Charlotte's Inheritance

by M. E. Braddon

The struggling young writer had but few friends. He had, indeed, worked too hard for the possibility of friendship. The cultivation of the severer Muses is rarely compatible with a wide circle of acquaintances; and Valentine, if not a cultivator of these severe ones, had been a hard and honest worker during the later reputable portion of his life. His friendships of the previous portion had been the friendships of the railway-carriage and the smoking room, the café and the gaming-table. He could count upon his fingers the people to whom he could apply for counsel in this crisis of his life. There was George Sheldon, a man for whom he entertained a most profound contempt; Captain Paget, a man who might or might not be able to give him good advice, but who would inevitably sacrifice Charlotte Halliday's welfare to self-interest, if self-interest could be served by the recommendation of an incompetent adviser.

"He would send me to some idiot of the Doddleson class, if he thought he could get a guinea or a dinner by the recommendation," Valentine said to himself, and decided that to Horatio Paget he would not apply. There were his employers, the editors and proprietors of the magazines for which he worked; all busy over-burdened workers in the great mill, spending the sunny hours of their lives between a pile of unanswered letters and a waste-paper basket; men who would tell him to look in the Post-office Directory, without lifting their eyes from the paper over which their restless pens were speeding.

No. Amongst these was not the counsellor whom Valentine Hawkehurst needed in this dire hour of difficulty.

"There are some very good fellows among the Ragamuffins," he said to himself, as he thought of the only literary and artistic club of which he was a member; "fellows who stuck by me when I was down in the world, and who would do anything to serve me now they know me for an honest worker. But, unfortunately, farce writers and burlesque writers, and young meerschaum-smoking painters, are not the sort of men to give good advice: I want the advice of a medical man."

Mr. Hawkehurst almost bounded from his seat as he said this. The advice of a medical man? Yes; and was there not a medical man among the Ragamuffins? and something more than a medical man? That very doctor, who of all other men upon this earth could best give him counsel—the doctor who had stood by the deathbed of Charlotte Halliday's father.

He remembered the conversation that had occurred at Bayswater, on the evening of Christmas day, upon this very subject. He remembered how from the talk about ghosts they had drifted somehow into talking of Tom Halliday; whereupon Mrs. Sheldon had been melted to tears, and had gone on to praise Philip Sheldon's conduct to his dying friend, and to speak of Mr. Burkham, the strange doctor, called in too late to save, or, it might have been, incapable to save.

"Sheldon seems to have a genius for calling in incapable doctors," he thought bitterly.

Incapable as Mr. Burkham might have been for the exigencies of this particular case, he would at least be able to inform Valentine who among the medical celebrities of London would be best adapted to advise in such an illness as Charlotte Halliday's.

"And if, as Diana has sometimes suggested, there is any hereditary disease, this Burkham may be able to throw some light upon the nature of it," thought Valentine.

He went straight from the railway terminus to the quiet tavern upon the first floor of which the Ragamuffins had their place of rendezvous. It was not an hour for the encounter of many Ragamuffins. A meek-looking young man, of clerical aspect, who had adapted a Palais Royal farce, and had awoke in the morning to find himself famous, and eligible for admission amongst the Ragamuffins, was sipping his sherry and soda-water while he skimmed the morning papers. Him Mr. Hawkehurst saluted with an absent nod, and went in search of the steward of the club, from whom he obtained Mr. Burkham's address, with some little trouble in the way of hunting through old and obscure documents.