‘Because you unconsciously taunt me with my poverty. The eight or ten patients I ought to see to-morrow morning are worth a hundred pounds a year to me at most, and yet I can hardly venture to jeopardise that insignificant income.’
‘How you will look back and laugh at these days years hence when you are being driven in your brougham from Savile-row to the railway station, to start for Windsor Castle, at the command of a telegram from royalty.’
‘Leaving royal telegrams and Windsor Castle out of the question, there is such a distance between my present abode and Savile-row that I doubt my ever being able to traverse it,’ said Gerard; ‘but in the meantime my few paying patients are of vital importance to me, and I have some rather critical cases among my poor people.’
‘Poor dear things, I am sure they can all wait,’ said Celia. ‘Perhaps it will do them good to suspend their treatment for a day or two. Physic seems at best such a doubtful advantage.’
‘I have a friend who looks after anything serious,’ said Gerard dubiously. ‘If I were to follow my own inclination I should most assuredly stay.’
‘Then follow it,’ cried Celia. ‘I always do. Mamma, give Mr. Gerard some bacon and potatoes, while I run and tell Peter to go to the George, and let them know that the omnibus need not call here.’
‘I am afraid I am imposing upon your kind hospitality, and giving you a great deal of trouble,’ said Gerard, when Celia had slipped out of the room to give her orders.
‘You are giving us no trouble; and you must know that I should be happy to receive any friend of my son’s.’
Gerard’s sallow cheek flushed faintly at this speech. He felt that there was a kind of imposture in his position at the Vicarage. Every one insisted upon regarding him as an intimate friend of Edward Clare; and already it had been made clear to him that Edward was a man whom he could never make his friend. But for Edward Clare’s mother and sister he had a much more cordial feeling.
He sat down to breakfast with the two ladies. The Vicar would breakfast later, and one of Edward’s privileges as a poet of the future was to lie in bed until ten o’clock every morning in the present. Never, perhaps, was a merrier breakfast eaten. Gerard, having made up his mind to stay, abandoned himself unreservedly to the pleasure of the moment. Celia questioned him about his life, and drew from him a lively description of some of the more curious incidents in his career. He had but rarely joined in the wilder amusements of his fellow students, but he had joined them often enough to see all that was strange and interesting in London life. Celia listened open-eyed, with rosy lips apart in wonder.