Doctor Phillips was a great favourite with the beau sexe. He was so mild and courteous, so benevolent and sympathetic, that they felt sure he might be trusted with their little secrets. Women, both old and young, invaded his premises daily, and therefore it was no matter of surprise to him, when, whilst he was still occupied with his breakfast on the morning following Harriet Brandt’s flight from the Red House, his confidential servant Charles announced that a young lady was waiting to see him in his consulting room.
“No name, Charles?” demanded the doctor.
“No name, Sir!” replied the discreet Charles without the ghost of a smile.
“Say that I will be with her in a minute!”
Doctor Phillips finished his cutlet and his coffee before he rose from table. He knew what ladies’ confidences were like and that he should not have much chance of returning to finish an interrupted meal.
But as he entered his consulting room, his air of indifference changed to one of surprise. Pacing restlessly up and down the carpet, was Harriet Brandt, but so altered that he should hardly have recognised her. Her face was puffy and swollen, as though she had wept all night, her eyelids red and inflamed, her whole demeanour wild and anxious.
“My dear young lady—is it possible that I see Miss Brandt?” the doctor began.
She turned towards him and coming up close to his side, grasped his arm. “I must speak to you!” she exclaimed, without further preliminary, “you are the only person who can set my doubts at rest.”
“Well! well! well!” he said, soothingly, for the girl looked and spoke as though her mind were disordered. “You may rely that I will do all I can for you! But let us sit down first!”
“No! no!” cried Harriet, “there is no time, I cannot rest; you must satisfy my mind at once, or I shall go mad! I have not closed my eyes all night—the time was interminable, but how could I sleep! I seemed to be torn in pieces by ten thousand devils!”
“My dear child,” said Doctor Phillips, as he laid his hand on hers and looked her steadily in the face, “you are over-excited. You must try to restrain yourself.”
He went up to a side table and, pouring out some cordial, made her drink it. Harriet gulped it down, and sank back exhausted in a chair. She was weak and worn-out with the excitement she had passed through.
“Come! that is better,” said the doctor, as he saw the tears stealing from beneath her closed eyelids, “now, don’t hurry yourself! Keep quiet till you feel strong enough to speak, and then tell me what it is that brings you here!”
The allusion appeared to stir up all her misery again. She sat upright and grasped the doctor by the arm as she had done at first.
“You must tell me,” she said breathlessly, “you must tell me all I want to know. They say you knew my father and mother in Jamaica! Is that true?”
The old doctor began to feel uncomfortable. It is one thing to warn those in whom you are interested against a certain person, or persons, and another to be confronted with the individual you have spoken of, and forced to repeat your words. Yet Doctor Phillips was innocent of having misjudged, or slandered anyone.
“I did know your father and mother—for a short time!” he answered cautiously.
“And were they married to each other?”
“My dear young lady, what is the use of dragging up such questions now? Your parents are both gone to their account—why not let all that concerned them rest also?”
“No! no! you forget that I live—to suffer the effects of their wrong-doing! I must know the truth—I will not leave the house until you tell me! Were they married? Am I a—a—bastard?”
“If you insist upon knowing, I believe they were not married—at least it was the general opinion in the Island. But would not Mr. Tarver be the proper person to inform you of anything which you may wish to know?”
Harriet seized his hand and carried it to her forehead—it was burning hot.
“Feel that!” she exclaimed, “and you would have me wait for weeks before I could get any satisfaction from Mr. Tarver, and not then perhaps! Do you think I could live through the agony of suspense. I should kill myself before the answer to my letter came. No! you are the only person that can give me any satisfaction. Madame Gobelli told me to ask you for the truth, if I did not believe her!”
“Madame Gobelli,” reiterated the doctor in surprise.
“Yes! I was staying with her at the Red House until last night, and then she was so cruel to me that I left. Her son Bobby is dead, and she accused me of having killed him. She said that my father was a murderer and my mother a negress—that they were both so wicked that their own servants killed them, and that I have inherited all their vices. She said that it was I who killed Mrs. Pullen’s baby and that I had vampire blood in me, and should poison everyone I came in contact with. What does she mean? Tell me the truth, for God’s sake, for more depends upon it than you have any idea of.”
“Madame Gobelli was extremely wrong to speak in such a manner, and I do not know on what authority she did so. What can she know of your parents or their antecedents?”
“But you—you—” cried Harriet feverishly, “what do you say?”
Doctor Phillips was silent. He did not know what to say. He was not a man who could tell a lie glibly and appear as if he were speaking the truth. Patients always guessed when he had no hope to give them, however soothing and carefully chosen his words might be. He regarded the distracted girl before him for some moments in compassionate silence, and then he answered:
“I have said already that if a daughter cannot hear any good of her parents, she had better hear nothing at all!”
“Then it is true—my father and mother were people so wicked and so cruel that their names are only fit for execration. If you could have said a good word for them, you would! I can read that in your eyes!”
“The purity and charity of your own life can do much to wipe out the stain upon theirs,” said the doctor. “You have youth and money, and the opportunity of doing good. You may be as beloved, as they were——”
“Hated,” interposed the girl, “I understand you perfectly! But what about my possessing the fatal power of injuring those I come in contact with! What truth is there in that? Answer me, for God’s sake! Have I inherited the vampire’s blood? Who bequeathed to me that fatal heritage?”
“My dear Miss Brandt, you must not talk of such a thing! You are alluding only to a superstition!”
“But have I got it, whatever it may be?” persisted Harriet. “Had I anything to do with the baby’s death, or with that of Bobby Bates? I loved them both! Was it my love that killed them? Shall I always kill everybody I love? I must know—I will!”
“Miss Brandt, you have now touched upon a subject that is little thought of or discussed amongst medical men, but that is undoubtedly true. The natures of persons differ very widely. There are some born into this world who nourish those with whom they are associated; they give out their magnetic power, and their families, their husbands or wives, children and friends, feel the better for it. There are those, on the other hand, who draw from their neighbours, sometimes making large demands upon their vitality—sapping their physical strength, and feeding upon them, as it were, until they are perfectly exhausted and unable to resist disease. This proclivity has been likened to that of the vampire bat who is said to suck the breath of its victims. And it was doubtless to this fable that Madame Gobelli alluded when speaking to you.”
“But have I got it? Have I got it?” the girl demanded, eagerly.
The doctor looked at her lustrous glowing eyes, at her parted feverish lips; at the working hands clasped together; the general appearance of excited sensuality, and thought it was his duty to warn her, at least a little, against the dangers of indulging such a temperament as she unfortunately possessed. But like all medical men, he temporised.
“I should certainly say that your temperament was more of the drawing than the yielding order, Miss Brandt, but that is not your fault, you know. It is a natural organism. But I think it is my duty to warn you that you are not likely to make those with whom you intimately associate, stronger either in mind or body. You will always exert a weakening and debilitating effect upon them, so that after a while, having sapped their brains, and lowered the tone of their bodies, you will find their affection, or friendship for you visibly decrease. You will have, in fact, sucked them dry. So, if I may venture to advise you I would say, if there is any one person in the world whom you most desire to benefit and retain the affection of, let that be the very person from whom you separate, as often as possible. You must never hope to keep anyone near you for long, without injuring them. Make it your rule through life never to cleave to any one person altogether, or you will see that person’s interest in you wax and wane, until it is destroyed!”
“And what if I—marry?” asked Harriet, in a strained voice.
“If you insist upon my answering that question, I should advise you seriously not to marry! I do not think yours is a temperament fitted for married life, nor likely to be happy in it! You will not be offended by my plain speaking, I hope. Remember, you have forced it from me!”
“And that is the truth, medically and scientifically—that I must not marry?” she repeated, dully.
“I think it would be unadvisable, but everyone must judge for himself in such matters. But marriage is not, after all, the ultimatum of earthly bliss, Miss Brandt! Many married couples would tell you it is just the reverse. And with a fortune at your command, you have many pleasures and interests quite apart from that very over-rated institution of matrimony. But don’t think I am presuming to do more than advise you. There is no real reason—medical or legal—why you should not choose for yourself in the matter!”
“Only—only—that those I cling to most nearly, will suffer from the contact,” said Harriet in the same strained tones.
“Just so!” responded the doctor, gaily, “and an old man’s advice to you is, to keep out of it as he has done! And now—if there is anything more—” he continued, “that I can do for you——”
“Nothing more, thank you,” replied the girl rising, “I understand it all now!”
“Will you not see your old friend, Mrs. Pullen, before you go?” asked the doctor. “She and her husband are staying with me!”
“Oh! no, no,” cried Harriet, shrinking from the idea, “I could not see her, I would rather go back at once!”
And she hurried from the consulting-room as she spoke.
Doctor Phillips stood for a while musing, after her departure. Had he done right, he thought, in telling her, yet how in the face of persistent questioning, could he have done otherwise? His thoughts were all fixed upon Ralph Pullen and the scenes that had taken place lately with him, respecting this girl. He did not dream she had an interest in Anthony Pennell. He did not know that they had met more than once. He thought she might still be pursuing Ralph; still expecting that he might break his engagement with Miss Leyton in order to marry herself; and he believed he had done the wisest thing in trying to crush any hopes she might have left concerning him.
“A most dangerous temperament,” he said to himself as he prepared to receive another patient, “one that is sufficient to mar a man’s life, if not to kill him entirely. I trust that she and Captain Pullen may never meet again. It was evident that my remarks on marriage disappointed the poor child! Ah! well, she will be much better without it!”
And here the discreet Charles softly opened the door and ushered in another lady.
An hour later, Anthony Pennell, who had projected a visit to the Red House that afternoon, received a note by a commissionaire instead, containing a few, hurried lines. “Come to me as soon as you can,” it said, “I have left Madame Gobelli. I am at the Langham Hotel, and very unhappy!” Needless to say that ten minutes after the reception of this news, her lover was rushing to her presence, as fast as hansom wheels could take him.
He was very desperately and truly in love with Harriet Brandt. Like most men who use their brains in fiction, his work, whilst in course of progression, occupied his energies to such an extent that he had no time or thought for anything else. But the burden once lifted, the romance written, the strain and anxiety removed, the pendulum swung in the other direction, and Anthony Pennell devoted all his attention to pleasure and amusement. He had been set down by his colleagues as a reserved and cold-blooded man with regard to the other sex, but he was only self-contained and thoughtful. He was as warm by nature, as Harriet herself, and once sure of a response, could make love with the best, and as he flew to her assistance now, he resolved that if anything unpleasant had occurred to drive her from the Red House, and launch her friendless on the world, he would persuade her to marry him at once, and elect him her protector and defence.
His fair face flushed with anticipation as he thought of the joy it would be to make her his wife, and take her far away from everything that could annoy or harass her.
Having arrived at the Langham and flung a double fare to the cab-driver, he ran up the high staircase with the light step of a boy, and dashed into Harriet’s private room. The girl was sitting, much as she had done since returning from her interview with the doctor—silent, sullen, and alone, at war with Heaven and Destiny and all that had conduced to blight the brightest hopes she had ever had.
“Hally, my darling, why is this?” exclaimed Pennell, as he essayed to fold her in his arms. But she pushed him off, not unkindly but with considerable determination.
“Don’t touch me, Tony!—don’t come near me. You had better not! I might harm you!”
“What is the matter? Are you ill? If so, you know me too well to imagine that I should fear infection.”
“No! no! you do not understand!” replied Harriet, as she rose from her seat and edged further away from him, “but I am going to tell you all! It is for that I sent for you!”
Then, waving him from her with her hand, she related the whole story to him—what the Baroness had accused her of, and what Doctor Phillips had said in confirmation of it, only that morning. Pennell had heard something of it before, through Margaret Pullen, but he had paid no attention to it, and now, when Harriet repeated it in detail, with swollen eyes and quivering lips, he laughed the idea to scorn.
“Pooh! Nonsense! I don’t believe a word of it,” he exclaimed, “it is a parcel of old woman’s tales. Phillips should be ashamed of himself to place any credence in it, far more to repeat it to you! Hally, my darling! you are surely not going to make yourself unhappy because of such nonsense. If so, you are not the sensible girl I have taken you for!”
“But, Tony,” said the girl, still backing from his advances, “listen to me! It is not all nonsense, indeed. I know for myself that it is true! Having been shut up for so many years in the Convent dulled my memory for what went before it, but it has all come back to me now! It seems as if what Madame Gobelli and Doctor Phillips have said, had lifted a veil from my eyes, and I can recall things that had quite escaped my memory before. I can remember now hearing old Pete say, that when I was born, I was given to a black wet nurse, and after a little while she was taken so ill, they had to send her away, and get me another, and the next one—died! Pete used to laugh and call me the puma’s cub, but I didn’t know the meaning of it, then. And—Oh! stop a moment, Tony, till I have done—there was a little white child, I can see her so plainly now. They called her little Caroline, I think she must have belonged to the planter who lived next to us, and I was very fond of her. I was quite unhappy when we did not meet, and I used to creep into her nursery door and lie down in the cot beside her. Poor little Caroline! I can see her now! So pale and thin and wan she was! And one night, I remember her mother came in and found me there and called to her husband to send the ‘Brandt bastard’ back to Helvetia. I had no idea what she meant, but I cried because she sent me home, and I asked Pete what a bastard was, but he would not tell me. And,” went on Harriet in a scared tone, “little Caroline died! Pete carried me on his shoulder to see the funeral, and I would not believe that Caroline could be in the narrow box, and I struck Pete on the face for saying so!”
“Well! my darling! and if you did, are these childish reminiscences to come between our happiness? Why should they distress you, Hally? Madame Gobelli’s insolence must have been very hard to bear—I acknowledge that, and I wish I had been by to prevent it, but you must make excuses for her. I suppose the poor creature was so mad with grief that she did not know what she was saying! But you need never see her again, so you must try to forgive her!”
“But, Anthony, you do not understand me! What the Baroness said was true! I see it now! I killed Bobby!”
“My dearest, you are raving! You killed Bobby! What utter, utter folly! How could you have killed Bobby?”
Harriet passed her hand wearily across her brow, as if she found it too hard to make her meaning plain.
“Oh! yes, I did! We were always together, in the garden or the house! And he used to sit with his head on my shoulder and his arm round my waist, I should not have allowed it! I should have driven him away! But he loved me, poor Bobby, and it will be the same, Doctor Phillips says, with everybody I love! I shall only do them harm!”
“Hally! I shall begin to think in another moment that you are ill yourself—that you have a fever or something, and that it is affecting your brain!”
“There was a sister at the Convent, Sister Theodosia, who was very good to me when I first went there,” continued the girl in a dreamy voice, as if she had not heard his words; “and she used to sit with me upon her lap for hours together, because I was sad. But she grew ill and they had to send her away up to the hill, where they had their sanatorium. That made the fourth in Jamaica!”
“Now! I will not have you talk any more of this nonsense,” said Pennell, half annoyed by her perseverance, “and to prove to you what a little silly you are to imagine that everyone who falls ill, or dies, or who comes within the range of your acquaintance, owes it to your influence, tell me how it is that your father and mother, who must have lived nearer to you than anybody else, did not fall sick and die also.”
“My parents saw less of me than anybody,” replied Harriet, sadly, “they were ashamed of their ‘bastard’, I suppose! But old Pete loved me, and took me with him everywhere, and he didn’t get sick,” she concluded, with a faint smile.
“Of course not! See! what rubbish you have been talking—making yourself and me unhappy for nothing at all! So now let me take you in my arms and kiss the remembrance of it away!”
He was about to put his suggestion into execution, but she still shrank from him.
“No! no! indeed you must not! It is all true! I cannot forget Olga Brimont, and Mrs. Pullen, and the baby, and poor Bobby! It is true, indeed it is, and I have been accursed from my birth.”
And she burst into a torrent of passionate tears.
Pennell let her expend some of her emotion, before he continued,
“Well! and what is to be the upshot of it all!”
“I must part from you,” replied the girl, “Indeed, indeed I must! I cannot injure you as I have done others! Doctor Phillips said I was not fit for marriage—that I should always weaken and hurt those whom I loved most—and that I should draw from them, physically and mentally, until I had sapped all their strength—that I have the blood of the vampire in me, the vampire that sucks its victims’ breaths until they die!”
“Doctor Phillips be damned!” exclaimed Pennell, “what right has he to promulgate his absurd and untenable theories, and to poison the happiness of a girl’s life, with his folly? He is an old fool, a dotard, a senseless ass, and I shall tell him so! Vampire be hanged! And if it were the truth, I for one could not wish for a sweeter death! Come along, Hally, and try your venom upon me! I am quite ready to run the risk!”
He held out his arms to her again, as he spoke, and she sank on her knees beside him.
“Oh! Tony! Tony! cannot you read the truth? I love you, dear, I love you! I never loved any creature in this world before I loved you. I did not know that it was given to mortals to love so much! And my love has opened my eyes! Sooner than injure you, whom I would die to save from harm, I will separate myself from you! I will give you up! I will live my lonely life without you, I could do that, but I can never, never consent to sap your manhood and your brains, which do not belong to me but to the world, and see you wither, like a poisoned plant, the leaves of which lie discoloured and dead upon the garden path.”
Never in the course of their acquaintanceship had Harriet Brandt seemed so sweet, so pathetic, so unselfish to Anthony Pennell as then. If he had resolved not to resign her from the first, he did so a thousand times more now. He threw his arms around her kneeling figure and lowered his head until it lay upon the crown of her dusky hair.
“My darling! my darling! my own sweet girl!” he murmured, “our destinies are interwoven for ever! No one and nothing shall come between us! You cannot give me up unless you have my consent to doing so. I hold your sacred promise to become my wife, and I shall not release you from it!”
“But if I harmed you?” she said fearfully.
“I do not believe in the possibility of your harming me,” he replied, “but if I am to die, which is what I suppose you mean, I claim my right to die in your arms. But whenever it happens, you will have neither hastened, nor retarded it!”
“Oh! if I could only think so!” she murmured.
“You must! Why cannot you trust my judgment as much as that of Madame Gobelli or old Phillips—a couple of mischief-makers. And now, Hally, when shall it be?”
“When shall ‘what’ be?” she whispered.
“You know what I mean as well as I do! When shall we be married? We have no one to consult but ourselves! I am my own master and you are alone in the world! These things are very easily managed, you know. I have but to go to Doctors’ Commons for a special license to enable us to be married at a registrar’s office to-morrow. Shall it be to-morrow, love?”
“Oh! no! no! I could not make up my mind so soon!”
“But why not? Would you live in this dull hotel all by yourself, Hally?”
“I do not know! I am so very unhappy! Leave me, Anthony, for God’s sake, leave me, whilst there is time! You do not know the risk you may be running by remaining by my side! How can I consent to let you, whom I love like my very life, run any risk for my sake! Oh! I love you—I love you!” cried the impassioned girl, as she clung tightly to him. “You are my lord and master and my king, and I will never, never be so selfish as to harm you for the sake of my own gratification. You must go away—put the seas between us—never see me, never write or speak to me more—only save yourself, my beloved, save yourself!”
He smiled compassionately, as he would have smiled at the ravings of a child, as he raised her from her lowly position and placed her in a chair.
“Do you know what I am going to do, little woman?” he said cheerfully. “I am going to leave you all alone to think this matter over until to-morrow. By that time you will have been able to compare the opinions of two people who do not care a jot about you, with those of mine who love you so dearly. Think well over what they have said to you, and I have said to you, and you have said to me! Remember, that if you adhere to your present determination, you will make both yourself and me most unhappy, and do no one any good. As for myself, I venture to say that if I lose you my grief and disappointment will be so great, that, in all probability, I shall never do any good work again. But be a sensible girl—make up your mind to marry me, and give the lie to all this nonsense, and I’ll write a book that will astonish the world! Come, Hally, is it to be ruin or success for me?—Ruin to spend my life without the only woman I have ever cared for, or success to win my wife and a companion who will help me in my work and make my happiness complete?”
He kissed her tear-stained face several times, and left her with a bright smile.
“This time to-morrow, remember, and I shall come with the licence in my pocket.”