Little Dr. Hemstruther, in his rusty clothes, came out from my Lady
Purcell’s house and entered the “chair” that was in waiting for him,
telling the men to carry him to my Lord Gore’s, in St. James’s Street.
He took snuff vigorously as the two chairmen swung along over the
cobbles, patted his chest, and beat his hands together to keep them
warm. His unwholesome face had a beaky, bird-like alertness, and he
appeared cynically amused by something, for Dr. Hemstruther delighted in
the quaint inconsistencies of human nature, and had a fanatical hatred
of all altruism and the sentiment of religion. Like many sour old men,
he was hugely pleased when he had discovered anything mean and
scandalous. And yet he was to be trusted in the keeping of a secret, his
cynical temper helping him to cover up the follies of those who filled
his purse. He merely jeered and mocked at them in philosophic privacy,
taking their money, and mocking his own self for being the creature of
such hire.
The chairmen stopped before the house in St. James’s Street, Dr.
Hemstruther waiting in the chair till the house door opened, for a keen
northwest wind was sweeping the street. Toddling in at last—a shrewd,
meagre figure, his long nose poking forward between the curls of his
huge wig—he was shown by the man Rogers into a little room at the back
of the house where Stephen Gore kept his books and papers.
Dr. Hemstruther was warming his hands at the fire when my lord came in
to him, his florid cheerfulness struggling to shine through a cloud of
anxiety and unrest. His suit of sky-blue satin, the lace ruffles at his
wrists, the very rings upon his fingers, seemed part of a radiance that
was wilfully assumed. A keen eye could detect a certain hollowness in
the face, a bagginess beneath the eyes, some slackness of the muscles
about the mouth. The silky gloss of his fine manner betrayed through the
very beauty of its texture the darker moods and thoughts beneath.
Dr. Hemstruther noted and commented on all this as he bowed his lean
little body, and rubbed his hands for fear of chilblains; and Dr.
Hemstruther despised my lord, though he covered up his sneers with
subserviency and unction. For my Lady Purcell had fallen sick of the
small-pox some days ago, and in her panic and distress of soul was
sending my lord messages, which he—brave gentleman—put discreetly to
one side.
“Well, sir, what news to-day?”
Dr. Hemstruther carried a very solemn face for the occasion.
“Great peril, my lord—great peril.”
“What! No better?”
“A threatening of malignancy, my lord.”
A flash of impatience escaped from Stephen Gore.
“What is your experience worth, Dr. Hemstruther, if you cannot handle a
woman with a fever? The greater part of our earthly wisdom is a mere
matter of words.”
He walked to the window and opened it.
“Poor Nan Purcell, to have escaped so long with a clean skin! There will
be much weeping and gnashing of teeth and covering up of mirrors.”
The petulance in his voice betrayed his resentment at the lack of
improvement in her affairs. Her sickness was infinitely mischievous at
such a moment, and inspired him with an uneasy and savage impatience. He
flung down into a chair, with all his sweet loftiness in peril of
toppling into a snarl of unseemly temper. Dr. Hemstruther appeared to be
intent upon brushing some of the snuff from his coat.
“The danger is not skin deep, sir,” he said.
“You find yourself quite helpless, Dr. Hemstruther, eh? There, pardon my
peevishness—”
“I would not venture the weight of a feather either way, my lord. And
she is a bad patient, mens turbida in corpore ægro.”
He sniffed, smoothed his wig, and looked deferentially at his shoes.
“My Lady Purcell is asking for you, my lord.”
“Then she is conscious—of everything?”
“Conscious to the quick, in spite of the heat of the fever. If I may be
pardoned—”
His eyes met my lord’s, and Stephen Gore was the more embarrassed of the
two.
“You think that I should do her good?”
“More good, my lord—”
“Than all your draughts and bleedings!”
Dr. Hemstruther bowed, and hid a smile with the obeisance.
“My Lord Gore might find some words to soothe the lady.”
“But you forget, man, that—”
He did not complete the sentence, for even his egotism stumbled at the
confession of the instinct of cowardice and self-love. Dr. Hemstruther
understood him, and mocked inwardly at the great man’s prudence.
“There is some danger, my lord; but still I would advise—”
“As a matter of policy?”
“As a matter of policy.”
Stephen Gore pushed back his chair and stood at his full height, as
though he felt the need of feeling himself taller than this little crab
of a man who knew so much, and whose authority was so obsequious and yet
so strong.
“Women have no patience, sir, and will scream ‘fire’ when a log falls on
the hearth. I am up to my eyes in a rush of affairs to-day. And my
friends will thank me if I breathe a pest into all their faces.”
“To-morrow would serve, my lord.”
“I may take your word for that? Good. Are there any cautions you would
give me?”
Dr. Hemstruther screwed his face into an expression of intense sagacity.
“I will send you a powder to burn, my lord, and a mild draught to clear
you. Sit by an open window, and have all the clothes you go in burned.”
“My thanks. And now, sir, if you will pardon me, my leisure is not my
own.”
He unlocked a cabinet, took out a silk purse, and, crossing the room,
held the purse out to the physician.
“I am exerting myself in that little affair of yours, Dr. Hemstruther,”
he said. “It is a pleasure to labor for one’s friends.”
Both smiled faintly as they looked into each other’s eyes. Dr.
Hemstruther put the purse away in an inner pocket and made one of his
most courtly bows.
“Your servant, my lord. I trust that I am mindful of all your
interests.” And he went out sniffing, to wrinkle up his nose
sardonically, like a grinning dog, so soon as he was out of Stephen
Gore’s sight.
But if Anne Purcell burned with a fever upon her bed, whimpering and
calling continually on Mrs. Jael, who had taken a heavy bribe to bide
beside her lady, my Lord Gore was in an equal fever of mind, the fever
of a man who has many things to dread. He knew enough of the human heart
to remember that the cords of silence char and slacken when Death holds
the torch to the secrets of the past. A panic of penitence, the betrayal
of others in the mad impulse to make amends, the emotions thirsting for
the comfort of the confessional dew. And Stephen Gore was wise as to the
gravity of a betrayal, for the man Grylls had ridden into Sussex, and
Anne Purcell knew it, and the sealed order that he carried. Moreover,
this blood-debt was not the only stain that darkened my lord’s
consciousness. He was sunk to the chin in other and wider waters, where
the breath from a hired creature’s lips might stir such a storm as
should smother death into the mouths of many.
He stood before the fire, staring into it, and turning the rings upon
his fingers. For the moment it was all self with him: self, savage,
querulous, impatient, driven to that height of fanaticism whence the
sorrows and hopes of a man’s fellows seem infinitely small and
insignificant. It was the mad, angry self that beats down and tramples
on the life instincts of others, crying a savage sacrifice to the Moloch
of the ego. And yet this man in the satin coat, so bland, so debonair,
so generous on the surface, heard the low clamor of that underworld that
every man carries in the deeps of consciousness. He suffered, yet would
not countenance his suffering, hardening himself to escape from it with
fierce strength and subtlety and anger.