“WELL,” said Dr. Beaton, rubbing his hands as he came forward, “at last we are tolerably comfortable. I have got him to bed without much more difficulty than usual, and I hope he will have a good night. But how cold it is here! I suppose, however careful you may be, it is impossible to keep draughts out of an apartment that communicates with the open air. If you will take my advice, Miss Rosalind, you will get to your warm room, and to bed, while your uncle and I adjourn to the smoking-room, where there are creature comforts—”
The doctor was always cheerful. He laughed as if all the incidents of the evening had been the most pleasant in the world.
“Is papa better, doctor?”
“Is Mrs. Trevanion with my brother?”
These two questions were asked together. The doctor answered them both with a “Yes—yes—where would she be but with him? My dear sir, you are a visitor, you are not used to our ways. All that is just nothing. He cannot do without her. We know better, Miss Rosalind; we take it all very easy. Come, come, there is nothing to be disturbed about. I will have you on my hands if you don’t mind. My dear young lady, go to bed.”
“I have been proposing that she should go to her aunt for a week or two for a little change.”
“The very best thing she could do. This is the worst time of the year for Highcourt. So much vegetation is bad in November. Yes—change by all means. But not,” said the doctor, with a little change of countenance, “too long, and not too far away.”
“Do you think,” said Rosalind, “that mamma will not want me to-night? then I will go as you say. But if you think there is any chance that she will want me—”
“She will not leave the patient again. Good-night, Miss Rosalind, sleep sound and get back your roses—or shall I send you something to make you sleep? No? Well, youth will do it, which is best.”
She took her candle, and went wearily up the great staircase, pausing, a white figure in the gloom, to wave her hand to Uncle John before she disappeared in the gallery above. The two men stood and watched her without a word. A tender reverence and pity for her youth was in both their minds. There was almost an oppression of self-restraint upon them till she was out of sight and hearing. Then John Trevanion turned to his companion:
“I gather by what you say that you think my brother worse to-night.”
“Not worse to-night; but only going the downhill road, and now and then at his own will and pleasure putting on a spurt. The nearer you get to the bottom the greater is the velocity. Sometimes the rate is terrifying at the last.”
“And you think, accordingly, that if she goes away it must not be too far; she must be within reach of a hasty summons?”
Dr. Beaton nodded his head several times in succession. “I may be mistaken,” he said, “there is a vitality that fairly surprises me; but that is in any other case what I should say.”
“Have these outbursts of temper much to do with it? Are they accelerating the end?”
“That’s the most puzzling question you could ask. How is a poor medical man, snatching his bit of knowledge as he can find it, to say yea or nay? Oh yes, they have to do with it; everything has to do with it either as cause or effect? If it were not perhaps for the temper, there would be less danger with the heart; and if it were not for the weak heart, there would be less temper. Do ye see? Body and soul are so jumbled together, it is ill to tell which is which. But between them the chances grow less and less. And you will see, by to-night’s experience, it’s not very easy to put on the drag.”
“And yet Mrs. Trevanion is nursing him, you say, as if nothing had happened.”
The doctor gave a strange laugh. “A sick man is a queer study,” he said, “and especially an excitable person with no self-control and all nerves and temper, like—if you will excuse me for saying so—your brother. Now that he needs her he is very capable of putting all this behind him. He will just ignore it, and cast himself upon her for everything, till he thinks he can do without her again. Ah! it is quite a wonderful mystery, the mind of a sick and selfish man.”
“I was thinking rather of her,” said John Trevanion.
“Oh! her?” said the doctor, waving his hand; “that’s simple. There’s nothing complicated in that. She is the first to accept that grand reason as conclusive, just that he has need of her. There’s a wonderful philosophy in some women. When they come to a certain pitch they will bear anything. And she is one of that kind. She will put it out of her mind as I would put a smouldering bombshell out of this hall. At least,” said the doctor, with that laugh which was so inappropriate, “I hope I would do it, I hope I would not just run away. The thing with women is that they cannot run away.”
“These are strange subjects to discuss with—pardon me—a stranger; but you are not a stranger—they can have no secrets from you. Doctor, tell me, is the scene to-night a usual one? Was there nothing particular in it?”
John Trevanion fixed very serious eyes—eyes that held the person they looked on fast, and would permit no escape—on the doctor’s face. The other shifted about uneasily from one foot to the other, and did his utmost to avoid that penetrating look.
“Oh, usual enough, usual enough; but there might be certain special circumstances,” he said.
“You mean that Mrs. Trevanion—”
“Well, if you will take my opinion, she had probably been to see the coachman’s wife, who is far from well, poor body; I should say that was it. It is across a bit of the park, far enough to account for everything.”
“But why then not give so simple a reason?”
“Ah! there you beat me; how can I tell? The way in which a thing presents itself to a woman’s mind is not like what would occur to you and me.”
“Is the coachman’s wife so great a favorite? Has she been ill long, and is it necessary to go to see her every night?”
“Mr. Trevanion,” said the doctor, “you are well acquainted with the nature of evidence. I cannot answer all these questions. There is no one near Highcourt, as you are aware, that does not look up to Madam; a visit from her is better than physic. She has little time, poor lady, for such kindness. With all that’s exacted from her, I cannot tell, for my part, what other moment she can call her own.”
John Trevanion would not permit the doctor to escape. He held him still with his keen eyes. “Doctor,” he said, “I think I am as much concerned as you are to prove her in the right, whatever happens; but it seems to me you are a special pleader—making your theory to fit the circumstances, ingenious rather than certain.”
“Mr. John Trevanion,” said the doctor, solemnly, “there is one thing I am certain of, that yon poor lady by your brother’s bedside is a good woman, and that the life he leads her is just a hell on earth.”
After this there was a pause. The two men stood no longer looking at each other: they escaped from the scrutiny of each other, which they had hitherto kept up, both somewhat agitated and shaken in the solicitude and trouble of the house.
“I believe all that,” said John Trevanion at last. “I believe every word. Still— But yet—”
Dr. Beaton made no reply. Perhaps these monosyllables were echoing through his brain too. He had known her for years, and formed his opinion of her on the foundation of long and intimate knowledge. But still—and yet: could a few weeks, a few days, undo the experience of years? It was no crime to walk across the park at night, in the brief interval which the gentlemen spent over their wine after dinner. Why should not Madam Trevanion take the air at that hour if she pleased? Still he made no answer to that breath of doubt.
The conversation was interrupted by the servants who came to close doors and windows, and perform the general shutting-up for the night. Neither of the gentlemen was sorry for this interruption. They separated to make that inevitable change in their dress which the smoking-room demands, with a certain satisfaction in getting rid of the subject, if even for a moment. But when Dr. Beaton reached, through the dim passages from which all life had retired, that one centre of light and fellowship, the sight of young Hamerton in his evening coat, with a pale and disturbed countenance, brought back to him the subject he had been so glad to drop. Hamerton had forgotten his dress-coat, and even that smoking-suit which was the joy of his heart. He had been a prisoner in the drawing-room, or rather in the conservatory, while that terrible scene went on. Never in his harmless life had he touched the borders of tragedy before, and he was entirely unmanned. The doctor found him sitting nervously on the edge of a chair, peering into the fire, his face haggard, his eyes vacant and bloodshot. “I say, doctor,” he said, making a grasp at his arm, “I want to tell you; I was in there all the time. What could I do? I couldn’t get out with the others. I had been in the conservatory before—and I saw— Good gracious, you don’t think I wanted to see! I thought it was better to keep quiet than to show that I had been there all the time.”
“You ought to have gone away with the others,” said the doctor, “but there is no great harm done; except to your nerves; you look quite shaken. He was very bad. When a man lets himself go on every occasion, and does and says exactly what he has a mind to, that’s what it ends in at the last. It is, perhaps, as well that a young fellow like you should know.”
“Oh, hang it,” said young Hamerton, “that is not the worst. I never was fond of old Trevanion. It don’t matter so much about him.”
“You mean that to hear a man bullying his wife like that makes you wish to kill him, eh? Well, that’s a virtuous sentiment; but she’s been long used to it. Let us hope she is like the eels and doesn’t mind—”
“It’s not that,” said the youth again. John Trevanion was in no hurry to appear, and the young man’s secret scorched him. He looked round suspiciously to make sure there was no one within sight or hearing. “Doctor,” he said, “you are Madam’s friend. You take her side?”
Dr. Beaton, who was a man of experience, looked at the agitation of his companion with a good deal of curiosity and some alarm. “If she had a side, yes, to the last of my strength.”
“Then I don’t mind telling you. When he began to swear— What an old brute he is!”
“Yes? when he began to swear—”
“I thought they mightn’t like it, don’t you know? We’re old friends at home, but still I have never been very much at Highcourt; so I thought they mightn’t like to have me there. And I thought I’d just slip out of the way into the conservatory, never thinking how I was to get back. I went right in to the end part where there was no light. You can see out into the park. I never thought of that. I was not thinking anything: when I saw—”
“Get it out, for Heaven’s sake! You had no right to be there. What did you see? Some of the maids about—”
“Doctor, I must get it off my mind. I saw Madam Trevanion parting with—a man. I can’t help it, I must get it out. I saw her as plainly as I see you.”
The doctor was very much disturbed and pale, but he burst into a laugh. “In a dark night like this! You saw her maid I don’t doubt, or a kitchen girl with her sweetheart. At night all the cats are gray. And you think it is a fine thing to tell a cock-and-bull story like this—you, a visitor in the house?”
“Doctor, you do me a great deal of injustice.” The young man’s heart heaved with agitation and pain. “Don’t you see it is because I feel I was a sort of eavesdropper against my will, that I must tell you? Do you think Madam Trevanion could be mistaken for a maid? I saw her—part from him and come straight up to the house—and then, in another moment, she came into the room, and I—I saw all that happened there.”
“For an unwilling witness, Mr. Hamerton, you seem to have seen a great deal,” said the doctor, with a gleam of fury in his eyes.
“So I was—unwilling, most unwilling: you said yourself my nerves were shaken. I’d rather than a thousand pounds I hadn’t seen her. But what am I to do? If there was any trial or anything, would they call me as a witness? That’s what I want to ask. In that case I’ll go off to America or Japan or somewhere. They sha’n’t get a word against her out of me.”
The moral shock which Dr. Beaton had received was great, and yet he scarcely felt it to be a surprise. He sat for some moments in silence, pondering how to reply. The end of his consideration was that he turned round upon the inquirer with a laugh. “A trial,” he said, “about what? Because Mr. Trevanion is nasty to his wife, and says things to her a man should be ashamed to say? Women can’t try their husbands for being brutes, more’s the pity! and she is used to it; or because (if it was her at all) she spoke to somebody she met—a groom most likely—and gave him his orders! No, no, my young friend, there will be no trial. But for all that,” he added, somewhat fiercely, “I would advise you to hold your tongue on the subject now that you have relieved your mind. The Trevanions are kittle customers when their blood’s up. I would hold my tongue for the future if I were you.”
And then John Trevanion came in, cloudy and thoughtful, in his smoking-coat, with a candle in his hand.