I did not faint or go into hysterics, for I was a healthy and after all a tolerably sensible young woman; but it is impossible to convey any idea of my bewilderment. Fortunately it lasted only a moment or so. Huddesley made his second exit to the right, for the sake of variety, maybe; and the Chorus, crossing the stage, stationed himself in the wings almost at my side, that he might be heard jodeling "off," in stage-phrase.
"No, that isn't Teddy," he whispered, in answer to my excited murmur. "Yo-de-la-hee-ho!—Teddy's sick, that's the doctor's man—La-he, la-he, la-he, ho!—Huddesley, you know; they got him to take Ted's place, mighty lucky he can, too—Yo-de-la—hee-ho, yo-de-la-a-a!"
FOOTNOTE:
[5] It was the last time I saw it; in fact, I doubt, on thinking it over, if any of us were ever inside the old Gwynne house again.—M. S. W.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Doctor Vardaman viewed the departure of his guests with mingled relief and chagrin; the evening had not ended quite according to his expectations, and he could not decide whether the disaster was his fault or theirs; perhaps on the whole, they were lucky the outcome was no worse. The young men of this generation lacked the self-control or the physical fibre of their sires, he told himself irritably; and then a queer smile twitched his lips as he remembered his own father saying the same thing. To every age its own faults, and also its own standards of judging them. In his day people used to speak tolerantly enough of a man who drank; it was held a contemptible, but hardly a disgraceful weakness. Are we grown better, or only more prudent? We go to church less, but we certainly bathe a deal oftener. The creed of keeping one's health is no such poor creed, when all is said; a man will diet to save his mortal body with twice the vigour and conviction than he will pray to save his immortal soul—and who shall say that it is not right, or at least expedient for him to do so? For after all the health of his soul is his own affair, but the health of his body vitally concerns the welfare of others. Thus the doctor, moralising a little far afield from the events of the evening; and he shrewdly suspected that to the rest of the young fellows, Ted's drunkenness was not so unforgivable an offence in itself, except for the monstrous inconvenience of it. "And I am afraid I am responsible for that," he said with half a sigh. "If I had married and brought up a family, I should have known better how to manage the lads. Eh, Louise?" He uttered the last words aloud with a pensive glance at his Labrador-stones, and started at the eerie sound of his own voice raised in sentimental monologue beside his empty hearth. "I'm getting maudlin myself, now!" he thought, and went to close the hall door swaying and creaking dismally in a rush of damp, chilly air. It was raining pitilessly; it had rained for nearly two weeks. The doctor, standing in his doorway, beheld the arrowy slant of water shining against the dark where the hall light irradiated it; amongst the irregularities of his brick-paved walk small puddles showed an unsteady glistening surface. The bushes in half-leaf on either side drooped and shone. Farther away there was an incessant rumour of wheels, and he was aware of the measured approach and passage of carriage-lamps in pairs, directed toward the Pallinder gate. Doctor Vardaman watched them absently for some time, while the swift wind refreshed his house; then he remembered Teddy, whom he had refused to leave alone, slammed the door and went upstairs.
The young man was sleeping heavily, spread out upon the doctor's staid old four-post bed; not in years, if ever, had that respectable piece of furniture witnessed such a spectacle, and the doctor had a quaint fancy that it withdrew itself shudderingly from the contamination. It had been his mother's, and a kind of feminine severity appeared in its starched and ruffled valance, as of indignant petticoats. He leaned over and scanned Teddy's face, holding his own chin in his hand, with knotted brows; then he felt the sleeper's pulse, listened to his thick breathing, shook his head with a perplexed look, and began mechanically to gather up the clothes thrown here and there about the room. He went back and surveyed the bed again. "Very strange," said Doctor Vardaman. And again: "Very strange!"
He went downstairs, and, not without a sardonic grin, brought up a pitcher of ice-water, and placed it in readiness on the little old mahogany candle-stand at the sufferer's right hand. The dining-room was a woeful picture as he re-entered it. In the middle of the table, the pyramid of jellies and cream had partly dissolved and trickled down to mix with a waste of crumbled cake, cigar-stumps and ashes, nut-shells, soiled napkins, shattered china—the doctor sat down amid the desolation, likening himself to Marius among the ruins of Carthage. There was a dreary odour—an odour? A stench, Doctor Vardaman vigorously characterised it—of stale wine, stale coffee, stale tobacco. Fragments of cheese swam in pudding-sauce; spent bottles cumbered the sideboard; the door was open into the kitchen, affording a vista of plates piled in tottering heaps, pots and pans crowded on the cold range, a bowl of dishwater crowned with scum in the sink, half-eaten meats and vegetables stiffening grimly in lakes of discoloured gravy. "Faugh!" said the doctor in strong distaste, and closed the door on the depressing scene. He sat down in his place at the head of the table. Huddesley would have a job of cleaning up this squalid hole on the morrow, he thought, and wondered how the man was getting on in his new sphere; smiled, too, as he reflected that the dream of Huddesley's life was being fulfilled. He had wanted to be a "hactor," and indeed he had some turn that way, poor creature! It was strange to think how unequally the gifts of Fate are distributed: now there was Huddesley, an honest man, not at all a dull man, who, if he had been born in any class but the servant class, even in a less respectable one, might have made more of himself! That inherited attitude of servility was a greater bar to his advancement than dulness or vice; in America it might have been different; we have no definite classes, and no traditions of behaviour. But in England a man who habitually says "sir," and drops his h's—here the old gentleman came bolt upright in his chair, upon a sudden moving recollection. Huddesley had not dropped a single h nor added one on, since assuming Teddy's character! During all the talk that had followed his proposal, and when he had hurriedly recited for them a number of Teddy's speeches, his accent had nowise differed from their own. The fact, noted in some obscure corner of the doctor's brain, now in the silence of the vacant room, obtruded itself with an unwelcome insistence. It was a slight thing, yet of a curious significance; a person could not thus at will abandon the habit of a lifetime. Say it were not such a habit, what then? Why, then the dialect was put on, like a garment; and for what reason? If that was the case, Huddesley was by far too much of a "hactor" to be officiating in the doctor's kitchen. We do not look for, nor somehow relish so much versatility in one of Huddesley's degree. Doctor Vardaman's thoughts hardly proceeded in so orderly a sequence as they have been here set down, but by vague speculative turns and windings they reached the last conclusion. He began uncomfortably to review the manner of his engaging Huddesley, and was startled to realise how little he actually knew of the man, how haphazard had been his methods of hiring servants. "I'll write to that Lord Whatever-his-name-was to-morrow," he told himself—and then had to smile a little at this access of belated caution. The whole thing, of course, was capable of some very simple explanation, he thought impatiently, unwilling to own himself baffled; there was not necessarily a dark, bloody mystery about a person's speaking in dialect one moment and in the queen's English the next. It might be that Huddesley was the exiled black sheep of some decent, even gentle family—well, perhaps, not a black sheep, but at least a brindled one, not good enough for the station to which he had been born, too good for that to which he had sunk; stranger things than that have happened. He had told a perfectly straight story; even if it were an invention, that, so long as the man behaved himself, was no concern of Doctor Vardaman's. "And when he misbehaves," said the doctor inwardly, "why, then, like Dogberry, I'll let him go, and thank God I am rid of a knave! I don't believe he is a knave, but certainly I've always had an idea he was no ordinary man. Maybe I'd better have a talk with him to-morrow."