A Bachelor's Dream by Margaret Wolfe Hungerford (most difficult books to read TXT) 📖

that was desperate enough. The Doctor returned it, and asked doubtfully:

"Mademoiselle, what do you wish me to do? You wish to help him?"

"Ah, sir--yes!" she cried eagerly, and then stopped, faltering. "But I have no money," she said, her head drooping.

The Doctor walked to the end of the room, came back, and stood beside her.

"My poor child, I understand you; but it must not be. Why should the little you earn go to your brother? At the best it would help him only for a very little time, for I see that he says he has no present prospect of employment. In a week or two he would be in his present state again. Something else must be done."

"Ah, sir, it is easy--so easy to speak!" said the governess bitterly. "What else can be done? Who is there that will help him, poor Gustave? He is even poorer, more helpless than I, for in all this England he has not even one friend."

It needed only these words and the glance that accompanied them to turn the doubtful notion that was in the Doctor's mind into a resolve. But he had a sufficient sense of his own imprudence even now to hesitate a little before speaking again.

"Mademoiselle," he said gently, "I know that a lad such as your brother must be often placed at a great disadvantage in his endeavors to get on if, as you say, he is alone and friendless. Being a foreigner increases the difficulty, no doubt. You must let me see if I cannot remedy it."

"You will help him!" cried Alexia eagerly. She rose, her face flushing, her eyes sparkling. It was the first time he had seen them shine so, the first time that a crimson flush had dispelled that curious ivory pallor; her beauty dazzled him; he thought her grateful for the help offered to a brother whom she loved. In her heart, with perfect coolness, she was thinking him a fool, and triumphing in the victory which she foresaw that she would win through his folly. It was her first full knowledge of her power over him. "Tell me what I must do?" she exclaimed.

"Write to your brother, and tell him to come here," returned the Doctor. He spoke quickly, refusing to doubt or falter. "I have no doubt I shall be able to help him to a fitting situation before long. Until then he must remain here. You will have at least the satisfaction of knowing that he is safe then. You--you do not object to the suggestion?" he added with sudden humility, afraid that he might have spoken too coolly, too imperatively. With a sudden movement she seized his hand and pressed it.

"Object--I? Ah, sir, how can I, when you are so good, so more than kind?" She stopped, faltering. "My poor Gustave shall thank you--I cannot. For what can I say but, Thank you a hundred times!"

"Tut, tut!" said the Doctor lightly, recovering his self-possession as she released his hand. "You make too much of it--it is nothing. I am only too pleased to be able to serve you. You will write to your brother?"

"At once, sir." She was turning to the door, when a thought occurred to him--a last lingering touch of prudence and caution made him say:

"Mademoiselle, you have not told me. How did your brother know where you were--where to write to you?"

"By the papers, sir--by what you call the reports of police," she said, turning and replying without the least hesitation. "It was the first thing that he saw, my poor boy, that account of me. But he would not come here or let me know he was in England, lest I should be troubled about him, and he did not wish me to know, besides, that he was poor and distressed. I am sure of that, although he does not tell me."

She left the room, and ran fleetly up-stairs to her own sitting-room. The children were in bed, and there was no one to see her as she drew her writing-case toward her, and wrote swiftly:

"I have succeeded; my cause was won before I had time to plead it. You are at liberty to come here. If, once here, you will succeed in doing what you desire, I cannot tell. It is your affair, not mine. I have done my part. Come then, and remember yours--my brother."

* * * * *


Doctor Brudenell, paying his visit to the governess's sitting-room the next evening to bid his nephews and niece good-night, found there, not the children, but a stranger. His momentary look of surprise vanished as he recollected; and, while he spoke a few rather embarrassed words of greeting and welcome, he keenly scanned Gustave Boucheafen.

He was a handsome young fellow, tall, slender, and dark, and looking very boyish, in spite of some deep lines on the white forehead and about the small, tightly-compressed lips. His clothes were shabby, almost threadbare; there was an air of carelessness, even recklessness, about him, and yet there was something that was far more easy to feel than to describe which proclaimed him to be a gentlemen. All this the Doctor noted as he took the soft slim hand, and answered as briefly as he could the voluble speech of thanks which the young man tendered him, speaking in English less correct than Alexia's and with a certain extravagance of expression and manner which discomfited George Brudenell, and which he decided was wholly French.

But, although embarrassed, as he always was by anything fresh and new, he spoke very kindly and encouragingly to the brother, conscious always of the sister's beautiful eyes resting gently upon him; and, after a few questions asked and answered, he left the two to themselves, and was called out shortly afterward to attend a very stout old gentleman whom he had warned six months before to take his choice between present port-wine and future apoplexy. The old gentleman, being as obstinate as old people of both sexes occasionally are, had heroically chosen the port; and now, according to the account of a flushed messenger, he was enduring the punishment prophesied, and was purple already. The weary Doctor took up his hat resignedly and went out. Alexia Boucheafen, standing idly leaning against the window-frame, negligently listening to what her companion was saying, saw her employer hurrying down the steps and along the hot pavement, upon which the sun had been shining fiercely all day.

"He has gone out," she said, looking round, with a curious inflection in her voice, as though that fact had a bearing upon the conversation that had gone before.

"Already?" cried the young man eagerly. "Better than I hoped. And does he leave his study, laboratory--what does he call it?--unlocked?"

"Yes."

"You are sure?"

"Am I likely to be mistaken?"

"Of course not--no!" He moved across to the door. "Well, come, show me! Come!"

"You are in a hurry," said the governess, not stirring.

"What would you have me do?" he demanded impatiently. "Can we let time and opportunity slip together, with what we have to do?"

"Have we not done enough for the present?" she asked slowly. Calm and cold as she was, a slight irrepressible shudder shook her frame, and he eyed her incredulously.

"Your note used to be different," he said, with a meaning glance. "Enough? What do you mean?"

"I saw it." She looked at him steadily, with unflinching eyes. "I saw him!"

"You did?"

"I did."

"You! What possessed you?"

"I hardly know. I could not help it. I had a fancy that I must."

"You with fancies, you with whims and caprices!" He laughed a laugh of fierce mockery, strode across the room, took her slender wrist in his hand and felt the pulse. "Ah, you are ill, your nerves are out of order, or"--in a different tone--"you suffer from a lapse of memory, perhaps!"

"What do you mean?"--wrestling herself free, and drawing her level brows together in a sudden threatening frown.

He went on as though he had not heard her:

"I hoped that your one relapse would be your last, and pleaded for you, thinking so. It was no easy matter to win you--even you--absolution."

"Bah!" she retorted scoffingly. "Think you I do not know why it was granted? I am valuable, am I not?"

"You were."

"Were!" she cried. "Am I less now because, looking at that dead boy, I for once remembered that I was a woman? You doubt me! Who are you to dare do it? What have you done for the Cause that will weigh in the scales against what I have done? Show me the paltry pin-prick of suffering that you place against my agony?"

"Hush!" he said, in a low tone, and glancing round warningly, evidently taken aback by her sudden vehemence. "You mistake me. I wished merely to remind you."

"Goad me, rather!" she retorted with unabated passion. "I forget! I forget either the blood of the dead or the tortures of the living! I forget the oath I swore with this in my hand!"

Her fingers had been restlessly plucking at the bosom of her gown, and now she held out upon her open hand the tiny roll of red-marked paper. She looked at it for a few moments with dilating eyes, while the color died out of her face and left it impassive marble again. Then she slowly restored the little roll to her breast and turned to the door.

"Come," she said. "I will show you."


CHAPTER VI.


Doctor Brudenell realized very often the fact that the life of a London medical man, however large his practice and solvent his patients, is not by any means an enviable one. Once upon a time, when a red lamp had been a novelty, and the power to write "M. D." after his ordinary signature a delicious dignity, a patient had been to him a prodigy, something precious for its rarity, even if it called him away from his dinner or ruthlessly rang him up in the middle of the night. But that was a long time ago, in the days of his impecunious youth; and now, in his prosperous middle-age, he would often have willingly bartered a good many patients for a little more leisure.

This was particularly the case upon a hot, oppressive night a week later, a night such as London generally experiences in August. It was Saturday, and certainly it was not pleasant, after a week of fatiguing work, to be summoned as soon as he had got into his bedroom, at considerably past eleven o'clock at night, to attend a patient who resided somewhere in the wilds of Holloway.

However, there was no help for it; and the Doctor, philosophically resigning himself, and taking care to be sure that his latch-key was in his pocket, spoke a word to Mrs. Jessop, as a precaution against that worthy woman's putting up the chain of the hall door before she went to bed, and let himself out. It was a fine night, hot as it was, with a large bright moon hardly beginning to wane, and myriads of stars. Doctor Brudenell, as good and quick a walker now as he had been twenty years before, thought lightly of