IT was to a house in one of the streets of Mayfair that Mrs. Leigh conveyed her young companion; one of those small expensive places where persons within the circle of what is called the world in London contrive to live with as little comfort and the greatest expenditure possible. It is dark and often dingy in Mayfair; nowhere is it more difficult to keep furniture, or even human apparel, clean; the rooms are small and the streets shabby; but it is one of the right places in which to live, not so perfect as it was once, indeed, but still furnishing an unimpeachable address.
It had half put on the aspect of the season by this time; some of the balconies were full of flowers, and the air of resuscitation which comes to certain quarters of London after Easter, as if, indeed, they too had risen from the dead, was vaguely visible. To be sure, little of this was apparent in the dim lamplight when the two ladies arrived at the door. Bee was hurried upstairs through the narrow passage, though she had been very keenly aware that someone in the lower room had momentarily lifted the blind to look out as they arrived—someone who did not appear, who made no sound, who had nothing to do with her or her life.
The rooms, which are usually the drawing-rooms of such a house, were turned evidently into the apartments of the sufferer. In the back room which they entered first was a nurse who greeted the ladies in dumb show, and whose white head-dress and apron had the strangest effect in the semi-darkness. She said, half by gesture, half with whispered words more visible than audible, “He is up—better—impatient—good sign—discontented with everything. Is this the lady?”
Mrs. Leigh answered in the same way, “His sister—shall I go with her?—you?—alone?”
“By herself,” said the nurse, laconic; and almost inaudible as this conversation was, it occasioned a stirring and movement in the inner room.
“What a noise you make,” cried a querulous, unsteady voice, “Who’s there—who’s there?”
The nurse took Bee’s hat from her head, with a noiseless swift movement, and relieved her of the little cloak she was wearing. She took her by the arm and pushed her softly forward. “Nothing to worry. Soothe him,” she breathed, holding up a curtain that Bee might pass. The room was but badly lighted, a single lamp on a table almost extinguished by the shade, a fire burning though the night was warm, and one of the long windows open, letting in the atmosphere and sounds of the London street. Bee stole in, an uncertain shadow into the shaded room, less eager than frightened and over-awed by this sudden entrance into the presence of sickness and misery. She was not accustomed to associate such things with her brother. It did not seem anyone with whom she was acquainted that she was about to see.
“Oh, Charlie!” the little cry and movement she made, falling down on her knees beside him, raised a pale, unhappy face, half covered with the down of an irregular fledgling beard from the pillow.
“Hallo!” he said, and then in a tone of disappointment and disdain, “You!”
“Oh, Charlie, Charlie dear! You have been ill and we never knew.”
“How do you know now? They knew I never wanted you to know,” he said.
“Oh, Charlie—who ought to know but your own people? We have been wretched, thinking all sorts of dreadful things—but not this.”
“Naturally,” he said, “my own people might be trusted never to think the right thing. Now you do know you may as well take yourself off. I don’t want you—or anybody,” he added, with an impatient sigh.
“Charlie—oh, please let me stay with you. Who should be with you but your sister? And I know—a great deal about nursing. Mamma——”
“I say—hold your tongue, can’t you? Who wants you to talk—of anything of that sort?”
Bee heard a slight stir in the curtains, and looking back hastily as she dried her streaming eyes saw the laconic nurse making signs to her. The sight of the stranger was more effectual even than her signs, and restored Bee’s self-command at once.
“Why did they bring you here?” said Charlie. “I didn’t want you; they know what I want, well enough.”
“What is it you want, oh, Charlie dear? Papa—and all of us—will do anything in the world you want.”
“Papa,” he said, and his weakened and irregular voice ran through the gamut from a high feeble tone of irritation to the quaver of that self-pity which is so strong in all youthful trouble. “Yes, he would be pleased to get me out of the way, and be done with me now.”
“Oh, Charlie! You know how wrong that is. Papa has been—miserable—”
Charlie uttered a feeble laugh. He put his hand upon his chin, stroking down the irregular tufts of hair; even in his low state the poor boy had a certain pride in what he believed to be his beard.
“Not much,” he said. “I daresay you’ve made a fuss—Betty and you. The governor will crack up Arthur for the F. O. and let me drop like a stone.”
“No, Charlie, no. He has no such thought—he has taken such trouble not to let it be known. He would not advertise or anything.”
“Advertise!” A sudden hot flush came over the gaunt face. “For me!” It did not seem that such a thought had ever occurred to the young man. “Like the fellows in the newspapers that steal their master’s money—‘All is arranged and you can return to your situation.’ By George!”
There was again a faint rustle in the curtains. Bee sprang up with her natural impatience, and went straight to the spot whence this sound had come.
“If I am not to speak to my brother alone and in freedom, I will not speak to him at all,” she said.
The laconic nurse remonstrated violently with her lips and eyes.
“Don’t excite him. Don’t disturb him. He’ll not sleep all night,” she managed to convey, with much arching of the eyebrows and mouth, then disappeared silently out of the bedroom behind.
“What’s that?” said Charlie, sharply. He moved on his sofa, and turned his head round with difficulty. “Are there more of you to come?”
There seemed a kind of hope and expectation in the question, but when Bee answered with despondency, “There’s only me, Charlie,” he broke out harshly:
“I don’t want you—I want none of you; I told them so. You can go and tell my father, as soon as they let me get out I’m going off to New Zealand or somewhere—the furthest-off place I can get to.”
“Oh, Charlie!” cried Bee, taking every word as the sincerest utterance of a fixed intention, “what could you do there?”
“Die, I suppose,” he said, with again that quaver of self-compassion in his voice, “or go to the dogs, which will be easy enough. You may say, why didn’t I die here and be done with it? I don’t know—I’m sure I wanted to. It was that doctor fellow, and that woman that talks with her eyebrows, and that confounded cad, Leigh—they wouldn’t let me. And I’ve got so weak; if you don’t go away this moment I’ll cry like a dashed baby!” with a more piteous quaver than ever in the remnant of his once manly voice.
All that Bee could do was to throw her arms round his neck and draw his head upon her shoulder, which he resisted fiercely for a moment, then yielded to in the abandonment of his weakness. Poor Charlie felt, perhaps, a momentary sweetness in the relaxation of all the bonds of self-control, and all the well-meaning attempts to keep him from injuring himself by emotion; the unexpected outburst did him good, partly because it was a breach of all the discipline of the sick room. Presently he came to himself and pushed Bee away.
“What do you come bothering about?” he said; “you ought to have left me alone. I’ve made my bed, and I’ve got to lie on it. I don’t suppose that anyone has taken the trouble to—ask about me?” he added, after a little while, in what was intended for a careless tone.
“Oh, Charlie, everyone who has known; but papa would let nobody know: except at Oxford. We—went to Oxford——”
He got up on his pillow with his eyes shining out of their hollow sockets, his long limbs coming to the ground with a faint thump. Poor Charlie was young enough to have grown during his illness, and those gaunt limbs seemed unreasonably long.
“You went to Oxford!” he said, “and you saw—”
“Dear Charlie, they will say I am exciting you—doing you harm——”
“You saw?” he cried, bringing down his fist upon the table with a blow that made the very floor shake.
“Yes,” said Bee, trembling, “we saw—or rather papa saw——”
He pushed up the shade of the lamp with his long bony fingers, and fixed his eyes, bright with fever, on her face.
“Oh, Charlie, don’t look at me so!—the lady whom you used to talk to me about—whom I saw in the academy——”
“Yes?”—he grasped her hand across the table with a momentary hot pressure.
“She came and saw papa in the hotel. She told him about you, and that you had—oh, Charlie, and she so old—as old as——”
“Hold your tongue!” he cried, violently, and then with a long-drawn breath, “What more? She told him—and he was rude, I suppose. Confound him! Confound—confound them all!”
“I will not say another word unless you are quiet,” said Bee, her spirit rising; “put up your feet on the sofa and be quiet, and remember all the risk you are running—or I will not say another word.”
He obeyed her with murmurs of complaint, but no longer with the languid gloom of his first accost. Hope seemed to have come into his heart. He subdued himself, lay back among his pillows, obeyed her in all she stipulated. The light from underneath the raised shade played on his face and gave it a tinge of colour, though it showed more clearly the emaciation of the outlines and the aspect of neglect, rather than, as poor Charlie hoped, of enhanced manly dignity, conveyed by the irregular sick man’s growth of the infant beard.
“Papa was not rude,” said Bee, “he is never rude; he is a gentleman. Worse than that—”
“Worse—than what?”
“Oh, I cannot understand you at all, you and—the rest,” cried the girl; “one after another you give in to her, you admire her, you do what she tells you—that woman who has harmed me all she can, and you all she can, and now—Charlie!” Bee stopped with astonishment and indignation. Her brother had raised himself up again, and aimed a furious but futile blow at her in the air. It did not touch her, but the indignity was no less on that account.
“Well,” he cried, again bringing down that hand which could not reach her, on the table, “How dare you speak of one you’re not worthy to name? Ah! I might have known she wouldn’t desert me. It is she who has kept the way open, and subdued my father, and——” An ineffable look of happiness came upon the worn and gaunt countenance, his eyes softened, his voice fell. “I might have known!” he said to himself, “I might have known!”
And what could Bee say? Though she did not believe in—though she hated and feared with a child’s intensity of terror the woman who had so often crossed her path—she could not contradict her brother’s faith, though she considered it an infatuation, a folly beyond belief; it seemed, after all, in a manner true that this woman had not deserted him. She had subdued his father’s displeasure somehow, made everything easier. Bee looked at him, the victim of those wiles, yet nevertheless indebted to them, with the same exasperation which her father’s subjugation had caused her. What could she say, what could she do, to reveal to them that enchantress in her true colours? But Bee knew that she could do nothing, and there began to rise in her heart a dreadful question, Was it so sure that she herself was right? Was this woman, indeed, an evil Fate, or was she, was she——? And the first story of all, the story of Aubrey, was it perhaps true?
The nurse came in noiselessly, hurrying, while Bee’s mind ran through those thoughts—evidently with the conviction that she would find the patient worse. But Charlie was not worse. He turned his face towards his attendant, still with something of that dreamy rapture in it.
“Oh, you may speak out,” he said; “I don’t mind noises to-night. Supper? Yes, I’ll take some supper. Bring me a beefsteak or something substantial. I’m going to get well at once.”
Nurse nodded at Bee, with much uplifting of her eyelids. “Put no faith in you,” she said, working the machinery of her lips; “was wrong; done him no end of good. Beefsteak; not exactly; but soon, soon, if you’re good.”