It is hard for the general practitioner who sits among his patients
both morning and evening, and sees them in their homes between, to
steal time for one little daily breath of cleanly air. To win it he
must slip early from his bed and walk out between shuttered shops when
it is chill but very clear, and all things are sharply outlined, as in
a frost. It is an hour that has a charm of its own, when, but for a
postman or a milkman, one has the pavement to oneself, and even the
most common thing takes an ever-recurring freshness, as though
causeway, and lamp, and signboard had all wakened to the new day. Then
even an inland city may seem beautiful, and bear virtue in its
smoke-tainted air.
But it was by the sea that I lived, in a town that was unlovely enough
were it not for its glorious neighbour. And who cares for the town
when one can sit on the bench at the headland, and look out over the
huge, blue bay, and the yellow scimitar that curves before it. I loved
it when its great face was freckled with the fishing boats, and I loved
it when the big ships went past, far out, a little hillock of white and
no hull, with topsails curved like a bodice, so stately and demure.
But most of all I loved it when no trace of man marred the majesty of
Nature, and when the sun-bursts slanted down on it from between the
drifting rainclouds. Then I have seen the further edge draped in the
gauze of the driving rain, with its thin grey shading under the slow
clouds, while my headland was golden, and the sun gleamed upon the
breakers and struck deep through the green waves beyond, showing up the
purple patches where the beds of seaweed are lying. Such a morning as
that, with the wind in his hair, and the spray on his lips, and the cry
of the eddying gulls in his ear, may send a man back braced afresh to
the reek of a sick-room, and the dead, drab weariness of practice.
It was on such another day that I first saw my old man. He came to my
bench just as I was leaving it. My eye must have picked him out even
in a crowded street, for he was a man of large frame and fine presence,
with something of distinction in the set of his lip and the poise of
his head. He limped up the winding path leaning heavily upon his
stick, as though those great shoulders had become too much at last for
the failing limbs that bore them. As he approached, my eyes caught
Nature's danger signal, that faint bluish tinge in nose and lip which
tells of a labouring heart.
"The brae is a little trying, sir," said I. "Speaking as a physician,
I should say that you would do well to rest here before you go further."
He inclined his head in a stately, old-world fashion, and seated
himself upon the bench. Seeing that he had no wish to speak I was
silent also, but I could not help watching him out of the corners of my
eyes, for he was such a wonderful survival of the early half of the
century, with his low-crowned, curly-brimmed hat, his black satin tie
which fastened with a buckle at the back, and, above all, his large,
fleshy, clean-shaven face shot with its mesh of wrinkles. Those eyes,
ere they had grown dim, had looked out from the box-seat of mail
coaches, and had seen the knots of navvies as they toiled on the brown
embankments. Those lips had smiled over the first numbers of
"Pickwick," and had gossiped of the promising young man who wrote them.
The face itself was a seventy-year almanack, and every seam an entry
upon it where public as well as private sorrow left its trace. That
pucker on the forehead stood for the Mutiny, perhaps; that line of care
for the Crimean winter, it may be; and that last little sheaf of
wrinkles, as my fancy hoped, for the death of Gordon. And so, as I
dreamed in my foolish way, the old gentleman with the shining stock was
gone, and it was seventy years of a great nation's life that took shape
before me on the headland in the morning.
But he soon brought me back to earth again. As he recovered his breath
he took a letter out of his pocket, and, putting on a pair of
horn-rimmed eye-glasses, he read it through very carefully. Without
any design of playing the spy I could not help observing that it was in
a woman's hand. When he had finished it he read it again, and then sat
with the corners of his mouth drawn down and his eyes staring vacantly
out over the bay, the most forlorn-looking old gentleman that ever I
have seen. All that is kindly within me was set stirring by that
wistful face, but I knew that he was in no humour for talk, and so, at
last, with my breakfast and my patients calling me, I left him on the
bench and started for home.
I never gave him another thought until the next morning, when, at the
same hour, he turned up upon the headland, and shared the bench which I
had been accustomed to look upon as my own. He bowed again before
sitting down, but was no more inclined than formerly to enter into
conversation. There had been a change in him during the last
twenty-four hours, and all for the worse. The face seemed more heavy
and more wrinkled, while that ominous venous tinge was more pronounced
as he panted up the hill. The clean lines of his cheek and chin were
marred by a day's growth of grey stubble, and his large, shapely head
had lost something of the brave carriage which had struck me when first
I glanced at him. He had a letter there, the same, or another, but
still in a woman's hand, and over this he was moping and mumbling in
his senile fashion, with his brow puckered, and the corners of his
mouth drawn down like those of a fretting child. So I left him, with a
vague wonder as to who he might be, and why a single spring day should
have wrought such a change upon him.
So interested was I that next morning I was on the look out for him.
Sure enough, at the same hour, I saw him coming up the hill; but very
slowly, with a bent back and a heavy head. It was shocking to me to
see the change in him as he approached.
"I am afraid that our air does not agree with you, sir," I ventured to
remark.
But it was as though he had no heart for talk. He tried, as I thought,
to make some fitting reply, but it slurred off into a mumble and
silence. How bent and weak and old he seemed--ten years older at the
least than when first I had seen him! It went to my heart to see this
fine old fellow wasting away before my eyes. There was the eternal
letter which he unfolded with his shaking fingers. Who was this woman
whose words moved him so? Some daughter, perhaps, or granddaughter,
who should have been the light of his home instead of---- I smiled to
find how bitter I was growing, and how swiftly I was weaving a romance
round an unshaven old man and his correspondence. Yet all day he
lingered in my mind, and I had fitful glimpses of those two trembling,
blue-veined, knuckly hands with the paper rustling between them.
I had hardly hoped to see him again. Another day's decline must, I
thought, hold him to his room, if not to his bed. Great, then, was my
surprise when, as I approached my bench, I saw that he was already
there. But as I came up to him I could scarce be sure that it was
indeed the same man. There were the curly-brimmed hat, and the shining
stock, and the horn glasses, but where were the stoop and the
grey-stubbled, pitiable face? He was clean-shaven and firm lipped,
with a bright eye and a head that poised itself upon his great
shoulders like an eagle on a rock. His back was as straight and square
as a grenadier's, and he switched at the pebbles with his stick in his
exuberant vitality. In the button-hole of his well-brushed black coat
there glinted a golden blossom, and the corner of a dainty red silk
handkerchief lapped over from his breast pocket. He might have been
the eldest son of the weary creature who had sat there the morning
before.
"Good morning, Sir, good morning!" he cried with a merry waggle of his
cane.
"Good morning!" I answered, "how beautiful the bay is looking."
"Yes, Sir, but you should have seen it just before the sun rose."
"What, have you been here since then?"
"I was here when there was scarce light to see the path."
"You are a very early riser."
"On occasion, sir; on occasion!" He cocked his eye at me as if to
gauge whether I were worthy of his confidence. "The fact is, sir, that
my wife is coming back to me to day."
I suppose that my face showed that I did not quite see the force of the
explanation. My eyes, too, may have given him assurance of sympathy,
for he moved quite close to me and began speaking in a low,
confidential voice, as if the matter were of such weight that even the
sea-gulls must be kept out of our councils.
"Are you a married man, Sir?"
"No, I am not."
"Ah, then you cannot quite understand it. My wife and I have been
married for nearly fifty years, and we have never been parted, never at
all, until now."
"Was it for long?" I asked.
"Yes, sir. This is the fourth day. She had to go to Scotland. A
matter of duty, you understand, and the doctors would not let me go.
Not that I would have allowed them to stop me, but she was on their
side. Now, thank God! it is over, and she may be here at any moment."
"Here!"
"Yes, here. This headland and bench were old friends of ours thirty
years ago. The people with whom we stay are not, to tell the truth,
very congenial, and we have, little privacy among them. That is why we
prefer to meet here. I could not be sure which train would bring her,
but if she had come by the very earliest she would have found me
waiting."
"In that case----" said I, rising.
"No, sir, no," he entreated, "I beg that you will stay. It does not
weary you, this domestic talk of mine?"
"On the contrary."
"I have been so driven inwards during these few last days! Ah, what a
nightmare it has been! Perhaps it may seem strange to you that an old
fellow like me should feel like this."
"It is charming."
"No credit to me, sir! There's not a man on this planet but would feel
the same if he had the good fortune to be married to such a woman.
Perhaps, because you see me like this, and hear me speak of our long
life together, you conceive that she is old, too."
He laughed heartily, and his eyes twinkled at the humour of the idea.
"She's one of those women, you know, who have youth in their hearts,
and so it can never be very far from their faces. To me she's just as
she was when she first took my hand in hers in '45. A wee little bit
stouter, perhaps, but then, if she had a fault as a girl, it was that
she was a shade too slender. She was above me in station, you know--I
a clerk, and she the daughter of my employer. Oh! it was quite a
romance, I give you my word, and I won her; and, somehow, I have never
got over the freshness and the wonder of it. To think that that sweet,
lovely girl has walked by my side all through life, and that I have
been able----"
He stopped suddenly, and I glanced round at him in surprise. He was
shaking all over, in every fibre of his great body. His hands were
clawing at the woodwork, and his feet shuffling on the gravel. I saw
what it was. He was trying to rise, but was so excited that he could
not. I half extended my hand, but a higher courtesy constrained me to
draw it back again and turn my face to the sea. An instant afterwards
he was up and hurrying down the path.
A woman was coming towards us. She was quite close before he had seen
her--thirty yards at the utmost. I know not if she had ever been as he
described her, or whether it was but some ideal which he carried in his
brain. The person upon whom I looked was tall, it is true, but she was
thick and shapeless, with a ruddy, full-blown face, and a skirt
grotesquely gathered up. There was a green ribbon in her hat, which
jarred upon my eyes, and her blouse-like bodice was full and clumsy.
And this was the lovely girl, the ever youthful! My heart sank as I
thought how little such a woman might appreciate him, how unworthy she
might be of his love.
She came up the path in her solid way, while he staggered along to meet
her. Then, as they came together, looking discreetly out of the
furthest corner of my eye, I saw that he put out both his hands, while
she, shrinking from a public caress, took one of them in hers and shook
it. As she did so I saw her face, and I was easy in my mind for my old
man. God grant that when this hand is shaking, and when this back is
bowed, a woman's eyes may look so into mine.