Moll Davis: a comedy

by Bernard Capes

To do him justice, the poor fellow lamented more for his Griselda than for his instrument, though the loss of the latter presented the more desperate problem to him. He could not afford from his scanty savings enough to buy him a new harp, and without one how was he to procure himself a living? In a last hope that he might find his conclusions premature, and the truants back where he had left them, he was returning dejectedly to the scene of his bereavement, when he caught sight of the figure of Salvator peering from his own doorway.

“What fortune?” quoth the medicus, with anxiety, and the other, his lips grimly pursed, only shook his head.

“Come in, good man, and explain,” said the physician kindly, “since I perceive there is more here than meets the eye, and that I have been in some manner I wot not of the unconscious instrument of your undoing. Nay, by your favour. I, who have been giving good advice all my years of discretion, may yet find enough to help a fellow-creature’s necessity.”

It was such a revelation of human charity that Sad Jack was moved to comply. He followed that Good Samaritan to his sanctum, and there, with some heartfelt lamenting for his ravished pet, frankly confided to sympathetic ears his circumstances and the nature of the trick which had victimized him. He had no reason to repent his candour. A practised, if a generous, reader of humankind, Salvator was soon enough convinced of the innate honesty and simplicity of soul which underlay the frozen surface of this nature. He saw a man here to be commiserated and trusted, and, in the end—to cut the story short—agreed to advance him the price of a new instrument, on the mere undertaking that he should repay the loan in such instalments as his success might justify. And to that arrangement, very delicately suggested, Bannister was persuaded to subscribe.

It was indeed an oasis to have discovered in this desert of a great city; and when, in the course of months, fame and fortune, at the instigation of an appreciative patron, leaped upon the humble street player, he did not forget to whom his success had been primarily due, but he sought out Salvator in his abode, and insisted on renting from him at a princely figure a suite of upper rooms in the house in Birchin Lane. And there he made his lodging, greatly to the satisfaction of his landlord, who, for all he was in no need of having patients harped to his door, was yet by far too upright a man ever to be counted a rich one.

“Phlebotomy, the conduct of a clyster, the sane mixing of a potion, the spreading of an adequate plaster—what more,” he would say to his tenant, “is needed to fulfil the functions of an honest practitioner? There be some, plain quacksalvers, who, seeking to supplement the legitimate by abstruse suggestion, adorn their chambers with the dried bodies of toads, crocadilloes, venomous asps contained in spirit, and other such monstra horrenda of a cheating fancy; whereby, indeed, if they show their improbity, they exhibit a true knowledge of the uses of the imagination, which will for ever pay to mystery the treble of what reason would pay to knowledge. But not of such suggestio falsi is my dealing: and, though I suffer by it, I would rather suffer in the company of Galen than prosper in that of Cornelius Tilbury.”

“Yet,” says Bannister, pointing to the astral globe, “you are not, it seems, for limiting your prescriptions to the terrestrial?”

“Why,” answered Salvator (whose real unprofessional name, by the way, was Shovel), “am I so dense and blind to the sources of light and life as to claim an independence for our planet? The herb is as much of heaven as the star, and the sign-manual of our origin is printed on man and flower alike. So must we consult man for heaven and heaven for man, his lines, his indications, whether derived from this celestial House or the other. For which reason I believe in astrology as in chiromancy, since both guide me to the association of a particular humour in a patient’s blood with its corresponding cause and remedy, they all being contained in his nativity, or horoscope, that is to say—man and season and herb alike. Without subscribing to the fantastical conceits of Gaule and Indagine, who profess to find in the palm of the hand a country of seven hills, each, as it were, a watershed laced with innumerable descending rivulets of tendency, I confess that I see no reason why what life hath marked on a man the Source of life had not in the first instance predestined there. Light is what I seek, and that comes not from the earth.”

So was this worthy doctor, sane, humane and religious in one—a very practical Samaritan. Yet, as it came to appear, not all his honest theories were able to serve him in the single direction where most he pined to see them vindicated. He was a widower, and possessed of an only child, a hopelessly crippled boy of fifteen.

Bannister had been an inmate of the house for a full week before he learned of the existence of this pathetic incubus. The building was well-sized, its upper part, until he came to occupy it, delivered to gloom and emptiness, and, to reach his rooms, he had to pass by a door on the first landing which, in his early notice of it, was invariably closed. But one night, as he went by, he observed the door ajar, and saw a light and heard a voice within. The voice was not that of his landlord, nor of the hard-faced woman who acted as his sole servant and housekeeper. It was a weak voice and a querulous, and it seemed to be expostulating over the meagreness of some concession grudgingly vouchsafed. The musician paused in some astonishment, resting momentarily the foot of the harp he shouldered on a stair-tread. He never parted from his loved instrument, though in these days he used a good packhorse to convey it to and from the places where he performed.