“Is there any one else,” said Clarissa in a hoarse voice, looking up at the medical man—”anyone I can send for besides yourself — any one who can cure my baby?”
“I doubt whether it would be of any use. The case is such a simple one. I have fifty such in a year. But if you would like a physician to see the little fellow, there is Dr. Ormond, who has peculiar experience in children’s cases. You might call him in, if you liked.”
“I will send for him this minute. — Jane, dear, will you go?”
“I don’t think it would be any use, just now. He will be out upon his rounds. There is no immediate danger. If you were to send to him this evening — a note would do — asking him to call to-morrow — that would be the best way. Remember, I don’t for a moment say the case is hopeless. Only, if you have any anxiety about the little one’s father, and if he is within a day’s journey, I would really advise you to send for him.”
Clarissa did not answer. She was hanging over the bed, watching every difficult breath with unutterable agony. The child had only begun to droop a week ago, had been positively ill only four days.
All the rest of that day Clarissa was in a kind of stupor. She watched the child, and watched Jane administering her remedies, and the landlady coming in now and then to look at the boy, or to ask about him with a friendly anxiety. She tried to help Jane sometimes, in a useless tremulous way, sometimes sat statue-like, and could only gaze. She could not even pray — only now and then, she whispered with her dry lips, “Surely God will not take away my child!”
At dusk the doctor came again, but said very little. He was leaving the room, when Clarissa stopped him with a passionate despairing cry. Until that moment she had seemed marble.
“Tell me the truth,” she cried. “Will he be taken away from me? He is all the world to me — the only thing on earth I have to love. Surely God will not be so pitiless! What difference can one angel more make in heaven? and he is all the world to me.”
“My dear lady, these things are ordered by a Wisdom beyond our comprehension,” the doctor answered gently. That picture of a disconsolate mother was very common to him — only Clarissa was so much lovelier than most of the mothers, and her grief had a more romantic aspect and touched him a little more than usual. “Believe me, I shall make every effort to pull the little fellow through,” he added with the professional air of hopefulness. “Have you written to Dr. Ormond?”
“Yes, my letter was posted an hour after you called.”
“Then we shall hear what he says to-morrow. You can have no higher opinion. And now pray, my dear Mrs. Graham” — Clarissa had called herself Graham in these Soho lodgings—”pray keep up your spirits; remember your own health will suffer if you give way — and I really do not think you are strong.”
He looked at her curiously as he spoke. She was deadly pale, and had a haggard look which aged her by ten years: beauty less perfect in its outline would have been obscured by that mental anguish — hers shone through all, ineffaceable.
“Do not forget what I said about the little one’s father,” urged the doctor, lingering for a minute on the threshold. “There is really too great a responsibility in keeping him ignorant of the case, if he is anywhere within reach.”
Clarissa smiled for the first time since her boy’s illness — a strange wan smile. She was thinking how Daniel Granger had threatened her with separation from her child; and now Death had come between them to snatch him from both.
“My son!” She remembered the proud serenity, the supreme sense of possession, with which she had pronounced those words.
And the child would die perhaps, and Daniel Granger never look upon his face again. A great terror came into her mind at that thought. What would her husband say to her if he came to claim his boy, and found him dead? For the first time since she had left him — triumphant in the thought of having secured this treasure — the fact that the boy belonged to him, as well as to herself, came fully home to her. From the day of the baby’s birth she had been in the habit of thinking of him as her own — hers by a right divine almost — of putting his father out of the question, as it were — only just tolerating to behold that doating father’s fond looks and caresses — watching all communion between those two with a lurking jealousy.
Now all at once she began to feel what a sacred bond there was between the father and son, and how awful a thing it would be, if Daniel Granger should find his darling dead. Might he not denounce her as the chief cause of his boy’s death? Those hurried journeys by land and sea — that rough shifting to and fro of the pampered son and heir, whose little life until that time had been surrounded with such luxurious indulgences, so guarded from the faintest waft of discomfort — who should say that these things had not jeopardised the precious creature? And out of her sin had this arisen. In that dread hour by her darling’s sick-bed, what unutterably odious colours did her flirtation with George Fairfax assume — her dalliance with temptation, her weak hankering after that forbidden society! She saw, as women do see in that clear after-light which comes with remorse, all the guilt and all the hatefulness of her sin.
“God gave me my child for my redemption,” she said to herself, “and I went on sinning.”
What was it the doctor had said? Again and again those parting words came back to her. The father should be summoned. But to summon him, to reveal her hiding-place, and then have her darling taken from her, saved from the grasp of death only to be torn from her by his pitiless unforgiving father! No thought of what Daniel Granger had been to her in all the days of her married life arose to comfort or reassure her. She only thought of him as he had been after that fatal meeting in her brother’s painting-room; and she hoped for no mercy from him.
“And even if I were willing to send for him, I don’t know where he is,” she said at last helplessly.
Jane Target urged her to summon him.
“If you was to send a telegraft to the Court, mum, Miss Granger is pretty sure to be there, and she’d send to her pa, wherever he was.”
Clarissa shivered. Send to Miss Granger! suffer those cold eyes to see the depth of her humiliation! That would be hard to endure. Yet what did anything in the world matter to her when her boy was in jeopardy?
“We shall save him, Jane,” she said with a desperate hopefulness, clasping her hands and bending down to kiss the troubled little one, who had brief snatches of sleep now and then in weary hours of restlessness. “We shall save him. The doctor said so.”
“God grant we may, mum! But the doctor didn’t say for certain — he only said he hoped; and it would be so much better to send for master. It seems a kind of crime not to let him know; and if the poor dear should grow worse—”
“He will not grow worse!” cried Clarissa hysterically. “What, Jane! are you against me? Do you want me to be robbed of him, as his father would rob me without mercy? No, I will keep him, I will keep him! Nothing but death shall take him from me.”
Later in the evening, restless with the restlessness of a soul tormented by fear, Clarissa began to grow uneasy about her letter to Dr. Ormond. It might miscarry in going through the postoffice. She was not quite sure that it had been properly directed, her mind had been so bewildered when she wrote it. Or Dr. Ormond might have engagements next morning, and might not be able to come. She was seized with a nervous anxiety about this.
“If there were any one I could send with another note,” she said.
Jane shook her head despondently. In that house there was no messenger to be procured. The landlady was elderly, and kept no servant — employing only a mysterious female of the charwoman species, who came at daybreak, dyed herself to the elbows with blacking or blacklead before breakfast, and so remained till the afternoon, when she departed to “do for” a husband and children — the husband and children passing all the earlier part of the day in a desolate and un-”done-for” condition.
“There’s no one to take a letter, mum,” said Jane, looking wistfully at her m
istress, who had been watching without rest or slumber for three days and three nights. “But why shouldn’t you go yourself, mum? Cavendish Square isn’t so very far. Don’t you remember our going there one morning with baby? It’s a fine evening, and a little fresh air would do you good.”
Clarissa was quite willing to go on the errand herself. It would be doing something at least. She might see the physician, and obtain his promise to come to her early next day; and beside that sick-bed she was of so little use. She could only hold her darling in her lap, when he grew weary of his bed, or carry him up and down the room sometimes. Jane, whose nerves were as steady as a rock, did all the rest.
She looked at the bed. It was hard to leave that tender little sufferer even for half an hour.
“If he should grow worse while I am away?” she said doubtfully.
“No fear of that,” replied Jane. “He’s sleeping better now than he has slept for ever so long. God grant he’s upon the turn!”
“God grant it! And you won’t forget the medicine at half-past eight?”
“Lor’, mum, as if I should forget!”
“Then I’ll go,” said Clarissa.
She put on her bonnet and shawl, startled a little by the white face that looked at her from the glass. The things she had worn when she left Paris were the darkest and plainest in her wardrobe. They had grown shabby by this time, and had a very sombre look. Even in these garments the tall slim figure had a certain elegance; but it was not a figure to be remarked at nightfall, in the London streets. The mistress of Arden Court might have been easily mistaken for a sempstress going home from her work.
Just at first the air made her giddy, and she tottered a little on the broad pavement of the quiet cul-de-sac. It seemed as if she had not been out of doors for a month. But by degrees she grew more accustomed to the keen March atmosphere and the noise of Oxford-street, towards which she was hastening, and so hurried on, thinking only of her errand. She made her way somehow to Cavendish-square. How well she remembered driving through it in the summer gloaming, during the brief glory of her one season, on her way to a commercial magnate’s Tusculum in the Regent’s-park! It had seemed remote and out of the world after Mayfair — a locality which one might be driven by reverse of fortune to inhabit, not otherwise. But to-night the grave old square had an alarming stateliness of aspect after slipshod Soho.
She found Dr. Ormond’s house, and saw his butler, a solemn bald-headed personage, who looked wise enough to prescribe for the most recondite diseases of humanity. The doctor himself was dining out, but the butler pledged himself for his master’s appearance at Clarissa’s lodgings between eleven and two to-morrow.
“He never disappints; and he draws no distinctions,” said the official, with an evident reference to the humility of the applicant’s social status. “There’s not many like him in the medical perfession.”
“And you think he is sure to come?” urged Clarissa anxiously.
“Don’t you be afraid, mum. I shall make a particular pint of it myself. You may be quite easy about his comin’.”
Clarissa thanked the man, and surprised him with half-a-crown gently slipped into his fat palm. She had not many half-crowns now; but the butler seemed to pity her, and might influence his master to come to her a little sooner than he would come in the ordinary way.
Her errand being done, she turned away from the house with a strange sinking at the heart. An ever-present fear of his illness coming to a fatal end, and a guilty sense of the wrong she was doing to Daniel Granger, oppressed her. She walked in a purposeless way, took the wrong turning after coming out of the square, and so wandered into Portland-place. She came to a full stop suddenly in that wide thoroughfare, and looking about her like an awakened sleep-walker, perceived that she had gone astray — recognised the place she was in, and saw that she was within a few doors of Lady Laura Armstrong’s house.
Although the London season had begun, there was an air of stillness and solitude in this grave habitation of splendours that have for the most part vanished. At one door there was a carriage waiting; here and there lighted windows shone out upon the night; but the general aspect was desolation. If there were gaiety and carousing anywhere, closed shutters hid the festival from the outer world. The underground world of Egypt could scarcely have seemed more silent than Portland-place.
Clarissa went on to the familiar corner house, which was made conspicuous to the stranger by encaustic tiled balconies, or glass fern and flower cases at every available window, and by a certain colour and glitter which seemed almost a family likeness to Lady Laura herself. There were lights burning dimly in the two last windows on the drawing-room floor looking into the side street. Clarissa remembered the room very well — it was Lady Laura’s own especial sanctum, the last and smallest of four drawing-rooms — a nest lined with crimson silk, and crowded with everything foolish in the way of ebony and ormolu, Venetian glass and Sèvres china, and with nothing sensible in it except three or four delicious easy-chairs of the pouff species, immortalised by Sardou. Alas for that age of pouff which he satirised with such a caustic pen! To what dismal end has it come! End of powder and petroleum, and instead of beauty, burning!
The lonely wanderer, so sorely oppressed with cares and perplexities, looked wistfully up at those familiar windows. How often she had loitered away the twilight with Lady Laura, talking idly in that flower-laden balcony! As she looked at it to-night, there came into her mind a foolish wonder that life could have had any interest for her in those days, before the birth of her son.
“If I were to lose him now, I should be no poorer than I was then,” she thought; and then, after a moment’s reflection, “O yes, yes, a thousand times poorer, once having had him.”
She walked a little way down the street, and then came back again and lingered under those two-windows, with an unspeakable yearning to cast herself upon her friend in this hour of shipwreck. She had such bitter need of sympathy from some one nearer her own level than the poor honest faithful Yorkshire girl.
“She was once my friend,” she said to herself, still hovering there irresolute, “and seemed very fond of me. She could advise me, knowing the world so well as she does; and I do not think she would betray me. She owes me something, too. But for my promise to her, I might have been George Fairfax’s wife, and all this trouble might have been avoided.”
George Fairfax’s wife! What a strange dreamlike fancy it seemed! And yet it might have been; it had needed only one little word from herself to make the dream a fact.
“I tried to do my duty,” she thought, “and yet ruin and sorrow have come upon me.” And then the small still voice whispered, “Tried to do your duty, but not always; sometimes you left off trying, and dared to be happy in your own way. Between the two roads of vice and virtue, you tried to make a devious pathway of your own, not wholly on one side or the other.”
Once having seen that light, feeling somehow that there was sympathy and comfort near, she could not go away without making some attempt to see her friend. She thought with a remorseful pang of times and seasons during her wedded life when Laura Armstrong’s too solicitous friendship had seemed to her something of a bore. How different was it with her now!
She summoned up resolution at last, and in a half desperate mood, went round to the front door and knocked — a tremulous conscience-stricken knock, as of some milliner’s apprentice bringing home a delayed bonnet. The man who opened the door looked involuntarily for her basket.
“What is it?” he asked dubiously, scenting a begging-letter writer in the tall slim figure and closely-veiled face, and being on principle averse from gentility that did not ride in its carriage. “What is it, young woman?”
“Can I see Lady Laura Armstrong? I want to see her very particularly.”
“Have you got an appointment?”
“No; but I wish to see her.”
“You’re from Madame Lecondre’s, I suppose. You can see my lady’s maid; but it’s quite out o
f the question for you to see my lady herself, at this time of night.”
“Will you take a message to her, on a slip of paper? I am almost sure she will see me.” And again Clarissa opened her slender purse, and slipped a florin into the man’s hand, by way of bribe.
He was somewhat melted by this, but yet had an eye to the portable property in the hall.
“You can come in,” he said, pointing with a lofty air to a table whereon were pens and paper, “and write your message.” And then rang an electric bell, which summons brought a second powdered footman, who was, as it were, a Corsican Brother or Siamese Twin, without the ligature, to the first.
Clarissa scrawled a few hasty lines on a sheet of paper, and folded it.
“Be so kind as to take that to your mistress,” she said. “I am sure she will see me.”
The second footman was that superior young man, Norris, whom Hannah Warman had praised. He stared aghast, recognising Mrs. Granger’s voice and bearing, in spite of the thick veil folded over her face, in spite of her shabby garments.
“My lady shall have your note immediately, ma’am,” he said with profound respect, and sped off as if to carry the message of a cabinet minister, much to the bewilderment of his brother officer, who did not know Mrs. Granger.
He reappeared in about two minutes, and ushered Clarissa duly up the broad staircase — dimly lighted to-night, the family being in Portland-place, in a kind of semi-state, only newly arrived, and without so much as a hall-porter — through the corridor, where there were velvet-cushioned divans against the walls, whereon many among Lady Laura’s guests considered it a privilege to sit on her great reception nights, content to have penetrated so far, and with no thought of struggling farther, and on to the white-and-gold door at the farther end, which admitted the elect into my lady’s boudoir.
Laura Armstrong was sitting at an ebony writing-table, with innumerable little drawers pulled out to their utmost extent, and all running over with papers, a chaotic mass of open letters before her, and a sheet of foolscap scrawled over with names. She had been planning her campaign for the season — so many dinners, so many dances, alternate Thursdays in May and June; and a juvenile fancy ball, at which a Pompadour of seven years of age could lead off the Lancers with a Charles the Twelfth of ten, with an eight-year-old Mephistopheles and a six-year-old Anna Boleyn for their vis-à-vis.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 578