Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/486

478 absolute idleness. Let us hope that, with youth on your side and the advantage of—”

He hesitated: for, although the patient’s countenance was beyond his view, he somehow felt that his eye was fixed keenly upon him.

“Go on, doctor. You were saying that, with youth on my side, and the advantage of—”

“I was about to say that, with care and a strict adherence to a healthier regimen, you have everything to hope; but, then, it is my duty to add, that without it, and in the event of your continuing the same round of hard labour which you young men christen pleasure, you will have everything to fear.”

As the young man came forward out of the gloom, and in an easy careless way lifted the paper shade from the lamp, and threw it upon the floor, the circle of light, before concentrated upon the table, seemed suddenly to expand and fill the whole room, so that doctor and patient stood face to face, and saw each other distinctly for the first time.

The doctor was right. The young man’s eyes were very bright, the face a little pale and worn, the chestnut hair—which was very abundant—a little wild and disordered, and he was startled at the similarity between the picture his imagination had formed of the man and the original now suddenly disclosed to his view.

“You doctors,” said Endwin, walking towards the mantelpiece, and lolling against the marble slab, “are great hypocrites; perhaps you are obliged to be so. One would think that the art of lying—lying naturally and with an air of authority—was included in your studies, and ranked among the most essential branches of your professional education.”

“I scarcely understand your meaning.”

“It is this,” replied Endwin; “that if you had uttered your thoughts aloud, instead of the set phrases of professional prudence, you would have said, ‘This young man has squandered his health, and perhaps his fortune too, in dissipation and reckless folly. The fortune might have been regained, but the health is gone for ever, for his constitution is undermined beyond permanent remedy. He may live a year, he may live two years, but—’ Yes, you may shake your head. I am sick of evasions—always in the same strain—and know their value. You will recommend travel in a minute. You all do.”

“My friend, if you take this absurd, excited view of the matter, how can I speak to you?”

“On the contrary, I have known the truth and faced it for several days.” He stopped for a moment to listen to the noise of carriage wheels passing along the street. “And, after all, why should such as I live? Why have I lived all this time? There is no one action of my life that has made the world one degree the better for my existence.”

As this was said half jocularly, the doctor laughed, and endeavoured to reassure his patient in the same bantering tone; but the only answer he obtained was, “Go on, doctor,” uttered with a strange mixture of good-humour and defiance. A little later he sat down to write a prescription, and, with an uneasy suspicion that it was received with as little confidence as it was given, he took his leave, remarking to himself that this was one of the strangest patients he had met with for many a month.

Alone in the dingy chamber, Endwin sat for several minutes lost in thought. It was not through any inherent melancholy in his constitution, but only in a spirit of vague and listless curiosity that he had sometimes, in former days, speculated on the manner and circumstances that would attend that certain event, so unimportant to all the world—his death.

Sometimes it was a hot struggle, and a great crash, and then life slowly ebbing away. Sometimes it was a road, in the chill night air, with hedges on either side, a sighing music among the trees, and the cold stars looking down upon him. Sometimes it was a room—quaintly furnished and far away from England—while cathedral bells clanged loud, and tried to enter the closed shutters in company with a dazzling burst of sunlight. Sometimes it was a closely-curtained, very quiet room in England; the warm glow of a dying fire-light; the ticking of falling embers in the grate; the lulling sound as of a large, hushed city; the pressure of a hand—a small, thin hand stretched out from behind the curtain, as of somebody watching through the dreary night hours—and life slowly ebbing away.

Suddenly waking from a reverie somewhere in this strange direction, he discovered himself mechanically playing with a little pink-coloured note received that morning from his Cousin Cissy.

“I think I’ll go and see Cousin Cissy,” he said to himself.

A few years ago he was to have married Cousin Cissy, for she was a gentle, bright-eyed, little creature, and she loved him with all her heart. But when it became rumoured abroad—and not altogether without foundation—that extravagance and careless living had deteriorated the value of Charles Endwin’s purse—by no means an empty one when he commenced life—Cissy’s father suddenly discovered he had a duty to perform, and very prudently broke off the match. None the less willingly, perhaps, that he saw, not very far distant, the probability of a richer and in every respect more eligible suitor in George Turldon, the clever, wealthy, broad-shouldered proprietor of the “Mountain Mills.” And so it fell, when the usual gradations of grief and pettish opposition to the change of suitors were gradually passed, that Cissy was married to George Turldon, and lived in the fine lawn-fronted villa he had built within view of the mills. In his own hard matter-of-fact way, George Turldon loved his wife. She liked jewels, and he brought her glittering cases from London; she was fond of flowers, and he festooned the garden with the brightest and the gayest. He always took her to the county balls, and was proud of his wife, and petted her, and worked harder than ever at the mills. He bore no ill-will towards Charles, who had, indeed, lately become to be regarded as a little bit of a scapegrace; but was rather inclined to extend to him the pity he always felt for those who lived without any regular employment or definite object in life. Whenever Charles came to pay them a few days’