Lost for love : a novel

Chapter I

De. Ollivant sat alone in his library and consulting-room, a Bpacious chamber built out at the back of his house in Wimpole-street, after his day's work was ended — a long day and a heavy one ; for at six-and- thirty years of age the doctor found himself possessed of a great practice — a practice that recompensed him largely for his devotion to science, but left little margin in his life for pleasure. It may indeed be doubted if Dr. Ollivant knew the meaning of that word " pleasure," except so far as it was accessible to him in dictionaries. His father had been a hard-working — the world added money-grubbing — country practitioner, and, at the earliest stage in which the infant brain is open to receive impressions, had striven to imbue his son's mind with a correct idea of life, contemplated always from his own particular point of view : that life was meant for hard work — that without hard work no man could expect to succeed — that worldly success was the supreme good to which the soul of man could aspire.

Cuthbert Ollivant learnt the lesson, but applied it after his own fashion. Had he possessed no higher brain than his father, he would most likely have restricted his notion of success — or, as his father called it, " getting on " — to the consolidation and improvement of his father's practice, the steady-going old-fashioned family-surgeon business, in the sleepy old town of Long Sutton, Devonshire. But the lad happened to be endowed with a larger mind than had illumined the Ollivant family within the present century ; and for him success meant originality — the fruition of new ideas, a step forward in the march of science ; or, if not absolute invention, at least such an application of the wisdom of the past as should achieve some fresh good in the present.

For a youth with such yearnings, Long Sutton was not large enough. Samuel Ollivant well-nigh uprooted the scanty wisp of hair which encircled his bald crown when, after walking the hospitals and going through the usual curriculum, his son told liim that he would return no more to the sleepy little Devonshire town, where his race had abided and thriven from generation to generation. His father might dispose of the good old family practice to whomsoever he would. He, Cuthbert, would remain in London — had indeed been already elected parish-doctor in a populous district by Bethnal-green. The pay was of the poorest, he wrote cheerfully, but the experience would be immense.

Mr. Ollivant groaned and gnashed his teeth, and told his wife that her son was an idiot ; but nothing he could say to the benighted young man could shake his purpose. Cuthbert began his work in the purlieus of Bethnal-green at three- andtwenty years of age, and went on with it steadily till he was twenty-six; and, except at Christmas time, when lie came to the home of his forefathers for a duty-visit, Long Sutton knew him no more. After three years' unflagging labour — there had never been such a parish-doctor within the memory of the oldest overseer — he went abroad, studied in Prance and Germany, pushed on to St. Petersburg, made himself familiar with every school of medicine, and was called back to England, a few months before his thirtieth birthday, to attend his father's deathbed.

"You've made a great mistake in life, Cuthbert," said the old man, during the one brief hour in which he was able to talk rationally with his son. "You might have made this a splendid practice, if you had worked with me for the last seven years ; as it is, the business has fallen off. I've been getting old; didn't like to have a stranger about me, so wouldn't take a partner. Pilby and Jackson have undermined me in the place, Cuthbert ; the practice isn't what it was when you were a boy at school, by three hundred a year. But I leave you a comfortable little bit of money, in spite of everything. It's your mother's doing — there never was such a woman to save money."

The " comfortable little bit of money " thus spoken of amounted to some thousands, quite enough to justify Cuthbert Ollivant in the step he took immediately after his father's funeral. He sold the Long Sutton practice to Filbv and

Jackson, who already had three-fourths of the town on their hooks, and by this purchase established a monoply. He would have sold his father's household goods also, but here his mother interposed. The chairs and tables might be old-fashioned, cumbrous, inelegant ; but they were the chairs and tables she had known all her married life.

" Two-and-thirty years, Outhbert ; think of that ! "

" I do, mother, and for that very reason think we ought to begin our new life with new furniture."

" I am too old to begin a new life, dear, and I like the old things best." This with a tender glance at an ancient Spanishmahogany sideboard that age had made almost as black as ebony. " They don't make such things now."

"I'm rather glad they don't," remarked her profane son. "It will cost more money to move the things than they are worth, I believe, mother ; but if you like them, they shall be moved. I'd as soon sit upon one chair as another. I have no artisti-Tj tastes."

So the ancient sideboard, the secretaires, and bureaus, antS four-post bedsteads of a bygone age — all pervaded by a certain grimness that stood for respectability — were conveyed from Long Sutton to the house which Cuthbert Ollivant had taken for himself in Wimpole-street, and being set up there, under Mrs. Ollivant's direction, made the London house almost as grim and dark and ancient-looking as the home of Outhbert's infancy. Perhaps Wimpole-street itself is hardly the gayest or brightest of thoroughfares. Its length is to the stranger akin to despair, and it has been hardly dealt with as to width, whereby the shadow of over-the-way broods sullenly upon the fronts of the houses that turn their backs to the afternoon sun. But Wimpole-street is eminently respectable, fashionable even, or at any rate appertaining to the West-end ; and Dr. Ollivant — he had taken the higher degree in Paris, and made haste now to obtain it in London — had chosen Wimpole-street as a fair base for his operations. He had no more to do with Bethnal-green, but he gave two hours of every morning — from eight till ten — to gratis patients. Por the first year of his Wimpole-street life they were almost his only patients. Then little by little his fame spread ; he had taken to himself a specialty during his continental travels, namely, the treatment of heart-disease — had written a little book upon this theme, and published the same in London and Paris. By the aid of this book he advertised himself into the notice of a good many idle people who fancied they had the >/eart-disease, and a few who were real sufferers. Rich old .'adies and gentlemen, who lived alone and lived too well, came to him, liked his manner — a grave and somewhat cold reserve, which was yet courteous, and implied profound wisdom — and made him their physician in ordinary. "Ollivant on Cardiao Diseases " and " Ollivant on Auscultation " became almost standard works. In a word, Cuthbert Ollivant had succeeded, and by the time five years had run off the lease of the house in Wimpole-street had made for himself a position which he deemed the stepping-stone to future distinction.

His mother lived with him now, as she had lived with him from the beginning, the careful mistress of his house, the intelligent companion of his brief intervals of leisure. Her character presented a curious mixture of the ultra-prosaic with the intellectual and imaginative. She would lay down her volume of Wordsworth or Shelley to order the dinner or give out a week's supply of grocery. She made her son's money go farther than perhaps any one else in the world could have made it go. She would not suffer a stale crust of bread or a basin of dripping to be wasted between January and December ; yet she contrived to retain the respect of her servants, and was accounted a liberal mistress. Her son's simple dinners were ordered with a discretion and cooked with a nicety that could hardly have been exceeded at a West-end club. Every detail of the table was perfection, though no modern elegance, no phantom-like glass or rich-hued majolica, adorned the board. The old-fashioned heavily-cut decanters, the ponderous plate, sparkled and shone upon the snowy linen ; and pleasantest of all was the mother's face — a feminine likeness of the son's — with deep earnest eyes, white teeth, and mobile mouth.

It was half-past nine o'clock, a November night, a wet night in a wet autumn, the rain beating heavily on the skylight above the doctor's head. He had dined, and spent his after-dinner hour with his mother, talking literature and politics, for she made it her business to be interested and well informed in everything that interested her son, and had come down to his own room to read — to read the last scientific book worth reading.

An old-fashioned silver teapot, a breakfast cup and saucer, stood on a Chippendale table at his elbow. The doctor smiled to himself as he poured out the tea — a grave, half-ironical smile.

" Old-bachelor ways already," he thought ; " tea-drinking and midnight study. But, then, I never was a young man — in the common acceptation of the phrase."

A double knock at the hall-door caught his quick ear.

" A cabman's knock," he said, with a little discontented look, and a longing glance at his open book ; " some dropper-in come for an evening's gossip — a nuisance, for I want to get at the bottom of this fellow's ideas."

"This fellow" was the author of the book — a formidable jjost jot Jjove. 9

volume of five hundred pages or so, half of which were still uncut.

Dr. Olllvant was not famous for his social instincts ; but, as he was apt to remark to his mother, " a man can't go through the world without some people insisting upon knowing him ; " and a few people had been pertinacious enough to establish themselves on familiar terms with the doctor, in spite of himself — Eelf-elected friends. They were for the most part of his own profession. He asked them to dinner two or three times in the year, and suffered them to drop in now and then of an evening, but gave no active encouragement to their visits.

A card was brought him by his servant — an elderly man, who had been his father's factotum, and had accompanied the furniture from Long Sutton. Dr. Ollivant looked at it listlessly, then brightened with a flash of surprise.

" Mark Chamney ! " he exclaimed, in a half-dreamy tone, " Mark Chamney ! " Then hurriedly to the servant, " Show the gentleman in here directly."

He began to poke the fire furiously — a man's favourite form of hospitality, and then went to the door to receive his visitor.

Mr. Chamney had been his school-friend more than twenty years ago, when he was a lad at a west-country public school— his bosom-friend in the days when he had some kind of belief in friendship.

The unexpected visitor came out of the dim light of the hall into the clear white light of the doctor's study. A tall man, of the type known as lanky, with long loose limbs and a cadaverous countenance, redeemed from absolute ugliness by honest blue eyes — eyes that were mild and tender as a woman's.

This was Mark Chamney, the doctor's senior by four years, and his protector in the days gone by. Chamney had been a dunce and an athlete. Cuthbert, a fragile youth of fourteen, had construed Homer and Virgil for his friend, whose prompt interference had shielded the younger boy from the school bullies.

Cuthbert — himself in no manner deficient in pluck — had worshipped Mark as the very incarnation of force and courage — his Achilles, his Hector, his Ajax ; and they had parted at the close of Mark's last term, swearing to be friends for life, and had never seen each other from that day until this.

3)r. Ollivant felt a faint pang of remorse at sight of the altered face — the same, but O, how changed! — remembering how little he had ever done to perpetuate this boyish friendship. But was not the other equally to blame? The two men clasped nands.

" I should have known you anywhere," said Mark.

Dr. Ollivant could hardly echo the declaration. He coxxld only grasv his friend's hand a little harder, and say,-^

" You are about the only man in the world I should be glad to see to-night, Chamney."

" And I am glad to hear you say as much, Ollivant, for I've come to claim the fulfilment of an old promise — a long-forgotten one, perhaps."

" No," said the other gravely, " not forgotten, if you mean our old vow of life-long friendship. I have gone through life without acquiring the knack of making many friends. I doubt if I have ever made one real one since the days when you used to take my part against the Goliaths of Hillersley Grammar-school."

This was said as heartily as it was in Cuthbert Ollivant to say anything — heartiness not being a characteristic of his manner.

" Odd, that we should never have knocked up against each other in all these years," continued the doctor after a brief interval of silence, during which Mr. Chamney had dropped into a chair, with a certain air of listlessness or fatigue, widely different from that muscular exuberance which Cuthbert remembered at Hillersley.

" Hardly so odd as it may appear at the first showing," answered Chamney. " Did you ever take any particular pains to look me up ? "

" I don't believe I have had an idle day since I left Hillersley."

"That means No. Well, Ollivant, if "you had looked for me, the result would have been pretty much the same ; for I have spent the best part of the interval on a sheep-run in Queensland."

The doctor felt relieved of some portion of that remorse which had seemed to weigh upon his spirit since Mark Chamney's entrance,

" What took you to Queensland?" he asked, ringing the bell for the man-of-all-work, who seemed to have an intuitive knowledge of what was wanted from him, as he came immediately, furnished with case bottles and a decanter of sherry on an old-fashioned silver tray — one of the heirlooms of the house of Ollivant. Even the case bottles were heirlooms, heavier and clumsier than modern bottles.

" What took me to Queensland ? " repeated the visitor, extending his long legs upon the doctor's hearth, and folding his gaunt arms. He was clothed from head to foot in a light gray stuff, which made him look his biggest. " A speculative temper, and an aversion to any mode of earning my living which was open to me at home. I was not a genius like you, Cuthbert. I always hated head-work, and was plucked ignominiously in every examination at Hillersley, as I daresay you remember. But I wasn't bad at figures, as long as I didn't see 'em upon paper. I heard of men doing wonders out yonder in the sheepline ; so, when my father — a prosperous solicitor at Exeter — ■ proposed making me his articled clerk, I saved myself the trouble of disputing the point, by running away. I needn't bore you with the details of my flight. I left Exeter with a few pounds in my pocket, and worked my way out to Australia, before the mast. I had rather a hard time of it for the first year or so, and made a nearer acquaintance with starvation than I cared about. But before the second year was over, I was manager for a man who had been lucky enough to get hold of one of the finest stations on the Darling Downs, extending upwards of ten miles in every direction. He held a squatter's lease from the government at a mere nominal rent, and on muster days I have stood at the gate and helped to count seventy thousand sheep as they went through. My employer made sixty thousand pounds in less than ten years, but contrived to drink himself to death in the same time. He had made me his partner a few years before he died — delirium tremens and business habits not being compatible — a fact of which he was sufficiently conscious to know that he couldn't get on without me. At the time he died sheep happened to be rather low ; I had saved enough money, with assistance from the Australian banks, to buy his share of the station; and so began life afresh at thirty years of age, worth twenty thousand pounds after all debts were paid — went on from this pretty comfortably, taking the bad with the good, and kept hard at it for fifteen years more, when I took it into my head I ought to come back to England and see my daughter."

" Tour daughter! " exclaimed Dr. Ollivant. " Then you had married ? " — as if it were the most unnatural thing a man could do.

" Yes," answered the other with a profound sigh, " I married the dearest girl in the world. She had come out to Hobart Town as a governess ; a solitary young creature, with hardly a friend in the world ; and I met her there in one of my summer holiday trips, and loved her from the hour I first saw her. I suppose the kind of life I led upon the farm — standing up to my waist in water to see the sheep-washing, and galloping thirty miles before breakfast after strays — was calculated to make a man susceptible to that kind of influence. Anyhow, I fell over head and ears in love with Mary Grover, and wasn't easy in my mind till I'd asked her to be my wife. She hung back at first, but I only loved her the better for her shyness ; and when I pressed her hard, ahe told me in her own pretty words, which were very different from mine, that she didn't want to marry me, because she didn't think she was good enough ; her family were a bad lot; her grandfather had been a gentleman, but hi 3 descendants had come down somehow ; in short, she gave me to understand they were a set of out-and-out scamps, and that she had come to the Antipodes to get out of their way. This did not move me one jot, and I told her so. I wanted to marry her —not her family; and little by little I won her round. She owned that she didn't dislike me; that she liked me a little, because I was strong and brave, she said — dear soul, as if she could know anything about that ! — and finally, that she would rather lead a solitary life with me up on the Downs than teach children French verbs and major scales in Hobart Town. After that I wasn't going to waste any more time ; so we were married three weeks later, and I took my sweet young wife back to the farm. I had a good wooden house on the station, with a tenfoot verandah all round it, which had been built by Jack Ferguson, my late partner, and I thought it would do for us. But God only knows how it was — whether it was the climate or the lonely life that didn't suit her — my darling drooped and died only two years after our marriage, and just one year after she had given me a little daughter."

" You should have brought her home," said the doctor.

" The very thing I wished to do ; but she wouldn't have it. She was unhappy even if I spoke of such a thing; she had some insuperable objection to returning to England, and I couldn't bear to vex her, and I didn't know the end was so near. She slipped away from me unawares — like a flower that you've transplanted overnight and find dead in the morning."

He got up and began to walk up and down the room, deeply moved by this agitating remembrance. Cuthbert watched him curiously. Then a wife was a thing that a man might really care for — not a hollow conventionality.

" I am very sorry for you, Mark," he said in a friendly tone, still wondering how so big a man could be so distressed by the loss of a woman. " But you have your daughter left, she must be a comfort to you." This was a mere mechanical attempt at consolation, Dr. Ollivant not having the faintest idea in what manner a daughter could be a comfort to any man.

" She's the only joy of my life," answered the other, with a rough energy which contrasted strangely with the doctor's grave tones — musical despite their gravity; for Dr. Ollivant's noble baritone voice was one of his richest gifts.

" And yet you could bring yourself to part with her ? " said the doctor, with vague wonder. The whole business was out of his line — part and parcel of that world of the affections whereof be knew nothing, except so much as he had heard of it from his mother's favourite Wordsworth.

" Could I see her droop and die like her mother. That might have been climate, though strong men thrive yonder. I could run no such risk with Flora — a pretty name, isn't it? her mother's choice ; so I sent her home with a shepherd's wife, when she was two years old. The woman took her straight to my people at Exeter; but before she was seven, my mother died, and my father sent Flora to a boarding-school near London. He died soon after, and there was the little thing, friendless, and with strangers. She seemed happy, however, at least her letters told me so — dear little childish letters ! — and she remained in the same care until I came home a year ago and took a house in London, and settled down with my little girl — she was seventeen last April — for the rest of my life." This with a faint sigh.

" And you have lived in London a year without trying to find me out until to-night?" said the doctor, with an injured air.

" You lived twenty years without making any attempt to find me," replied his friend. " Shall I tell you what brought me to you to-night, Cuthbert? It's hardly flattering to the ghost of our boyish friendship — if there's even as much as a ghost left of that ! — but I daresay you've found out before now that human nature is selfish. It was a book you've written that induced me to come to you."

" A book of mine ! I never wrote anything but medical pamphlets.

" Precisely. What's the name of your book ? On Cardiac Diseases. That's it, I think. Ever so long before I left Queensland I had reason to suspect there was something not quite right here," — touching his broad chest, — " the gentlest hill winded me. I had palpitation sometimes, at other times a dull heavy feeling, as if my heart didn't move at all ; sleepless nights, languor, a dozen disagreeable symptoms. Finding I couldn't walk as I used to walk, I took it out of myself in hard riding ; but this didn't mend matters. I began to think that I was nervous or fanciful, and fought hard, against my own sensations. "

"You consulted no medical man?"

" The faculty doesn't abound among our sheepwalks. Besides, I shouldn't have liked to have myself overhauled by a stranger. I thought the voyage home would do me good, and it did. But the home life and this murky atmosphere have played the deuce with me ; and, in a few words, I've a notion that I've come pretty near the end of my tether."

" You've had no doctor in England P "

" No. I suppose the life I led over the water makes a man something of a eavage. I've a rooted antipathy to strangers. But as I was reading the Times the other day your name caught my eye at the top of a column. Ollivaut is not a common name. I remembered that your father was a doctor, and I thought I might as well come and see if the Dr. Ollivant of

14s Lost for Love.

Wimpole- street was the little fellow I used to save from a licking now and then at Hillersley."

"My dear old friend," said the doctor, stretching out his hand to his old schoolfellow with a warmth that was not common to him, " God grant that the instinct which brought you to me may be an instinct designed to accomplish your cure ! The fancied heart-disease is, I daresay, only an effect of the natural depression of mind which your bereavement and your lonely life in Australia were calculated to engender. Change of air, change of scene, new pursuits "

"Have done nothing for me," answered the other, with conviction.

Dr. Ollivant looked at his friend for the first time with the searching gaze of the physician. To the keen professional eye that haggard visage, lantern jaws, and faded eyes betokened a shattered constitution, if not organic disease.

" Come to me to-morrow morning," he said, in his soothing

frofessional tone, " and I will make a careful examination, daresay I shall find things a great deal better than you suppose."

" To-night is as good as to-morrow morning," answered Mr. Chamney, as coolly as if it were a mere business question that he wanted settled. " Why not to-night ? "

" To-night, if you prefer it. Only I thought you might like to devote this evening to a little friendly talk about old times, and that you'd come up-stairs to the drawing-room and let me present you to my mother."

" I shall be very glad to know your mother, and to talk about old times. But I'd rather have that other question settled first."

" So be it then. Just take off your coat and waistcoat, like a good fellow. I'll lock the door, to make sure against inter' ruption."

The doctor took a stethoscope out of a little drawer near at hand, and began his examination with that quiet professional lir which has a certain soothing influence, the air of a man who Knly requires to ascertain what is wrong in the human machine /n order to set it right straightway. His face grew graver as he sounded and listened, graver and more grave as the examination proceeded, till at the end of about ten minutes, which seemed longer to the patient, he lifted his head from Mark Chamney's broad chest with a faint sigh, and put down the stethoscope.

" You find I was right," said Mr. Chamney, without a break in his voice.

" I fear so."

*' Come, why put it doubtfully like that ? You kaow so."

" There is disease, I admit," answered the other cautiously ; " I should do wrong to deny that. But that kind of disease is not always fatal. With care a man may live to a good old age, in spite of organic derangement as bad, perhaps worse ,thau yours. I have known a man so affected live to eighty, and die at last of bronchitis. You must take care of yourself, Chamney, that's all you have to do."

And then the doctor proceeded to describe the necessary regimen, a regimen chiefly of deprivation. The patient was to avoid this, not to do the other, and so on ; no violent exercise, no excitement, no late hours.

" It's a poor dead-and-alive kind of existence," said Mr. Chamney, when the doctor had finished; " and I thought when I came home I should be able to enjoy myself a little ; follow the hounds, charter a yacht, and take my little girl about the world — see life, in short. But this puts an end to all those notions. If it were not for Flora's sake I think I'd sooner chance it, and get as much as I can out of life while it lasts. But I haven't a friend in the world that I can count upon for my darling when I'm gone."

" You may count upon me," said Dr. Ollivant, " and upon my mother into the bargain."

" Do you know I had some idea of that when I came to you to-night, Cuthbert ? If he's my Ollivant, and as good a fellow as he promised to be, he might be a friend for my little girl when I'm gone, I said to myself. And your mother is still living, is she ? That's comfortable."

" Yes, and likely to live for many years, thank God," answered the doctor. "You must bring your daughter here to-morrow, Mark. I'm a busy man, as you may suppose ; but my mother has ample leisure for friendship."