A DISAPPOINTMENT.
Dr. Paull and his son left Waterloo with their cases of flowers at an
early hour next morning. Hugh was in a severe humour. Out of temper with
himself, he was inclined to be out of temper with the rest of mankind.
The first incident did not improve his humour. Like other travellers, he
was in the habit of buying papers, to beguile the tedium of the railway
journey. He had partially read his _Times_, when Ralph, who sat
opposite, leant over, and, showing him an illustration in a well-known
weekly, said:
“Is it like her, father?”
It was the portrait of the Princess Andriocchi, after a painting in the
Paris _Salon_.
For a moment he hardly realised the extraordinary fact that his boy
should ask him such a question, then recovering himself:
“Like whom?” he asked.
“Like the princess. Jones told me you had a new patient—a princess—and
showed me the prince’s card. Poor old fellow! He does think a lot of
royalty, father.”
“These people do not happen to be royal,” said Dr. Paull, as coldly as
he ever spoke to his son. “But I am sorry that Jones is getting old and
garrulous. I thought he would last my time out.”
“He meant no harm——” began Ralph; but his father gave him a _Times_
leader on the recent death of a celebrated geologist to read, and
glanced at the memoir attached to the portrait.
This, after stating that the Princess Andriocchi was the daughter of the
Duke and Duchess of Saldanhés, who were high in favor at the Court of
Spain, enlarged upon the sensation her beauty had created in Paris, how
her carriage had been mobbed, how great portrait painters had made
interest in influential quarters to have the privilege of taking her
portrait, not knowing, until the picture by a celebrated Spanish artist
was on the walls of the _Salon_, that they had been forestalled. After
some further complimentary remarks, the article ended with the statement
that although the princess was Spanish by birth, she had been educated
in England.
“And this is the fulsome adulation with which the world ruins its
sweetest women!” thought Hugh, intensely disgusted and annoyed. “What
can be done against that? How can anyone or anything make an honest,
God-fearing woman out of the object of that sort of stuff?”
He tried to occupy his mind with general subjects until they reached F——
Station, where Mr. and Mrs. Mervyn met them, beaming with smiles.
“Granny!”
“My dearest boy!”
Ralph was rapturously embraced by Mrs. Mervyn, who was stouter and
greyer than twenty years before, while Mr. Mervyn, a handsome old man,
with hair as white as Hugh’s prematurely blanched locks, shook hands
with Dr. Paull, who this year had been absent from the Pinewood for six
months.
“You must be glad to get away for a peep at the dear old place,” said
Mrs. Mervyn, warmly, as she sat opposite Hugh in the waggonette. “You
will find the garden a little neglected, I fear. You see, the men have
had no direct orders, and we did not like to interfere.”
To Hugh, the peeps of the grounds through the clumps of pines as they
drove along produced an effect of desolation. There was the still,
overgrown, neglected look about the place which even the best kept
estate will assume after the protracted absence of its owner. They were
all to lunch together at the Pinewood. As they neared the house, Hugh’s
spirits fell lower and lower.
“It is like a big churchyard with one grave in it,” he thought. To him
the house looked mausoleum-like. Its windows stared blankly at him like
so many reproachful eyes.
Within, he fancied there was a smell of damp. Mrs. Mervyn and the old
housekeeper assured him, as they accompanied him through the unused
rooms where the furniture was carefully shrouded in holland and the
carpets rolled up, that during the wet weather there had been fires
everywhere, and that at a couple of days’ notice the house would be
ready for occupation.
“You could invite any number of people, sir. I’d undertake to be ready
for them,” said Mrs. Gray, who had been housemaid at the Pinewood when
Sir Roderick was a young man. “The parties as old Mr. Pym had here
during the shooting! And how they used to enjoy theirselves! I only wish
as how those times would come again, sir. As I said before, I’d be ready
for ’em, as long as you’d let me have two housemaids and a man as knew
something of his business.”
Hugh looked sharply at her—as if the tempter himself had spoken through
her lips.
“If I had people here—the whole place would have to be refurnished,” he
said, turning to Mrs. Mervyn. “It all looks—so faded—so worn out.”
Last night’s splendid scene was in his mind. Not for one moment had his
memory failed to reproduce it. Even as he looked at the good old
furniture—(they were standing in the drawing-room, he, Mrs. Mervyn, and
the housekeeper)—he seemed to see the opera house as background to the
central figure of the princess in her pearl-embroidered robe, wearing
priceless gems on her fair neck and arms and in her black hair as
carelessly as if they were glass.
“I daresay it does all look poor after the houses you are accustomed to
see,” said Mrs. Mervyn, indulgently. Good, untiringly faithful in
well-doing as she was, her woman’s natural instincts remained; she daily
witnessed by far too much squalor and poverty, and at the faint promise
of something that would “brighten up the place,” as she termed it, she
revived as an old war-horse pricks up his ears at the sound of the
trumpet. “But, you know, all these things are solid and good, and at a
comparatively small expense you could make the house look utterly
different,” she added, persuasively.
Then, while Mrs. Gray stood by, intensely interested, she unfolded the
poor old chocolate-coloured draperies, and showing Hugh how threadbare
and faded they were, suggested numberless little plans for beautifying
the rooms at a comparatively trivial outlay.
He listened with seeming interest. But he hardly heard what she was
saying. He was building a castle in the air. He was reorganising the
whole place on a far grander scale than would ever have occurred to Mrs.
Mervyn’s frugal mind—he was preparing it for the entertainment of such
guests as Sir David and Lady Forwood. (Sir David and Lady Forwood—his
thoughts presumed no further. Hugh Paull, hitherto sincere, true to
himself, had taken the first plunge into the bottomless waters of
self-deception!)
“It seems a shame that a house with such capacities should be allowed to
be in this state, doesn’t it?” he said to Mrs. Mervyn.
“It seems a shame so beautiful a place should ‘waste its sweetness on
the desert air,’” she said, half-laughingly, half-earnestly. “But we
know you will not leave it as it is,” she went on, in a low voice, to
Hugh, as they followed the inwardly-elated housekeeper out of the room.
“You see, Ralph is getting to be a young man, and should meet people. We
have thought you would come to see this in its right light before very
long.”
As Mrs. Mervyn was saying these words, they were passing through the
hall, and Mrs. Gray, in her exuberance of spirits at the prospect of
liveliness to come, went up to the gong and sounded the summons to
luncheon in quite a joyous fashion.
Hugh, following Mrs. Mervyn into the dining-room, was struck by the bare
and empty appearance of the room, but he was still more impressed by
something else. This was Lilia’s portrait in pastel, which he had had
painted by a celebrated French artist after her death, to be hung over
the mantelshelf where Roderick Pym’s portrait in oils used to hang. This
portrait, which had been somewhat of an abstraction, a study in grey and
lilac, had lost whatever life the artist had put into it.
“It might be a portrait of her ghost,” he thought, with an eerie
feeling.
In truth, as he sat at luncheon, and afterwards, when he and Ralph laid
the wreaths on the grave, there was no longer that old sensation of her
presence lingering about the place. It was all empty as a husk.
“The old life has gone for ever,” he thought. To make the Pinewood
bearable, he felt he must live a new life.
They took tea at the Rectory with the Mervyns.
As he was strolling in the garden with his hostess afterwards, he said
to her, suddenly:
“If I should invite people here later on, would you consent to be
hostess for a time?”
Mrs. Mervyn was slightly startled, but acquiesced. After the father and
son had left, she broached the matter to her husband.
“Do you think he means to marry again?” suggested Mr. Mervyn, who had
noticed some change in Hugh.
“Marry again!”
Mrs. Mervyn’s indignation made her husband smile.
“Well, we shall see,” he said. “My belief is, he will.”
Arrived home, by far more cheerful than when he started, Hugh went at
once to his library for letters. There were a few, manifestly business
communications. He looked at these somewhat blankly, then rang the bell.
“Are these all the letters?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Who called?”
“No one, sir.”
“You are _sure_?”
He looked somewhat sternly at old Jones (the prattler).
“I am positive certain, sir,” said the old domestic, aggrieved, casting
a reproachful look at his master as he retired. Dr. Paull had never
spoken so sharply to him before.
“What a curious thing,” Hugh was telling himself. “Lady Forwood made all
that fuss about my seeing the girl—and I am not sent for!”
It was only twenty-four hours since he was sitting in the box talking to
the princess, but this fact did not occur to him. So many thoughts had
passed through his mind, he had made such startling resolutions during
those twenty-four hours that they seemed a week.
The next day passed, and the day after, in the usual routine. Rarely had
that routine seemed so dull.
“What is the matter with my father, do you think, Jones?” asked Ralph of
his old crony, who had been his secret playfellow since he first spun
tops and made kite-tails for him. “He seems so strange. Has he been ill,
and kept it to himself?”
“How can I tell, Master Ralph? How can the likes o’ me understand the
likes o’ _him_?” answered Jones. In his heart of hearts, Jones feared
that “much learning” was making his master certainly inclined to
madness.
A few days later came a note from Lady Forwood.
“At last,” muttered Dr. Paull, who considered himself somewhat
peculiarly treated by “a couple of women,” and attributed his irritable
humour to annoyance thereat. But the letter merely asked him to dine
to-morrow, and contained no mention of the princess.
“But it is pretty certain she is to be there, or I should scarcely have
been invited,” he thought.
Apart from his profession, he thought very lightly of himself. Since
Lilia died he had merged the man in the physician; if one had told him
people liked or disliked him as the man, without reference to the
professional healer, he would scarcely have believed it.
He put the note into his breast-pocket—he was just going to deliver a
lecture—said a few words to Ralph, and, stopping the carriage at a
telegraph office, wired “With pleasure” to Lady Forwood.
He lectured brilliantly that day. The students were astonished at the
youthful enthusiasm of their ordinarily calm and logical professor.
Returning, he found a letter from Mrs. Mervyn, who was anxious to keep
him up to his new good resolutions. Mrs. Mervyn offered to come to town
any day and “do his shopping for him.”
He talked of his idea of embellishing the Pinewood to Ralph that
evening.
“You both, you and granny, have more artistic taste than I have,” he
said to his son. “Suppose I were to give you _carte blanche_ to
refurnish the house—both houses, this is a great deal too shabby—and I
will not grumble at the bills?”
Ralph acceded to his father’s suggestion joyfully, as he invariably did.
But in private he wondered, and pondered. This man, all elation one day
and moody abstraction the next, was not the father he had loved and
revered. He was metamorphosed.
Sir David Forwood lived in one of the fashionable squares. When Hugh’s
carriage drove up, it had to wait—another equipage was “setting down” at
the hall-door, where there was an awning.
“A large party?” he asked the footman who took his hat.
“My lady receives after dinner, this evening,” said the man.
There were two or three ladies seated near Lady Forwood, and a few men
were standing about in the big front drawing-room. One of these was the
count, who bowed to him with what he considered an ironical smile.
“I want you particularly to take in Lady Boisville,” Lady Forwood said
to him after she had said a few nothings. “She is dying to talk to you.
You know she is a bit blue—and she positively raves about your
‘Commentaries on Psychological Facts.’ Did I pronounce that properly?
Yes? For the first time, I assure you!”
Then she introduced him to the lady in question.
Lady Boisville was the wife of a millionaire who had been recently
created a baron for some good reason best known to the title creators of
the period. She was a stout lady in the sixties, who worshipped brains,
as she said, and took a motherly interest in her juniors. She was fond
of a little bit of gossip, and Hugh listened to her monologue half
interested, half dreading that he might hear something—what, he hardly
knew—that would unpleasantly affect him.
“You know Count Tornelli?” she said to him, after she had chattered
about most of the persons present not strictly within earshot. “The man
who is always with the Prince Andriocchi? I am very much interested in
him.”
“Indeed?” remarked Hugh, coldly.
“You speak as if—do you know anything about him that is not quite nice?”
asked her ladyship, alarmed by his manner. “Because, if you do, you must
tell me at once! That dark girl sitting by him is my niece, and we quite
think that it will be a match—if everything should be suitable, of
course.”
Hugh felt quite sorry for having excited Lady Boisville’s suspicions. He
became suddenly sympathetic in her regard, and thinking she was a good
motherly soul, he assured her quite warmly that during his slight
acquaintance with the count he had seen nothing at all at which she
might take exception.
“I hear that the prince is dreadfully _fast_” said she. “But that the
count does his utmost to lead him away from his temptations.”
“A sort of Mentor,” said Hugh, with a smile.
He felt amused now, and discussed the advantages of the possible
marriage with Lady Boisville with as much interest as if he had been a
lady matchmaker.
The dinner over, he established himself in a corner of the back
drawing-room and watched the arrivals to the “At Home.”
These were many; people he knew, people he did not know. Every gown as
it flitted past the doorway set him on the alert—he felt that each dark
head or pair of snowy shoulders might be hers.
As the quarters were chimed by a clock on a cabinet near him, as ten
o’clock came, then eleven—he began to feel a peculiar sensation of
uneasiness. It annoyed him. What was there to be uneasy about? he asked
himself. Was he uneasy because he was wasting his time? Had he thought
he was there in the cause of science, to see a patient that had baffled
greater nerve-doctors than himself? Yes, that was it. Men came up to him
and talked, and he conversed with them, still watching the doorway. Then
guests began to depart, and feeling as if he had been made a fool of, he
sought out his hostess and somewhat reproachfully told her he must
leave, now.
“I am sorry I cannot wait any longer to see my _patient_,” he said with
emphasis.
“Your patient?” repeated Lady Forwood. “Oh, dear! You expected to meet
Mercedes!” she said. “You thought I was arranging something like they
did with the Paris doctor. No! I wanted you particularly to know Lady
Boisville. Mercedes and her husband are with the Arrans in Wales. I had
a more cheerful letter from her than I have had for a long time. Her
husband seems to like Wales, and all is _couleur de rose_.”
“I am happy to hear it,” said Hugh. Then he made his way out of the
house and walked home, utterly disgusted with himself—ashamed of himself
to himself for the first time in his life.