COSMO AND THE DOCTOR.
To the eyes of Jermyn, Cosmo appeared, mainly from his simplicity,
younger than he was, while the doctor’s manners, and his knowledge
of the world, made Cosmo regard him as a much greater man than, in
any sense or direction, he really was. His kindness having gained
the youth’s heart, he was ready to see in him everything that love
would see in the loved.
“You are very good to me, Doctor Jermyn,” he said, one day, “--so
good, that I am the more sorry though the less unwilling--”--The
doctor could not keep his hold of the thread of Cosmo’s speech, yet
did not interrupt him--“to tell you what is now weighing on my
mind: I do not know how or when I shall be able to hand you your
fees. I hope you will not come to see me once more than is
necessary; and the first money I earn, you shall be paid part at
least of what I owe you.”
The doctor laughed. It was such a school-boy speech, he thought! It
was a genuine relief to Cosmo to find him take the thing so
lightly.
“You were robbed on the way, Lady Joan tells me,” Jermyn said.
“I am not sure that I was robbed,” returned Cosmo; “but in any
case, even had I brought every penny I started with, I could not
have paid you. My father and I are very poor, Mr. Jermyn.”
“And my father and I are pretty well to do,” said the doctor,
laughing again.
“But,” resumed Cosmo, “neither condition is a reason why you should
not be paid. Mine is only the cause why you are not paid at once.”
“My dear fellow,” said the doctor, laying his hand on the boy’s, “I
am not such a very old man--it is not so very long since I was a
student myself--in your country too--at Edinburgh--that I should
forget what it is to be a student, or how often money is scarce in
the midst of every other kind of plenty and refinement.”
“But I am not exactly a student now. I have been making a little
money as tutor; only--”
“Don’t trouble your head about it, I beg of you,” interrupted the
doctor. “It is the merest trifle. Besides, I should never have
thought of taking a fee from you! I am well paid in the pleasure of
making your acquaintance.--But there is one way,” he added, “in
which you could make me a return.”
“What is that?” asked Cosmo eagerly.
“To borrow a little money of me for a few months? I am not at all
hard up at present. I had to borrow many a time when I was in
Edinburgh.”
The boy-heart of Cosmo swelled in his bosom, and for a time he
could not answer. He thought with himself, “Here is a man of the
true sort!--a man after my father’s own heart! who in the ground of
his rights plants fresh favours, and knows the inside of a fellow’s
soul as well as his body! This is a rare man!”
But he felt it would be to do Joan a wrong to borrow money from the
doctor and not from her. So with every possible acknowledgment he
declined the generous offer. Now the doctor was quite simple in
behaving thus to Cosmo. He was a friendly man and a gentleman, and
liked Cosmo as no respectable soul could help liking him. It had
not yet entered into him to make him useful. That same night,
however, he began to ask himself whether he might not make Cosmo
serve instead of hindering his hope, and very soon had thought the
matter out. He was by no means too delicate to talk at once about
his love, but would say nothing of it until he had made more sure
of Cosmo, and good his ground by sowing another crop first: he must
make himself something in the eyes of the youth, plant himself
firmly in his estimation, cause his idea of him to blossom; and
for the sake of this he must first of all understand the boy!
Nor was it long before the doctor imagined he did understand the
boy; and indeed, sceptical as both his knowledge of himself and of
the world had made him, he did so far understand him as to believe
him as innocent of evil as the day he was born. His eyes could not
shine so, his mouth could not have that childlike--the doctor
called it childish--smile otherwise. He put out various feelers to
satisfy himself there was no pretence, and found his allusions
either passed over him like a breath of merest air, or actually
puzzled him. It was not always that Cosmo did not know what the
suggestion _might_ mean, but that he could not believe Jermyn meant
that; and perceiving this, the doctor would make haste to alter the
shadow into something definitely unobjectionable. Jermyn had no
design of corrupting the youth; he was above that, even could he
have fancied anything to be gained by it, whereas his interest lay
in the opposite direction, his object being to use the lad
unconsciously to himself. He discovered also concerning him that he
had lofty ideas of duty in everything; that he was very trusting,
and unready to doubt; and that with him poetry was not, as with
Lady Joan, a delight, but an absolute passion. After such
discoveries, he judged it would not be hard to make for himself,
as for an idol, a high place in the imagination of the boy. For
this end he brought to bear upon him his choicest fragments of
knowledge, and all his power to interest; displayed in pleasing
harmonies his acquaintance with not a few of the more delicate
phases of humanity, and his familiarity with the world of
imagination as embodied in books; professed much admiration he did
not feel, in the line of Cosmo’s admiration, going into raptures,
for instance, over Milton’s profoundest gems, whose beauty he felt
only in a kind of reflected cold-moony way, through the external
perfection of their colour and carving; brought to his notice
Wordsworth’s _Happy Warrior_, of which he professed, and truly, that
he had pasted it on his wall when a student, that at any moment he
might read it; and introduced him to the best poems of Shelley, a
favour for which alone Cosmo felt as if he must serve him for life.
Cosmo was so entire, so utterly honest, so like a woman, that he
could not but regard the channel through which anything reached
him, as of the nature of that which came to him through it; how
could that serve to transmit which was not one in spirit with the
thing transmitted? To his eyes, therefore, Jermyn sat in the reflex
glory of Shelley, and of every other radiant spirit of which he had
widened his knowledge. How could Cosmo for instance regard him as a
common man through whom came to him first that thrilling
trumpet-cry, full of the glorious despair of a frustrate divinity,
beginning,
O wild west wind, thou breath of autumn’s being,
--the grandest of all pagan pantheistic utterances he was ever
likely to hear! The whole night, and many a night after, was Cosmo
haunted with the aeolian music of its passionate, self-pitiful
self-abandonment. And in his dreams, the “be thou me, impetuous
one!” of the poem, seemed fulfilled in himself--for he and the wind
were one, careering wildly along the sky, combing out to their
length the maned locks of the approaching storm, and answering the
cry of weary poets everywhere over the world.
As he sat by his patient’s bed, Jermyn would also tell him about
his travels, and relate passages of adventure in various parts of
the world; and he came oftener, and staid longer, and talked more
and more freely, until at length in Cosmo’s vision, the more
impressible perhaps from his weakness, the doctor seemed a hero, an
admirable Crichton; a paragon of doctors.
In all this, Jermyn, to use his own dignified imagery, was
preparing an engine of assault against the heart of the lady. He
had no very delicate feeling of the relation of man and woman,
neither any revulsion from the loverly custom in low plays of
making a friend of the lady’s maid, and bribing her to chaunt the
praises of the briber in the ears of her mistress. In his
intercourse with Lady Joan, something seemed always to interfere
and prevent him from showing himself to the best advantage--which
he never doubted to be the truest presentation; but if he could
send her a reflection of him in the mind of such an admirer as he
was making of Cosmo, she would then see him more as he desired to
be seen, and as he did not doubt he was.