Dr. Wainwright's Patient: A Novel

by Edmund Yates

RELENTING.

When George Wainwright left the presence of the strange old German doctor, upon whom he had looked with an almost awful anxiety, a half-superstitious hope, it was with an acute sense of disappointment, such as had rarely stung the young man's ordinarily placid and well-disciplined mind. He had the profoundest respect for his father's opinion, the most implicit reliance on his father's judgment; and from the sentence which pronounced the case of Annette hopeless, except under those conditions whose fulfilment he now found it impossible to procure, he never thought of appealing. His father--of whose science in theory, of whose skill in practice, his own experience had offered him innumerable instances--had told him, with genuine concern and with true sympathy, rather than the more formal paternal manner it was the doctor's custom to exhibit towards his son, that this one only hope existed, this solitary chance presented itself. He had caught at the hope; he had endeavoured to reduce the chance to practice; and he had failed.

There was bitterness, there was agony, in the conviction, such as had never fallen to the lot of George Wainwright before, though life had brought him some of those experiences which Mr. Dunlop was wont to designate as "twisters" too. But then so much depends on the direction, the strength, and the duration of the "twist," and there are some so easily gotten over.

This, however, was not one of them; and George's heart was sorely wrung. The pain was directed cunningly, and strongly applied, and as for its duration--well, George believed, as we all believe when suffering is very keen and very fresh, that it was going to be everlasting. It couldn't be otherwise, indeed, in the sense in which "everlasting" applies itself to this mortal individual life; for did it not mean that the woman he loved, the one woman he really loved and longed for, was doomed for her term of terrestrial existence to the saddest of all destinies, which included utter separation from him? While they both lived, if that fiat should remain unaltered, how should his sorrow be less than everlasting? If it be true that there are certain kinds of trouble, and sharp trouble too, to which men and women do become accustomed, of a surety this was not one of them, but trouble of a vital kind, full of murmuring, of wretchedness, and regret. So long as they both should live--he a sane man, loving this periodically-insane woman as he loved her, with a strong passionate attachment, by no means deficient in the conservative element of intellectual attraction--whence should the alleviation come?

George Wainwright liked pain as little as most men like it; and as he turned his face towards England, discomfited and utterly downcast, he felt, with a sardonic morbidity of feeling, that he would not be disinclined now to exchange his capacity of suffering and his steadiness of disposition for the volage fickleness which he was accustomed to despise in many of his associates. If he could get over it, it would be much better for him, and no worse for her, he thought; but the next true and fine impulse of his nature rebuked the foregoing, and made him prize the sentiments which had come to ennoble his life, to check its selfishness and dissipate its ennui, though by the substitution of pain. And for her? He had seen so plainly, so unmistakably the difference in Annette, the new element of hope, anticipation, and enjoyment which her affection for him had brought into her hitherto darkened life, that the utmost exertion of his common sense failed to make him believe she would be the better for the complete severance between them which reason dictated to him ought to be the upshot of the failure of his enterprise.

"It is better to have loved," he repeated to himself, as he sat moodily in the railway-carriage on his return journey, unheeding alike the trimly-cultivated country through which he was passing, and the profusion of flimsy literature, journalistic and other, with which the cushions were strewn--"it is better to have loved----" And then he thought, "She is not lost. She lives, and I can see her. I may cheer and alleviate her life, though it may never be blessed with union. When the dark days come, they will be less dark to her, because when she emerges into light again, it will be to find me; and at her best and brightest--ah, how good and bright that is!--she will be happier and better because of me. Good God! am I so weak and so selfish that I cannot accept what there is in this of blessing, without pining for that which can never be?"

Thus, striving manfully with his bitter disappointment, and strengthening himself with earnest and manly resolutions, George Wainwright returned to England. Perhaps the sharpest pang he felt, sharper even than that with which he had heard Dr. Hildebrand's decided refusal and had obeyed his peremptory dismissal, was caused by the momentary shrinking from the sight of Annette, which made itself felt as he approached the place of her abode. At first there had been wild, reckless longing to see her, longing in which love was intensified by pity and sharpened by grief; then came this instinctive dread and lingering. He had left her with so much hope, so much energy, such strong conviction; he was returning with none of these. He was returning to look in the dear face so often overhung with the mysterious fitful veil of insanity, and to be forced to feel that it could never be given to mortal hand to lift that veil, and to throw it aside for ever. And though his first impulse had been to hasten back to England with all possible speed, when he arrived in London he lingered and hesitated about announcing himself at the residence of the Derinzys.

Should he go to his father's chambers at the Albany in the first instance, and tell him how his hopes had collapsed?--not because, as Dr. Wainwright had supposed, the eccentric and famous German savant was dead, but because the rampant vitality of professional jealousy had utterly closed his heart to George's pleadings, and even obscured the ambition to make one cure more, which, to the joy of many a heart, has been found too strong to be resisted by more than one celebrated physician en retraite. Yes, he would see his father in the first instance; it would give him nerve. Indeed, he ought to do so for another reason.

He must henceforth be doubly careful in his dealings with Annette; he who--it would be absurd to disguise his knowledge of the fact--had assumed greater importance in her life than any other being, who noted and managed her, and swayed her temper and her fancies as no one beside; and this was exactly the conjuncture in which the advice, the guidance, of the physician charged with her case would be indispensable. George would obtain it and obey it to the utmost. Supposing his father, in the interest of his patient and his son, were to pronounce that under the circumstances it would be advisable that the young people should not meet, could George undertake to obey the behests of the physician or the counsel of the father? This was a difficult question. In such a case he would appeal promptly to that excellent understanding, that taken-for-granted equality which had subsisted between him and Dr. Wainwright, and put it to him that he was prepared to sacrifice himself for the welfare of the girl, and to lend to her blighted life all the alleviation which his friendship and his society could afford, while strictly guarding himself from the avowal of any warmer feeling.

Assisted by these resolutions, and perhaps not quite unconscious that he would have been slow to credit any other person who might have formed them with the courage to maintain them, George Wainwright presented himself before his father. The Doctor received him kindly, and listened to the account of his fruitless journey without any evidence of surprise.