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.”