Master of His Fate Part 8

Lefevre slept the night through like a child, and awoke refreshed, though still very weak. He was bewildered with his condition for a moment or two, till he recalled the moving and exhausting experiences of the day before, and then he was suffused with a glow of elation,--elation which was not all satisfaction in the successful performance of a new experiment, nor in a good deed well done. His friend came to see him early, to antic.i.p.ate the risk of his rising. He insisted that he should keep his bed, for that day at least, if not for a second and a third day. He reported that the patient was doing well; that she had asked with particularity, and had been informed with equal particularity, concerning the method of her recovery, upon which she was much bemused, and asked to see her physician.

"It is a pity she was told," said Lefevre; "it is not usual to tell a patient such a thing, and I meant it to be kept secret, at least till it was better established." But for all his protest he was again suffused with that new sense of inward joy.

Alone, and lying idle in bed, it was but natural--it was almost inevitable--that the doctor's thoughts should begin to run upon the strange events and suspicions of the past two days; and their current setting strongly in one channel, made him long to be resolved whether or no the Man of the Crowd, the author of yesterday's outrage, the "M.

Dolaro" of whom the detective had gone in search, and who, if captured, would be certainly overwhelmed with contumely, if not with punishment,--whether or not that strange creature was Julius's father, or any relation at all of Julius. He was not clear how he could well put the matter to Julius, since he so evidently shrank from discourse upon it, yet he thought some kind of certainty might be arrived at from an interview with him. On the chance of his having returned to his chambers, he called for pen and paper and wrote a note, asking him to look in, as he would be resting all day. "Try to come," he urged; "I have something important to speak about."

This he sent by the trusty hand of his man in black; and by mid-day Julius was announced. He came in confident, and bright as sunshine (Lefevre thought he had never seen him looking more serene); but suddenly the sunshine was beclouded, and Julius ceased to be himself, and became a restless, timorous kind of creature, like a bird put in a cage under the eye of his captor.

"What?" he cried when he entered, with an eloquent gesture. "Lazying in bed on such a day as this? What does this mean?" But when he observed the pallor and weakness of Lefevre's appearance, he paused abruptly, refrained from the hand stretched out to greet him, and exclaimed in a tone of something like terror, "Good heavens! Are you ill?" A paleness, a shudder, and a dizziness pa.s.sed upon him as if he sickened. "May I,"

he said, "open the window?"

"Certainly, Julius," said Lefevre, in surprise and alarm. "Do you feel ill?"

"No--no," said Julius from the window, where he stood letting the air play upon his face, and speaking as if he had to put considerable restraint upon himself. "I--I am unfortunately, miserably const.i.tuted: I cannot help it. I cannot bear the sight of illness, or lowness of health even. It appals me; it--it horrifies me with a quite instinctive horror; it deadens me."

Lefevre, whose abundant sympathy and vitality went out instinctively to succour and bless the weak and the ill, was inexpressibly shocked and offended by this confession of what to his sense appeared selfish cowardice and inhumanity. He had again and again heard it said, and he had with pleasure a.s.sented to the opinion, that Julius was a rare, finely-strung being, with such pure and glowing health that he shrank from contact with, or from the sight of, pain or ill-health, and even from their discussion; but now that the singularity of Julius's organization impinged upon his own experience, now that he saw Julius shrink from himself, he was shocked and offended. Julius, on his part, was pitiably moved. He kept away from the bed; he fidgeted to and fro, looking at this thing and that, without a sparkle of interest in his eye, yet all with his own peculiar grace.

"You wanted to speak to me," he said. "Do you mind saying what you have to say and letting me go?"

"I reckoned upon your staying to lunch," said Lefevre.

"I can't!--I can't!... Very sorry, my dear Lefevre, but I really can't!

Forgive what seems my rudeness. It distresses me that at such a time as this my sensations are so acute. But I cannot help it!--I cannot!"

"You have been in the country,--have you not?" said Lefevre, beginning with a resolve to get at something.

"I have just come back," said Julius. "My man told me you had called."

"Yes. My mother wrote in a state of great anxiety about you, and asked me to go and look at you. She said that she and my sister had seen a good deal of you lately; that you began to look unwell, and then ceased to appear, and she was afraid you might be ill."

This was put forth as an invitation to Julius to expound not only his own situation, but also his relations with Lady and Miss Lefevre, but Julius took no heed of it. He merely said, "No; I was not ill. I only wanted a little change to refresh me,"--and walked back to the window to lave himself in the air.

"Well," continued Lefevre, "since I called to see you, I have had an adventure or two. You never look at a newspaper except for the weather, and so it is probable you do not know that I had brought to me yesterday afternoon another strange case like that of the young officer a month ago,--a similar case, but worse."

"Worse?" exclaimed Julius, dropping into the chair by the window, and glancing, as a less preoccupied observer than the doctor would have remarked, with a wistful desire at the door.

"Much worse--though, I believe, from the same hand," said Lefevre. "A lady this time,--t.i.tularly and really a lady,--Lady Mary Fane, the daughter of Lord Rivercourt."

"Oh, good heavens!" exclaimed Julius, and there were manifest so keen a note of apprehension in his voice and so deep a shade of apprehension on his face, that Lefevre could not but note them and confirm himself in his suspicion of the intimate bond of connection between him and the author of the outrage. He pitied Julius's distress, and hurried through the rest of his revelation, careless of the result he had sought.

"It may prove," said he, "a far more serious affair than the other. Lord Rivercourt is not the man to sit quietly under an outrage like that."

Julius astonished him by demanding, "What is the outrage? Has the lady given an account of it? What does she accuse the man of?"

"She has not spoken yet,--to me, at least," said Lefevre; "and I don't know what the outrage can be called, but I am sure Lord Rivercourt--and he is a man of immense influence--will move heaven and earth to give it a legal name, and to get it punishment. There is a detective on the man's track now."

"Oh!" said Julius. "Well, it will be time enough to discuss the punishment when the man is caught. Now, if that is all your news," he added hurriedly, "I think--" He took up his hat, and was as if going to the door.

"It is not quite all," said the doctor, and Julius went back to the window, with his hat in his hand.

"I wonder," he broke out, "if we shall ever be simple enough and intelligent enough to perceive that real wickedness--the breaking of any of the laws of Nature, I mean (or, if you prefer to say so, the laws of G.o.d)--is best punished by being left to itself? Outraged nature exacts a severe retribution! But you were going to say--?"

"The night before last," continued Lefevre, determined to be brief and succinct, "I was walking in the Strand, and I could not help observing a man who fulfilled completely the description given of the author of this case and my former one."

"Well?"

"That is not all. When I caught sight of his face I was completely amazed; for--I must tell you--it looked for all the world like you grown old, or, as I said to myself at the time, like a death-mask of you."

"You--you saw that?" exclaimed Julius, leaning against the window with a sudden look of terror which Lefevre was ashamed to have seen: it was like catching a glimpse of Julius's poor naked soul. "And you thought--?" continued Julius.

"You shall hear. Dr Rippon--you remember the old doctor?--had a sight of a man in the Strand the night before, who, he believes, was his old friend Courtney that he thought dead, and who, I believe, was the man I saw."

Lefevre stopped. There was a pause, in which Julius put his head out of the window, as if he had a mind to be gone that way. Then he turned with a marked control upon himself.

"Really, Lefevre," said he, "this is the queerest stuff I've heard for a long time! This is hallucination with a vengeance! I don't like to apply such a tomfool word to anything, but observe how all this has come about. An excellent old gentleman, who has been dining out or something, has a glimpse at night, on a crowded pavement, of a man who looks like a friend of his youth. Very well. The excellent old gentleman tells you of that, and it impresses you. _You_ walk on the same pavement the next evening--I won't emphasise the fact of its being after dinner, though I daresay it was--"

"It was."

"--_You_ have a glimpse of a man who looks--well, something like me; and you instantly conclude, 'Ah! the Courtney person--the friend of Dr Rippon's youth!--and, surely, some relative of my friend Julius!' Next day this hospital case turns up, and because the description of its author, given by more or less un.o.bservant persons, fits the person you saw, _argal_, you jump to the conclusion that the three are one! Is your conclusion clear upon the evidence? Is it inevitable? Is it necessary?

Is it not forced?"

"Well," began Lefevre.

"It is bad detective business," broke in Julius, "though it may be good friendship. You have thought there was trouble in this for me, and you wished to give me warning of it. But--_que diable vas-tu faire dans cette galere?_ You are the best friend in the world, and whenever I am in trouble--and who knows? who knows? 'Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward'--I may ask of you both your friendship and your skill. One thing I ask of you here: don't speak of me as you see me now, thus miserably moved, to any one! Now I must go. Good-bye." And before Lefevre could find another word, Julius had opened the door and was gone.

"If it moves him like that," said the doctor to himself, through his bewilderment, "there must be something worse in it--G.o.d forgive me for thinking so!--than I have ever imagined."

Chapter VII.

Contains a Love Interlude.

Next day Lefevre learned that the police had been again baffled in their part of the inquiry. The detective had contrived to trace his man--though not till the morning after the event--to the St Pancras Hotel, where he had dined in private, and gone to bed early, and whence he had departed on foot before any one was astir, to catch, it was surmised, the first train. But wherever he had gone, it was just as in the former case: from the time the hotel door had closed on his cloaked figure, all trace of him was lost.

Nor could Lady Mary Fane add anything of moment to what Lefevre already knew or guessed. Her account of her adventure (which she gave him in her father's house, whither she had been removed on the third day) was as follows: She was returning home from St Thomas's Hospital, dressed according to her habit when she went there; she had crossed Westminster Bridge, and was proceeding straight into St James's Park, when she became aware of a man walking in the same direction as herself, and at the same pace. She casually noted that he looked like a distinguished foreigner, and that he had about him an indefinable suggestion of death clinging with an eager, haggard hope to life,--a suggestion which melted the heart of the beholder, as if it were the mute appeal of a drowning sailor. She was stirred to pity; and when he suddenly appeared to reel from weakness, she stepped out to him on an overwhelming impulse, laid a steadying hand on his arm, and asked what ailed him. He turned on her a pair of wonderful dark eyes, which were animal-like in their simple, direct appeal, and their moist softness. He begged her to lead him aside into a path by which few would pa.s.s: he disliked being stared at.

Thinking only of him as a creature in sickness and distress, she obeyed without a thought for herself. She helped him to sit down upon a bench, and sat down by him and felt his pulse. He looked at her with an open, kindly eye, with a simple-seeming grat.i.tude, which held her strangely (though she only perceived that clearly on looking back). He said to her suddenly,--

"There was a deep, mystical truth in the teaching of the Church to its children--that they should prefer in their moments of human weakness to pray to the Virgin-mother; for woman is always man's best friend."

She looked in his face, wondering at him, still with her finger on his pulse, when she felt an unconsciousness come over her, not unlike "the thick, sweet mystery of chloroform;" and she knew no more till she opened her eyes in the hospital bed. "Revived by you," she said to Lefevre.

He inquired further, as to her sensations before unconsciousness, and she replied in these striking words: "I felt as if I were strung upon a complicated system of threads, and as if they tingled and tingled, and grew tighter to numbness." That answer, he saw, was kindred to the description given by the young officer of his condition. It was clear that in both cases the nerves had been seriously played upon; but for what purpose? What was the secret of the stranger's endeavour? What did he seek?--and what find? To these questions no satisfactory answer would come for the asking, so that in his impatience he was tempted to break through the severe self-restraint of science, and let unfettered fancy find an answer.

But, most of all, he longed to see close to him the man whom the police sought for in and out, to judge for himself what might be the method and the purpose of his strange outrages. He scarcely desired his capture, for he thought of the possible results to Julius, and yet--Day after day pa.s.sed, and still the man was unfound, and very soon a change came over Lefevre's life, which lifted it so far above the plane of his daily professional experience, that all speculation about the mysterious "M.

Dolaro," and his probable relation to Julius, fell for a time into the dim background. The doctor had been calling daily in Carlton Terrace to see his patient, when, on a certain memorable day, he intimated to her father that she was so completely recovered that there was no need of his calling on her professionally again. The old lord, looking a little fl.u.s.tered, asked him if he could spare a few minutes' conversation, and led him into his study.