"You are always so good," she said.

Then he took pity on Sarah's impatience, and left the little worshipper to the interview with her idol which she so earnestly desired.

"I will go and pay my respects to my cousins," said John.

But the banqueting-hall was deserted, and gaps in the row of clogs and goloshes suggested that the old ladies were taking a morning stroll.

They had not thought it proper to drive, save in a close carriage, since their brother's death; and on such a warm day of spring weather a close carriage was not inviting to country-bred people.

CHAPTER VIII

John took his hat and stepped out once more upon the drive, and there met Dr. Blundell, who had left his dog-cart at the stables, and was walking up to the house.

He did not pause to a.n.a.lyze the sentiment of slight annoyance which clouded his usual good humour; but Dr. Blundell divined it, with the quickness of an ultra-sensitive nature. He showed no signs that he had done so.

"It was you I came to see," he said, shaking hands with John. "I heard--you know how quickly news spreads here--that you had arrived. I hoped you might spare me a few moments for a little conversation."

"Certainly," said John. "Will you come in, or shall we take a turn?"

"You will be glad of a breath of fresh air after your journey,"

said the doctor, and he led the way across the south terrace, to a sheltered corner of the level plateau upon which the house was built, which was known as the fountain garden.

It was rather a deserted garden, thickly surrounded and overgrown by shrubs. Through the immense spreading Portuguese laurels which sheltered it from the east, little or no sunshine found its way to the grey, moss-grown basin and the stone figures supporting it; over which a thin stream of water continually flowed with a melancholy rhythm, in perpetual twilight.

A giant ivy grew rankly and thickly about the stone b.u.t.tresses of this eastern corner of the house, and around a great mullioned window which overlooked the fountain garden, and which was the window of Lady Mary's bedroom.

"These shrubberies want thinning," said John, looking round him rather disgustedly. "This place is reeking with damp. I should like to cut down some of these poisonous laurels, and let in the air and the sunshine, and open out the view of the Brawnton hills."

"And why don't you?" said the doctor, with such energy in his tone that John stopped short in his pacing of the gravel walk, and looked at him.

The two men were almost as unlike in appearance as in character.

The doctor was nervous, irritable, and intense in manner; with deep-set, piercing eyes that glowed like hot coal when he was moved or excited. A tall, gaunt man, lined and wrinkled beyond his years; careless of appearance, so far as his shabby clothes were concerned, yet careful of detail, as was proven by spotless linen and well-preserved, delicate hands.

He was indifferent utterly to the opinion of others, to his own worldly advancement, or to any outer consideration, when in pursuit of the profession he loved; and he knew no other interest in life, save one. He had the face of a fanatic or an enthusiast; but also of a man whose understanding had been so cultivated as to temper enthusiasm with judgment.

He had missed success, and was neither resigned to his disappointment, nor embittered by it.

The gaze of those dark eyes was seldom introspective; rather, as it seemed, did they look out eagerly, sadly, pitifully at the pain and sorrow of the world; a pain he toiled manfully to lessen, so far as his own infinitesimal corner of the universe was concerned.

John Crewys, on the other hand, was, to the most casual observer, a successful man; a man whose personality would never be overlooked.

There was a more telling force in his composure than in the doctor's nervous energy. His clear eyes, his bright, yet steady glance, inspired confidence.

The doctor might have been taken for a poet, but John looked like a philosopher.

He was also, as obviously, in appearance, a man of the world, and a Londoner, as the doctor was evidently a countryman, and a hermit. His advantages over the doctor included his voice, which was as deep and musical as the tones of his companion were harsh.

The manner, no less than the matter of John's speech, had early brought him distinction.

Nature, rather than cultivation, had bestowed on him the faculty of conveying the impression he wished to convey, in tones that charm; and held his auditors, and penetrated ears dulled and fatigued by monotony and indistinctness.

The more impa.s.sioned his pleading, the more utterly he held his own emotion in check; the more biting his subtly chosen words, the more courteous his manner; now deadly earnest, now humorously scornful, now graciously argumentative, but always skilfully and designedly convincing.

The doctor, save in the presence of a patient, had no such control over himself as John Crewys carried from the law-courts, into his life of every day.

"Why don't you," he said, in fiery tones, "let in air and life, and a view of the outside world, and as much sunshine as possible into this musty old house? You have the power, if you had only the will."

"You speak figuratively, I notice," said John. "I should be much obliged if you would tell me exactly what you mean."

He would have answered in warmer and more kindly tones had Sarah's words not rung upon his ear.

Was the doctor going to fight Lady Mary's battles now, and with him, of all people in the world? As though there were any one in the world to whom her interests could be dearer than--

John stopped short in his thoughts, and looked attentively at the doctor. His heart smote him. How pallid was that tired face; and the hollow eyes, how sad and tired too! The doctor had been up all night, in a wretched isolated cottage, watching a man die--but John did not know that.

He perceived that this was no meddler, but a man speaking of something very near his heart; no presuming and interfering outsider who deserved a snub, but a man suffering from some deep and hidden cause.

The doctor's secret was known to John long before he had finished what he had to say; but he listened attentively, and gave no sign that this was so.

"She will die," said Blundell, "if this goes on;" and he neither mentioned any name, nor did John Crewys require him to do so.

The doctor's words came hurrying out incoherently from the depths of his anxiety and earnestness.

"She will die if this goes on. There were few hopes and little enough pleasure in her life before; but what is left to her now? _De mortuis nil nisi bonum._ But just picture to yourself for a moment, man, what her life has been."

He stopped and drew breath, and strove to speak calmly and dispa.s.sionately.

"I was born in the valley of the Youle," he said. "My people live in a cottage--they call it a house, but it's just a farm--on the river,--Cullacott. I was a raw medical student when _she_ came here as a child. Her father was killed in the Afghan War. He had quarrelled with his uncle, they said, who afterwards succeeded to the earldom; so she was left to the guardianship of Sir Timothy, a distant cousin.

Every one was sorry for her, because Sir Timothy was her guardian, and because she was a little young thing to be left to the tender mercies of the two old ladies, who were old even then. If you will excuse my speaking frankly about the family"--John nodded--"they bullied their brother always; what with their superiority of birth, and his being so much younger, and so on. Their bringing-up made him what he was, I am sure. He went nowhere; he always fancied people were laughing at him.

His feeling about his--his mother's lowly origin seemed to pervade his whole life. He exaggerated the importance of birth till it became almost a mania. If you hadn't known the man, you couldn't have believed a human being--one of the million crawling units on the earth--could be so absurdly inflated with self-importance. It was pitiful. He went nowhere, and saw no one. I believe he thought that Providence had sent a wife of high rank to his very door to enable him partially to wipe out his reproach. She looked like a child when she came, but she shot up very suddenly into womanhood. If you ask me if she was unhappy, I declare I don't think so. She had never realized, I should think, what it was to be snubbed or found fault with in her life. She was a motherless child, and had lived with her old grandfather and her young father, and had been very much spoilt. And they were both s.n.a.t.c.hed away from her, as it were, in a breath; and she alone in the world, with an uncle who was only glad to get rid of her to her stranger guardian. Well,--she was too young and too bright and too gay to be much downcast for all the old women could do. She laughed at their scolding, and when they tried severity she appealed to Sir Timothy. The old doctor who was my predecessor here told me at the time that he thought she had bewitched Sir Timothy; but afterwards he said that he believed it was only that Sir Timothy had made up his mind even then to quarter the Setoun arms with his own. Anyway, he went against his sisters for the first and only time in his life, and they learnt that Lady Mary was not to be interfered with. Whether it was grat.i.tude or just the childish satisfaction of triumphing over her two enemies, I can't tell, but she married him in less than two years after she came to live at Barracombe. The old ladies didn't know whether to be angry or pleased. They wanted him to marry, and they wanted his wife to be well-born, no doubt; but to have a mere child set over them! Well, the marriage took place in London."

"I was present," said John.

"The people here said things about it that may have got round to Sir Timothy; but I don't know. He never came down to the village, except to church, where he sat away from everybody, in the gallery curtained off. Anyway, he wouldn't have the wedding down here. He invited all her relatives, and none of them had a word to say. It wasn't as if she were an heiress. I believe she had next to nothing. She was just like a child, laughing, and pleased at getting married, and with all her finery, perhaps,--or at getting rid of her lessons with the old women may be,--and the thought of babies of her own. Who knows what a girl thinks of?" said the doctor, harshly. "I didn't see her again for a long time after. But then I came down; the Brawnton doctor was getting old, and it was a question whether I should succeed him or go on in London, where I was doing well enough. And--and I came here," said the doctor, abruptly.

John nodded again. He filled in the gaps of the doctor's narrative for himself, and understood.

"She had changed very much. All the gaiety and laughter gone. But she was wrapt up in the child as I never saw any woman wrapt up in a brat before or since; and I've known some that were pretty ridiculous in that way," said the doctor, and his voice shook more than ever. "It was--touching, for she was but a child herself; and Peter, between you and me, was an unpromising doll for a child to play with. He was ugly and ill-tempered, and he wouldn't be caressed, or dressed up, or made much of, from the first minute he had a will of his own. As he grew bigger he was for ever having rows with his father, and his mother was for ever interceding for him. He was idle at school; but he was a manly boy enough over games and sport, and a capital shot. Anyway, she managed to be proud of him, G.o.d knows how. I shouldn't wonder if this war was the making of him, though, poor chap, if he's spared to see the end of it all."

"I have no doubt the discipline will do him a great deal of good,"

said John, dryly.

It cannot be said that his brief interview at Southampton had impressed John with a favourable opinion of the sulky and irresponsive youth, who had there listened to his mother's messages with lowering brow and downcast eye. Peter had betrayed no sign of emotion, and almost none of grat.i.tude for John's hurried and uncomfortable journey to convey that message.

"A few hard knocks will do you no harm, my young friend; and I almost wish you may get them," John had said to himself on his homeward journey; dreading, yet expecting, the news that awaited him at Peter's home, and for which he had done his best to prepare the boy.