“Yes, sir, they’re on your table; and, please, sir, I’ve put the little carpet-bag into your study.”
“Carpet-bag! What carpet-bag?” asked his master.
“Why, sir, the little bag as came with your luggage. We didn’t take it upstairs, because it’s nothing as you took with you when you left home, and Mary says it don’t belong to mistress; so I thought it would be better to put it into your study till you came home, as it might be something particular. It’s in the corner by the fire-place, sir.”
“Well, well, never mind,” was the reply; “let me know when your mistress comes in,” and the doctor retired to his sanctum.
Drawing up his chair to the table, he was soon deep in his letters; but turning round to poke the fire, his eye fell on the little bag. “How can I have come by this, I wonder? And what can it be?” he said to himself, as he took it up and turned it round and round. It was fastened by an ordinary padlock, which easily opened on the application of one of the doctor’s keys. “Nothing but waste paper,” he said, as he turned out a portion of the contents, which appeared to consist merely of pieces of newspaper and brown paper crumpled up. “Pshaw! Some foolish hoax or practical joke intended for me, or somebody else, perhaps!” he exclaimed. “Well, it seems scarcely worth making any trouble about; but if it has come here by mistake, and is of sufficient value, there will be inquiries or an advertisement about it.” So saying, he replaced the crumpled papers, locked the bag again, and opening his closet, placed it on one of the upper shelves, where it must rest for a while and gather dust.
When Dr Prosser had finished reading his letters, and had answered such as needed an immediate reply, he betook himself to the drawing-room. This was a large apartment, occupying upstairs the same area as the library, hall, and dining-room. It was handsomely furnished, bearing marks in every direction of a highly cultivated taste and of woman’s handiwork. Yet there was wanting that peculiar air of comfort which gives a heart—cheering glow alike to the humblest cottage parlour and the elegant saloon of the man of wealth and refinement. Indeed, it might truly be said that the room abounded in everything that could be devised, but comfort. Like a picture full of brilliant colouring, the various hues of which need blending and toning down, so the articles of luxury and beauty lavishly scattered about Dr Prosser’s drawing-room, though tastefully selected, seemed calculated rather to call forth the passing admiration of friends and strangers than to give abiding pleasure to their possessors.
At present there was certainly something very discouraging about the whole appearance of things in the eyes of the doctor, as he entered the costly furnished apartment. A fire, it is true, twinkled between the bars of the grate; but its few feeble sparks, in contrast with the prevailing surroundings of black coal and cinders, were suggestive to the feelings rather of the chilliness they were meant to counteract than of the warmth which they were designed to impart. Near the fire was a dwarf, round, three-legged table, on which lay a manuscript in a female hand. The doctor took it up, and laid it down with a sigh. It was a portion of a long-since-begun and never-likely-to-be-finished essay on comparative anatomy. A heap of unanswered letters lay on a taller table close by, having displaced a work-basket, whose appearance of superlative neatness showed how seldom the fingers of its gentle owner explored or made use of its homely stores. A grand piano stood near the richly curtained windows. It was open. A vocal duet occupied the music-rest, and various other pieces for voice and instrument were strewed along the highly polished top. Near the piano was a harp, while a manuscript book of German and Italian songs was placed upon an elegant stand near it, and other pieces filled a gaping portfolio at the foot. On a beautifully inlaid table in the centre of the room was an unfinished water-colour drawing, propped up by a pile of richly gilded and ornamented books. The drawing, with its support, had been pushed back towards the middle of the table, to make way for a sheet or two of note-paper containing portions of a projected poem. And the presiding and inspiring genius of all this beautiful confusion was Agnes Prosser.
And did she make her husband happy? Well, it was taken for granted by friends and acquaintance that she did—or, at any rate, that it must be his fault if she did not; and so the poor doctor thought himself. He was proud of his wife, and considered that he ought to be thoroughly happy with her; but somehow or other, he was not so. She was, in the common acceptation of the words, highly accomplished, of an amiable and loving disposition, graceful and winning in person and manner, able to take the head of his table to the entire satisfaction of himself and his friends, and capable of conversing well on every subject with all who were invited to her house, or whom she met in society elsewhere.
What could her husband want more? He did want something more—his heart asked and yearned for something more. What was it? He could hardly distinctly tell. Nevertheless he felt himself on this afternoon—he had been gradually approaching the feeling for some time past—a disappointed man. Perhaps it was his own fault, he thought; yet so it was.
He was now just forty years of age, and had been married three years. His wife was some ten years younger than himself. He had looked well round him before making choice of one with whom he was to share the joys and sorrows of a domestic life. He was a man who thoroughly respected religion, and could well discriminate between the genuine servant of Christ and the mere sounding professor, while at the same time scientific studies had rather tended to make him undervalue clear dogmatic teaching as set forth in the revealed Word of God. Yet he was too profound a thinker to adopt that popular scepticism which is either the refuge of those who, consciously or unconsciously, use it as a screen, though it proves but a semi-transparent one at the best, to shut out the light of a coming judgment, or the halting-place of thinkers who stop short of the only source of true and infallible wisdom—the revealed mind of God. His wife, too, had been taught religiously, and cordially assented to the truths of the gospel, though the constraining love of Christ was yet wanting; and both she and her husband were intimate friends of one whose path had ever been since they had known it, “the path of the just, like the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day:” and that one was Ernest Maltby, now vicar of Crossbourne.