Johnny Ludlow Fourth Series Part 75

Scott finished dressing the arm, giving the patient sundry cautions meanwhile; and I got up to leave. Lizzie had stepped outside and was leaning over the little wooden entrance-gate, chanting a song to herself and gazing up and down the quiet road.

"What am I to say to your mother?" I said to Bevere in a low tone. "You knew I had to write to her."

"Oh, say I am all right," he answered. "I have written to her myself now, and had two letters from her."

"How do the letters come to you? Here?"

"Scott gets them from Mrs. Long's. Johnny"--with a sharp pressure of the hand, and a beseeching look from his troubled blue eyes--"be a good fellow and don't talk. _Anywhere._"

Giving his hand a rea.s.suring shake, and lifting my hat to the lady at the gate as I pa.s.sed her, I went away, thinking of this complication and of that. In a minute, Scott overtook me.

"I think you knew where he was, all along," I said to him; "that your ignorance was put on."

"Of course it was," answered Scott, as coolly as you please. "What would you? When a fellow-chum entrusts confidential matters to you and puts you upon your honour, you can't betray him."

"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 gla.s.s 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sive 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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.