Charlotte's Inheritance

by M. E. Braddon

"And a very sweet place it is, my dear Miss Lotta," she said to Charlotte the next day, when she described her adventures. "The apartments are at a farmhouse overlooking the sea; and the smell of the cows under your windows, and the sea-breezes blowing across the farmyard, can't fail to bring the colour back to your pretty cheeks, and the brightness back to your pretty eyes."

CHAPTER IV.

VALENTINE'S SKELETON.

The idea of this visit to the Sussex village by the sea seemed delightful to every one except Gustave Lenoble, who was still in town, and who thought it a hard thing that he should be deprived of Diana's society during an entire fortnight, for the sake of this sickly Miss Halliday.

For the rest, there was hope and gladness in the thought of this change of dwelling. Charlotte languished for fresher breezes and more rustic prospects than the breezes and prospects of Bayswater; Diana looked to the sea-air as the doctor of doctors for her fading friend; and Valentine cherished the same hope.

On Valentine Hawkehurst the burden of an unlooked-for sorrow had weighed very heavily. To see this dear girl, who was the beginning, middle, and end of all his hopes, slowly fading before his eyes, was, of all agonies that could have fallen to his lot, the sharpest and most bitter. Not Ugolino sitting silent amidst his famishing children—not Helen, when she would fain that the tempest had swept her from earth's surface on that evil day when she was born—not Penelope, when she cried on Diana, the high-priestess of death, to release her from the weariness of her days—not Agamemnon, when the fatal edict had gone forth, and his fair young daughter looked into his face, and asked him if it was true that she was to die—not one of these typical mourners could have suffered a keener torture than that which rent this young man's heart, as he marked the stealthy steps of the Destroyer drawing nearer and nearer the woman he loved. Of all possible calamities, this was the last he had ever contemplated. Sometimes, in moments of doubt or despondency, he had thought it possible that poverty, the advice of friends, caprice or inconstancy on the part of Charlotte herself, should sever them. But among the possible enemies to his happiness he had never counted Death. What had Death to do with so fair and happy a creature as Charlotte Halliday? she who, until some two months before this time, might have been the divine Hygieia in person—so fresh was her youthful bloom, so buoyant her step, so bright her glances. Valentine's hardest penance was the necessity for the concealment of his anxiety. The idea that Charlotte's illness might be—nay, must be—for the greater part an affair of the nerves was always paramount in his mind. He and Diana had talked of the subject together whenever they found an opportunity for so doing, and had comforted themselves with the assurance that the nerves alone were to blame; and they were the more inclined to think this from the conduct of Dr. Doddleson, on that physician's visits to Miss Halliday. Mrs. Sheldon had been present on each occasion, and to Mrs. Sheldon alone had the physician given utterance to his opinion of the case. That opinion, though expressed with a certain amount of professional dignity, amounted to very little. "Our dear young friend wanted strength; and what we had to do was to give our dear young friend strength—vital power. Yes—er—um, that was the chief point. And what kind of diet might our dear young friend take now? Was it a light diet, a little roast mutton—not too much done, but not underdone? O dear, no. And a light pudding? what he would call—if he might be permitted to have his little joke—a nursery pudding." And then the old gentleman had indulged in a senile chuckle, and patted Charlotte's head with his fat old fingers. "And our dear young friend's room, now, was it a large room?—good! and what was the aspect now, south?—good again! nothing better, unless, perhaps, south-west; but, of course, everyone's rooms can't look south-west. A little tonic draught, and gentle daily exercise in that nice garden, will set our dear young friend right again. Our temperament is nervous we are a sensitive plant, and want care." And then the respectable septuagenarian took his fee, and shuffled off to his carriage. And this was all that Mrs. Sheldon could tell Diana, or Nancy Woolper, both of whom questioned her closely about her interview with the doctor. To Diana and to Valentine there was hope to be gathered from the very vagueness of the physician's opinion. If there had been anything serious the matter, the medical adviser must needs have spoken more seriously. He came again and again. He found the pulse a little weaker, the patient a little more nervous, with a slight tendency to hysteria, and so on; but he still declared that there were no traces of organic disease, and he still talked of Miss Halliday's ailments with a cheery easy-going manner that was very reassuring.

In his moments of depression Valentine pinned his faith upon Dr. Doddleson. Without organic disease, he told himself, his darling could not perish. He looked for Dr. Doddleson's name in the Directory, and took comfort from the fact of that physician's residence in a fashionable West End square. He took further comfort from the splendour of the doctor's equipage, as depicted to him by Mrs. Sheldon; and from the doctor's age and experience, as copiously described by the same lady.

"There is only one fact that I have ever reproached myself with in relation to my poor Tom," said Georgy, who, in talking to strangers of her first husband, was apt to impress them with the idea that she was talking of a favourite cat; "and that is, the youthfulness of the doctor Mr. Sheldon employed. Of course I am well aware that Mr. Sheldon would not have consulted the young man if he had not thought him clever; but I could lay my head upon my pillow at night with a clearer conscience if poor Tom's doctor had been an older and more experienced person. Now, that's what I like about Dr. Doddleson. There's a gravity—a weight—about a man of that age which inspires one with immediate confidence. I'm sure the serious manner with which he questioned me about Lotta's diet, and the aspect of her room, was quite delightful."

In Dr. Doddleson, under Providence, Valentine was fain to put his trust. He did not know that the worthy doctor was one of those harmless inanities who, by the aid of money and powerful connections, are sometimes forced into a position which nature never intended them to occupy. Among the real working men of that great and admirable brotherhood, the medical profession, Dr. Doddleson had no rank; but he was the pet physician of fashionable dowagers suffering from chronic laziness or periodical attacks of ill-humour. For the spleen or the vapours no one was a better adviser than Dr. Doddleson. He could afford to waste half an hour upon the asking of questions which the fair patient's maid might as well have asked, and the suggestions of remedies which any intelligent abigail could as easily have suggested. Elderly ladies believed in him because he was pompous and ponderous, lived in an expensive neighbourhood, and drove a handsome equipage. He wore mourning-rings left him by patients who never had anything particular the matter with them, and who, dying of sheer old age, or sheer over-eating, declared with their final gasp that Dr. Doddleson had been the guardian angel of their frail lives during the last twenty years.

This was the man who, of all the medical profession resident in London, Mr. Sheldon had selected as his stepdaughter's medical adviser in a case so beyond common experience, that a man of wide practice and keen perception was especially needed for its treatment.