A JOURNEY’S END.
In the back parlour of a little house at Camberwell a young woman lies,
wan and white-faced, upon an antiquated and uncomfortable sofa of the
lodging-house pattern. In a chair by the side of her, holding her hand
in a professional manner, sits a pale, smooth-faced gentleman, dressed
in black. Standing near, his eyes fixed eagerly upon the pale
gentleman’s face, is an old man, whose garb and manner speak eloquently
of the country.
The invalid is Bess, the old man is her father, and the professional
gentleman is Mr. Goff, the surgeon, who, having a large family and a
small practice, and living in a neighbourhood where half-crown fees are
commoner than guinea ones, is fain to unite the business of a chemist
with the profession of a surgeon. But though Mr. Goff is not above
retailing tooth-brushes, acid drops, scented soap, and lemonade, as
well as leeches, rhubarb, magnesia, and drugs of all descriptions, he
has the reputation of being a very clever man, and of having effected
some marvellous cures; and when Marks, terrified at his daughter’s
appearance, asked Mrs. Ketley, the landlady, if she knew of a good
medical man, Mrs. Ketley immediately suggested Mr. Goff, round the
corner.
Mr. Goff was plain-spoken and curt. The half-guinea-a-minute small talk
and the fashionable-physician smirk were not part and parcel of his
business. ‘Visit, medicine included, two-and-six,’ left but small
margin for those little courtesies which are so necessary to the
success of a West-End doctor.
Mr. Goff would feel a pulse, look at a tongue, prescribe, and be down
the front door-steps before the smiling creature, all shirt-front and
white teeth, who basks in the favour of fashionable indisposition,
would have arranged his hat and cane in the hall, and put on his
sympathetic smirk preparatory to being shown into the presence of his
patient.
But Mr. Goff, in spite of his tremendous hurry, his bluff speech, his
rough hair, and his ill-fitting black clothes, loved his work and took
real interest in his patients. He was particularly interested in the
white-faced trembling girl, by whose side he sat while her old father
watched his face so eagerly.
‘Shock to system, eh? Something upset her?’
This with an inquiring glance at Marks.
‘Yes, sir,’ answered the old man; ‘she’s seen a sight o’ trouble
lately.’
Where’s her husband?’
A flush of shame spread itself over the old gamekeeper’s withered old
face.
‘Ah, I see—family trouble. Guessed so. Been fretting.’
He bent down kindly over Bess.
‘Come, you must cheer up, Mrs. Smith,’ he said. ‘Get to the window—look
out—read—work—do something.’
He rose to go.
Marks went with him to the door.
‘Can’t you give her anything, sir?’ he said. ‘She’s changing dreadful.
She’s breaking her heart.’
‘My good sir,’ answered the doctor, ‘I don’t keep any plaister that can
heal that. She doesn’t want medicine. She wants change and fresh air.
Get her away from London—seaside—bracing air. Talk to her—keep her from
thinking.’
That was Mr. Goff’s advice on the first day, but, just to please old
Marks and to make a show for his fee, he sent a tonic for Bess to take.
He called again and again, and each time he was more desirous that Bess
should be got away.
He told her father plainly what was the matter. Her great trouble,
whatever it was, had completely shattered her strength, and there was a
danger that if she brooded on it much more her mind might suffer.
There was a look in her eyes that frightened him.
One day Marks told the doctor their history. It was necessary he should
know it, for Bess’s condition was becoming alarming.
The terrible sentence pronounced on her husband, the thought of his
awful fate, and the long, weary years of separation, had crushed her
gentle, loving heart. It seemed as though the thread of her life had
been suddenly snapped. She was like the sweet meadowland flower, which,
crushed in its beauty by the heel of some passing hind, never lifts its
head to the sun again, but slowly withers and dies.
It was after one of his short visits that Mr. Goff put the case plainly
to Marks.
‘Look here, my good fellow,’ he said; ‘I’m not coming here to rob you
any more. Take her away from London at once. Get to the sea, and let
her have the air as much as you can. If you can’t afford it, or won’t
do it, the end isn’t far off.’
‘You don’t think she will die?’ asked Marks, in an agonized tone,
clutching the doctor’s arm.
‘If she’s got a good constitution she will not die. The mind will go
before the body. It’s seaside or lunatic asylum—which you like.’
The doctor was quite right. A hundred little things bore out his
opinion. Bess would sit for hours staring into vacancy and talking to
herself. She did not cry. She sat with tearless, lacklustre eyes,
repeating to herself the sad story of her later life. There was no
emotion, no passionate outbreak, only the monotonous misery. Marks made
up his mind to obey the doctor’s instructions at once.
Bess offered no opposition. She seemed to have lost all power of will,
all care or thought for herself. She expressed no surprise when her
father told her they were going on a journey. She was still feeble and
weak, but she could get about, and she obeyed him as the tired child
obeys its nurse—mechanically.
Somehow or other, his daughter’s illness seemed to have obliterated all
other thoughts from the old man’s mind. In that great trouble he lost
sight of the disgrace of the young squire and the sufferings of the old
one. He seldom thought of either.
It seemed to him that something very dreadful had happened a long time
ago, but that was all over now, and he had nothing to do with it.
He had but one thing left to him now—his daughter. He knew that the
prison-gates had closed upon her husband for years—that he was walled
up in a living tomb, and might as well be dead. He knew that the old
master he had served so faithfully, and whose service he had quitted
stealthily and like a thief in the night, was lying paralyzed in his
lonely mansion, body and mind alike wrecked by the blow which, as he
thought, his own son had dealt him.
He had read in the papers the whole terrible history, for they had not
been loth to comment on it, and his own name had been seized upon by
the sensation-mongers and artfully interwoven With a narrative more
fiction than fact.
To shun publicity and avoid inquiry, he had hidden his real name when
he took the little London lodgings. All his desire was to forget the
horrible past and devote himself to the poor girl cast back to his
loving arms once more by the cruel waves of misfortune.
He accepted the doctor’s warning, and acted upon it at once. He had
still enough money left to last them some months with care, and when
Bess’s health was re-established he supposed they must set to and work,
and, if Bess was too weak, why, he must work for the two.
He went down to the seaside with his invalid daughter and nursed her
day and night. He painted the future to her brightly, talked of setting
the lawyers to work to prove George’s innocence yet, and so bouyed her
with hope that at last he saw a faint color coaxed into the white
cheeks again and the dull eyes grow bright with tears.
As tenderly as he had watched and cherished her when she was a babe did
the old father watch and cherish her now.
And just as he was rejoicing over the cure which time and the fresh
sea-breezes had effected, a new trouble presented itself.
The expenses of the trip and the long period of idleness had absorbed
all his savings, and he saw the time approaching when the luxuries he
had indulged his sick daughter in would be unobtainable, and the bare
necessities of life would have to be earned with the sweat of his
wrinkled brow and the labours of his old arms.
He thought about it night and day. What could he do?
The mystery was solved for him. It was destined that after the long
labour of his years he should toil no more.
One morning he did not come to his daughter’s room as was his wont. He
had waited on her hand and foot. He had risen first and done the menial
work of the little rooms they rented in a side street. He had pottered
about in his old-fashioned Country way, and put things ship-shape, and
then gone up to the invalid’s room with a gentle step, carrying her a
cup of tea made with his own hand.
One morning Bess woke and heard the clock strike.
It was an hour later than her father’s usual time to stand by her
bedside.
Alarmed, she rose and dressed herself hurriedly, taxing her new-found
strength.
She went across to his room, knocked, and received no answer.
She pushed the door open and ran to the bedside.
‘Father,’ she cried, ‘are you ill? Speak, father, speak!’
The face—the dear old face that had never frowned on her—lay on the
pillow still, though the sun was high. There was a sweet smile on it,
sueh as she had often seen there in the days before their troubles
came. It was a calm, happy face that Bess gazed upon that morning, and
well it might be, for all the old lodge-keeper’s troubles were over at
last. The poverty he had dreaded would never come upon him now. The
labour he had nerved himself for he would never be called upon to do.
God had willed it otherwise, and had called him home to rest.
Who shall say that that night in his dreams fancy had not touched his
eyelids with her fairy fingers and bidden him see the old happy
home-life once again?
He had died in his sleep with a smile upon his honest face.
And the woman who clasped the cold hand, and knelt by the little bed
and sobbed, was henceforth alone in the world.