Love's Usuries Part 23

"Who am I, Phoebe?" asked he, dwelling tenderly on the name shared alike by parent and child.

"Ow is Dot Dandy," was the lisped reply. "Mammy, is Dot Dandy nice?"

Mrs Cameron hurriedly lifted the loquacious imp from its impromptu perch. Again "Dot" noticed a delicious flush on the transparent cheek, and his heart leaped within him.

"Pooh!" sneered the inward mentor again, "the la.s.sie is substantial--too substantial for any woman to carry without colouring!"

"Mammy, is Dot Dandy nice?" clamoured Phoebe minor again.

Her mother took the precaution of ringing for the nurse before replying.

"Yes, darling. Very nice."

That time she _did_ blush. Ralph could have sworn it!

How he reached home he never knew. The biggest men are the largest fools sometimes. His enormous heart drew its own pattern of her perfections, and coloured it with her beauty round and about. Her reflections of him never extended beyond the locality of her brain. He did not look half smart out of uniform--was awkward as ever, but kind-hearted, and her baby liked him! If it were ill, he would be the person to send for. But Phoebe must be taught not to chatter! Had it been anyone else but Dot----!

Danby's coachman, when not cogitating on the off-chances suggested by "straight tips" from stablemen in the mews, used to puzzle himself in the days which followed at the frequency of the doctor's visits to the tiny house in Maida Vale. He became conversant with the pattern of the window curtains, and began to cultivate a lively interest in the headgear of the "superior young person" who wheeled Miss Cameron's go-cart. As a reward of his attentions, the "superior young person,"

whose encyclopaedic qualities were unbounded, certified to a fact he had long suspected, that there was absolutely no sickness in the establishment!

But Ralph Danby was happily unconscious of the delicate supervision of man and maid, and pursued the even tenor of his way in a delightful state of beat.i.tude till one day he overstepped the bounds of public thoroughfare and found himself face to face with a warning to trespa.s.sers. In fact, he made an a.s.s of himself and proposed.

Without rhyme or reason he placed his six-foot-three of c.u.mbersome manhood at the disposal of a woman from whom he afterwards confessed he had never received the smallest encouragement. She had certainly never objected to his continual presence, but, to those who have known each other in a garrison town where daily meetings and calls are common, visits are not noted with the same importance as metropolitan formalities of like description.

Mrs Cameron had not yet returned to society, and consequently cultivated few acquaintances. Her intimates called as frequently as Ralph, whose arrival was never objectless. Sometimes there was a doll to be delivered to Phoebe minor; occasionally he produced tickets for some lecture on infancy or education; now and then he brought music which he especially wished to hear (he could recognise "G.o.d Save the Queen" if played at the end of a programme); and once he had ventured to offer flowers! But the quick march came to an abrupt halt through his own folly. Because one morning he found her with a complexion more like a rose petal than usual, because the birds made a perfect din of song outside, and the spring sun seemed to pour through every crack and cranny and say, "Winter is past," he thought her heart must be as love-flushed as his own. Always downright--blunt some people said--he invaded where angels might have feared to tread.

"Mrs Cameron--Phoebe--I love you. Will you marry me? Will you let me make you happy again?"

Two dove-grey eyes blinked wide with amazement; then, seeing the reality of his emotion, she stepped back a pace, and seemed to freeze as she stood.

The birds sounded discordantly; the sunshine lost all its warmth--it was but a winter gleam after all; the rose-bloom of her cheek changed to deadly pallor. Big man as he was, he grew giddy as he looked. He knew at once the magnitude of his vanity and his mistake, and cursed himself for having spoken.

"Doctor Danby, I--I--you do me honour. I thank you very much, but oh!

why did you spoil our friendship with such folly?"

"Folly? To love you? I have never done a wiser thing in my life!"

"Pray do not speak of love. You know--you must know--that word to me is dead for ever!"

"But some day, in the future, you might----"

"My future, Doctor Danby, belongs to my child. I shall never allow any interest to come before my love for her. Will you understand this, and forgive and forget to-day as though it had never been?"

He was not a really vain man, or her frigid words, her rejection of his love, would have sent him from the house angered and mortified, never to return. But he was large-souled and childishly tender of heart, and thought, even in his disappointment, that, in her unprotected state, she might at times have need of him.

Because his demand had exceeded his deserts, and because he had received a merited snub for his rashness, there was no reason, he argued, that she should be deprived the right of using him as her friend.

He smiled a sickly a.s.sent and extended his hand.

"Good-bye, and I may come and see you sometimes still? It is not as if there were anyone else----"

Mrs Cameron interrupted hurriedly.

"Please do, and we will never reopen this subject again!"

"Never again!" swore poor Danby as he left the house--and he meant it.

In his own sanctum he conned over every speech of hers and found the interview had been bald to desolation. Not one green blade of sympathy even had she given to cheer the dreary wilderness of his life. She had wished to keep him as her friend, certainly; but that in itself was a dubious compliment. Had she cared for him ever so little, and felt bound by duty for her child's sake to sacrifice love, she would have avoided painful chances of meeting.

"She has evidently no fear of falling in love with me," groaned Ralph to himself. "I am not even sufficiently interesting to be dangerous."

This rankled for some time. He continued on his daily rounds, endeavouring, if possible, to avoid pa.s.sing through the street in which his frosty idol dwelt. With dreary, l.u.s.treless eyes he received the blandishments of the feminine throng which had elevated him to popularity; with tired, joyless heart he buried himself in his lonely home after the treadmill hours were over. Only some exceptional case of suffering or technical interest had power to rouse him. He was but happy when ministering to the physical pain of others; if possible, he would have shared it. In mental trouble the absolute p.r.i.c.k and smart of bodily injury seems a welcome inconvenience, for at least it admits of hope, the continued hope of recovery, to give impetus to life. He was neither mawkish nor sentimental--his years of scientific training had pruned such tendencies; but the inborn sympathy with his fellow-men which had prompted him to the choice of medicine as a career permeated every tissue of his medical knowledge and supplemented a powerful element of healing peculiarly its own. He had been ever ready to throw heart and soul into any case of interest or alarm, but now his patients found him more than ever devoted. They did not know that in their service alone the heart's blood of the man was kept from anaesthesia. For nearly a month Ralph Danby avoided the house in Mervan Street; then with the inconsistency symbolic of great minds, he decided to go there at once.

He counselled himself that half a loaf was better than no bread, and came rightly to the conclusion that if he intended calling again, the more he postponed the ordeal the more impossible would be the resumption of the old relations which had existed so happily before he had made a fool of himself.

On the doorstep he trembled--absolutely trembled (he who, in Egypt, had bandaged wound after wound, while bullets peppered the air with their metal hail)--but once in her presence, her serene composure was infectious, he was himself again, and almost forgot his last unhappy visit and the miserable interregnum of mental nothingness from which he had suffered. He might have been uneasy or constrained, but her calm suavity left him no opportunity. About her manner there was no spark of vanity, no simpering nor restraint--she was merely a well-bred young hostess entertaining an intimate friend.

In novels heroines are credited with the exhibition of complex emotions on the smallest provocation, but women of breeding in the nineteenth century are too good actresses to hang their hearts on their sleeves without exceptional cause. So Ralph Danby's little brougham came and went as of yore, and only in the solitary evenings, when reason unprejudiced criticised his actions, did he realise that again was he building a palace of Eros, and again its foundation was nothing but sand!

One evening, in the midst of his mental accusations, came a note:--

Please come soon. Phoebe seems very ill.--P. C.

He hailed a hansom and was off in a moment.

The child was asleep in her crib, and Mrs Cameron watched uneasily by her side. The flushed face, hurrying pulse, the dry skin, and spasmodic breathing showed signs of fever. There were cases of diphtheria about, and he looked grave. But he decided to cause no unnecessary anxiety, and promised to return later. Then there was no concealing it; great care, he said, must be exercised, as the child was young and not over-strong.

He put his opinion in that form to avoid being an alarmist, though the symptoms of the disease were unfavourable, and he dreaded the worst. But his own hope was so great that it tempered his report with consolation, for he had not the heart to warn Phoebe's mother of his fears.

After hours of anxious watching he could not but own to himself that no progress was made, and that the crisis must be awaited with dread.

Should he tell her? Dared he? In front of him lay the probably dying little creature that was first in her life--before himself, before anything. Should she perish, there would be no barrier in the world between them; Mrs Cameron would have no duty but to herself!

A warm flush underlay his features--not the flush of pride or of satisfaction; it was the dye of shame for thoughts which placed himself and his egoistic desires before the life of the innocent being whose fate seemed to lie in his hands. It lasted not a moment, for he rose and left the house with a face quite ashen grey, whence all the light and fire of youth had faded. He was not long absent, for he had secured a pa.s.sing hansom and paid a doubled fare for doubled speed.

He found Mrs Cameron alone with the child, while the nurse, worn out and weary, dozed in an adjacent room. Little Phoebe, who, earlier in the day, had been restless to a frightful degree, flinging about her waxen, chubby arms distractedly in the effort to gain breath, now lay almost motionless. Her mother, little experienced in any phase of illness, imagined that some slight improvement had taken place, but Ralph Danby knew better. The dull bluish pallor of the hitherto rosy skin; the rapid pulsation and agonised breathing; the feeble, sad croak that could not develop force enough for a cry--all told him there was no time to be lost.

He hastily opened the case for which he had journeyed home, and produced a small silver tube.

Mrs Cameron watched his movements with anxiety.

"What are you going to do?"

She was standing near the crib, midway between it and a table whereon he had deposited the case. As her eyes met his she read, by an extraordinary intuition which comes to most of us when reason fails, that he purposed some extreme course of action.

"What are you going to do?" she reiterated, somewhat sharply.

"I must give our little patient relief--instant relief--by means of this," he answered, hastily. She seemed to be wasting time with questions when every moment was precious. Still she stood motionless in front of him.

"How?" she persisted, in a voice so hollow that he could scarcely recognise it.

"I cannot explain now. You must trust me."