THE warm sunlight of July shining softly through a green blind; an open
window with fresh flowers set on the sill; a strange bed, in a strange
room; a giant figure of the female sex (like a dream of Mrs. Wragge)
towering aloft on one side of the bed, and trying to clap its hands;
another woman (quickly) stopping the hands before they could make any
noise; a mild expostulating voice (like a dream of Mrs. Wragge again)
breaking the silence in these words, "She knows me, ma'am, she knows me;
if I mustn't be happy, it will be the death of me!"--such were the
first sights, such were the first sounds, to which, after six weeks of
oblivion, Magdalen suddenly and strangely awoke.
After a little, the sights grew dim again, and the sounds sank into
silence. Sleep, the merciful, took her once more, and hushed her back to
repose.
Another day--and the sights were clearer, the sounds were louder.
Another--and she heard a man's voice, through the door, asking for
news from the sick-room. The voice was strange to her; it was always
cautiously lowered to the same quiet tone. It inquired after her, in the
morning, when she woke--at noon, when she took her refreshment--in the
evening, before she dropped asleep again. "Who is so anxious about me?"
That was the first thought her mind was strong enough to form--"Who is
so anxious about me?"
More days--and she could speak to the nurse at her bedside; she could
answer the questions of an elderly man, who knew far more about her than
she knew about herself, and who told her he was Mr. Merrick, the doctor;
she could sit up in bed, supported by pillows, wondering what had
happened to her, and where she was; she could feel a growing curiosity
about that quiet voice, which still asked after her, morning, noon, and
night, on the other side of the door.
Another day's delay--and Mr. Merrick asked her if she was strong enough
to see an old friend. A meek voice, behind him, articulating high in
the air, said, "It's only me." The voice was followed by the prodigious
bodily apparition of Mrs. Wragge, with her cap all awry, and one of
her shoes in the next room. "Oh, look at her! look at her!" cried Mrs.
Wragge, in an ecstasy, dropping on her knees at Magdalen's bedside, with
a thump that shook the house. "Bless her heart, she's well enough to
laugh at me already. 'Cheer, boys, cheer--!' I beg your pardon, doctor,
my conduct isn't ladylike, I know. It's my head, sir; it isn't _me._ I
must give vent somehow, or my head will burst!" No coherent sentence,
in answer to any sort of question put to her, could be extracted that
morning from Mrs. Wragge. She rose from one climax of verbal confusion
to another--and finished her visit under the bed, groping inscrutably
for the second shoe.
The morrow came--and Mr. Merrick promised that she should see another
old friend on the next day. In the evening, when the inquiring voice
asked after her, as usual, and when the door was opened a few inches to
give the reply, she answered faintly for herself: "I am better, thank
you." There was a moment of silence--and then, just as the door was
shut again, the voice sank to a whisper, and said, fervently, "Thank
God!" Who was he? She had asked them all, and no one would tell her. Who
was he?
The next day came; and she heard her door opened softly. Brisk footsteps
tripped into the room; a lithe little figure advanced to the bed-side.
Was it a dream again? No! There he was in his own evergreen reality,
with the copious flow of language pouring smoothly from his lips; with
the lambent dash of humor twinkling in his party-colored eyes--there he
was, more audacious, more persuasive, more respectable than ever, in a
suit of glossy black, with a speckless white cravat, and a rampant shirt
frill--the unblushing, the invincible, unchangeable Wragge!
"Not a word, my dear girl!" said the captain, seating himself
comfortably at the bedside, in his old confidential way. "I am to do
all the talking; and, I think you will own, a more competent man for
the purpose could not possibly have been found. I am really
delighted--honestly delighted, if I may use such an apparently
inappropriate word--to see you again, and to see you getting well. I
have often thought of you; I have often missed you; I have often said
to myself--never mind what! Clear the stage, and drop the curtain on the
past. _Dum vivimus, vivamus!_ Pardon the pedantry of a Latin quotation,
my dear, and tell me how I look. Am I, or am I not, the picture of a
prosperous man?"
Magdalen attempted to answer him. The captain's deluge of words flowed
over her again in a moment.
"Don't exert yourself," he said. "I'll put all your questions for you.
What have I been about? Why do I look so remarkably well off? And how
in the world did I find my way to this house? My dear girl, I have been
occupied, since we last saw each other, in slightly modifying my old
professional habits. I have shifted from Moral Agriculture to Medical
Agriculture. Formerly I preyed on the public sympathy, now I prey on the
public stomach. Stomach and sympathy, sympathy and stomach--look them
both fairly in the face when you reach the wrong side of fifty, and you
will agree with me that they come to much the same thing. However that
may be, here I am--incredible as it may appear--a man with an income,
at last. The founders of my fortune are three in number. Their names are
Aloes, Scammony, and Gamboge. In plainer words, I am now living--on a
Pill. I made a little money (if you remember) by my friendly connection
with you. I made a little more by the happy decease (_Requiescat in
Pace!_) of that female relative of Mrs. Wragge's from whom, as I told
you, my wife had expectations. Very good. What do you think I did? I
invested the whole of my capital, at one fell swoop, in advertisements,
and purchased my drugs and my pill-boxes on credit. The result is
now before you. Here I am, a Grand Financial Fact. Here I am, with my
clothes positively paid for; with a balance at my banker's; with
my servant in livery, and my gig at the door; solvent, flourishing,
popular--and all on a Pill."
Magdalen smiled. The captain's face assumed an expression of mock
gravity; he looked as if there was a serious side to the question, and
as if he meant to put it next.
"It's no laughing matter to the public, my dear," he said. "They can't
get rid of me and my Pill; they must take us. There is not a single
form of appeal in the whole range of human advertisement which I am
not making to the unfortunate public at this moment. Hire the last new
novel, there I am, inside the boards of the book. Send for the last new
Song--the instant you open the leaves, I drop out of it. Take a
cab--I fly in at the window in red. Buy a box of tooth-powder at the
chemist's--I wrap it up for you in blue. Show yourself at the theater--I
flutter down on you in yellow. The mere titles of my advertisements
are quite irresistible. Le t me quote a few from last week's issue.
Proverbial Title: 'A Pill in time saves Nine.' Familiar Title: 'Excuse
me, how is your Stomach?' Patriotic Title: 'What are the three
characteristics of a true-born Englishman? His Hearth, his Home, and his
Pill.' Title in the form of a nursery dialogue: 'Mamma, I am not well.'
'What is the matter, my pet?' 'I want a little Pill.' Title in the form
of a Historical Anecdote: 'New Discovery in the Mine of English History.
When the Princes were smothered in the Tower, their faithful attendant
collected all their little possessions left behind them. Among the
touching trifles dear to the poor boys, he found a tiny Box. It
contained the Pill of the Period. Is it necessary to say how inferior
that Pill was to its Successor, which prince and peasant alike may now
obtain?'--Et cetera, et cetera. The place in which my Pill is made is an
advertisement in itself. I have got one of the largest shops in London.
Behind one counter (visible to the public through the lucid medium of
plate-glass) are four-and-twenty young men, in white aprons, making the
Pill. Behind another counter are four-and-twenty young men, in white
cravats, making the boxes. At the bottom of the shop are three elderly
accountants, posting the vast financial transactions accruing from the
Pill in three enormous ledgers. Over the door are my name, portrait, and
autograph, expanded to colossal proportions, and surrounded in flowing
letters, by the motto of the establishment, 'Down with the Doctors!'
Even Mrs. Wragge contributes her quota to this prodigious enterprise.
She is the celebrated woman whom I have cured of indescribable agonies
from every complaint under the sun. Her portrait is engraved on all the
wrappers, with the following inscription beneath it: 'Before she took
the Pill you might have blown this patient away with a feather. Look at
her now!!!' Last, not least, my dear girl, the Pill is the cause of my
finding my way to this house. My department in the prodigious Enterprise
already mentioned is to scour the United Kingdom in a gig, establishing
Agencies everywhere. While founding one of those Agencies, I heard of a
certain friend of mine, who had lately landed in England, after a long
sea-voyage. I got his address in London--he was a lodger in this house.
I called on him forthwith, and was stunned by the news of your illness.
Such, in brief, is the history of my existing connection with British
Medicine; and so it happens that you see me at the present moment
sitting in the present chair, now as ever, yours truly, Horatio Wragge."
In these terms the captain brought his personal statement to a close. He
looked more and more attentively at Magdalen, the nearer he got to the
conclusion. Was there some latent importance attaching to his last words
which did not appear on the face of them? There was. His visit to the
sick-room had a serious object, and that object he had now approached.
In describing the circumstances under which he had become acquainted
with Magdalen's present position, Captain Wragge had skirted, with his
customary dexterity, round the remote boundaries of truth. Emboldened
by the absence of any public scandal in connection with Noel Vanstone's
marriage, or with the event of his death as announced in the newspaper
obituary, the captain, roaming the eastern circuit, had ventured back to
Aldborough a fortnight since, to establish an agency there for the sale
of his wonderful Pill. No one had recognized him but the landlady of
the hotel, who at once insisted on his entering the house and reading
Kirke's letter to her husband. The same night Captain Wragge was in
London, and was closeted with the sailor in the second-floor room at
Aaron's Buildings.
The serious nature of the situation, the indisputable certainty that
Kirke must fail in tracing Magdalen's friends unless he first knew who
she really was, had decided the captain on disclosing part, at least, of
the truth. Declining to enter into any particulars--for family reasons,
which Magdalen might explain on her recovery, if she pleased--he
astounded Kirke by telling him that the friendless woman whom he
had rescued, and whom he had only known up to that moment as Miss
Bygrave--was no other than the youngest daughter of Andrew Vanstone. The
disclosure, on Kirke's side, of his father's connection with the
young officer in Canada, had followed naturally on the revelation of
Magdalen's real name. Captain Wragge had expressed his surprise, but had
made no further remark at the time. A fortnight later, however, when
the patient's recovery forced the serious difficulty on the doctor of
meeting the questions which Magdalen was sure to ask, the captain's
ingenuity had come, as usual, to the rescue.
"You can't tell her the truth," he said, "without awakening painful
recollections of her stay at Aldborough, into which I am not at liberty
to enter. Don't acknowledge just yet that Mr. Kirke only knew her as
Miss Bygrave of North Shingles when he found her in this house. Tell her
boldly that he knew who she was, and that he felt (what she must feel)
that he had a hereditary right to help and protect her as his father's
son. I am, as I have already told you," continued the captain, sticking
fast to his old assertion, "a distant relative of the Combe-Raven
family; and, if there is nobody else at hand to help you through this
difficulty, my services are freely at your disposal."
No one else was at hand, and the emergency was a serious one.
Strangers undertaking the responsibility might ignorantly jar on past
recollections, which it would, perhaps, be the death of her to revive
too soon. Near relatives might, by their premature appearance at the
bedside, produce the same deplorable result. The alternative lay between
irritating and alarming her by leaving her inquiries unanswered, or
trusting Captain Wragge. In the doctor's opinion, the second risk was
the least serious risk of the two--and the captain was now seated at
Magdalen's bedside in discharge of the trust confided to him.
Would she ask the question which it had been the private object of all
Captain Wragge's preliminary talk lightly and pleasantly to provoke?
Yes; as soon as his silence gave her the opportunity, she asked it: "Who
was that friend of his living in the house?"
"You ought by rights to know him as well as I do," said the captain.
"He is the son of one of your father's old military friends, when your
father was quartered with his regiment in Canada. Your cheeks mustn't
flush up! If they do, I shall go away."
She was astonished, but not agitated. Captain Wragge had begun by
interesting her in the remote past, which she only knew by hearsay,
before he ventured on the delicate ground of her own experience.
In a moment more she advanced to her next question: "What was his name?"
"Kirke," proceeded the captain. "Did you never hear of his father, Major
Kirke, commanding officer of the regiment in Canada? Did you never hear
that the major helped your father through a great difficulty, like the
best of good fellows and good friends?"
Yes; she faintly fancied she had heard something about her father and an
officer who had once been very good to him when he was a young man.
But she could not look back so long. "Was Mr. Kirke poor?" Even Captain
Wragge's penetration was puzzled by that question. He gave the true
answer at hazard. "No," he said, "not poor."
Her next inquiry showed what she had been thinking of. "If Mr. Kirke was
not poor, why did he come to live in that house?"
"She has caught me!" thought the captain. "There is only one way out of
it--I must administer another dose of truth. Mr. Kirke discovered you
here by chance," he proceeded, aloud, "very ill, and not nicely attended
to. Somebody was wanted to take care of you while you were not able
to take care of yourself. Why not Mr. Kirke? He was the son of your
father's old friend--which is the next thing to being _your_ old friend.
Who had a better claim to send for the right doctor, and get the right
nurse, when I was not here to cure you with my wonderful Pill? Gently!
gently! you mustn't take hold of my superfine black coat-sleeve in that
unceremonious manner."
He put her hand back on the bed, but she was not to be checked in that
way. She persisted in asking another question.--How came Mr. Kirke
to know her? She had never seen him; she had never heard of him in her
life.
"Very likely," said Captain Wragge. "But your never having seen _him_ is
no reason why he should not have seen _you_."
"When did he see me?"
The captain corked up his doses of truth on the spot without a moment's
hesitation. "Some time ago, my dear. I can't exactly say when."
"Only once?"
Captain Wragge suddenly saw his way to the administration of another
dose. "Yes," he said, "only once."
She reflected a little. The next question involved the simultaneous
expression of two ideas, and the next question cost her an effort.
"He only saw me once," she said, "and he only saw me some time ago. How
came he to remember me when he found me here?"
"Aha!" said the captain. "Now you have hit the right nail on the head at
last. You can't possibly be more surprised at his remembering you than
I am. A word of advice, my dear. When you are well enough to get up
and see Mr. Kirke, try how that sharp question of yours sounds in _his_
ears, and insist on his answering it himself." Slipping out of the
dilemma in that characteristically adroit manner, Captain Wragge got
briskly on his legs again and took up his hat.
"Wait!" she pleaded. "I want to ask you--"
"Not another word," said the captain. "I have given you quite enough to
think of for one day. My time is up, and my gig is waiting for me. I am
off, to scour the country as usual. I am off, to cultivate the field
of public indigestion with the triple plowshare of aloes, scammony and
gamboge." He stopped and turned round at the door. "By-the-by, a message
from my unfortunate wife. If you will allow her to come and see you
again, Mrs. Wragge solemnly promises _not_ to lose her shoe next time.
_I_ don't believe her. What do you say? May she come?"
"Yes; whenever she likes," said Magdalen. "If I ever get well again, may
poor Mrs. Wragge come and stay with me?"
"Certainly, my dear. If you have no objection, I will provide her
beforehand with a few thousand impressions in red, blue, and yellow of
her own portrait ('You might have blown this patient away with a feather
before she took the Pill. Look at her now!'). She is sure to drop
herself about perpetually wherever she goes, and the most gratifying
results, in an advertising point of view, must inevitably follow. Don't
think me mercenary--I merely understand the age I live in." He stopped
on his way out, for the second time, and turned round once more at the
door. "You have been a remarkably good girl," he said, "and you deserve
to be rewarded for it. I'll give you a last piece of information before
I go. Have you heard anybody inquiring after you, for the last day or
two, outside your door? Ah! I see you have. A word in your ear, my dear.
That's Mr. Kirke." He tripped away from the bedside as briskly as ever.
Magdalen heard him advertising himself to the nurse before he closed
the door. "If you are ever asked about it," he said, in a confidential
whisper, "the name is Wragge, and the Pill is to be had in neat boxes,
price thirteen pence half-penny, government stamp included. Take a few
copies of the portrait of a female patient, whom you might have blown
away with a feather before she took the Pill, and whom you are simply
requested to contemplate now. Many thanks. _Good_-morning."
The door closed and Magdalen was alone again. She felt no sense of
solitude; Captain Wragge had left her with something new to think of.
Hour after hour her mind dwelt wonderingly on Mr. Kirke, until the
evening came, and she heard his voice again through the half-opened
door.
"I am very grateful," she said to him, before the nurse could answer his
inquiries--"very, very grateful for all your goodness to me."
"Try to get well," he replied, kindly. "You will more than reward me, if
you try to get well."
The next morning Mr. Merrick found her impatient to leave her bed, and
be moved to the sofa in the front room. The doctor said he supposed
she wanted a change. "Yes," she replied; "I want to see Mr. Kirke." The
doctor consented to move her on the next day, but he positively forbade
the additional excitement of seeing anybody until the day after. She
attempted a remonstrance--Mr. Merrick was impenetrable. She tried, when
he was gone, to win the nurse by persuasion--the nurse was impenetrable,
too.
On the next day they wrapped her in shawls, and carried her in to the
sofa, and made her a little bed on it. On the table near at hand were
some flowers and a number of an illustrated paper. She immediately asked
who had put them there. The nurse (failing to notice a warning look from
the doctor) said Mr. Kirke had thought that she might like the flowers,
and that the pictures in the paper might amuse her. After that reply,
her anxiety to see Mr. Kirke became too ungovernable to be trifled with.
The doctor left the room at once to fetch him.
She looked eagerly at the opening door. Her first glance at him as he
came in raised a doubt in her mind whether she now saw that tall figure
and that open sun-burned face for the first time. But she was too weak
and too agitated to follow her recollections as far back as Aldborough.
She resigned the attempt, and only looked at him. He stopped at the foot
of the sofa and said a few cheering words. She beckoned to him to come
nearer, and offered him her wasted hand. He tenderly took it in his, and
sat down by her. They were both silent. His face told her of the sorrow
and the sympathy which his silence would fain have concealed. She still
held his hand--consciously now--as persistently as she had held it on
the day when he found her. Her eyes closed, after a vain effort to speak
to him, and the tears rolled slowly over her wan white cheeks.
The doctor signed to Kirke to wait and give her time. She recovered a
little and looked at him. "How kind you have been to me!" she murmured.
"And how little I have deserved it!"
"Hush! hush!" he said. "You don't know what a happiness it was to me to
help you."
The sound of his voice seemed to strengthen her, and to give her
courage. She lay looking at him with an eager interest, with a gratitude
which artlessly ignored all the conventional restraints that interpose
between a woman and a man. "Where did you see me," she said, suddenly,
"before you found me here?"
Kirke hesitated. Mr. Merrick came to his assistance.
"I forbid you to say a word about the past to Mr. Kirke," interposed the
doctor; "and I forbid Mr. Kirke to say a word about it to _you._ You are
beginning a new life to-day, and the only recollections I sanction are
recollections five minutes old."
She looked at the doctor and smiled. "I must ask him one question," she
said, and turned back again to Kirke. "Is it true that you had only seen
me once before you came to this house?"
"Quite true!" He made the reply with a sudden change of color which she
instantly detected. Her brightening eyes looked at him more earnestly
than ever, as she put her next question.
"How came you to remember me after only seeing me once?"
His hand unconsciously closed on hers, and pressed it for the first
time. He attempted to answer, and hesitated at the first word. "I have a
good memory," he said at last; and suddenly looked away from her with
a confusion so strangely unlike his customary self-possession of manner
that the doctor and the nurse both noticed it.
Every nerve in her body felt that momentary pressure of his hand, with
the exquisite susceptibility which accompanies the first faltering
advance on the way to health. She looked at his changing color, she
listened to his hesitating words, with every sensitive perception of her
sex and age quickened to seize intuitively on the truth. In the moment
when he looked away from her, she gently took her hand from him, and
turned her head aside on the pillow. "_Can_ it be?" she thought, with
a flutter of delicious fear at her heart, with a glow of delicious
confusion burning on her cheeks. "_Can_ it be?"
The doctor made another sign to Kirke. He understood it, and rose
immediately. The momentary discomposure in his face and manner had both
disappeared. He was satisfied in his own mind that he had successfully
kept his secret, and in the relief of feeling that conviction he had
become himself again.
"Good-by till to-morrow," he said, as he left the room.
"Good-by," she answered, softly, without looking at him.
Mr. Merrick took the chair which Kirke had resigned, and laid his hand
on her pulse. "Just what I feared," remarked the doctor; "too quick by
half."
She petulantly snatched away her wrist. "Don't!" she said, shrinking
from him. "Pray don't touch me!"
Mr. Merrick good-humoredly gave up his place to the nurse. "I'll return
in half an hour," he whispered, "and carry her back to bed. Don't let
her talk. Show her the pictures in the newspaper, and keep her quiet in
that way."
When the doctor returned, the nurse reported that the newspaper had not
been wanted. The patient's conduct had been exemplary. She had not been
at all restless, and she had never spoken a word.
The days passed, and the time grew longer and longer which the doctor
allowed her to spend in the front room. She was soon able to dispense
with the bed on the sofa--she could be dressed, and could sit up,
supported by pillows, in an arm-chair. Her hours of emancipation from
the bedroom represented the great daily event of her life. They were the
hours she passed in Kirke's society.
She had a double interest in him now--her interest in the man whose
protecting care had saved her reason and her life; her interest in the
man whose heart's deepest secret she had surprised. Little by little
they grew as easy and familiar with each other as old friends; little by
little she presumed on all her privileges, and wound her way unsuspected
into the most intimate knowledge of his nature.
Her questions were endless. Everything that he could tell her of himself
and his life she drew from him delicately and insensibly: he, the least
self-conscious of mankind, became an egotist in her dexterous hands. She
found out his pride in his ship, and practiced on it without remorse.
She drew him into talking of the fine qualities of the vessel, of the
great things the vessel had done in emergencies, as he had never in his
life talked yet to any living creature on shore. She found him out in
private seafaring anxieties and unutterable seafaring exultations which
he had kept a secret from his own mate. She watched his kindling face
with a delicious sense of triumph in adding fuel to the fire; she
trapped him into forgetting all considerations of time and place, and
striking as hearty a stroke on the rickety little lodging-house table,
in the fervor of his talk, as if his hand had descended on the
solid bulwark of his ship. His confusion at the discovery of his own
forgetfulness secretly delighted her; she could have cried with pleasure
when he penitently wondered what he could possibly have been thinking
of.
At other times she drew him from dwelling on the pleasures of his life,
and led him into talking of its perils--the perils of that jealous
mistress the sea, which had absorbed so much of his existence, which had
kept him so strangely innocent and ignorant of the world on shore. Twice
he had been shipwrecked. Times innumerable he and all with him had been
threatened with death, and had escaped their doom by the narrowness of
a hair-breadth. He was always unwilling at the outset to speak of this
dark and dreadful side of his life: it was only by adroitly tempting
him, by laying little snares for him in his talk, that she lured him
into telling her of the terrors of the great deep. She sat listening to
him with a breathless interest, looking at him with a breathless wonder,
as those fearful stories--made doubly vivid by the simple language
in which he told them--fell, one by one, from his lips. His noble
unconsciousness of his own heroism--the artless modesty with which
he described his own acts of dauntless endurance and devoted courage,
without an idea that they were anything more than plain acts of duty
to which he was bound by the vocation that he followed--raised him to
a place in her estimation so hopelessly high above her that she became
uneasy and impatient until she had pulled down the idol again which
she herself had set up. It was on these occasions that she most rigidly
exacted from him all those little familiar attentions so precious to
women in their intercourse with men. "This hand," she thought, with an
exquisite delight in secretly following the idea while he was close to
her--"this hand that has rescued the drowning from death is shifting my
pillows so tenderly that I hardly know when they are moved. This hand
that has seized men mad with mutiny, and driven them back to their
duty by main force, is mixing my lemonade and peeling my fruit more
delicately and more neatly than I could do it for myself. Oh, if I could
be a man, how I should like to be such a man as this!"
She never allowed her thoughts, while she was in his presence, to lead
her beyond that point. It was only when the night had separated them
that she ventured to let her mind dwell on the self-sacrificing devotion
which had so mercifully rescued her. Kirke little knew how she thought
of him, in the secrecy of her own chamber, during the quiet hours that
elapsed before she sank to sleep. No suspicion crossed his mind of the
influence which he was exerting over her--of the new spirit which he was
breathing into that new life, so sensitively open to impression in the
first freshness of its recovered sense. "She has nobody else to amuse
her, poor thing," he used to think, sadly, sitting alone in his small
second-floor room. "If a rough fellow like me can beguile the weary
hours till her friends come here, she is heartily welcome to all that I
can tell her."
He was out of spirits and restless now whenever he was by himself.
Little by little he fell into a habit of taking long, lonely walks at
night, when Magdalen thought he was sleeping upstairs. Once he went away
abruptly in the day-time--on business, as he said. Something had passed
between Magdalen and himself the evening before which had led her into
telling him her age. "Twenty last birthday," he thought. "Take twenty
from forty-one. An easy sum in subtraction--as easy a sum as my little
nephew could wish for." He walked to the Docks, and looked bitterly at
the shipping. "I mustn't forget how a ship is made," he said. "It won't
be long before I am back at the old work again." On leaving the Docks
he paid a visit to a brother sailor--a married man. In the course
of conversation he asked how much older his friend might be than his
friend's wife. There was six years' difference between them. "I suppose
that's difference enough?" said Kirke. "Yes," said his friend; "quite
enough. Are you looking out for a wife at last? Try a seasoned woman of
thirty-five--that's your mark, Kirke, as near as I can calculate."
The time passed smoothly and quickly--the present time, in which _she_
was recovering so happily--the present time, which _he_ was beginning to
distrust already.
Early one morning Mr. Merrick surprised Kirke by a visit in his little
room on the second floor.
"I came to the conclusion yesterday," said the doctor, entering abruptly
on his business, "that our patient was strong enough to justify us at
last in running all risks, and communicating with her friends; and I
have accordingly followed the clew which that queer fellow, Captain
Wragge, put into our hands. You remember he advised us to apply to Mr.
Pendril, the lawyer? I saw Mr. Pendril two days ago, and was referred
by him--not overwillingly, as I thought--to a lady named Miss Garth.
I heard enough from her to satisfy me that we have exercised a wise
caution in acting as we have done. It is a very, very sad story; and I
am bound to say that I, for one, make great allowances for the poor girl
downstairs. Her only relation in the world is her elder sister. I have
suggested that the sister shall write to her in the first instance, and
then, if the letter does her no harm, follow it personally in a d ay or
two. I have not given the address, by way of preventing any visits from
being paid here without my permission. All I have done is to undertake
to forward the letter, and I shall probably find it at my house when I
get back. Can you stop at home until I send my man with it? There is not
the least hope of my being able to bring it myself. All you need do is
to watch for an opportunity when she is not in the front room, and to
put the letter where she can see it when she comes in. The handwriting
on the address will break the news before she opens the letter. Say
nothing to her about it--take care that the landlady is within call--and
leave her to herself. I know I can trust _you_ to follow my directions,
and that is why I ask you to do us this service. You look out of spirits
this morning. Natural enough. You're used to plenty of fresh air,
captain, and you're beginning to pine in this close place."
"May I ask a question, doctor? Is _she_ pining in this close place, too?
When her sister comes, will her sister take her away?"
"Decidedly, if my advice is followed. She will be well enough to be
moved in a week or less. Good-day. You are certainly out of spirits, and
your hand feels feverish. Pining for the blue water, captain--pining for
the blue water!" With that expression of opinion, the doctor cheerfully
went out.
In an hour the letter arrived. Kirke took it from the landlady
reluctantly, and almost roughly, without looking at it. Having
ascertained that Magdalen was still engaged at her toilet, and having
explained to the landlady the necessity of remaining within call, he
went downstairs immediately, and put the letter on the table in the
front room. Magdalen heard the sound of the familiar step on the floor.
"I shall soon be ready," she called to him, through the door.
He made no reply; he took his hat and went out. After a momentary
hesitation, he turned his face eastward, and called on the ship-owners
who employed him, at their office in Cornhill.