A Double Knot. Fenn George Manville
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be sure,” said Huish.
“Excuse me a few moments. A sailor always eats when he has a chance. May be called on deck at any moment. Would you oblige me?” said the captain suddenly to Huish.
“I beg your pardon, certainly,” said Huish; and, partly from habit, he placed his glass in his eye and brought it to bear on the speaker.
“This is rather a good story – eh, doctor?”
“Yes. Go on, Captain Lawdor.”
“Well, you see, I had been communicating with the Admiralty for six years about my invention when – would you oblige me by taking that glass out of your eye?” said the captain, breaking off short in his narrative. “It irritates me, and makes me feel as if I must throw something at it.”
John Huish’s eyeglass dropped inside his vest, while, in spite of all his efforts to master his emotions, he glanced uneasily at the door.
“But you would not do anything so rude, Lawdor,” said the doctor gravely, as he fixed his eye upon the captain.
“Thank you, doctor. No; of course I would not. I should be extremely sorry to insult a patient of yours.”
Huish began to feel for his glass, but remembered himself, and listened eagerly to the captain, while Mr Roberts seemed to have sunk into a pensive, thoughtful state, paying no heed to what was going on at the table.
“If I had danced attendance in Whitehall once,” said Captain Lawdor, “I had hung about that entrance a thousand times, and it was fill up forms, make minutes, present petitions to my Lords, address this department and come back to that, till it nearly drove me – till,” he added hastily, “I was very wroth with them, and one day – let me see, I think I told you,” he continued, rolling up a piece of new bread into a marble, “that I was an excellent shot with a biscuit?” and he stared hard at Huish.
“Yes, you did,” said Huish, smiling.
“Don’t laugh, sir,” exclaimed the captain. “This is not a ribald jest.”
“Breakers ahead, captain,” said the doctor, holding his glass to be refilled.
“To be sure, of course, doctor. Wear ship – you are listening, sir?”
“With the greatest attention,” replied Huish, who was becoming reconciled to his position.
“Well, sir, one day I went with my pockets filled with the roundest, smallest, and hardest ships’ biscuits I could procure, and – you are not attending, Roberts,” he exclaimed, filliping the bread marble at John Huish’s vis-à-vis, who bowed and smiled.
“Well, sir, as I told you, I went loaded with the biscuits, and marched straight into a board room, or a committee room, or something of the kind, and there I stormed them for quite ten minutes before they got me out. Ha, ha, ha! I emptied my pockets first, and the way I rattled the biscuits on one bald-headed fellow’s pate was something to remember. I did not miss him once, Mr Huish,” he said, turning sharply round.
“Indeed?” he said, smiling.
“In – deed, in – deed,” said the captain. “It was such a head! He was one of those youngish men whose heads are so aggravatingly white and smooth and shiny that they do not look bald, but perfectly naked. He was a Junior Lord of the Admiralty, and I declare to you, sir, that his head was perfectly indecent till I coloured it a little with the biscuits.”
“Yes, an amusing story,” said the doctor, as the dinner went on. “Come, Roberts, you are very quiet. Have a glass of that dry champagne?”
“And once again I see that brow,” said Mr Roberts in a low, soft, sweet voice: “no bridal wreath is there, a widow’s sombre cap conceals – thank you, doctor,” he continued, sighing as he altered the position of the glass.
The dinner passed off without any further incident, save that Mr Rawlinson returned looking very quiet and calm, and in time for the second course, of which he partook heartily, rising after the dessert to open the door for Miss Stonor to leave the room, and all in the most natural manner.
“Suppose we go into my room a bit now,” said the doctor. “We can have a cigar there;” and Daniel entering at that moment with coffee, it was taken into the doctor’s sanctum, the patients following the tray, the doctor hanging back with his principal guest.
“Well, my dear John, do you think you are going mad now?”
“No,” was the quick reply.
“Of course not. You see now what even a mild form of mania is.”
“I do,” was the reply. “But look here, doctor,” said Huish earnestly; “this feeling has troubled me terribly just lately.”
“And why?” said the doctor sharply, for Huish hesitated.
“Well, the fact is, doctor, it is possible that I may marry some day, and I felt – ”
“Yes, of course, I know,” said the doctor; “you felt, and quite rightly, that it would be a crime to marry some sweet young girl if you had the seeds of insanity waiting to develop themselves in your brain.”
“Yes, doctor, that was it.”
“My dear John Huish, you are a bit of a favourite of mine, and I like you much.”
“Thank you, doctor, I – ”
“I made the acquaintance of your father and mother in a peculiar manner, and they have always trusted me since.”
“Yes; I have heard something of it from it my father, but – ”
“Just hold your tongue and listen to me, sir. You have, I am sure, chosen some sweet, gentle, good girl; nothing else would suit you. So all I have to say is this: your brain is as right as that of any man living. Marry her, and the sooner the better. I like these young marriages, and hang all those musty old fogies who preach about improvidence and so many hundreds a year! Marry early, while you and the woman you love are in the first flush of your youth and vigour. It’s nature – it’s holy – and the good God smiles upon it. Damn it all, sir! it makes me savage to see a wretched, battered old fellow being chosen by a scheming mother of the present day as a husband for her child. Money and title will not compensate for youth. It’s a wrong system, John Huish, a wrong system. I’m a doctor, and I ought to know. Marry, then, my dear boy, as soon as you like, and God bless you!”
“Thank you, doctor, thank you,” said Huish, smiling. “But I say, doctor, if it is not impertinence, why didn’t you marry young?”
“Because I was a fool. I wanted to make money and a name in my profession, and did not calculate what would be the cost. They cost me thirty years, John Huish, and now I am an old fogey, content to try and do some good among my poor patients. But come away; they will think me rude. Eh, going now? Well, I will not say stop, as you have so far to go back. One more word: think your head’s screwed on right now?”
“Yes, doctor.”
“So do I. If it ever goes wrong, come to me, and I’ll turn it back.”
But John Huish did not feel quite satisfied, all the same.
Volume One – Chapter Eight.
In Borrowed Plumes
There was a good deal of excitement in the Hampton Court dovecote, and a general touching up of plumage, for Lady Littletown, who resided at Hampton, so as to be near her dear old friend Lady Anna Maria Morton, who had rooms up a narrow dingy stone staircase in the corner of a cloistered court, in the private apartments at the Palace, had sent out cards for her dinner-party and “at home.”
Lady Littletown was rich, and her position in the society of the neighbourhood was that of queen. A widow for many years, she was always thinking of marriage. Not for herself. She had been through the fire, and found it hot. In fact, she bore her mental scars to her elderly age, for it was a well-known fact that the late Viscount Littletown was the extreme opposite of an angel. He had possessed a temper which grew and blossomed in wild luxuriance, and the probabilities