"My dear one, you shall not, if love can guard and keep you. No, dear, I _cannot_ believe that G.o.d will take you from me. Heaven may be your fittest habitation; but such sweet spirits as yours are sorely needed upon earth. I will be brave, dearest one; brave and hopeful in the mercy of Heaven. And now I must go and telegraph to my tiresome printer. _Au revoir_!"
He hurried away from the farmhouse, and started at a rattling pace along the pleasant road, with green waving corn on his left, and broad blue ocean on his right.
"I can get a fly to bring me back from St. Leonard"s" he thought; "I should only lose time by hunting for a vehicle here."
He was at St. Leonards station within an hour after leaving the farm.
He despatched the message in Mr. Sheldon"s name, and took care to make it urgent.
CHAPTER VI.
DESPERATE MEASURES.
Fitful and feverish were the slumbers which visited Mr. Hawkehurst on that balmy summer"s night. His waking hours were anxious and unhappy; but his sleeping hours were still more painful. To sleep was to be the feverish fool of vague wild visions, in which Charlotte and Dr.
Doddleson, the editor of the _Cheapside_, the officials of the British Museum reading-room, Diana Paget, and the Sheldons, figured amidst inextricable confusion of circ.u.mstances and places. Throughout these wretched dreams he had some consciousness of himself and the room in which he was lying, the July moon shining upon him, broad and bright, through the diamond-paned lattice. And O, what torturing visions were those in which Charlotte smiled upon him, radiant with health and happiness; and there had been no such thing as her illness, no such thing as his grief. And then came hurried dreams, in which Dr. Doddleson was knocking at the farmhouse door, with the printer of the _Cheapside_. And then he was a spectator in a mighty theatre, large as those Roman amphitheatres, wherein the audience seemed a ma.s.s of flies, looking down on the encounter of two other flies, and all the glory of an imperial court only a little spot of purple and gold, gleaming afar in the sunshine. To the dreamer it was no surprise that this unknown theatre of his dreams should be vast as the gladiatorial arena. And then came the deep thunderous music of innumerable ba.s.s-viols and ba.s.soons: and some one told him it was the first night of a great tragedy. He felt the breathless hush of expectation; the solemn ba.s.s music sank deeper; dark curtains were drawn aside, with a motion slow and solemn, like the waving of mountain pines, and there appeared a measureless stage, revealing a moonlit expanse, thickly studded with the white headstones of unnumbered graves, and on the foremost of these--revealed to him by what power he knew not, since mortal sight could never have reached a point so distant--he read the name of Charlotte Halliday. He awoke with a sharp cry of pain. It was broad day, and the waves were dancing gaily in the morning sunlight. He rose and dressed himself. Sleep, such as he had known that night, was worse than the weariest waking. He went out into the garden by-and-by, and paced slowly up and down the narrow pathways, beside which box of a century"s growth rose dark and high. Pale yellow lights were in the upper windows. He wondered which of those sickly tapers flickered on the face he loved so fondly.
"It is only a year since I first saw her," he thought: "one year! And to love her has been my "liberal education;" to lose her would be my desolation and despair."
To lose her! His thoughts approached that dread possibility, but could not realize it; not even yet.
At eight o"clock Diana came to summon him to breakfast.
"Shall I see Charlotte?" he asked.
"No; for some time past she has not come down to breakfast."
"What kind of night has she had?"
"A very quiet night, she tells me; but I am not quite sure that she tells me the truth, she is so afraid of giving us uneasiness."
"She tells you. But do you not sleep in her room, now that she is so ill?"
"No. I was anxious to sleep on a sofa at the foot of her bed, and proposed doing so, but Mr. Sheldon objects to my being in the room. He thinks that Charlotte is more quiet entirely alone, and that there is more air in the room with only one sleeper. Her illness is not of a kind to require attention of any sort in the night."
"Still I should have thought it better for her to have you with her, to cheer and comfort her.
"Believe me, Valentine, I wished to be with her."
"I am sure of that, dear," he answered kindly.
"It was only Mr. Sheldon"s authority, as a man of some medical experience, that conquered my wish."
"Well, I suppose he is right. And now we must go in to breakfast. Ah, the dreary regularity of these breakfasts and dinners, which go on just the same when our hearts are breaking!"
The breakfast was indeed a dreary soul-dispiriting meal. Farmhouse luxuries, in the way of new-laid eggs and home-cured bacon, abounded; but no one had any inclination for these things. Valentine remembered the homestead among the Yorkshire hills, with all the delight that he had known there; and the "sorrow"s crown of sorrow" was very bitter. Mr.
Sheldon gave his Sabbath-morning meditations to the study of a Sat.u.r.day-evening share-list; and Georgy plunged ever and anon into the closely printed pages of a Dissenting preacher"s biography, which she declared to be "comforting."
Diana and Valentine sat silent and anxious; and after the faintest pretence of eating and drinking, they both left the table, to stroll drearily in the garden. The bells were ringing cheerily from the grey stone tower near at hand; but Valentine had no inclination for church on this particular morning. Were not all his thoughts prayers--humble piteous entreaties--for one priceless boon?
"Will you see the doctor when he comes, and manage matters so as not to alarm Charlotte?" he asked of Mr. Sheldon. That gentleman agreed to do so, and went out into the little front-garden to lie in wait for the great Doddleson--"Dowager Doddleson" as he was surnamed by some irreverent unbelievers.
A St. Leonards fly brought the doctor while the bells were still ringing for morning service. Mr. Sheldon received him at the gate; and explained the motive of his summons.
The doctor was full of pompous solicitude about "our sweet young patient."
"Really one of the most interesting cases I ever had upon my hands,"
the West-end physician said blandly; "as I was remarking to a very charming patient of mine--in point of fact, the amiable and accomplished Countess of Ka.s.sel-k.u.mberterre, only last Tuesday morning. A case so nearly resembling the Countess"s own condition as to be highly interesting to her."
"I really ought to apologize for bringing you down," said Mr. Sheldon, as he led the doctor into the house. "I only consented to your being sent for in order to tranquillize this young fellow Hawkehurst, who is engaged to my daughter; a rising man, I believe, in his own particular line, but rather wild and impracticable. There is really no change for the worse, absolutely none; and as we have not been here more than three days, there has been positively no opportunity for testing the effect of change and sea air, and so on."
This seemed rather like giving the learned physician his cue. And there were those among Dr. Doddleson"s professional rivals who said that the worthy doctor was never slow to take a cue so given, not being prejudiced by any opinions of his own.
Charlotte had by this time been established in her easy-chair by the open window of the sitting-room, and here Dr. Doddleson saw her, in the presence of Mr. and Mrs. Sheldon; and here Dr. Doddleson went through the usual Abracadabra of his art, and a.s.sented to the opinions advanced, with all deference, by Mr. Sheldon.
To Georgy this interview, in which Mr. Sheldon"s opinions were pompously echoed by the West-end physician, proved even more comforting than the benignant career of the Dissenting minister, who was wont to allude to that solemn pa.s.sing hence of which the ancients spoke in dim suggestive phrase, as "going upstairs."
Diana and Valentine strolled in the garden while the physician saw his patient. Dr. Doddleson"s ponderous polysyllables floated out upon the summer air like the droning of a humble-bee. It was a relief to Valentine to know that the doctor was with his patient: but he had no intention to let that gentleman depart unquestioned.
"I will take no secondhand information," he thought; "I will hear this man"s opinion from his own lips."
He went round to the front of the house directly the droning had ceased, and was in the way when Dr. Doddleson and Mr. Sheldon came out of the rose-hung porch.
"If you have no objection," he said to Mr. Sheldon, "I should like to ask Dr. Doddleson a few questions."
"_I_ have no objection," replied the stockbroker; "but it is really altogether such an unusual thing, and I doubt if Dr. Doddleson will consent to--"
And here he cast a deprecating glance at the doctor, as who should say, "Can you permit yourself to comply with a demand go entirely unwarranted by precedent?"
Dowager Doddleson was eminently good-natured.
"And this is our sweet young friend"s _fiance_," he said; "dear me--dee-ar me!"
And then he looked at Valentine with bland pale-blue eyes that twinkled behind his gold-framed spectacles; while Valentine was taking his measure, so far as the measure of any man"s moral and intellectual force can be taken by the eyes of another man. "And this is the man who is chosen to s.n.a.t.c.h my darling from the jaws of death!" he said to himself, with burning rage in his heart, while the amiable physician repeated blandly:
"And this is our sweet young patient"s _fiance_. Dee-ar me, how very interesting!"
The three men strolled round to the garden behind the house, Mr. Sheldon close at the physician"s elbow.
"For G.o.d"s sake tell me the truth, Dr. Doddleson!" said Valentine in a low hoa.r.s.e voice, directly they were beyond ear-shot of the house. "I am a man, and I can steel myself to hear the worst you can tell."
"But really, Hawkehurst, there is no occasion for this kind of thing,"
interjected Philip Sheldon; "Dr. Doddleson agrees with me, that the case is one of extreme languor, and no more."
"Unquestionably," said the doctor in a fat voice.
"And Dr. Doddleson also coincides with me in the opinion that all we can do is to wait the reviving influence of sea-air."