THE PROCESS OF ANNEALING
Soon after breakfast they separated as was their wont. Roger and the
doctor came and went as usual, but the November afternoon had grown
to darkness before Michael returned, looking pale and fagged from
his long ride and hard day’s work. Taken as a whole, the patients in
and around Bradstane were not a very profitable set. For one rich
old lady like Miss Strangforth, said Dr. Rowntree, lingering on as a
chronic invalid for years—always wanting attention, and always
profoundly grateful for all that her physicians either did or failed
to do for her, and paying her bills with a cheque by return of
post—for one treasure like this there were a dozen farmers’ wives
and daughters, or sordid, unlovely poor in Bridge Street, calling
upon the doctor with a frequency and persistency which they would
never have dreamed of if they had possessed either the means or the
intention of paying him. Others there were, cottagers, labourers,
living at immense distances over bad roads, and expecting a great
deal of attention in return for very small fees—anything but a
profitable _clientèle_—and some of these Michael had been visiting
to-day.
He came in, picked up a note which lay on the hall table waiting for
him, which he looked for as if he expected it—his dark face lighted
for a moment as he took it, for the handwriting was that of Magdalen
Wynter—put his head in at the library door, remarking, ‘I’m wet
through—change my things—down directly,’ and ran upstairs, shutting
his bedroom door after him.
‘What a spirit!’ cried the doctor, enthusiastically. ‘What a spirit
he has! He’ll get over it yet.’
‘Better than his brother will, I think,’ said Roger, half to
himself; and then, gazing into the fire, he wondered what Gilbert
was doing, and wished, as he had caught himself wishing more than
once that day, that Michael could have seen his way to answer that
note of Gilbert’s differently.
By and by the gong sounded. Roger and the doctor went into the
dining-room. Michael was still upstairs. The soup had been served,
and he came not.
‘Go to Mr. Langstroth’s door and say everything will be cold, and we
are waiting for him,’ said Dr. Rowntree to the serving-maid, who did
as she was told, and presently returned, speedily followed by
Michael.
Roger gave a sharp glance at him, and thought he carried his head
very high—higher than usual.
‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ he said, with an affected, jaunty air,
not in the least like his usual manner. ‘I quite forgot how time was
going on.’
He laughed as he spoke, and said he was ravenously hungry, but
offended the doctor greatly by scarcely touching what was set before
him.
‘What do you mean by saying you are ravenous, and then not eating
anything?’ he asked, crossly.
Michael laughed a nervous, forced laugh, and replied—
‘Oh, I must have thought I was hungrier than I really am. I can’t
eat anything now. These long rides take it out of a fellow in such a
way.’
‘Did you have lunch at the Brydges?’
‘Yes. They have quite a lot of people staying there. That was one
reason why I was so late. After lunch I went with Tom to the stables
to see his new hunter. It is a beauty, too.’
Roger sat silent, misliking the unusual volubility of Michael’s
speech and excuses. Michael himself, in the meantime, had gone off
on a new tack, and was describing his adventures at a farmhouse on
the moors, and the extraordinary symptoms enumerated by the mistress
of it as requiring his advice. Dr. Rowntree, pleased to see that
Michael was what he called ‘plucking up a bit,’ did not notice
anything forced or unnatural in his manner. Roger’s forebodings grew
every moment darker, and he was thankful when at last they rose from
the table and went into the library. On their way thither, however,
he happened to touch Michael’s sleeve with his hand, and found that
it was wet.
‘Why, man!’ exclaimed he, ‘you said you were wet through, and you
have got on the identical togs that you came in with. What an ass
you are, Michael!’ he added, gently. ‘Go upstairs and change, right
away, or you won’t get to Balder Hall to-night.’
‘I’m not going to Balder Hall—I think not,’ said Michael, wearily,
as he let Roger push him towards the stairs, up which he began
slowly and aimlessly to climb.
‘There’s something wrong—something wrong—something wrong,’ kept
ringing through Roger’s mind. ‘And something more than I know of.’
Michael’s room was over the study. Roger, listening intently, heard
him go into it, move about for a moment, and then all was quiet. He
sat with a book in his hand, and waited till his suspense grew
almost to agony. At last he could be quiet no longer. He went
upstairs and knocked softly at Michael’s door. There was no answer.
When he had tried once or twice again, he opened the door and went
in. The candle burned on the dressing-table. Michael was in a large
old easy-chair by the bedside, his head sunk on his breast, his eyes
closed, and an open letter drooping from his right hand.
‘Still in those wet clothes,’ muttered Roger. ‘He’ll kill himself.’
He went up to him, and touched him on the shoulder. Michael awoke
with a start, and looked confusedly around him.
‘Roger!’ he said. ‘I’m so sleepy. I don’t know what’s come over me.’
He seemed to see the letter he held, and went on, in an absent way,
‘Wasn’t it rather too bad of her not to wait till she had seen me?
So long—it’s three years since I began to wait for her and work for
her. But as soon as she heard the first whisper—well, I did write
and tell her what I’d done, and said I would go up and see her
to-night, you know—yes, to-night. But she never waited. She flung me
off,’ and he threw out his arms. ‘She made haste to do it. She must
have been glad to do it! There’s something in her letter which says
so. See!’ He held it out to Roger. ‘What a lot of disagreeable
things you’ve had to do for me lately!’ he went on. ‘Good Lord! how
tired I am! I never was so tired in my life. I can’t imagine the
reason of it.’
Roger, deferring for a moment his intention of making Michael go to
bed, stopped to read the letter, which ran:—
‘MY DEAR MICHAEL,
‘I received your letter this morning, and I am sorry to say
I cannot approve of what you have done. Even before I got it, I had
been thinking for some time about our engagement, and wondering if
it had ever been a wise one. During these three days that you have
not been here, I have had ample time to consider the subject. Even
if nothing further had happened, I should have written as I now do;
but I do not disguise from you that the manner in which you have
yourself cut off every prospect of advancement strengthens my
resolution. These things are best done promptly. It saves pain to
all concerned.
‘As there is now evidently no prospect of our being married within
any definite time, I wish our engagement to cease. I desire this
both on your account and my own. In addition to the reasons already
stated, I do not think it would be for your happiness to continue
it, and I am quite sure it would not be for mine. I shall be glad of
a line from you when convenient, to say that you consent to my
proposal; and with every wish for your happiness and prosperity, I
remain,
‘Your sincere friend,
‘MAGDALEN WYNTER.’
‘There’s a specimen of elegant composition!’ exclaimed Michael,
suddenly sitting upright, and laughing harshly. ‘It could not have
been more proper if she had written it at school, and the head
governess had corrected it. What a blessed thing it is when people
know their own minds, and can command plain English in which to make
them known! Only it’s a pity that they should take three years to
learn what they do want, or whom they don’t want.’ He gave a
disagreeable little laugh at his own pleasantry, and then rose. ‘If
you’ll go down, Roger, I will now change these things, and join you
directly. But it’s lucky I need not go to Balder Hall, for I feel
more and more tired every minute.’
‘Take off your things, by all means,’ said Roger, gravely; ‘but you
must not come down. You must go to bed.’
‘To bed!’ exclaimed Michael, contemptuously. ‘A man go to bed
because he’s had a long ride in the wet and cold, and finds rather a
chilly letter to greet him on his return! I am not such an ass.’
But as he spoke, strength seemed to forsake his limbs; he could not
stand any more, but sat down again in the chair by the bedside.
‘Perhaps Askam is sitting with her now. I suppose they will be
married,’ he said, betraying in his sudden weakness what his secret
fear had evidently been. ‘Perhaps she will keep him straight. He
needs it, and she has a spirit, though I know Gilbert and my father
never thought so; and——’
Here he began to wander in his talk; was shivering and shaking with
cold one moment, burning hot the next. The thorough drenching which
he had got after leaving the Brydges and riding for miles in the
teeth of the bitter wind and rain; the excited condition of his
brain over Gilbert’s treachery; the receipt of Magdalen’s letter,
with its icy, unyielding egoism, showing him that all these years
her own advantage was what she had been thinking of, and that there
was not a spark of love for him in her dull heart;—these things
broke through even his magnificent health and strength. He could not
shake off the physical chill any more than he could the mental
prostration. An attack of a tedious, wearing low fever reduced him
to perfect physical weakness and docility; but far worse than the
fever was the accompanying mental gloom, the result of the shock to
the nervous system. The young man, shut up in his room, too weak in
body to move and shake off his demon visitant, went through all the
horrors of a complete nervous breakdown, and made intimate
acquaintance with all its attendant crew of ghastly shades—those
pallid ghosts which assemble and gibber and mouth at us when we have
so imposed upon our hard-worked servants, nerves and brain, as to
have rendered them for the time powerless to answer to our imperious
demands. Exhausted, they sink down, and say to us, ‘We can no more,’
and then we are at the mercy of every shadow, every whisper, every
vain imagining and thought of horror.
Michael Langstroth, with his superb constitution and youth and
temperance to back him, and with the devoted nursing of two such
friends as Roger and the doctor, was in the course of a few weeks
restored to comparative strength. Gradually the shades and ghosts,
the bats and owls that haunt the dark places of the human mind,
retired before gathering physical strength. Things were gone that
could never be restored—hopes, joys, faiths, enthusiasms; things
which had once seemed all-important, appeared now almost too
insignificant for notice. Under Roger’s eyes was the process
accomplished which in his blindness he had long ago wished for his
friend. He was made into a man: going into the valley of the shadow
a youth, for all his six and twenty years, his bone, and his muscle,
and his brain; coming out of it alive, sane, whole, if weak, but
stripped of every superfluous hope, confidence, or youthfulness.
It was November when he went to his room that night; it was the very
end of December when he came out of it, a hollow-eyed spectre
enough. And it was a month later still when Dr. Rowntree carried him
down to Hastings one day, returning himself the next, and leaving
his adopted son there to recruit.
So ended Michael Langstroth’s youth, as a tale that is told.