Oh, Harry, how you frightened me, coming behind me like that! Supper been ready half an hour! Has it? All right, dear, I’m coming.
CHAPTER XIV
THE YOUNG PLAY-ACTOR.
I was telling you about the young lady, who was so ill in our house, when I was interrupted through Harry insisting on my coming to supper. No matter whether I want any supper or not, Harry won’t let me stop away. He always makes the excuse, that he hates to have his meals alone. Certainly it is not very nice, but often and often I could get a quiet half-hour at my writing but for supper. After supper I can never do anything, for, somehow or other, I settle down in my easy chair and get sleepy directly.
Harry smokes one pipe—his quiet pipe, he calls it—looks at the paper, and then we go to bed. Sometimes, if there is a very exciting or very amusing case in the Law Courts, he reads it out loud to me. If we have friends staying with us, or come to spend the evening, sometimes after supper we have a hand at cards, but it is not often. We are generally very glad indeed to get to bed, as most people are who have done a hard day’s work, especially as we are always up very early in the morning, which is necessary in an hotel, where everybody wants looking after personally, or else it very soon goes wrong.
After the doctor had told me the story of the young lady, who was so ill in our house, you may be sure that I took more interest in her than I had ever done before. There is nothing which touches a woman’s heart so much as an unhappy love affair, and poor Miss Elmore’s was unhappy enough in all conscience, for it had brought her to what looked like being her death-bed.
One day the doctor told me he had had a very serious talk with Mrs. Elmore—I told you about her being so hard—and had as good as said to her that there was only one thing could save the young lady, and that was to let her see her sweetheart again.
Mrs. Elmore sniffed and tossed her head, and said, “And what about my daughter’s soul? Was it a fit preparation for the other world, if she was dying, to have a play-actor standing by her bed-side? The only persons who had a right there were the doctor and the clergyman.” It was no good to argue—all Mrs. Elmore would say was that never, with her consent, should her daughter see that lost young man again. “What was the good?” she said. She would never consent to the marriage, and if what the doctor said was true, that she was breaking her heart about the young fellow, what was the good of seeing him if she couldn’t marry him? Besides, she was sure her daughter wasn’t so bad as the doctors tried to make out. She would be better again if she would only make an effort, and allow herself to rally, and fix her thoughts upon respectable things instead of play-actors.
You wouldn’t think a mother would talk like it, but Mrs. Elmore did. The human nature in her seemed to have dried up—if I may use the expression.
The doctor said it was no good talking to the mother any more, so he went and saw our local Methodist clergyman, that Mrs. Elmore sat under every Sunday, and that came sometimes to visit the sick young lady.
He put the case straight to him, and told him he believed that the poor girl’s life might be saved if her mother could be induced to consent to the match, and perhaps he, the clergyman, might be able to persuade her.