"Produce the youngster. I suppose she'll call me 'Dot Dandy' as the
other kids used to!"
Phoebe was absent for a few moments, and then returned with a toddling
article, half embroidery, half flesh, with cheeks like apples, and eyes
wide with youthful criticism.
"This is Doctor Danby," introduced her parent, lifting the child and
placing her on the guest's capacious knee, though still supporting the
tiny waist with an assuring hand.
He and the juvenile scanned each other carefully. The grey eyes, the
bronze curls, and rosy mouth--they were the exact presentments of her
mother. He stooped and kissed them one by one.
Before an outsider he would have been for ever compromised, but fond
mammas can see nothing extraordinary in any affectionate demonstration
towards their offspring!
"Who am I, Phoebe?" asked he, dwelling tenderly on the name shared alike
by parent and child.
"Ow is Dot Dandy," was the lisped reply. "Mammy, is Dot Dandy nice?"
Mrs Cameron hurriedly lifted the loquacious imp from its impromptu
perch. Again "Dot" noticed a delicious flush on the transparent cheek,
and his heart leaped within him.
"Pooh!" sneered the inward mentor again, "the lassie is substantial--too
substantial for any woman to carry without colouring!"
"Mammy, is Dot Dandy nice?" clamoured Phoebe minor again.
Her mother took the precaution of ringing for the nurse before replying.
"Yes, darling. Very nice."
That time she _did_ blush. Ralph could have sworn it!
How he reached home he never knew. The biggest men are the largest fools
sometimes. His enormous heart drew its own pattern of her perfections,
and coloured it with her beauty round and about. Her reflections of him
never extended beyond the locality of her brain. He did not look half
smart out of uniform--was awkward as ever, but kind-hearted, and her
baby liked him! If it were ill, he would be the person to send for. But
Phoebe must be taught not to chatter! Had it been anyone else but
Dot----!
Danby's coachman, when not cogitating on the off-chances suggested by
"straight tips" from stablemen in the mews, used to puzzle himself in
the days which followed at the frequency of the doctor's visits to the
tiny house in Maida Vale. He became conversant with the pattern of the
window curtains, and began to cultivate a lively interest in the
headgear of the "superior young person" who wheeled Miss Cameron's
go-cart. As a reward of his attentions, the "superior young person,"
whose encyclopaedic qualities were unbounded, certified to a fact he had
long suspected, that there was absolutely no sickness in the
establishment!
But Ralph Danby was happily unconscious of the delicate supervision of
man and maid, and pursued the even tenor of his way in a delightful
state of beatitude till one day he overstepped the bounds of public
thoroughfare and found himself face to face with a warning to
trespassers. In fact, he made an ass of himself and proposed.
Without rhyme or reason he placed his six-foot-three of cumbersome
manhood at the disposal of a woman from whom he afterwards confessed he
had never received the smallest encouragement. She had certainly never
objected to his continual presence, but, to those who have known each
other in a garrison town where daily meetings and calls are common,
visits are not noted with the same importance as metropolitan
formalities of like description.
Mrs Cameron had not yet returned to society, and consequently cultivated
few acquaintances. Her intimates called as frequently as Ralph, whose
arrival was never objectless. Sometimes there was a doll to be delivered
to Phoebe minor; occasionally he produced tickets for some lecture on
infancy or education; now and then he brought music which he especially
wished to hear (he could recognise "God Save the Queen" if played at the
end of a programme); and once he had ventured to offer flowers! But the
quick march came to an abrupt halt through his own folly. Because one
morning he found her with a complexion more like a rose petal than
usual, because the birds made a perfect din of song outside, and the
spring sun seemed to pour through every crack and cranny and say,
"Winter is past," he thought her heart must be as love-flushed as his
own. Always downright--blunt some people said--he invaded where angels
might have feared to tread.
"Mrs Cameron--Phoebe--I love you. Will you marry me? Will you let me
make you happy again?"
Two dove-grey eyes blinked wide with amazement; then, seeing the reality
of his emotion, she stepped back a pace, and seemed to freeze as she
stood.
The birds sounded discordantly; the sunshine lost all its warmth--it was
but a winter gleam after all; the rose-bloom of her cheek changed to
deadly pallor. Big man as he was, he grew giddy as he looked. He knew at
once the magnitude of his vanity and his mistake, and cursed himself for
having spoken.
"Doctor Danby, I--I--you do me honour. I thank you very much, but oh!
why did you spoil our friendship with such folly?"
"Folly? To love you? I have never done a wiser thing in my life!"
"Pray do not speak of love. You know--you must know--that word to me is
dead for ever!"
"But some day, in the future, you might----"
"My future, Doctor Danby, belongs to my child. I shall never allow any
interest to come before my love for her. Will you understand this, and
forgive and forget to-day as though it had never been?"
He was not a really vain man, or her frigid words, her rejection of his
love, would have sent him from the house angered and mortified, never to
return. But he was large-souled and childishly tender of heart, and
thought, even in his disappointment, that, in her unprotected state, she
might at times have need of him.
Because his demand had exceeded his deserts, and because he had received
a merited snub for his rashness, there was no reason, he argued, that
she should be deprived the right of using him as her friend.
He smiled a sickly assent and extended his hand.
"Good-bye, and I may come and see you sometimes still? It is not as if
there were anyone else----"
Mrs Cameron interrupted hurriedly.
"Please do, and we will never reopen this subject again!"
"Never again!" swore poor Danby as he left the house--and he meant it.
In his own sanctum he conned over every speech of hers and found the
interview had been bald to desolation. Not one green blade of sympathy
even had she given to cheer the dreary wilderness of his life. She had
wished to keep him as her friend, certainly; but that in itself was a
dubious compliment. Had she cared for him ever so little, and felt bound
by duty for her child's sake to sacrifice love, she would have avoided
painful chances of meeting.
"She has evidently no fear of falling in love with me," groaned Ralph to
himself. "I am not even sufficiently interesting to be dangerous."
This rankled for some time. He continued on his daily rounds,
endeavouring, if possible, to avoid passing through the street in which
his frosty idol dwelt. With dreary, lustreless eyes he received the
blandishments of the feminine throng which had elevated him to
popularity; with tired, joyless heart he buried himself in his lonely
home after the treadmill hours were over. Only some exceptional case of
suffering or technical interest had power to rouse him. He was but happy
when ministering to the physical pain of others; if possible, he would
have shared it. In mental trouble the absolute prick and smart of bodily
injury seems a welcome inconvenience, for at least it admits of hope,
the continued hope of recovery, to give impetus to life. He was neither
mawkish nor sentimental--his years of scientific training had pruned
such tendencies; but the inborn sympathy with his fellow-men which had
prompted him to the choice of medicine as a career permeated every
tissue of his medical knowledge and supplemented a powerful element of
healing peculiarly its own. He had been ever ready to throw heart and
soul into any case of interest or alarm, but now his patients found him
more than ever devoted. They did not know that in their service alone
the heart's blood of the man was kept from anaesthesia. For nearly a
month Ralph Danby avoided the house in Mervan Street; then with the
inconsistency symbolic of great minds, he decided to go there at once.
He counselled himself that half a loaf was better than no bread, and
came rightly to the conclusion that if he intended calling again, the
more he postponed the ordeal the more impossible would be the resumption
of the old relations which had existed so happily before he had made a
fool of himself.
On the doorstep he trembled--absolutely trembled (he who, in Egypt, had
bandaged wound after wound, while bullets peppered the air with their
metal hail)--but once in her presence, her serene composure was
infectious, he was himself again, and almost forgot his last unhappy
visit and the miserable interregnum of mental nothingness from which he
had suffered. He might have been uneasy or constrained, but her calm
suavity left him no opportunity. About her manner there was no spark of
vanity, no simpering nor restraint--she was merely a well-bred young
hostess entertaining an intimate friend.
In novels heroines are credited with the exhibition of complex emotions
on the smallest provocation, but women of breeding in the nineteenth
century are too good actresses to hang their hearts on their sleeves
without exceptional cause. So Ralph Danby's little brougham came and
went as of yore, and only in the solitary evenings, when reason
unprejudiced criticised his actions, did he realise that again was he
building a palace of Eros, and again its foundation was nothing but
sand!