“I thought if you’d just come round,” he said in a deep voice, with extreme embarrassment. Robert Grimshaw was already half out of his chair, but to his, “What is it?” Mr. Held replied only, “I don’t know that it’s anything, but I should like you just to come round.”
Robert Grimshaw was in the hall and then in the street beside the figure of Mr. Held, who, with his dancing and hurrying step and his swarthy but extreme leanness, had the grotesque appearance of an untried tragic actor. It wasn’t that Dudley was any worse, he said, and it wasn’t—no, certainly it wasn’t, that he’d made any attack upon Pauline. It was simply that he would like Mr. Grimshaw just to come round.
In the drawing-room in Curzon Street Pauline was sitting chafing Dudley Leicester’s hands between her own, and Robert Grimshaw never quite understood what it was that had led the young man to call him in. By cross-questioning him a great deal later he discovered that young Mr. Held had conceived a mournful but enormous tenderness for Pauline. It was, indeed, enough to see how from a distance his enormous eyes pored like a spaniel’s over her tiny figure, or to see how, like a sprinter starting to make a record, he would spring from one end of the drawing-room to fetch her a footstool before she could even select a chair upon which to sit down. It couldn’t be said that he did not brood over Dudley Leicester with efficiency and attention, for that obviously was one of the services he rendered her. But the whole of his enthusiasm went into his attempts to foresee what in little things Pauline would be wanting. And, as he explained later to Robert Grimshaw, that day he had felt—he had felt it in his bones, in his soul—that Pauline was approaching a crisis, a breakdown of her personality. It wasn’t anything she had done; perhaps it was rather what she hadn’t, for she had sat that whole afternoon holding Leicester’s hand, rubbing it between her own, without speaking, looking straight in front of her. And suddenly he had a feeling—he couldn’t explain it. Perhaps, he said, Christian Science had had something to do with it—helped him to be telepathic.
But, sitting as she always did, perched on the arm of the chair where Leicester sprawled, Pauline simply turned her head to the door at Grimshaw’s entry.
“This doctor’s no good,” she said, “and the man he’s called in in consultation’s no good. What’s to be done?”
And then, like Mr. Held himself, Robert Grimshaw had a “feeling.” Perhaps it was the coldness of her voice. That day Sir William Wells had called in a confrère, a gentleman with red hair and an air of extreme deafness; and, wagging his glasses at his friend, Sir William had shouted:
“What d’you say to light baths? Heh? What d’you say to zymotic massage? Heh?” whilst his friend had looked at Dudley with a helpless gaze, dropping down once or twice to feel Leicester’s pulse, and once to press his eyeball. But he did not utter a word, and to Grimshaw, too, the spectacle of these two men standing over the third—Sir William well back on his heels, his friend slouched forward—had given him a sudden feeling of revulsion. They appeared like vultures. He understood now that Pauline, too, had had the same feeling.
“No, they don’t seem much good,” he said.
She uttered, with a sudden fierceness, the words:
“Then it’s up to you to do what’s to be done.”