'You, Maurice? My dear fellow!' said Robert, getting up with sudden enthusiasm, and seizing his friend by both his hands, 'you going in for Rivers's! I never was so glad in my life!'
'You need not be violent,' said the doctor. 'Have I said anything very clever, Mrs Drummond? I am going in for Rivers's because it seems such a capital investment. I can't expect, of course, to get put on the board of directors, or to sit at the receipt of custom, like such a great man as you are. Don't shake my hands off, my good fellow. What is there wonderful in this?'
'Nothing wonderful,' said Robert; 'but the best joke I ever heard in my life. Fancy, Helen, I was going to him humbly, hat in hand, to ask his advice, thinking perhaps he would put his veto on it, and prevent me from making my fortune. And now he is a shareholder like the rest. You may not see it, but it is the best joke! You must stay to dinner, old fellow, and we will talk business all the evening. Helen, we cannot let him go to-night.'
And Helen smiled too as she repeated her husband's invitation. Robert had been wiser than his friends, though he had asked nobody's advice but hers. It was a salve to her often-wounded pride. The doctor did not like it half so much. His friend had stolen a march upon him, reversed their usual positions, gone first, and left the other to follow. He stayed to dinner, however, all the same, and pared apples for Norah, and talked over Rivers's afterwards over his wine. But when he left the door to go home, he shrugged his shoulders with a half-satisfied prophecy. 'He will never paint another good picture,' Maurice said, with a certain tone of friendly vengeance. 'When wealth comes in good-bye to art.'
CHAPTER VI.
It was on an October day, mellow and bright, when Robert Drummond, with a smile on his face, and a heavy heart in his breast, reached the house in Victoria Villas, to superintend poor Stephen's return to the sitting-room, as he had superintended his removal to his bed. The sitting-room was larger, airier, and less isolated, than the mournful chamber up-stairs, in which he had spent half the summer. It was a heart-rending office, and yet it was one from which his friend could not shrink. Before he went up-stairs the painter paused, and took hold of Miss Jane's hand, and wept, as people say, 'like a child;' but a child's hot thunder-shower of easily-dried tears are little like those few heavy drops that come to the eyes of older people, concentrating in themselves so much that words could not express. Miss Jane, for her part, did not weep. Her gray countenance, which was grayer than ever, was for a moment convulsed, and then she pushed her brother's friend away. 'Don't you see I daren't cry?' she said, almost angrily, with one hard sob. Her brother Stephen was the one object of her life. All the romance of which she was capable, and a devotion deeper than that of twenty lovers, was in her worship of him. And this was what it was coming to! She hurried into the room which she had been preparing for him, which was henceforward to be his dwelling day and night, and shut the door upon the too sympathetic face. As for Robert, he went into his friend's little chamber with cheery salutations: 'Well, old fellow, so you are coming back to the world!' he said. Poor Haldane was seated in his dressing-gown in an easy-chair. To look at him, no chance spectator would have known that he was as incapable of moving out of it as if he had been bound with iron, and everybody about him had been loud in their congratulations on the progress he was making. They thought they deceived him, as people so often think who flatter the incurable with hopes of recovery. He smiled as Robert spoke, and shook his head.
'I am changing my prison,' he said; 'nothing more. I know that as well as the wisest of you, Drummond. You kind, dear souls, do you think those cheery looks you have made such work to keep up, deceive me?'
'What cheery looks? I am as sulky as a bear,' said Robert. 'And as for your prison, Maurice doesn't think so. You heard what he said?'
'Maurice doesn't say so,' said poor Haldane. 'But never mind, it can't last for ever; and we need not be doleful for that.'