As for the other personages mentioned in these pages, their affairs worked themselves out as was to be expected, with no very extraordinary results. Roger Burchell recovered of his wound because he could not help it, not with any will of his; and went out to India in due time, where he did very well and made steady progress, but neither then nor now became very remarkable. He married too in the due course of events, when he could afford it—as most men do, except perhaps in the very heart and centre of society, a sect so small that it does not affect the world’s continuance, nor need necessarily affect our peace of mind who look on. He forgot Cara and the chapter in his life which was dominated by her, far more completely than the romantic reader would believe possible, and was not at all sure after he had been some years married whether it was not he who had behaved badly to her; and, indeed, I think his wife had this impression, and never having seen this object of his early affections, was rather pleased to believe Cara a little flirt with whom her Roger had been involuntarily ‘entangled,’ but escaped in time. So stories are travestied and turned into myths with piquant change of circumstance all over the world.
Mr. Maxwell had a more unlikely fate. Bursting out of No. 6 in the Square, in the trouble of his mind, after that unlucky interference which had come to less than nothing, but which must, he felt sure, cost him his friends, he went with murderous energy through all his round of patients, and took it out of them with unregulated zeal, making his hypochondriacs really ill by way of variety, twisting the joints and cramping the sinews of the unhappy people in his hands as cruelly as Prospero. This way of avenging himself upon mankind, however, did not prevent him from suffering tortures in his own person. Should he apologise—should he appeal to Cara to intercede for him? Should he go humbly to the feet of the injured one, and ask to be kicked and forgiven? He adopted another expedient more wonderful than any of these. Next day was the day of his weekly visit to the Hill. Lovelier lights and visions than those that revealed themselves through the openings of the trees on that sweetest day of June could scarcely be. The sky was as soft as a child’s eyes—the air as its breath. The trees hung rich and close still in their early green, throwing their wealth of foliage all the more closely together to hide that the flowers were over, the may faded, the golden laburnum boughs all dropped to dust. Through the leafy arches came glimpses of the great plain all billowy with trees, shadowing far into the blue distance, and the great grey castle with its royal flag. Underneath on the hedgerows there was one flush of the wild rose lighting up the winding road as with a smile. To live on such a day was enough for pleasure. To move through it easily without fatigue, with trees waving over you, and the unfathomable blue shining, and the sun throwing magical gleams over the landscape, hushed even the most restless soul to a semblance of goodness and happiness. Unless you happen to be toiling along a dusty road, in the blaze of the sunshine, in tight boots, or a dress too warm for the season, which circumstances I allow to be contrary both to happiness and goodness, I cannot understand how you could refuse to be good and happy on such a day.
But everything promoted these exemplary sensations about the Hill. Fatigue was not there, nor dust, nor undue heat. Old Miss Charity in her sun-bonnet, and less old but still not young Miss Cherry in her cool and soft grey gown, were on the lawn, surrounded by a world of roses—roses everywhere in standards, in dwarfs, on trellis-work, over arches, along the walls. The air was just touched by them to a delicate sweetness, to be elevated into beatitude when you approached your face to a particular flower. Mr. Maxwell arrived with his troubled soul, and the ladies made much of him. They compassionated him for his hot drive. They offered him tea; they gave him, on his refusal of the tea, claret cup with great bits of ice tinkling in it, and making a grateful noise. They gave him a comfortable chair on the lawn, where he had his doctors’ talk with old Miss Charity, and felt her pulse and admired its steady beat, not one more or less than it ought to be. ‘Please God, if I live long enough, I’ll pull you along to a hundred,’ he said, with professional enthusiasm. ‘But I shall not live long enough,’ he added, in a despondent tone.
‘How old are you now?’ said Miss Charity. ‘Fifty? phoo, nonsense. I am seventy-three. I want only seven-and-twenty of the hundred. You will be just over my present age when we’ve accomplished it. And what a thing to have lived for?’ The old lady was more ready for the joke than he was—he shook his head.
‘You can’t think what foolish things I have been doing,’ he said; ‘never man made a greater fool of himself.’
‘You have been asking someone to marry you, my poor man!’
‘No, by Jove! I never thought of that,’ he said, looking up quickly. Miss Cherry had walked discreetly out of hearing, as she always did while they had their medical talk. This was evidently a new idea to the doctor. ‘No,’ he went on, ‘trying to keep other people from marrying, that was all.’
‘Still sillier; they will hate you for ever and ever,’ Miss Charity said, in her ignorance, seated cool and smiling in her garden chair.
Meanwhile Miss Cherry strayed to one of the openings and looked wistfully across the country. She wanted to hear about ‘the child.’ A thousand questions were on her lips, but in her soft old-maidenly self-consciousness she did not like to take the doctor aside in her turn, and there were questions which she did not wish to ask in her aunt’s presence. It may be imagined then what her surprise was when, startled by a voice at her elbow, she turned round and found the doctor by her side. ‘The views are lovely to-day,’ he said; but he was not thinking of the views, Miss Cherry could see. Had he something painful to tell her—had anything gone wrong? She began to ask a few faltering questions. ‘Tell me about Cara,’ she said. ‘I am so hungering for news of the child.’ Miss Cherry looked up pathetically in the doctor’s face with wistful anxiety in her soft eyes—everything about her was soft, from her grey gown to her eyes. A mild consolatory woman, not charming like Mrs. Meredith, not clever like other people he knew, but a refreshment, like green lawns and green leaves and quietness to the heart. The doctor turned round to see that nobody was looking. The old lady, who had her suspicions of him, had gone in, and like a naughty old lady as she was, had gone upstairs to a bedroom window, where she stood behind the curtains, chuckling to herself, to watch the result. When Mr. Maxwell saw the coast was clear and nobody looking (as he thought), he turned round again to Miss Cherry, who stood anxiously waiting for the next word, and deliberately, without a word of preface, fired as it were point blank into her with a pistol at her heart—that is to say, he proposed. A greater shock never was administered by any human being to another. Right off on the spot, without wasting any words, he offered her himself and his brougham and his practice and all that he had. The old lady at the window—naughty old lady!—could make out the very moment when it was done, and saw Cherry’s start and jump of amazement. ‘Will she have him?’ she asked herself. ‘I could not put up with a man in my house.’ But it does not do to take a gentle old maiden like Miss Cherry so suddenly. In the very extremity of her surprise, she said no. How she trembled! ‘Oh no, I could not, I could not, thank you, Mr. Maxwell! I am too old now. Long ago I might have thought of such a thing; but I could not, I could not. It is not possible. You must excuse me now.’
‘Oh, no one will force you, Miss Cherry, against your inclination,’ said the doctor, angry and discomfited. And without waiting to say good-day to his patient, he went off and threw himself into his brougham more uncomfortable than before.