DR. PAULL’S THEORY
_A ROMANCE_
BY
MRS. A. M. DIEHL
AUTHOR OF THE GARDEN OF EDEN, ETC.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1893
COPYRIGHT, 1893,
BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED
AT THE APPLETON PRESS, U. S. A.
DEDICATED TO
HENRY IRVING, ESQ.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. FATE 1
II. AN INITIAL LETTER 12
III. EXTRACT FROM THE DIARY OF HUGH PAULL 25
IV. A MORAL DUEL 56
V. A STARTLING PROPOSAL 82
VI. THE LOCKET 104
VII. FOUND IN AN OLD NOTEBOOK OF LILIA PYM 123
VIII. DIARY OF HUGH PAULL 139
IX. THE BEGINNING OF THE SEQUEL 155
X. A DISAPPOINTMENT 186
XI. MERCEDES 197
XII. “’TWIXT THE CUP AND THE LIP” 213
XIII. HER DREAM 224
XIV. A QUESTIONABLE DOCTRINE 238
XV. EXTRACT FROM THE DIARY OF DR. HUGH PAULL 251
XVI. MIZPAH 268
DR. PAULL’S THEORY.
CHAPTER I.
FATE.
Hugh Paull, house-surgeon to a great City hospital, was seated at his
writing-desk. During his spare time he was working at a treatise on
nervous disease, the special subject which attracted him. It was a day
when a certain public event was disturbing the usual City routine. The
thoroughfares near to the hospital were blocked, and his room was
quieter than usual. He had almost forgotten that he was liable to be
disturbed, when a tap came at his door.
“Wanted, sir. Accident just brought in.”
The porter spoke, standing in the doorway.
Hugh laid down his pen with a sigh.
“Has Mr. Hamley taken the case?”
“Yes, sir. They are getting him into the ward. Old gentleman—carriage
accident. Horse frightened and bolted. Two bobbies brought him in.”
“All right, I’ll come.”
He put aside his manuscript, and went down to the accident ward. The
“sister” of the ward, two nurses, and young Hamley, a dresser, were
standing round the recumbent figure of a fine old man, who lay on his
narrow bed still as death, his pale features composed, his grey hair
tossed upon the pillow. It was a grand face—a model for a painter.
As Paull neared the group the two nurses moved away to bring forward and
unfold a screen.
“Take it away,” he said.
“I think he’s gone, or nearly so,” said the dresser, a fair young man,
his face flushing. He had asked for the screen, usually drawn around the
dying or dead.
“Nothing of the sort,” said Hugh. He felt the patient’s pulse, listened
at his heart, opened the closed eyelids, placed his hand lightly on his
brow, which was cold and clammy, then ordered him to be undressed,
himself assisting the nurses to rip up the coat-sleeves.
There were no injuries. It was a case of concussion of the brain. The
groom was having his slight wounds dressed in the out-patients’
department; and Hugh learned from him that his master, whom he appeared
to hold greatly in awe, was Sir Roderick Pym, one of the partners in the
well-known banking firm of Pym, Clithero and Pym. He had a town house in
a West-end square, and a country house in Surrey, where he mostly lived.
He was staying in town for a few days, and had insisted on driving
towards the City to-day, in spite of the warning issued by the police to
the public. Moreover, he insisted on driving a thoroughbred mare, who no
sooner got among quite a small assemblage of roughs than she kicked up
her heels and was off. The groom stuck to the tilbury till the final
crash, but his master fell out shortly before. That was all he knew (or
chose to tell). He was a town groom. He never went into the country. He
would return home and tell Sir Roderick’s housekeeper. She would come
round and see about their master.
Hugh went thoughtfully back to the ward, and standing at the foot of the
bed gazed at the solemn, set face of the unconscious man. He was
interested—unusually so. This old man’s aquiline, grave face was full of
expression. Peaceful and composed as it was now, it was the countenance
of one who had suffered, and suffered deeply.
“His eyelids quivered a little when the ice-bag was applied, sir,” said
the nurse who was watching the patient.
Hugh was once more gravely examining the case, when the stout, matronly
personage, in a high cap and huge white apron, who was called the
“sister” of the ward, came from the little room at its end, through the
square window of which she could see all that was going on in the long
room with the rows of beds.
“I thought I would give you these, Mr. Paull. I would rather not have
anything to do with them,” she said, handing Hugh a massive gold watch
and chain, a purse, and some letters and papers.
“I will see to them, sister,” he said.
Giving directions as to the immediate treatment of Sir Roderick, he
returned to his room to lock them away in a small iron safe, where
certain of the hospital books and cases of instruments were kept. The
watch was a hunter. It struck him that the glass might be broken. It
was. He shook out the fragments; then, seeing a locket attached to the
chain, he opened that.
The glass of this was intact, and covered the coloured photograph of a
woman’s face—sweet, bright, fair, with smiling lips and dark eyes, that
even on lifeless paper looked mischief and pretty defiance.
He shut up the locket in a hurry—he had not meant prying—and placing the
contents of Sir Roderick’s pockets in a corner of the safe, turned the
key upon them.
“This is my quiet day’s work,” he thought, with a sigh. It was useless
to sit down to a scientific treatise, for which the most complete
abstraction was an absolute necessity, when at any moment he might be
summoned to this unexpected and important case; so he put the scattered
sheets of manuscript together, and re-arranged the books of reference
that he had piled on chairs by his writing-table in their rightful
places on the book-shelves. Then he sat down in his American chair, and
stared at the fire.
“A strange old face,” he was thinking, “massive, thoughtful. Quite a
Rembrandt head. I wonder how old he is—whether he will get over it?
Nasty shock, anyhow. Must have fallen on a soft bit of road; if it had
been the kerb, or cobbles even, it might have been all over with him.”
It seemed to Paull that he must have seen that face before. Yet this
could scarcely be. He had come to the hospital from his country home. He
was the only son of the Rector of Kilby, in Derbyshire, and had seldom
gone out, except to the museums and to scientific lectures; his ambition
kept him chained to its object—his profession.
“The sort of face one sometimes dreams of,” he concluded. “I thought I
was past nonsense of this sort. This latest thing in accidents has upset
me as if I were a girl.”
Presently, the “gentleman’s housekeeper” was announced, and a portly
dame, handsomely dressed in dark silk and a fur-trimmed cloak, entered.
At once Hugh banished all idea of the locket and Mrs. Naylor having the
faintest connecting link.
Sir Roderick’s housekeeper was comely, and good-looking in her buxom
way. But although there was anxiety in her enquiries, and evident relief
in her manner when Paull gave her hopes that her employer might recover,
the ruddiness did not forsake her cheeks, nor was she in the least
flurried.
“I feared something might happen, that I did,” she said, accepting a
chair. “The groom, David, he didn’t half like going behind that mare.
Sir Roderick’s a first-rate driver; they do say at both riding and
driving he can manage anything in the way of a horse. But there, I’ve
seen that Kitty in the stable, and I know she’s that bad-tempered—but,
lor! no one daren’t say one word to Sir Roderick.”
Paull asked if there were no near relations who might be sent for, or
informed of her master’s condition.
“Mr. Edmund—that’s Sir Roderick’s next eldest brother—had dinner with
him last night,” she answered, doubtfully, “But he’s taken his family to
see the procession. Mr. Pym—that’s the eldest, the head of the
firm—isn’t on what you might call good terms with Sir Roderick, who has
nothing to do with the bank now.”
“Were those all?” asked Hugh.
Mrs. Naylor could not suggest anyone else. Sir Roderick—well, he was one
of those gentlemen that you didn’t know how to take. You might offend
him mortally, and you wouldn’t know it except by his never having
anything to do with you afterwards.
“You would rather not take any responsibility in the matter then, Mrs.
Naylor?” asked Hugh, slightly amused.
The character of that strange man, lying for the present dead to the
world without, was being unexpectedly revealed to him.
“I certainly would rather not, sir,” said Mrs. Naylor, briskly.
“But you will not object to give me his brother’s address?”
Mrs. Naylor being quite ready to give Mr. Edmund Pym’s address, Hugh
wrote it down. Then he offered to take Mrs. Naylor to see her master.
From this she seemed to shrink; and it was only after being adjured that
it was her duty to remain, at all events, in the hospital, until someone
else belonging to Sir Roderick came—that she consented to visit the
ward.
Mr. Edmund Pym arrived to visit his brother about nine in the evening: a
singularly impassive personage, who showed no emotion whatever of any
kind, and who departed as soon as possible.
Mrs. Naylor, evidently greatly relieved, slipped away after she had had
a short interview with her master’s brother.
At ten o’clock the old man still lay on the hospital bed—breathing,
living, but apparently dead to all around him.
“What do you think of him, Mr. Paull?” asked the Sister, as Hugh went
his last round—at least the round which was usually his last.
“Think of him?” repeated Hugh, absently. “Oh—well—Dr. Fairlight will be
here in the morning. He will take the case. Tell the night nurse I shall
be down in an hour.”
“You’re not going to sit up, Mr. Paull?”
“I think I shall.”
The Sister looked from patient to doctor, as Hugh went striding out of
the ward, and back again to the livid, solemn face on the pillow.
“That young cabman’s case last week was a good deal worse than this,”
she mused, “and he didn’t sit up. I suppose the old gentleman’s age
makes him anxious.”
Hugh Paull, with his odd attractiveness, his scrupulous fidelity to his
duties, and his learning, which was acknowledged by the great men who
were appointed to the hospital, as well as by his fellow-workers, was
the hero of the resident staff, both doctors and nurses; and it did not
enter the good Sister’s head to dream that any other motive but that of
devotion to duty led to this sacrifice of a night’s rest, and singular
departure from ordinary hospital routine.
Yet when Hugh took up his position at the patient’s bedside with some
books as the possible companions of his vigil, he smiled to himself with
a cynical wonder.
“Why am I doing this?” he asked himself. Why, indeed? He could have been
summoned if any change took place. He could have ordered an extra night
nurse for Sir Roderick. Why should he go out of his way for a strange
man? Because this old man’s brother and the housekeeper had behaved so
coolly, and his sense of humanity was aroused? Because this human
windfall in the accident ward was Sir Roderick Pym, of Pym, Clithero &
Pym? No! for neither of these reasons. Hugh Paull was in the habit of
self-interrogation. His dissatisfaction with ordinary life as ordinary
people took it had made him desperately in earnest; and being
desperately in earnest, had made—
“To thine own self be true,
Thou canst not then be false to any man,”
one of his governing mottoes. As he settled himself to his night watch
he grimly told himself that he was here for the sole reason that he knew
he could not without a struggle have kept away. Sir Roderick Pym
attracted him like a magnet. Why, he had still to learn.
Alternately watching the slightest movement of the patient, and reading,
the night wore on. There was silence in the long ward. The rows of beds
loomed whitely in the distance. The fire crackled. Now and then there
was a sigh or a weary moan. The distant clatter of cab-wheels, the howl
of a restless dog, or the slow rumbling of the market-waggons, were the
only signs that not all in London slept, as did these victims of
carelessness or misadventure within the quiet stone building.
Between one and two o’clock, Sir Roderick gave signs of returning
consciousness. As the night nurse glided from bed to bed, administering
medicine to those patients for whom it had been ordered, he opened his
eyes, and muttered something. Then he moved his head on his pillow,
turned, and gradually subsided into natural sleep.
After Hugh was completely satisfied that this was real slumber—“tired
Nature’s sweet restorer,” indeed—he might safely have sought “balmy
sleep” for his own solace; but by this time he was so wide awake, and
his brain so fit for study, that he remained. Sir Roderick slept for
hours as placidly as an infant, while Hugh studied with all his might
and strength.
At six o’clock the night nurse brought him a cup of tea, and
congratulated him on the changed appearance of the patient.
“Yes; he’ll do now, I think,” said Hugh, contentedly.
The clatter of the spoon in the saucer, or the whispering, or both,
aroused Sir Roderick. He opened his eyes, and stared at Hugh, first
wildly, then with an amazed expression.
“Kemble, in _Hamlet_,” he muttered. Then, as Hugh bit his lip to
restrain a smile—a shaken brain must not be irritated—he frowned and
stared, stared and frowned, then jerked his head away as from an
unpleasant object.
Since the old man had been resolutely driving into the City, against
much warning and advice, all had been a blank. Now he was awakening amid
the most unpleasant sensations: his limbs heavy as lead, his head
curiously light. At first he squinted at the strange objects around him,
struggling to focus them aright, like a semi-conscious infant. As his
sight adjusted itself, he found that there were really many beds—a row
of beds. He began to count them, but before he had reached two figures
he felt sick and faint, and instinctively turned back for help.
A lithe strong arm was round him, a glass with some cordial was at his
lips. He swallowed the draught, and helplessly subsided.
As he revived he began to think.
“This is real,” was his first thought. “What has happened to me?”
After the thought had hummed about in his mind like a spinning-top, it
subsided, tottered, and tumbled. He, as it were, picked it up.
“Who am I?” he stammered, suddenly, to Hugh, who was sitting near, his
eyes alert. He had not meant that, but it came out higgledy-piggledy,
somehow, and he listened to his own voice wonderingly.
“You are quite safe, Sir Roderick Pym,” said Hugh, gently. “A few hours
ago you were thrown out of your carriage, and were brought here. You
have been slightly—faint—but you will soon be all right again, and able
to go home.”
“A—hospital!” Sir Roderick looked round with evident disgust.
“Who—knows?” he added, with a glance of alarm.
Hugh hastened to relate details, slowly, clearly, while the nurse
administered some light nourishment.
Sir Roderick listened attentively. The only question he asked was if his
mare, Kitty, had suffered.
“I wouldn’t have had anything happen to Kitty,” he began, emphatically.
Then, as he glanced up at Hugh from under his shaggy grey eyebrows, he
seemed to remember that he was speaking to a stranger, and stopping
short, sank wearily back.
“I took you for a vision of ‘Hamlet,’” he said, with a short laugh. “You
looked like it—all black against the light, bending over your books.”
“My black clothes?” said Hugh. “I am just in mourning for my mother. I
am house-surgeon here.”
Sir Roderick looked at him less coldly, and murmured some thanks. Then
he asked the time.
“I want to telegraph. I was expected home—in the country—to-day,” he
said. “Perhaps—I could go this afternoon.”
Hugh convinced him that this would be, if not impossible, the height of
imprudence.
Sir Roderick listened to reason, but bargained that he should write a
telegram now, at once, while he was able.
So excitedly did he plead, that Hugh reluctantly fetched a telegram form
from the secretary’s room, and propped his troublesome patient up in the
bed, that he might fill it in himself.
But the pencil fell from Sir Roderick’s fingers, the effort made him
feel faint.
Not till an hour after was the telegram despatched, and then it was Hugh
who had written it at Sir Roderick’s dictation:—
“_To L. Pym, The Pinewood_,
“_Near F——, Surrey_.
“_Am detained by important business. Will return as soon as possible.
Keep all letters, and do not see visitors._
_Roderick Pym._”
“To his wife, presumably,” thought Hugh, as he left his patient to the
day nurse, who was fresh from her night’s rest; and as he thought this
he sneered: “Younger than her lord and master; very much under his
thumb, too, evidently. Married him for his money, of course! The
original of the portrait in the locket, doubtless. Fancy the jealous
prudence of the old fox! Wouldn’t write ‘Lady Pym,’ only put ‘L.’ I
wondered why he hesitated so long before yielding up the name. Poor old
fellow! A young wife, with that mischievous face! Why didn’t the
housekeeper mention her?”
Hugh went about his day’s work strangely dissatisfied, and had never
felt more annoyed with anyone in his life than with the Sister of the
accident ward when she told Dr. Fairlight that he had kindly remained
all night by Sir Roderick’s bedside.