“Oh, well, I suppose not. That damsel over there, Scott—is she his sister, or his cousin, or his aunt?”
“You can call her which you like,” replied Scott, affably. “Are you very busy this afternoon, Ludlow?”
“I am not busy at all.”
“Then I wish you would go to Pitt. I can’t spare the time. I’ve a heap of work on my shoulders to-day: it was only the pressing note I got from Bevere about his arm that brought me out of it. He is getting a bit doubtful himself, you see; and Pitt had better come to it without loss of time.”
“Bevere won’t thank me for sending Pitt to him. You heard what he said.”
“Nonsense as to Bevere’s thanks. The arm is worse than he thinks for. In my opinion, he stands a good chance of losing it.”
“No!” I exclaimed in dismay. “Lose his arm!”
“Stands a chance of it,” repeated Scott. “It will be his own fault. A week yesterday he damaged it again, the evening he came back here, and he has neglected it ever since. You tell Pitt what I say.”
“Very well, I will. I suppose the account Bevere gave to his mother and Mr. Brandon—that he had been living lately with you—was all a fable?”
Scott nodded complaisantly, striding along at the pace of a steam-engine. “Just so. He couldn’t bring them down upon him here, you know.”
I did not exactly know. And thoughts, as the saying runs, are free.
“So he hit upon the fable, as you call it, of saying he had shared my lodgings,” continued Scott. “Necessity is a rare incentive to invention.”
We had gained the Bell-and-Clapper Station as he spoke: two minutes yet before the train for the city would be in. Scott utilized the minutes by dashing to the bar for a glass of ale, chattering to Miss Panken and the other one while he drank it. Then we both took the train; Scott going back to the hospital—where he fulfilled some official duty beyond that of ordinary student—and I to see after Pitt.
II.
Roger Bevere’s arm proved obstinate. Swollen and inflamed as I had never seen any arm yet, it induced fever, and he had to take to his bed. Scott, who had his wits about him in most ways, had not spoken a minute too soon, or been mistaken as to the probable danger; while Mr. Pitt told Roger every time he came to dress it, beginning with the first evening, that he deserved all he got for being so foolhardy as to neglect it: as a medical man in embryo, he ought to have foreseen the hazard.
It seemed to me that Roger was just as ill as he was at Gibraltar Terrace, when they sent for his mother: if not worse. Most days I got down to Paradise Place to snatch a look at him. It was not far, taking the underground-railway from Miss Deveen’s.
I made the best report I could to Lady Bevere, telling nothing—excepting that the arm was giving a little trouble. If she got to learn the truth about certain things, she would think the letters deceitful. But what else could I do?—I wished with all my heart some one else had to write them. As Scott had said to me about the flitting from Mrs. Long’s (the reason for which or necessity, I was not enlightened upon yet), I could not betray Bevere. Pitt assured me that if any unmanageable complications arose with the arm, both Lady Bevere and Mr. Brandon should be at once telegraphed for. A fine complication it would be, of another sort, if they did come! How about Miss Lizzie?
Of all the free-and-easy young women I had ever met with, that same Lizzie was the freest and easiest. Many a time have I wondered Bevere did not order her out of the room when she said audacious things to him or to me—not to say out of the house. He did nothing of the kind; he lay passive as a bird that has had its wings clipped, all spirit gone out of him, and groaning with bodily pain. Why on earth did he allow her to make his house her abode, disturbing it with her noise and her clatter? Why on earth—to go on further—did he rent a house at all, small or large? No one else lived in it, that I saw, except a little maid, in her early teens, to do the work. Later I found I was mistaken: they were only lodgers: an old landlady, lame and quiet, was in the kitchen.
“Looks fearfully bad, don’t he?” whispered Lizzie to me on one occasion when he lay asleep, and she came bursting into the room for her bonnet and shawl.
“Yes. Don’t you think you could be rather more quiet?”
“As quiet as a lamb, if you like,” laughed Lizzie, and crept out on tiptoe. She was always good-humoured.
One afternoon when I went in, Lizzie had a visitor in the parlour. Miss Panken! The two, evidently on terms of close friendship, were laughing and joking frantically; Lizzie’s head, with its clouds of red-gold hair, was drawn close to the other head and the mass of black braids adorning it. Miss Panken sat sipping a cup of tea; Lizzie a tumbler of hot water that gave forth a suspicious odour.
“I’ve got a headache, Mr. Johnny,” said she: and I marvelled that she did not, in her impudence, leave the “Mr.” out. “Hot gin-and-water is the very best remedy you can take for it.”
Shrieks of laughter from both the girls followed me upstairs to Roger’s bedside: Miss Panken was relating some joke about her companion, Mabel. Roger said his arm was a trifle better. It always felt so when Pitt had been to it.
“Who is it that’s downstairs now?” he asked, fretfully, as the bursts of merriment sounded through the floor. “Sit down, Johnny.”
“It’s a girl from the Bell-and-Clapper refreshment-room. Miss Panken they call her.”
Roger frowned. “I have told Lizzie over and over again that I wouldn’t have those girls encouraged here. What can possess her to do it?” And, after saying that, he passed into one of those fits of restlessness that used to attack him at Gibraltar Terrace.
“Look here, Roger,” I said, presently, “couldn’t you—pull up a bit? Couldn’t you put all this nonsense away?”
“Which nonsense?” he retorted.
“What would Mr. Brandon say if he knew it? I’ll not speak of your mother. It is not nice, you know; it is not, indeed.”
“Can’t you speak out?” he returned, with intense irritation. “Put what away?”
“Lizzie.”
I spoke the name under my breath, not liking to say it, though I had wanted to for some time. All the anger seemed to go out of Roger. He lay still as death.
“Can’t you, Roger?”
“Too late, Johnny,” came back the answer in a whisper of pain.
“Why?”
“She is my wife.”
I leaped from my chair in a sort of terror. “No, no, Roger, don’t say that! It cannot be.”
“But it is,” he groaned. “These eighteen months past.”
I stood dazed; all my senses in a whirl. Roger kept silence, his face turned to the pillow. And the laughter from below came surging up.
I had no heart affection that I was aware of, but I had to press my hand to still its thumping as I leaned over Roger.
“Really married? Surely married?”
“As fast and sure as the registrar could marry us,” came the smothered answer. “We did not go to church.”
“Oh, Roger! How came you to do it?”
“Because I was a fool.”
I sat down again, right back in the chair. Things that had puzzled me before were clearing themselves now. This was the torment that had worried his mind and prolonged, if not induced, the fever, when he first lay ill of the accident; this was the miserable secret that had gone well-nigh to disturb the brain: partly for the incubus the marriage entailed upon him, partly lest it should be found out. It had caused him to invent fables in more ways than one. Not only had he to conceal his proper address from us all when at Gibraltar Terrace, especially from his mother and Mr. Brandon; but he had had to scheme with Scott to keep his wife in ignorance altogether—of his accident and of where he was lying, lest Lizzie should present herself at his bedside. To account for his absence from home, Scott had improvised a story to her of Roger’s having been despatched by the hospital authorities to watch a case of illness at a little distance; and Lizzie unsuspiciously supplied Scott with changes of raiment and other things Roger needed from his chest of drawers.
This did for a time. But about the period of Roger’s quitting Gibraltar Terrace, Lizzie unfortunately caught up an inkling that she was being deceived. Miss Panken’s general acquaintance was numerous, and one day one of them chanced to go into the bar-room of the Bell-and-Clapper, and to mention, incidentally, that Roger Bevere had been run over by a hansom cab, and was lying disabled in some remote doctor’s quarters—for that’s what Scott told his fellow-students. Madam Lizzie rose in rebellion, accused Scott of being no gentleman, and insisted upon her right to be enlightened. So, to stop her from making her appearance at St. Bartholomew’s with inconvenient inquiries, and possibly still more inconvenient revelations, Roger had promptly to quit the new lodgings at Mrs. Long’s, and return to the old home near the Bell-and-Clapper. But I did not learn these particulars at first.
“Who knows it, Roger?” I asked, breaking the silence.
“Not one of them but Scott,” he answered, supposing I alluded to the hospital. “I see Pitt has his doubts.”
“But they know—some of them—that Lizzie is here!”
“Well? So did you, but you did not suspect further. They think of course that—well, there’s no help for what they think. When a fellow is in such a position as mine, he has to put up with things as they come. I can’t quite ruin myself, Johnny; or let the authorities know what an idiot I’ve been. Lizzie’s aunt knows it; and that’s enough at present; and so do those girls at the Bell-and-Clapper—worse luck!”
It was impossible to talk much of it then, at that first disclosure; I wished Roger good-afternoon, and went away in a fever-dream.
My wildest surmises had not pictured this dismal climax. No, never; for all that Mistress Lizzie’s left hand displayed a plain gold ring of remarkable thickness. “She would have it thick,” Roger said to me later. Poor Roger! poor Roger!
I felt it like a blow—like a blow. No good would ever come of it—to either of them. Worse than no good to him. It was not so much the unsuitableness of the girl’s condition to his; it was the girl herself. She would bring him no credit, no comfort as long as she lived: what happiness could he ever find with her? I had grown to like Roger, with all his faults and failings, and it almost seemed to me, in my sorrow for him, as if my own life were blighted.
It might not have been quite so bad—not quite—had Lizzie been a different girl. Modest, yielding, gentle, like that little Mabel I had seen, for instance, learning to adapt her manners to the pattern of her husband’s; had she been that, why, in time, perhaps, things might have smoothed down for him. But Lizzie! with her free and loud manners, her off-hand ways, her random speech, her vulgar laughs! Well, well!
How was it possible she had been able to bring her fascinations to bear upon him—he with his refinement? One can but sit down in amazement and ask how, in the name of common-sense, such incongruities happen in the world. She must have tamed down what was objectionable in her to sugar and sweetness while setting her cap at Bevere; while he—he must have been blind, physically and mentally. But no sooner was the marriage over than he awoke to see what he had done for himself. Since then his time had been principally spent in setting up contrivances to keep the truth from becoming known. Mr. Brandon had talked of his skeleton in the closet: he had not dreamt of such a skeleton as this.
“Must have gone in largely for strong waters in those days, and been in a chronic state of imbecility, I should say,” observed Pitt, making his comments to me confidentially.
For I had spoken to him of the marriage, finding he knew as much as I did. “I shall never be able to understand it,” I said.
“That’s easy enough. When Circe and a goose sit down to play chess, no need to speculate which will win the game.”
“You speak lightly of it, Mr. Pitt.”
“Not particularly. Where’s the use of speaking gravely now the deed’s done? It is a pity for Bevere; but he is only one young man amidst many such who in one way or another spoil their lives at its threshold. Johnny Ludlow, when I look about me and see the snares spread abroad in this great metropolis by night and by day, and at the crowds of inexperienced lads—they are not much better—who have to run to and fro continually, I marvel that the number of those who lose themselves is not increased tenfold.”
He had changed his tone to one solemn enough for a judge.
“I cannot think how he came to do it,” I argued. “Or how such a one as Bevere, well-intentioned, well brought up, could have allowed himself to fall into what Mr. Brandon calls loose habits. How came he to take to drinking ways, even in a small degree?”
“The railway refreshment-bars did that for him, I take it,” answered Pitt. “He lived up here from the first, by the Bell-and-Clapper, and I suppose found the underground train more convenient than the omnibus. Up he’d rush in a morning to catch—say—the half-past eight train, and would often miss it by half-a-minute. A miss is as good as a mile. Instead of cooling his heels on the draughty and deserted platform, he would turn into the refreshment-room, and find there warmth and sociable company in the shape of pretty girls to chat with: and, if he so minded, a glass of something or other to keep out the cold on a wintry morning.”
“As if Bevere would!—at that early hour!”
“Some of them do,” affirmed Pitt. “Anyway, that’s how Bevere fell into the habit of frequenting the bar-room of the Bell-and-Clapper. It lay so handy, you see; right in his path. He would run into it again of an evening when he returned: he had no home, no friends waiting for him, only lodgings. There——”
“I thought Bevere used to board with a family,” I interrupted.
“So he did at first; and very nice people they were: Mr. Brandon took care he should be well placed. That’s why Bevere came up this way at all: it was rather far from the hospital, but Mr. Brandon knew the people. In a short time, however, the lady died, the home was broken up, and Bevere then took lodgings on his own account; and so—there was no one to help him keep out of mischief. To go on with what I was saying. He learnt to frequent the bar-room at the Bell-and-Clapper: not only to run into it in a morning, but also on his return in the evening. He had no sociable tea or dinner-table waiting for him, you see, with pleasant faces round it. All the pleasant faces he met were those behind the counter; and there he would stay, talking, laughing, chaffing with the girls, one of whom was Miss Lizzie, goodness knows how long—the places are kept open till midnight.”
“It had its attractions for him, I suppose—what with the girls and the bottles.”
Pitt nodded. “It has for many a one besides him, Johnny. Roger had to call for drink; possibly without the slightest natural inclination for anything, he had perforce to call for it; he could hardly linger there unless he did. By-and-by, I reckon, he got to like the drink; he acquired the taste for it, you see, and habit soon becomes second nature; one glass became two glasses, two glasses three. This went on for a time. The next act in the young man’s drama was, that he allowed himself to glide into an entanglement of some sort with one of the said girls, Miss Lizzie Field, and was drawn in to marry her.”
“How have you learnt these particulars?”
“Partly from Scott. They are true. Scott has a married brother living up this way, and is often running up here; indeed at one time he lived with him, and he and Bevere used to go to and fro to St. Bartholomew’s in company. Yes,” slowly added the doctor, “that refreshment-room has been the bane of Roger Bevere.”
“And not of Scott?”
“It did Scott no good; you may take a vow of that. But Scott has some plain, rough common-sense of his own, which kept him from going too far. He may make a good man yet; and a name also, for he possesses all the elements of a skilful surgeon. Bevere succumbed to the seductions of the bar-room, as other foolish young fellows, well-intentioned at heart, but weak in moral strength, have done, and will do again. Irresistible temptations they present, these places, to the young men who have to come in contact with them. If the lads had to go out of their way to seek the temptation, they might never do it; but it lies right in their path, you perceive, and they can’t pass it by. Of course I am not speaking of all young men; only of those who are deficient in moral self-control. To some, the Bell-and-Clapper bar-room presents no more attraction than the Bell-and-Clapper Church by its side; or any other of such rooms, either.”
“Is there not any remedy for this state of things?”
Pitt shrugged his shoulders. “I suppose not,” he said. “Since I pulled up from drinking, I have been unable to see what these underground railway-rooms are needed for: why a man or woman, travelling for half-an-hour, more or less, must needs be provided with places to drink in at both ends of the journey and all the middles. Biscuits and buns are there as well, you may say—serving an excuse perhaps. But for one biscuit called for, there are fifty glasses of ale, or what not. Given the necessity for the rooms,” added Pitt, with a laugh, “I should do away with the lady-servers and substitute men; which would put an end to three parts of the attraction. No chance of that reformation.”
“Because it would do away with three parts of the custom,” I said, echoing his laugh.
“Be you very sure of that, Johnny Ludlow. However, it is no business of mine to find fault with existing customs, seeing that I cannot alter them,” concluded the doctor.
What he said set me thinking. Every time I passed by one of these stations, so crowded with the traffic of young city men, and saw the bottles arrayed to charm the sight, their bright colours gleaming and glistening, and looked at the serving-damsels, with their bedecked heads, arrayed to charm also, I knew Pitt must be right. These rooms might bring in grist to their owners’ mill; but it struck me that I should not like, when I grew old, to remember that I had owned one.
Roger Bevere’s arm began to yield to treatment, but he continued very ill in himself; too ill to get up. Torment of mind and torment of body are a bad complication.
One afternoon when I was sitting with him, sundry quick knocks downstairs threatened to disturb the doze he was falling into—and Pitt had said that sleep to him just now was like gold. I crept away to stop it. In the middle of the parlour, thumping on the floor with her cotton umbrella—a huge green thing that must have been the fellow, when made, to Sairey Gamp’s—stood Mrs. Dyke, a stout, good-natured, sensible woman, whom I often saw there. Her husband was a well-to-do coachman, whose first wife had been sister to Lizzie’s mother, and this wife was their cousin.
“Where’s Lizzie, sir?” she asked. “Out, I suppose?”
“Yes, I think so. I saw her with her bonnet on.”
“The girl’s out, too, I take it, or she’d have heard me,” remarked Mrs. Dyke, as she took her seat on the shabby red sofa, and pushed her bonnet back from her hot and comely face. “And how are we going on up there, sir?”—pointing to the ceiling.
“Very slowly. He cannot get rid of the fever.”
She lodged the elegant umbrella against the sofa’s arm and turned sideways to face me. I had sat down by the window, not caring to go back and run the risk of disturbing Roger.
“Now come, sir,” she said, “let us talk comfortable: you won’t mind giving me your opinion, I dare say. I have looked out for an opportunity to ask it: you being what you are, sir, and his good friend. Them two—they don’t hit it off well together, do they?”
Knowing she must allude to Bevere and his wife, I had no ready answer at hand. Mrs. Dyke took silence for assent.
“Ah, I see how it is. I thought I must be right; I’ve thought it for some time. But Lizzie only laughs in my face, when I ask her. There’s no happiness between ’em; just the other thing; I told Lizzie so only yesterday. But they can’t undo what they have done, and there’s nothing left for them, sir, but to make the best of it.”
“That’s true, Mrs. Dyke. And I think Lizzie might do more towards it than she does. If she would only——”
“Only try to get a bit into his ways and manners and not offend him with hers,” put in discerning Mrs. Dyke, when I hesitated, “He is as nice a young gentleman as ever lived, and I believe has the making in him of a good husband. But Lizzie is vulgar and her ways are vulgar; and instead of checking herself and remembering that he is just the opposite, and that naturally it must offend him, she lets herself grow more so day by day. I know what’s what, sir, having been used to the ways of gentry when I was a young woman, for I lived cook for some years in a good family.”
“Lizzie’s ways are so noisy.”
“Her ways are noisy and rampagious,” assented Mrs. Dyke, “more particularly when she has been at her drops; and noise puts out a sick man.”
“Her drops!” I repeated, involuntarily, the word calling up a latent doubt that lay in my mind.
“When girls that have been in busy employment all day and every day, suddenly settle down to idleness, they sometimes slip into this habit or that habit, not altogether good for themselves, which they might never else have had time to think of,” remarked Mrs. Dyke. “I’ve come in here more than once lately and seen Lizzie drinking hot spirits-and-water in the daytime: I know you must have seen the same, sir, or I’d not mention it—and beer she’ll take unlimited.”
Of course I had seen it.
“I think she must have learnt it at the counter; drinking never was in our family, and I never knew that it was in her father’s,” continued Mrs. Dyke. “But some of the young women, serving at these bars, get to like the drink through having the sight and smell of it about ’em all day long.”
That was more than likely, but I did not say so, not caring to continue that branch of the subject.
“The marriage was a misfortune, Mrs. Dyke.”
“For him I suppose you gentlemen consider it was,” she answered. “It will be one for her if he should die: she’d have to go back to work again and she has got out o’ the trick of it. Ah! she thought grand things of it at first, naturally, marrying a gentleman! But unequal marriages rarely turn out well in the long run. I knew nothing of it till it was done and over, or I should have advised her against it; my husband’s place lay in a different part of London then—Eaton Square way. Better, perhaps, for Lizzie had she gone out to service in the country, like her sister.”
“Did she always live in London?”
“Dear, no, sir, nor near it; she lived down in Essex with her father and mother. But she came up to London on a visit, and fell in love with the public life, through getting to know a young woman who was in it. Nothing could turn her, once her mind was set upon it; and being sharp and clever, quick at figures, she got taken on at some wine-vaults in the city. After staying there awhile and giving satisfaction, she changed to the refreshment-room at the Bell-and-Clapper. Miss Panken went there soon after, and they grew very intimate. The young girl left, who had been there before her; very pretty she was: I don’t know what became of her. At some of the counters they have but one girl; at others, two.”
“It is a pity girls should be at them at all—drawing on the young men! I am speaking generally, Mrs. Dyke.”
“It is a pity the young men should be so soft as to be drawn on by them—if you’ll excuse my saying it, sir,” she returned, quickly. “But there—what would you? Human nature’s the same all the world over: Jack and Jill. The young men like to talk to the girls, and the girls like very much to talk to the young men. Of course these barmaids lay themselves out to the best advantage, in the doing of their hair and their white frills, and what not, which is human nature again, sir. Look at a young lady in a drawing-room: don’t she set herself off when she is expecting the beaux to call?”
Mrs. Dyke paused for want of breath. Her tongue ran on fast, but it told of good sense.
“The barmaids are but like the young ladies, sir; and the young fellows that congregate there get to admire them, while sipping their drops at the counter; if, as I say, they are soft enough. When the girls get hold of one softer than the rest, why, perhaps one of them gets over him so far as to entrap him to give her his name—just as safe as you hook and land a fish.”
“And I suppose it has a different termination sometimes?”
Honest Mrs. Dyke shook her head. “We won’t talk about that, sir: I can’t deny that it may happen once in a way. Not often, let’s hope. The young women, as a rule, are well-conducted and respectable: they mostly know how to take care of themselves.”
“I should say Miss Panken does.”
Mrs. Dyke’s broad face shone with merriment. “Ain’t she impudent? Oh yes, sir, Polly Panken can take care of herself, never fear. But it’s not a good atmosphere for young girls to be in, you see, sir, these public bars; whether it may be only at a railway counter, or at one of them busy taverns in the town, or at the gay places of amusement, the manners and morals of the girls get to be a bit loose, as it were, and they can’t help it.”
“Or anybody else, I suppose.”
“No, sir, not as things are; and it’s just a wrong upon them that they should be exposed to it. They’d be safer and quieter in a respectable service, which is the state of life many of ’em were born to—though a few may be superior—and better behaved, too: manners is sure to get a bit corrupted in the public line. But the girls like their liberty; they like the free-and-easy public life and its idleness; they like the flirting and the chaffing and the nonsense that goes on; they like to be dressed up of a day as if they were so many young ladies, their hair done off in bows and curls and frizzes, and their hands in cuffs and lace-edgings; now and then you may see ’em with a ring on. That’s a better life, they think, than they’d lead as servants or shop-women, or any of the other callings open to this class of young women: and perhaps it is. It’s easier, at any rate. I’ve heard that some quite superior young people are in it, who might be, or were, governesses, and couldn’t find employment, poor young ladies, through the market being so overstocked. Ah, it is a hard thing, sir, for a well-brought-up young woman to find lady-like employment nowadays. One thing is certain,” concluded Mrs. Dyke, “that we shall never have a lack of barmaids in this country until a law is passed by the legislature—which, happen, never will be passed—to forbid girls serving in these places. There’d be less foolishness going on then, and a deal less drinking.”
These were Pitt’s ideas over again.
A loud laugh outside, and Lizzie came running in. “Why, Aunt Dyke, are you there!—entertaining Mr. Johnny Ludlow!” she exclaimed, as she threw herself into a chair. “Well, I never. And what do you two think I am going to do to-morrow?”
“Now just you mind your manners, young woman,” advised the aunt.
“I am minding them—don’t you begin blowing-up,” retorted Lizzie, her face brimming over with good-humour.
“You might have your things stole; you and the girl out together,” said Mrs. Dyke.
“There’s nothing to steal but chairs and tables. I’m sure I’m much obliged to you both for sitting here to take care of them. You’ll never guess what I am going to do,” broke off Lizzie, with shrieks of laughter. “I am going to take my old place again at the Bell-and-Clapper, and serve behind the counter for the day: Mabel Falkner wants a holiday. Won’t it be fun!”
“Your husband will not let you; he would not like it,” I said in my haste, while Mrs. Dyke sat in open-mouthed amazement.
“And I shall put on my old black dress; I’ve got it yet; and be a regular barmaid again. A lovely costume, that black is!” ironically ran on Lizzie. “Neat and not gaudy, as the devil said when he painted his tail pea-green. You need not look as though you thought I had made acquaintance with him and heard him say it, Mr. Johnny; I only borrowed it from one of Bulwer’s novels that I read the other day.”
If I did not think that, I thought Madam Lizzie had been making acquaintance this afternoon with something else. “Drops!” as Mrs. Dyke called it.
“There I shall be to-morrow, at the old work, and you can both come and see me at it,” said Lizzie. “I’ll treat you more civilly, Mr. Johnny, than Polly Panken did.”
“But I say that your husband will not allow you to go,” I repeated to her.
“Ah, he’s in bed,” she laughed; “he can’t get out of it to stop me.”
“You are all on the wrong tack, Lizzie girl,” spoke up the aunt, severely. “If you don’t mind, it will land you in shoals and quicksands. How dare you think of running counter to what you know your husband’s wishes would be?”
She received this with a louder laugh than ever. “He will not know anything about it, Aunt Dyke. Unless Mr. Johnny Ludlow here should tell him. It would not make any difference to me if he did,” she concluded, with candour.
And as I felt sure it would not, I held my tongue.
By degrees, as the days went on, Roger got about again, and when I left London he was back at St. Bartholomew’s. Other uncanny things had happened to me during this visit of mine, but not one of them brought with it so heavy a weight as the thought of poor Roger Bevere and his blighted life.
“His health may get all right if he will give up drinking,” were the last words Pitt said to me. “He has promised to do so.”
The weather was cold and wintry as we began our railway journey. From two to three years have gone on, you must please note, since the time told of above. Mr. Brandon was about to spend the Christmas with his sister, Lady Bevere—who had quitted Hampshire and settled not far from Brighton—and she had sent me an invitation to accompany him.
We took the train at Evesham. It was Friday, and the shortest day in the year; St. Thomas, the twenty-first of December. Some people do not care to begin a journey on a Friday, thinking it bodes ill-luck: I might have thought the same had I foreseen what was to happen before we got home again.
London reached, we met Roger Bevere at the Brighton Station, as agreed upon. He was to travel down with us. I had not seen him since the time of his illness in London, except for an hour once when I was in town upon some business for the Squire. Nothing had transpired to his friends, so far as I knew, of the fatal step he had taken; that was a secret still.
I cannot say I much liked Roger’s appearance now, as he sat opposite me in the railway-carriage, leaning against the arm of the comfortably-cushioned seat. His fair, pleasant face was gentle as ever, but the once clear blue eyes no longer looked very clear and did not meet ours freely; his hands shook, his fingers were restless. Mr. Brandon did not much like the signs either, to judge by the way he stared at him.
“Have you been well lately, Roger?”
“Oh yes, thank you, Uncle John.”
“Well, your looks don’t say much for you.”
“I am rather hard-worked,” said Roger. “London is not a place to grow rosy in.”
“Do you like your new work?” continued Mr. Brandon. For Roger had done with St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, and was outdoor assistant to a surgeon in private practice, a Mr. Anderson.
“I like it better than the hospital work, Uncle John.”
“Ah! A fine idea that was of yours—wanting to set up in practice for yourself the minute you had passed. Your mother did well to send the letter to me and ask my advice. Some of you boys—boys, and no better—fresh from your hospital studies, screw a brass-plate on your door, announcing yourselves to the world as qualified surgeons. A few of you go a step further and add M.D.”
“Many of us take our degree as physician at once, Uncle John,” said Roger. “It is becoming quite the custom.”
“Just so: the custom!” retorted Mr. Brandon, cynically. “Why didn’t you do it, and modestly call yourself Dr. Bevere? In my former days, young man, when some ultra-grave ailment necessitated application to a physician, we went to him in all confidence, knowing that he was a man of steady years, of long-tried experience, whose advice was to be relied upon. Now, if you are dying and call in some Dr. So-and-so, you may find him a young fellow of three or four and twenty. As likely as not only an M.B. in reality, who has arrogated to himself the title of Doctor. For I hear some of them do it.”
“But they think they have a right to be called so, Uncle John. The question——”
“What right?” sharply demanded Mr. Brandon. “What gives it them?”
“Well—courtesy, I suppose,” hesitated Roger.
“Oh,” said Mr. Brandon.
I laughed. His tone was so quaint.
“Yes, you may laugh, Johnny Ludlow—showing your thoughtlessness! There’ll soon be no modesty left in the world,” he continued; “there’ll soon be no hard, plodding work. Formerly, men were content to labour on patiently for years, to attain success, whether in fame, fortune, or for a moderate competency. Now they must take a leap into it. Tradespeople retire before middle-age, merchants make colossal fortunes in a decade, and (to leave other anomalies alone) you random young hospital students spring into practice full-fledged M.D.’s.”
“The world is changing, Uncle John.”
“It is,” assented Mr. Brandon. “I’m not sure that we shall know it by-and-by.”
From Brighton terminus we had a drive of two or three miles across country to get to Prior’s Glebe—as Lady Bevere’s house was named. It was old-fashioned and commodious, and stood in a large square garden that was encircled by a thick belt of towering shrubs. Nothing was to be seen around it but a huge stretch of waste land; half a-mile-off, rose a little church and a few scattered cottages. “The girls must find this lively!” exclaimed Roger, taking a comprehensive look about him as we drove up in the twilight.
Lady Bevere, kind, gentle, simple-mannered as ever, received us lovingly. Mr. Brandon kissed her, and she kissed me and Roger. It was the first Christmas Roger had spent at home since rushing into that mad act of his; he had always invented some excuse for declining. The eldest son, Edmund, was in the navy; the second, George, was in the Church; Roger was the third; and the youngest, John, had a post in a merchant’s house in Calcutta. Of the four girls, only the eldest, Mary, and the youngest were at home. The little one was named Susan, but they called her Tottams. The other two were on a visit to their aunt, the late Sir Edmund Bevere’s sister.
Dinner was waiting when we got in, and I could not snatch half a word with Roger while making ready for it. He and I had two little rooms opening to each other. But when we went upstairs for the night we could talk at will; and I put my candle down on his chest of drawers.
“How are things going with you, Roger?”
“Don’t talk of it,” he cried, with quite a burst of emotion. “Things cannot be worse than they are.”
“I fancy you have not pulled up much, as Pitt used to call it, have you, old friend? Your hands and your face tell tales.”
“How can I pull up?” he retorted.
“You promised that you would.”
“Ay. Promised! When all the world’s against a fellow, he may not be able to keep his promises. Perhaps may not care to.”
“How is Lizzie?” I said then, dropping my voice.
“Don’t talk of her,” repeated Bevere, in a tone of despair; despair if I ever heard it. It shut me up.
“Johnny, I’m nearly done over; sick of it all,” he went on. “You don’t know what I have to bear.”
“Still—as regards yourself, you might pull up,” I persisted, for to give in to him, and his mood and his ways, would never do. “You might if you chose, Bevere.”
“I suppose I might, if I had any hope. But there’s none; none. People tell us that as we make our bed so we must lie upon it. I made mine in an awful fashion years ago, and I must pay the penalty.”
“I gather from this—forgive me, Bevere—that you and your wife don’t get along together.”
“Get along! Things with her are worse than you may think for. She—she—well, she has not done her best to turn out well. Heaven knows I’d have tried my best; the thing was done, and nothing else was left for us: but she has not let me. We are something like cat-and-dog now, and I am not living with her.”
“No!”
“That is, I inhabit other lodgings. She is at the old place. I am with a medical man in Bloomsbury, you know. It was necessary for me to be near him, and six months ago I went. Lizzie acquiesced in that; the matter was obvious. I sometimes go to see her; staying, perhaps, from Saturday to Monday, and come away cursing myself.”
“Don’t. Don’t, Bevere.”
“She has taken to drink,” he whispered, biting his agitated lips. “For pretty near two years now she has not been a day sober. As Heaven hears me, I believe not one day. You may judge what I’ve had to bear.”
“Could nothing be done?”
“I tried to do it, Johnny. I coaxed, persuaded, threatened her by turns, but she would not leave it off. For four months in the autumn of last year, I did not let a drop of anything come into the house; drinking water myself all the while—for her sake. It was of no use: she’d go out and get it: every public-house in the place knows her. I’d come home from the hospital in the evening and find her raving and rushing about the rooms like a mad woman, or else lying incapable on the bed. Believe me, I tried all I could to keep her straight; and Mrs. Dyke, a good, motherly woman, you remember, did her best to help me; but she was too much for both of us, the demon of drink had laid too fast hold of her.”
“Does she come bothering you at your new lodgings?”
“She doesn’t know where to come,” replied Bevere; “I should not dare to tell her. She thinks I am in the doctor’s house, and she does not know where that is. I have told her, and her Aunt Dyke has told her, that if ever she attempts to come after me there, I shall stop her allowance. Scott—you remember Richard Scott!”
“Of course.”
“Well, Scott lives now near the Bell-and-Clapper: he is with a surgeon there. Scott goes to see her for me once a-week, or so, and brings me news of her. I declare to you, Johnny Ludlow, that when I first catch sight of his face I turn to a cold shiver, dreading what he may have to say. And you talk about pulling up! With such a wife as that, one is thankful to drown care once in a way.”
“I—I suppose, Roger, nothing about her has ever come out here?”
He started up, his face on fire. “Johnny, lad, if it came out here—to my mother—to all of them—I should die. Say no more. The case is hopeless, and I am hopeless with it.”
Any way, it seemed hopeless to talk further then, and I took up my candle. “Just one more word, Roger: Does Lizzie know you have come down here? She might follow you.”
His face took a look of terror. The bare idea scared him. “I say, don’t you invent impossible horrors,” gasped he. “She couldn’t come; she has never heard of the place in connection with me. She has never heard anything about my people, or where they live, or don’t live, or whether I have any. Good-night.”
“Good-night, Roger.”
III.
People say you can never sleep well in a strange bed. I know I did not sleep well, but very badly, that first night at Lady Bevere’s. It was not the fault of the bed, or of its strangeness; it was Roger’s trouble haunting me.
He did not seem to have slept well either, to judge by his looks when I went into his room in the morning. His fair, pleasant face was pale; his lips trembled, the blue eyes had torment in their depths.
“I have had a bad dream,” he said, in answer to a remark I made. “An awful dream. It came to me in my last sleep this morning; and morning dreams, they say, come true. I’m afraid I have you to thank for it, Johnny.”
“Me!”
“You suggested last night, startling me well-nigh out of my senses by it, that Lizzie might follow me down here. Well, I dreamt she did so. I saw her in the dining-room, haranguing my mother, her red-gold hair streaming over her shoulders and her arms stretched wildly out. Uncle John stood in a corner of the room, looking on.”
I felt sorry, and told him so: of course my speaking had prompted the dream. He need not fear. If Lizzie did not know he had come down here, or that his family lived here, or anything about them, she could not follow him.
“You see shadows where no shadows are, Roger.”
“When a man spoils his life on its threshold, it is all shadow; past, present, and future.”
“Things may mend, you know.”
“Mend!” he returned: “how can they mend? They may grow worse; never mend. My existence is one long torment. Day by day I live in dread of what may come: of her bringing down upon herself some public disgrace and my name with it. No living being, man or woman, can imagine what it is to me; the remorse for my folly, the mortification, the shame. I believe honestly that but for a few things instilled into me at my mother’s knee in childhood, I should have put an end to myself.”
“It is a long lane that has no turning.”
“Lanes have different outlets: bad as well as good.”
“I think breakfast must be ready, Roger.”
“And I started with prospects so fair!” he went on. “Never a thought or wish in my heart but to fulfil honestly the duties that lay in my way to the best of my power, to God and to man. And I should have done it, but for —— Johnny Ludlow,” he broke off, with a deep breath of emotion, “when I see other young fellows travelling along the same wrong road, once earnest, well-meaning lads as I was, not turning aside of their own wilful, deliberate folly, but ensnared to it by the evil works and ways they encounter in that teeming city, my soul is wrung with pity for them. I sometimes wonder whether God will punish them for what they can hardly avoid; or whether He will not rather let His anger fall on those who throw temptations in their way.”
Poor Roger, poor Roger! Mr. Brandon used to talk of the skeleton in his closet: he little suspected how terrible was the skeleton in Roger’s.
Lady Bevere kept four servants: for she was no better off, except for a little income that belonged to herself, than is many another admiral’s widow. An upper maid, Harriet, who helped to wait, and did sewing: a housemaid and a cook; and an elderly man, Jacob, who had lived with them in the time of Sir Edmund.
During the afternoon of this day, Saturday, Roger and I set off to walk to Brighton with the two girls. Not by the high-road, but by a near way (supposed to cut off half the distance) across a huge, dreary, flat marsh, of which you could see neither the beginning nor the end. In starting, we had reached the gate at the foot of the garden, when Harriet came running down the path. She was a tall, thin, civil young woman, with something in her voice or in her manner of speaking that seemed to my ear familiar, though I knew not how or why.
“Miss Mary,” she said, “my lady asks have you taken umbrellas, if you please. She thinks it will snow when the sun goes down.”
“Yes, yes; tell mamma we have them,” replied Mary: and Harriet ran back.
“How was it the mother came to so lonely a spot as this?” questioned Roger, as we went along, the little one, Tottams, jumping around me. “You girls must find it lively?”
Mary laughed as she answered. “We do find it lively, Roger, and we often ask her why she came. But when mamma and George looked at the place, it was a bright, hot summer’s day. They liked it then: it has plenty of rooms in it, you see, though they are old-fashioned; and the rent was so very reasonable. Be quiet, Tottams.”
“So reasonable that I should have concluded the place had a ghost in it,” said Roger.
“George’s curacy was at Brighton in those days, you know, Roger: that is why we came to the neighbourhood.”
“And George had left for a better curacy before you had well settled down here! Miss Tottams, if you pull at Johnny Ludlow like that, I shall send you back by yourself.”
“True. But we like the place very well now we are used to it, and we know a few nice people. One family—the Archers—we like very much. Six daughters, Roger; one of them, Bessy, would make you a charming wife. You will have to marry, you know, when you set up in practice. They are coming to us next Wednesday evening.”
My eye caught Roger’s. I did not intend it. Caught the bitter expression in it as he turned away.
Brighton reached, we went on the pier. Then, while they did some commissions for Lady Bevere at various shops, I went to the post-office, to register two letters for Mr. Brandon. Tottams wanted to keep with me, but they took her, saying she’d be too troublesome. The letters registered, I came out of the office, and was turning away, when some one touched me on the arm.
“Mr. Ludlow, I think! How are you?”
To my surprise it was Richard Scott. He seemed equally surprised to see me. I told him I had come down with Roger Bevere to spend Christmas week at Prior’s Glebe.
“Lucky fellow!” exclaimed Scott, “I have to go back to London and drudgery this evening: came down with my governor last night for an operation to-day. Glad to say it’s all well over.”
But a thought had flashed into my mind: I ought not to have said so much. Drawing Scott out of the passing crowd, I spoke.
“Look here, Scott: you must be cautious not to say that Bevere’s down here. You must not speak of it.”
“Speak where?” asked Scott, turning his head towards me. He had put his arm within mine as we walked along. “Where?”
“Oh—well—up with you, you know—in Bevere’s old quarters. Or—or in the railway-room at the Bell-and-Clapper.”
Scott laughed. “I understand. Madam Lizzie might be coming after him to his mother’s. But—why, what an odd thing!”
Some thought seemed to have struck him suddenly. He paused in his walk as well as in his speech.
“I dare say it was nothing,” he added, going on again. “Be at ease as to Bevere, Ludlow. I should as soon think of applying to him a lighted firebrand.”
“But what is it you call odd?” I asked, feeling sure that, whatever it might be, it was connected with Bevere.
“Why, this,” said Scott. “Last night, when we got here, I left my umbrella in the carriage, having a lot of other things to see to of my own and the governor’s. I went back as soon as I found it out, but could hear nothing of it. Just now I went up again and got it”—slightly showing the green silk one he held in his hand. “A train from London came in while I stood there, bringing a heap of passengers. One of them looked like Lizzie.”
I could not speak from consternation.
“Having nothing to do while waiting for my umbrella to be brought, I was watching the crowd flock out of the station,” continued Scott. “Amidst it I saw a head of red-gold hair, just like Lizzie’s. I could not see more of her than that; some other young woman’s head was close to hers.”
“But do you think it was Lizzie?”
“No, I do not. So little did I think it that it went clean out of my mind until you spoke. It must have been some accidental resemblance; nothing more; red-gold hair is not so very uncommon. There’s nothing to bring her down to Brighton.”
“Unless she knows that he is here.”
“That’s impossible.”
“What a wretched business it is altogether!”
“You might well say that if you knew all,” returned Scott. “She drinks like a fish. Like a fish, I assure you. Twice over she has had a shaking-fit of three days’ duration—I suppose you take me, Ludlow—had to be watched in her bed; the last time was not more than a week ago. She’ll do for herself, if she goes on. It’s an awful clog on Bevere. The marriage in itself was a piece of miserable folly, but if she had been a different sort of woman and kept herself steady and cared for him——”
“The problem to me is, how Bevere could have been led away by such a woman.”
“Ah, but you must not judge of that by what she is now. She was a very attractive girl, and kept her manners within bounds. Just the kind of girl that many a silly young ape would lose his head for; and Bevere, I take it, lost his heart as well as his head.”
“Did you know of the marriage at the time?”
“Not until after it had taken place.”
“They could never have pulled well together as man and wife; two people so opposite as they are.”
“No, I fancy not,” answered Richard Scott, looking straight out before him, but as though he saw nothing. “She has not tried at it. Once his wife, safe and sure, she thought she had it all her own way—as of course in one sense she had, and could give the reins to her inclination. Nothing that Bevere wanted her to do, would she do. He wished her to give up all acquaintance with the two girls at the Bell-and-Clapper; but not she. He——”
“Is Miss Panken flourishing?”
“Quite,” laughed Scott, “The other one came to grief—Mabel Falkner.”
“Did she! I thought she seemed rather nice.”
“She was a very nice little girl indeed, as modest as Polly Panken is impudent. The one could take care of herself; the other couldn’t—or didn’t. Well, Mabel fell into trouble, and of course lost her post. Madam Lizzie immediately gave her house-room, setting Bevere, who forbade it, at defiance. What with grief and other disasters, the girl fell sick there; had an illness, and had to be kept I don’t know how long. It put Bevere out uncommonly.”
“Is this lately?”
“Oh no; last year. Lizzie—— By the way,” broke off Scott, stopping again and searching his pocket, “I’ve got a note from her for Bevere. You can give it him.”
The words nearly seared away my senses. A note from Lizzie to Bevere! “Why, then, she must know he is here!” I cried.
“You don’t understand,” quietly said Scott, giving me a note from his pocket-book. “A day or two ago, I met Lizzie near the Bell-and-Clapper. She——”
“She is well enough to be out, then!”
“Yes. At times she is as well as you are. Well, I met her, and she began to give me a message for her husband, which I could not then wait to hear. So she sent this note to me later, to be delivered to him when we next met. I had not time to go to him yesterday, and here the note is still.”
It was addressed “Mr. Bevary.” I pointed out the name to Scott.
“Does she not know better, think you?”
“Very likely not,” he answered. “A wrong letter, more or less, in a name, signifies but little to one of Lizzie’s standard of education. It is not often, I expect, she sees the name on paper, or has to write it. Fare you well, Ludlow. Remember me to Bevere.”
Scott had hardly disappeared when they met me. I said nothing of having seen him. After treating Tottams to some tarts and a box of bonbons, we set off home again; the winter afternoon was closing, and it was nearly dark when we arrived. Getting Roger into his room, I handed him the note, and told him how I came by it. He showed me the contents.