The Tragic Muse (London & New York: Macmillan & Co., 1890)/Volume 2/Chapter 18
XVIII.
It mattered not so much what the doctors thought (and Sir Matthew Hope, the greatest of them all, had been down twice in one week) as that Mr. Chayter, the omniscient butler, declared with all the authority of his position and his experience that Mr. Carteret was very bad indeed. Nick Dormer had a long talk with him (it lasted six minutes) the day he hurried to Beauclere in response to a telegram. It was Mr. Chayter who had taken upon himself to telegraph, in spite of the presence in the house of Mr. Carteret's nearest relation and only surviving sister, Mrs. Lendon. This lady, a large, mild, healthy woman, with a heavy tread, who liked early breakfasts, uncomfortable chairs and the advertisement-sheet of the Times, had arrived the week before and was awaiting the turn of events. She was a widow and lived in Cornwall, in a house nine miles from a station, which had, to make up for this inconvenience, as she had once told Nick, a delightful old herbaceous garden. She was extremely fond of an herbaceous garden; her principal interest was in that direction. Nick had often seen her—she came to Beauclere once or twice a year. Her sojourn there made no great difference; she was only an "Urania dear," for Mr. Carteret to look across the table at when, on the close of dinner, it was time for her to retire. She went out of the room always as if it were after some one else; and on the gentlemen "joining" her later (the junction was not very close) she received them with an air of gratified surprise.
Chayter honoured Nick Dormer with a regard which approached, without improperly competing with it, the affection his master had placed on the same young head, and Chayter knew a good many things. Among them he knew his place; but it was wonderful how little that knowledge had rendered him inaccessible to other kinds. He took upon himself to send for Nick without speaking to Mrs. Lendon, whose influence was now a good deal like that of a large occasional piece of furniture which had been introduced in case it should be required. She was one of the solid conveniences that a comfortable house would have; but you couldn't talk with a mahogany sofa or a folding-screen. Chayter knew how much she had "had" from her brother, and how much her two daughters had each received on marriage; and he was of the opinion that it was quite enough, especially considering the society in which they (you could scarcely call it) moved. He knew beyond this that they would all have more, and that was why he hesitated little about communicating with Nick. If Mrs. Lendon should be ruffled at the intrusion of a young man who neither was the child of a cousin nor had been formally adopted, Chayter was parliamentary enough to see that the forms of debate were observed. He had indeed a slightly compassionate sense that Mrs. Lendon was not easily ruffled. She was always down an extraordinary time before breakfast (Chayter refused to take it as in the least admonitory), but she usually went straight into the garden (as if to see that none of the plants had been stolen in the night), and had in the end to be looked for by the footman in some out-of-the-way spot behind the shrubbery, where, plumped upon the ground, she was doing something "rum" to a flower.
Mr. Carteret himself had expressed no wishes. He slept most of the time (his failure at the last had been sudden, but he was rheumatic and seventy-seven), and the situation was in Chayter's hands. Sir Matthew Hope had opined, even on his second visit, that he would rally and go on, in rudimentary comfort, some time longer; but Chayter took a different and a still more intimate view. Nick was embarrassed: he scarcely knew what he was there for from the moment he could give his good old friend no conscious satisfaction. The doctors, the nurses, the servants, Mrs. Lendon, and above all the settled equilibrium of the square, thick house, where an immutable order appeared to slant through the polished windows and tinkle in the quieter bells, all represented best the kind of supreme solace to which the master was most accessible.
For the first day it was judged better that Nick should not be introduced into the darkened chamber. This was the decision of the two decorous nurses, of whom the visitor had had a glimpse and who, with their black uniforms and fresh faces of business, suggested a combination of the barmaid and the nun. He was depressed, yet restless, felt himself in a false position and thought it lucky Mrs. Lendon had powers of placid acceptance. They were old acquaintances: she treated him with a certain ceremony, but it was not the rigour of mistrust. It was much more an expression of remote Cornish respect for young abilities and distinguished connections, inasmuch as she asked him a great deal about Lady Agnes and about Lady Flora and Lady Elizabeth. He knew she was kind and ungrudging, and his principal chagrin was the sense of meagre information and of responding poorly in regard to his uninteresting aunts. He sat in the garden with newspapers and looked at the lowered blinds in Mr. Carteret's windows; he wandered around the abbey with cigarettes and lightened his tread and felt grave, wishing that everything were over. He would have liked much to see Mr. Carteret again, but he had no desire that Mr. Carteret should see him. In the evening he dined with Mrs. Lendon, and she talked to him, at his request and as much as she could, about her brother's early years, his beginnings of life. She was so much younger that they appeared to have been rather a tradition of her own youth; but her talk made Nick feel how tremendously different Mr. Carteret had been at that period from what he, Nick, was to-day. He had published at the age of thirty a little volume (it was thought wonderfully clever) called "The Incidence of Rates"; but Nick had not yet collected the material for any such treatise. After dinner Mrs. Lendon, who was in full dress, retired to the drawing-room, where at the end of ten minutes she was followed by Nick, who had remained behind only because he thought Chayter would expect it. Mrs. Lendon almost shook hands with him again, and then Chayter brought in coffee. Almost in no time afterwards he brought in tea, and the occupants of the drawing-room sat for a slow half-hour, during which the lady looked round at the apartment with a sigh and said: "Don't you think poor Charles had exquisite taste?"
Fortunately at this moment the "local man" was ushered in. He had been up-stairs and he entered, smiling, with the remark: "It's quite wonderful—it's quite wonderful." What was wonderful was a marked improvement in the breathing, a distinct indication of revival. The doctor had some tea and he chatted for a quarter of an hour in a way that showed what a "good" manner and how large an experience a local man could have. When he went away Nick walked out with him. The doctor's house was near by and he had come on foot. He left Nick with the assurance that in all probability Mr. Carteret, who was certainly picking up, would be able to see him on the morrow. Our young man turned his steps again to the abbey and took a stroll about it in the starlight. It never looked so huge as when it reared itself in the night, and Nick had never felt more fond of it than on this occasion, more comforted and confirmed by its beauty. When he came back he was readmitted by Chayter, who surveyed him in respectful deprecation of the frivolity which had led him to attempt to help himself through such an evening in such a way.
Nick went to bed early and slept badly, which was unusual with him; but it was a pleasure to him to be told almost as soon as he came out of his room that Mr. Carteret had asked for him. He went in to see him and was struck with the change in his appearance. He had however spent a day with him just after the New Year, and another at the beginning of March, so that he had perceived the first symptoms of mortal alteration. A week after Julia Dallow's departure for the Continent Nick had devoted several hours to Beauclere and to the intention of telling his old friend how the happy event had been brought to naught—the advantage that he had been so good as to desire for him and to make the condition of a splendid gift. Before this, for a few days, Nick had been keeping back, to announce it personally, the good news that Julia had at last set their situation in order: he wanted to enjoy the old man's pleasure—so sore a trial had her arbitrary behaviour been for a year. Mrs. Dallow had offered Mr. Carteret a conciliatory visit before Christmas—had come down from London one day to lunch with him, but only with the effect of making him subsequently exhibit to poor Nick, as the victim of her whimsical hardness, a great deal of earnest commiseration in a jocose form. Upon his honour, as he said, she was as clever and "specious" a woman (this was the odd expression he used) as he had ever seen in his life. The merit of her behaviour on this occasion, as Nick knew, was that she had not been specious at her lover's expense: she had breathed no doubt of his public purpose and had had the feminine courage to say that in truth she was older than he, so that it was only fair to give his affections time to mature. But when Nick saw their sympathizing host after the rupture that I lately narrated he found him in no state to encounter a disappointment: he was seriously ailing, it was the beginning of worse things and no time for trying on a sensation. After this excursion Nick went back to town saddened by Mr. Carteret's now unmistakably settled decline, but rather relieved that he had not been forced to make his confession. It had even occurred to him that the need for making it might not come up if the ebb of his old friend's strength should continue unchecked. He might pass away in the persuasion that everything would happen as he wished it, though indeed without enriching Nick on his wedding-day to the tune that he had promised. Very likely he had made legal arrangements in virtue of which his bounty would take effect in the right conditions and in them alone. At present Nick had a larger confession to treat him to—the last three days had made the difference; but, oddly enough, though his responsibility had increased his reluctance to speak had vanished: he was positively eager to clear up a situation over which it was not consistent with his honour to leave a shade.
The doctor had been right when he came in after dinner; it was clear in the morning that they had not seen the last of Mr. Carteret's power of picking up. Chayter, who had been in to see him, refused austerely to change his opinion with every change in his master's temperature; but the nurses took the cheering view that it would do their patient good for Mr. Dormer to sit with him a little. One of them remained in the room, in the deep window-seat, and Nick spent twenty minutes by the bedside. It was not a case for much conversation, but Mr. Carteret seemed to like to look at him. There was life in his kind old eyes, which would express itself yet in some further wise provision. He laid his liberal hand on Nick's with a confidence which showed it was not yet disabled. He said very little, and the nurse had recommended that the visitor himself should not overflow in speech; but from time to time he murmured with a faint smile: " Tonight's division, you know—you mustn't miss it." There was to be no division that night, as it happened, but even Mr. Carteret's aberrations were parliamentary. Before Nick left him he had been able to assure him that he was rapidly getting better, that such valuable hours must not be wasted. "Come back on Friday, if they come to the second reading." These were the words with which Nick was dismissed, and at noon the doctor said the invalid was doing very well, but that Nick had better leave him alone for that day. Our young man accordingly determined to go up to town for the night and even, if he should receive no summons, for the next day. He arranged with Chayter that he should be telegraphed to if Mr. Carteret were either better or worse.
"Oh, he can't very well be worse, sir," Chayter replied, inexorably; but he relaxed so far as to remark that of course it wouldn't do for Nick to neglect the House.
"Oh, the House!" Nick sighed, ambiguously, avoiding the butler's eye. It would be easy enough to tell Mr. Carteret, but nothing would have sustained him in the effort to make a clean breast to Chayter.
He might be ambiguous about the House, but he had the sense of things to be done awaiting him in London. He telegraphed to his servant and spent that night in Rosedale Road. The things to be done were apparently to be done in his studio: his servant met him there with a large bundle of letters. He failed that evening to stray within two miles of Westminster, and the legislature of his country reassembled without his support. The next morning he received a telegram from Chayter, to whom he had given Rosedale Road as an address. This missive simply informed him that Mr. Carteret wished to see him, and it seemed to imply that he was better, though Chayter wouldn't say so. Nick again took his place in the train to Beauclere. He had been there very often, but it was present to him that now, after a little, he should go only once more, for a particular dismal occasion. All that was over—everything that belonged to it was over. He learned on his arrival—he saw Mrs. Lendon immediately—that his old friend had continued to pick up. He had expressed a strong and a perfectly rational desire to talk with Nick, and the doctor had said that if it was about anything important it was much better not to oppose him. "He says it's about something very important," Mrs. Lendon remarked, resting shy eyes on him while she added that she was looking after her brother for the hour. She had sent those wonderful young ladies out to see the abbey. Nick paused with her outside of Mr. Carteret's door. He wanted to say something comfortable to her in return for her homely charity—give her a hint, which she was far from looking for, that practically he had now no interest in her brother's estate. This was impossible of course. Her absence of irony gave him no pretext, and such an allusion would be an insult to her simple discretion. She was either not thinking of his interest at all, or she was thinking of it with the tolerance of a mind trained to a hundred decent submissions. Nick looked for an instant into her mild, uninvestigating eyes, and it came over him supremely that the goodness of these people was singularly pure: they were a part of what was cleanest and sanest and dullest in humanity. There had been just a little mocking inflection in Mrs. Lendon's pleasant voice; but it was dedicated to the young ladies in the black uniforms (she could perhaps be satirical about them), and not to the theory of the "importance" of Nick's interview with her brother. Nick's arrested desire to let her know he was not dangerous translated itself into a vague friendliness and into the abrupt, rather bewildering words: "I can't tell you half the good I think of you." As he passed into Mr. Carteret's room it occurred to him that she would perhaps interpret this speech as an acknowledgment of obligation of her good-nature in not keeping him away from the rich old man.
END OF VOLUME II.
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