“Your friends ought to look after you and get you a wife,” I said.
“I have no friends,” he said sadly. “No nearer relation than a cousin a good deal older than I am, who looks upon me as one who was born to rob him of what should be his.”
“But by the law of primogeniture, so sacred to the upper ten thousand, he must know you are entitled to it.”
“Yes; but for years and years I was always going to die. My life was not thought worth six months’ purchase. All of a sudden I got well. Ever since then I have seemed, even to myself, a kind of interloper.”
“It must be unpleasant to have a man longing for one’s death. All the more reason you should marry, and put other lives between him and the title.”
“I fancy I shall never marry,” said Carriston, looking at me with his soft dark eyes. “You see, a boy who has waited for years expecting to die, doesn’t grow up with exactly the same feelings as other people. I don’t think I shall ever meet a woman I can care for enough to make my wife. No, I expect my cousin will be Sir Ralph yet.”
I tried to laugh him out of his morbid ideas. “Those who live will see,” I said. “Only promise to ask me to your wedding, and better still, if you live in town, appoint me your family doctor. It may prove the nucleus of that West End practice which it is the dream of every doctor to establish.”
I have already alluded to the strange beauty of Carriston’s dark eyes. As soon as companionship commenced between us those eyes became to me, from scientific reasons, objects of curiosity on account of the mysterious expression which at times I detected in them. Often and often they wore a look the like to which, I imagine, is found only in the eyes of a somnambulist—a look which one feels certain is intently fixed upon something, yet upon something beyond the range of one’s own vision. During the first two or three days of our new-born intimacy, I found this eccentricity of Carriston’s positively startling. When now and then I turned to him, and found him staring with all his might at nothing, my eyes were compelled to follow the direction in which his own were bent. It was at first impossible to divest one’s self of the belief that something should be there to justify so fixed a gaze. However, as the rapid growth of our friendly intercourse soon showed me that he was a boy of most ardent poetic temperament—perhaps even more a poet than an artist—I laid at the door of the Muse these absent looks and recurring flights into vacancy.
We were at the Fairy Glen one morning, sketching, to the best of our ability, the swirling stream, the gray rocks, and the overhanging trees, the last just growing brilliant with autumnal tints. So beautiful was everything around that for a long time I worked, idled, or dreamed in contented silence. Carriston had set up his easel at some little distance from mine. At last I turned to see how his sketch was progressing. He had evidently fallen into one of his brown studies, and, apparently, a harder one than usual. His brush had fallen from his fingers, his features were immovable, and his strange dark eyes were absolutely riveted upon a large rock in front of him, at which he gazed as intently as if his hope of heaven depended upon seeing through it.