything (desirable) had shone upon his suit save moonlight. That only, of all poetic glamours, was yet lacking. And so he prevailed with Molly Tregarthen to consent to a postprandial trysting among the trees, on the very evening subsequent to that of his arrival.
He had no difficulty in escaping from papa, the imperturbable sybarite. Seated in an open window over against shrouded lawns, and a moon which rose like a bubble in liquid darkness; dreaming betwixt decanter and cigar-case, papa would not have had his luminous coma disturbed for anything less than a serious fire. So Dicky left him, and going up alone to the woods, leaned his back against a tree and smoked placidly.
It was very quiet, and fragrant, and beautiful there; and presently the young gentleman lost himself somewhat in reflections. The moonlight, penetrating the leaves, made of the sward a ghostly Tom Tiddler’s Ground, which was all mottled with disks of faint gold. What a soft, fine shower to fall upon the head of his Danae, as she should come stealing up the alleys of light! Stealing—stealing! There was a little thrill of ecstasy in the word. How wide her eyes would be, and how would her bosom rise and fall in the breathlessness of some phantom guilt!