MERCEDES.
For the first time in his life Dr. Paull felt that he had considerably
lost in his respect for himself, and he set himself to inquire into his
mental and moral condition.
“I have lowered myself in some way,” he thought. (He was thinking of
self in a strictly professional sense, be it understood.) “It has been
the doctor running after the patient, not the patient seeking the
doctor. It must not occur again. I know I _meant_ well—but it must not
occur again.”
After this neat little compromise with his conscience, which perhaps was
rusty for want of work and therefore not equal to the occasion, he as it
were shook hands with himself, and set to work again, ignoring the
question of unhappy young princesses with neglectful husbands and
doubtful counts in dangerous proximity.
It was the old life again. Patients at home in the morning, hospital
work later, later still consultations or sudden calls. Then evenings
spent quietly with Ralph, talking over his late tour with the geologist
and helping him to arrange his specimens.
The boy was never so happy as when his father was sharing his life,
thus. But he loved him unselfishly, and the seed of doubt whether that
father was as well or as happy as he should be was sown, and had already
fructified.
“Father,” he said suddenly, one evening, “why have you given up going
out?”
“My dear boy, I cannot give up what I never began,” said Dr. Paull,
startled so that his pale face flushed.
“You went to the opera and to parties,” persisted Ralph. “And you looked
so jolly then. You don’t now. You are quite different.”
“Don’t let us talk nonsense,” said Hugh, annoyed.
Could it be true that he looked brighter after mixing with a crowd of
silly people, who lived to waste time in amusing themselves?
The very next morning he was down to breakfast somewhat earlier, to keep
an appointment with a patient, when Ralph came in, all eagerness. A
letter was in his hand.
“From the princess, father,” he said. “A footman brought it, and is
waiting for an answer.”
“Well, let him wait,” said Hugh, once more flushing with annoyance. (Why
his son’s _empressement?_)
“He says one word will do,” said Ralph, pleadingly.
“What is the matter with you?” asked his father, with an embarrassed
laugh, taking up the dainty little note addressed to “Monsieur le
Docteur Paull,” in a weak but pretty handwriting. “There,” he said,
suddenly, by some curious impulse handing the open note to the lad. “I
don’t know what to do. You shall decide.”
The note contained but a few words:
“Cher Monsieur,—I will ask you as a great kindness to me to give me
your advice, when and how it pleases you. Receive my compliments.
“MERCEDES (PRINCESS ANDRIOCCHI).”
“Decide?” Ralph stared at his father.
“Shall I go, or not?” said Hugh.
“What else would you do, father?” said his son, astonished.
He scarcely understood—he had never known his father refuse advice to a
patient.
“Look here,” said Dr. Paull, throwing himself back in his chair. “This
is a fashionable, selfish woman, who has really nothing the matter with
her. If I go, it is merely truckling to her position and wealth.”
“Has she consulted you before, then?” said the boy, seriously.
He was naturally serious, and in the most minor matters, which had any
reference to his father, he was preternaturally so.
“No, I have not seen her professionally, exactly,” admitted Hugh.
“You once told me, father, that no man, however gifted in diagnosis,
should pronounce upon a patient without making an—what was the word?—an
exhaustive examination.”
“Does that mean I ought to go?”
“Why not?”
Hugh looked into the earnest blue eyes which, despite the lad’s years,
had still an almost infantine expression.
“Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings one often hears the truth,” he
thought.
“I suppose I must go, then,” he said, “although it is most
inconvenient,” and abruptly rising he went into the hall, spoke to the
man, and returned pledged to see the princess.
He was set down for a clinical lecture at noon. At eleven he started in
his brougham and drove to one of the new roads in South Kensington where
the Prince Andriocchi rented a furnished house for the season.
An English groom of the chambers came forward as the door opened.
The princess was at home.
Hugh followed the man, who wore a dress something akin to ordinary levée
costume, up the wide staircase, through the large, silent drawing-rooms
which were furnished in the Parisian style rather than according to
British taste, into a boudoir where he left him.
It was a circular room lighted from above. The ceiling was a dome draped
in a peculiar fashion with some soft white stuff in cloud-like puffings;
the narrow windows were of pink glass. The carpet was rose-pink with a
white flower pattern, the walls were lined with puffings of white and
pale pink satin, while the furniture was of pink and white brocade and
gilded wood. A few engravings of celebrated pictures stood about on
easels; and everywhere, wherever he looked, Hugh saw the choicest
flowers; cut flowers in bowls, plants in jardinières. It was a room
which was unlike all other rooms he remembered, yet, as he looked
around, it struck him that he had seen some room like it somewhere,
once. When? How? In a dream?
The sound of a door opening behind him made him turn round, and he saw
the princess coming towards him through a conservatory which lay beyond
a curtained arch opposite the door by which he had entered.
She was dressed in some floating girlish dress of softly tinted stuffs:
she seemed lost in thought—Hugh fancied she was unaware that he was
there: she walked slowly and wearily, her eyes cast down—then paused to
pick off a dying blossom as she passed between the banks of bloom.
But—she knew! For as she came in she raised her eyes, and the colour
rising to her pale cheek she said:
“Ah, I knew you would come!”
It was a strange thing to say; but it was said simply, earnestly,
without the slightest tinge of vanity. As for coquetry, no man, looking
at that sad, beautiful young face, would have been so lost to all sense
of chivalry as to dream of the detestable quality in the presence of
this gentle, modest woman.
She did not offer Hugh her hand. She seated herself on a settee, and
motioned him to occupy an easy-chair opposite.
“My husband is away,” she said, in her foreign English, looking
wistfully at Dr. Paull. “He sent to me the count late last night, to say
it was impossible that he should return.”
She was evidently watching for the effect of her communication. But Dr.
Paull maintained his professional sphinx-like calm.
“Indeed!” he said. “But you have friends staying with you? You are not
alone?”
“I am quite alone,” she said. “But I have always been alone, so that is
nothing.”
There was an awkward pause. Hugh hardly knew how to meet these naïve
confidences.
“You sent for me?” he began, suggestively.
She looked at him with a peculiar, scrutinising glance for quite half a
minute. Then she said:
“Lady Forwood told me you are a _good_ man.”
This was somewhat disconcerting.
“Lady Forwood is a charming, kind woman,” he said, warmly; “and I am
glad that you are such friends.”
“She told me I should tell you everything!” said the girl, clasping her
jewelled hands nervously.
“Naturally, of course,” said Hugh, who had rapidly determined to treat
the princess’ case, whatever it might prove to be, with bare
matter-of-fact common sense: and, as in the case of hysterical subjects,
to be unsympathetic—even, if necessary, rough. “A doctor should hear the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth, from a patient. Otherwise, he is
working in the dark, and might do more harm than good.”
The princess was evidently in earnest about herself. She fixed her eyes
intently upon Hugh as he was speaking, listened with all her ears, and
when he had ended his somewhat didactic little speech, sighed a little
sigh of relief.
“It is a long story,” she began, apologetically.
“We medical men are accustomed to long stories,” said Hugh, “especially
from ladies.”
“You do not like ladies?” said the princess, with a smile. (She seemed
rather pleased than otherwise.) “I did not like the ladies of my country
when I was a child. My mother and father were every day at the Court.
Their own palace was a little Court. I was very unhappy. It was there I
began to _dream_.”
She hesitated and gave a nervous glance around before she said the word,
which, indeed, she spoke with bated breath.
“To dream?” said Dr. Paull, beginning to set down his new patient among
the hysterical category. (When his hysterical patients could find
nothing else to complain of, they invariably grumbled about their bad
dreams, which were beyond anyone’s power to verify.) “Why, dreams are
only imagination. Everyone has bad dreams. Dreams are nothing.”
“Do you think so?” asked the girl, with intense anxiety, with a strained
look in her big eyes. “Tell me that again! Tell me dreams are
_nothing!_”
“I do not exactly mean that they are _nothing_, that is merely an
expression to be taken for what it is worth,” said he, impressed by her
intensity. “But come, tell me all about these dreams; I am interested in
dreams. I wish I could have met you when I was writing a little book
about the brain. Your experiences might have been of great use to me.
They still will be, if you will tell me all about them.”
She knitted her brow, considered for some moments, then said, with
evident effort:
“Tell me, doctor, tell me truly. Do you think there could be two souls
in one body, and one soul could be awake when the other was asleep?”
“Is such a wild, horrible idea allowed by your Catholic religion?” asked
Hugh, somewhat brusquely. “Do you know, princess, that allowing yourself
to think of such things probably causes you these bad dreams?”
She looked at him with a sad smile, and shook her head slowly.
“Ah! you do not know!” she said. He had heard that plaintive tone of
voice before from patients suffering acute anguish from deadly disease.
“But you are right, monsieur le docteur, I am wrong to say such a thing.
It is against my holy faith.”
Her proud humility touched him.
“And I was wrong to ask you such a question,” he said. Then he coaxed
her to speak freely to him.
“You dreamt these dreams as a child?” he began. “They ought to be
forgotten—dead.”
Then she told him simply, in her imperfect English, what her trouble
really was. As a young child, she had been much like other children,
without their life and cheerfulness when awake. But no sooner did she
sleep than she felt herself surrounded by terrors, vague but horrible; a
sense of impending doom seemed to suffocate her, yet some interior
feeling made her believe that the doom was just. She heard weeping and
lamenting among the dark shadows that surrounded her; and sometimes
great eyes, with an expression of frantic appeal, appeared amid the
gloom, and haunted her waking thoughts.
“I did think the souls in Purgatory were near me,” she said. “I told the
Reverend Mother of the Convent. We children could any of us go to her
when we liked, just as to a real mother. Oh, much more! I could never
have talked to my mother, the Marquesa, like that.”
“And what did the Reverend Mother say?” asked Hugh, with a suggestion of
sarcasm, for he had a good honest British distaste for the conventual
system.
“Oh! she laughed at me, and said little children had nothing to do with
Purgatory; and she showed me a picture-book, _The Cats’ Tea Party_, and
when a lay sister brought her some _bouillon_, I had some in a pretty
cup.”
“Altogether the bad dreams were rather a good thing than otherwise?”
suggested Hugh, almost banteringly, thinking that at least that nun had
some common sense, whatever dreamers the rest may have been.
“I had holidays, and the doctor came, and I had more things to eat,”
said Mercedes; “and everyone was so kind to me.”
“Did not all that send away the bad dreams?” asked Hugh, still speaking
lightly.
“No,” she said, sadly. “Nothing has ever altered them. It is so—always.
And I cannot care for my life!”
She spoke with such despair that Hugh was touched. His determination to
be harsh wavered, although he was unaware of the fact.
“But, for instance, lately,” he said, thinking of Lady Forwood’s account
of a cheery letter, “you have been away in the country, I understand.
How did you sleep there?”
“Not at all,” she said. “And it was beautiful! First came the quiet,
dark night, with the scent of roses coming in with the cool air, and
just a little rustle of the trees outside. Then a grey light, and the
young birds twitting (is that the word?) little questions to their
parents. Then the old birds began to sing sweet, happy songs, and the
day came, first with blue light, then white, then pale rose. Then I got
up, and from my window saw the rise of the glorious sun—ah! that waking
is better than the sleep you doctors say is good. It is _not_ good, to
be asleep!”
Her eyes sparkled; her dejection had lifted.
“I cannot agree with you,” said Hugh. “And sleep—good sleep, mind—you
must have. But last night—here, in London,—you had no rest?”
“I had my worst-of-all dream!” she said, bitterly. “It has come to me
these last years: at first—years back—I waked up crying and miserable,
but could not remember. Then I remembered something about _pistolets_. I
do not know your English word.”
“Pistols?” said Hugh. He never used the word, or thought of the weapon,
without a shudder.
“That is it,” she assented.
“Were you ever frightened by firearms, do you think?” asked Dr. Paull,
resolutely suppressing the commencement of the hopelessly wretched mood
which inevitably succeeded any suggestion of that past terrible
experience. “Sometimes a fright in infancy will reproduce unpleasant
impressions.... Do you understand me?”
“I never saw pistolets before that dream,” she said, slowly and
solemnly. “I could swear it to you before the _bon Dieu_, monsieur!”
“I quite believe you,” said Hugh, hurriedly. “There are strange
incidents in the lives of young children, and they have curious
ideas—science is yet in the dark about these things. But——” He paused
and looked almost tenderly at the great, childish, anxious eyes raised
to his. “I want to help you,” he said; “but, frankly, it is difficult.”
Then he questioned her as to the drugs physicians had ordered her, and
she brought him a pile of prescriptions which proved to him how futile
the greatest scientists’ efforts had been to alleviate the torture
suffered by this envied, but in reality most pitiable young creature.
She looked so lovely, such a rare blossom of sweet womanhood; and,
glancing at her amid her luxurious surroundings, anyone would have
derided the idea of pitying her. But, as Hugh looked at her a strong
belief arose in his mind that she was not, in some way, like other
people; and that—how or why, he dared not imagine—some blight was upon
that fair young head. Possibly some ante-natal occurrence, however
remote, might have produced her morbid condition.
As he sat looking at her, thinking deeply, casting about how he could
help her, she was watching him hopefully. At their first meeting she had
felt a calmed sensation, an access of strength, while talking to him,
and since—even when merely remembering or speaking of him.
“Well, monsieur?” she asked at last, with a smile.
He sighed, almost impatiently.
“You expect me to give you medicine?” he asked.
“If you do, monsieur le docteur, I think I could not take it,” she said.
“I have had so much _médécine_, and never, never did it take away one
dream; no, not one!”
“Then what am I to do for you?” asked Hugh, in his perplexed mood
unaware how strange a question this was from an eminent physician to a
patient.
She looked at him earnestly, and leaning forward she said, slowly:
“See me—every—day!”
Hugh started. Then he laughed, then checked himself. Was she mad, or
only eccentric?
“Why?” he asked. “Why see you every day, especially as you tell me that
if I prescribe for you, you will not take my medicine?”
She opened her lips; evidently she would have told him—had not some
secondary thought arisen to check her confidence, whatever it might be.
“Will you see me every day for one week? then I will tell you,” she
said, imploringly. “Lady Forwood said you would be my good friend. Be my
good friend, monsieur, and do this!”
It was an embarrassing position; and although Hugh was deeply moved by
the girl’s pathetic tone of entreaty, by this almost desperate appeal to
him—for that was really what it seemed to be,—he wondered what was
behind this strange request. Was Mercedes in the power of one of those
two men—the prince and the count,—and unconsciously aiding in some bet
or frivolous conspiracy? Or was she herself whimsical and
capricious—“hysterical”? No! Those last ideas were treason. Having
harboured them for an instant brought back his instinctive faith in the
simple young creature.
“I would do what you ask, but really it is not possible, princess,” he
said, gently, respectfully. Then he explained how his time was occupied,
and gave her a list, jotted down hastily upon a leaf torn out of his
pocket-book, of the engagements for the next few days, which could not
be cancelled.
She took the list and went over it carefully, in a practical manner,
quite unlike that of a hysterical woman.
“I see,” she said. “But, monsieur, the evenings? There is nothing for
the evenings.”
Hugh told her that his evenings were sacred to his son.
“I am all that he has,” he said, “both mother and father. His mother
died when he was born.”
She asked his age, and Hugh told her.
“Nineteen!” she said, with a little laugh of surprise. “How funny! That
is my age. But your son, when is he nineteen? You say, a few days ago?
Why, he is older than I am, monsieur? You could be my father.”
“Certainly,” said Hugh, relieved, somehow, of part of the uneasy
sensation excited by the situation by this suggestion. “But I confess I
thought you older.”
“I was eighteen last March,” she said, gravely. “And my friend, Lady
Forwood, was twenty-four.”
Eighteen—and a wife! Hugh looked pityingly at her. It seemed to him that
parents who could wed a child of seventeen to a young _roué_ of
twenty-six were almost criminal in their rashness—or worse than
rashness.
“But, your son, he would like to go out?” said the princess. “Monsieur,
you and he, can you not come sometimes to Lady Forwood—to Lady
Boisville? Then I could see you.”
“Impossible,” said Hugh, suddenly rising. This curious interview had
lasted long enough.
“You will _not_?”
She sat back on the settee, and to his astonishment, a deathlike pallor
spread over her face. A shrunken look aged her sweet youthful features,
her eyes seemed to harden and recede beneath her dark eyebrows. His
conscience smote him.
“I will try and see you again soon,” he said, lamely.
She raised her eyes languidly. He could not bear to see such abject
misery on so young a face.... Young? This girl was younger than Ralph,
more than young enough to be his own child. And so alone—and he could
help her; he saw, he felt that there was some strong bond of sympathy
between them.
Without further thought, he almost flung himself down upon the settee at
her side.
“Suppose I were to see you every day for five days,” he said, with an
affectation of amusement, “what good would that do you?”
“You shall see,” she said, reviving somewhat; “I promise you, you shall
be astonished.”
“Pleasantly astonished?” he asked. He determined to treat her in a
fatherly, indulgent way, as a spoilt child.
“You will see,” she said, nodding her head. “But,”—she seized his hand
in hers in a familiar, innocent way which took his breath away for the
moment—“you _promise_?”
“Promise! What?” he asked, uneasily. Something in the clinging touch of
those slender fingers moved him deeply, recalled—what? Sensations long
passed and gone, almost forgotten; sensations that stirred his heart to
feel the pain of loss.
“Promise to accept the invitations you will receive this week,” she
said.
“But where?” he asked.
“Here, to Lady Forwood, to Lady Boisville,” she said.
“Nowhere else?” he asked, gazing wonderingly into her upturned eyes. Had
there ever been such beautiful dark eyes in this world before? He
believed not. In any case, if such existed, he had never seen them.
“Nowhere else,” she said, earnestly.
“I do not quite understand, but I promise,” he said, rising. “And now
_au revoir_, princess.”
He bowed low, and hurried away without looking back. He felt shamefaced
and guilty: running downstairs more actively than he had run for years
past, he came full tilt against the count, who was standing at the foot
of the staircase.
Bows, apologies. Then the count asked tenderly about the princess.
“We may hope, now that you have seen her, that our beautiful lady will
be better, docteur,” he said, obsequiously. “But how, how do you find
her?”
“There is nothing much the matter,” said Hugh, dryly. Then, wondering
where the prince was, and how he could “let that fellow come hanging
about at all hours,” he hurried out to his carriage.
“Where to, sir?” asked the coachman, leaning over as he came up.
“Where to? The hospital, of course,” said Hugh, getting into his
brougham and pulling the door to. What did Fuller, his coachman, mean?
He knew his hours well enough. And what was the matter? He was tapping
at the glass. Hugh let down a front window, impatiently.
“Did you say to the hospital, sir?”
“Of course!” shouted Hugh.
“It’s half-past twelve, sir,” said the coachman, reproachfully. Had he
not sat on his box wondering what had become of his master for five
mortal quarters-of-an hour?
“Half-past eleven, you mean!” said Dr. Paull, sternly.
For reply, Fuller pulled out a turnip silver watch.
“It don’t never vary a second, sir, _it_ don’t,” he said, conclusively.
A glance at his own watch, and Hugh, saying, “You’re right, _home_,”
drew up the window, and threw himself back in consternation.
“Am I mad, or dreaming?” he asked himself. He had missed a lecture for
the first time since his appointment ten years ago!