The Romance of His Life Part 12

"Do you think he's off his head?" I said. "It sounds perfectly ridiculous, a sort of cracked hallucination."

"Oh, no. It's all true," said Mildred, in the same matter-of-fact tone as if she had said the fire was out. Women are curious creatures. The story evidently did not strike her as at all peculiar.

"What a pity he did not stick to the high road," she said.

"What high road, in Heaven's name?" I asked.

"Why, his duty, of course. Don't you see, it was there she was sitting waiting for him. It led him straight to her. She saw that, and that he couldn't miss her. He had only got to take the train to his sister when she was dying and he would have found his lady there. That was what she meant when she said the road was open between them. But he went down a side track to flirt with me and lost his chance. And the second time, if he had only stuck to going to the rescue of his foster brother, he could have given her a lift in his motor as Anna did, and have made himself known to her."

"What a preposterously goody-goody idea! I don't believe it for a moment. Here have I been doing my duty for the last ten years, toiling and moiling and snarling at everybody, and it never led me to you that I can see."

"It might have done," said Mildred, "if you hadn't been entirely compacted of pride and uncharitableness. I made a mistake ten years ago, and was horribly sorry for it, but you never gave me a chance of setting it right till last Tuesday."

"I never thought I had the ghost of a chance till last Tuesday," I said.

"Upon my honour I didn't. The first moment I saw it I simply pounced on it."

"Pounced on it, did you?" said Mildred scornfully "And poor me, with hardly a rag of self-respect left from laying it in your way over and over again for you to pounce on. Men are all alike; all as blind as bats. I'm sure I don't know why we trouble our heads about them with their silly ghosts and chances and pouncings."

The Goldfish

A Favourite has no Friends.

It was my first professional visit to the Robinsons. I had been called in to prescribe for Arthur Robinson, a nervous, emaciated young man, whom I found extended on a black satin sofa, in a purple silk dressing gown embroidered with life-sized hydrangeas. The sofa and the dressing gown shrieked aloud his artistic temperament.

He had a bronchial cold, and my visit was, as he said, purely precautionary. He kept me a long time recounting his symptoms, and a.s.suring me that he was absolutely fearless, and then dragged himself to his feet and led me into the magnificent studio his mother had built for him, where his sketches were arranged on easels, and where we found his wife, a pale, dark-eyed young creature cleaning his brushes.

He appeared--like most egotistic people--to be greatly in need of a listener, and he poured forth his views on art, and the form his own message to the world would probably take. I am unfortunately quite inartistic, but I gave him my attention. I was in no hurry, for at that time the one perpetual anxiety that dogged my waking hours was that I had not enough patients.

At last I remembered that I ought not to appear to have time to spare, and his wife took me downstairs to the drawing-room, where his mother was awaiting us, a large, fair woman, with a kindly foolish face.

I saw at once that I was in for another interview as long as the first.

Mrs. Robinson did not wait for me to give an opinion on her son's condition. She pressed me to be perfectly frank, and, before I could open my mouth to reply, poured forth a stream of information on what was evidently her only theme--Arthur's health.

"I said the day before yesterday--didn't I, Blanche. 'Arthur, you have got a cold.' And _he_ said, so like him--'No Mother, I haven't.' That is Arthur all over. Isn't it, Blanche?"

Blanche made no response. She sat motionless, gazing at her mother-in-law with half absent eyes, as if she were trying--and failing--to give her whole attention to the matter in hand.

"Then I said in my joking way, 'Arthur, I can't have you starting a cold, and giving it to me and Blanche.' We don't want any presents of that kind. Do we, Blanche?"

Blanche made no reply. Perhaps experience had taught her that it was a waste of energy.

"So I said, 'with your tendency to bronchitis I shall send for Doctor Giles, and it will be a good opportunity to make his acquaintance now that our dear Doctor Whittington has retired.'"

It went on a long time, Mrs. Robinson beaming indiscriminately on me and her daughter-in-law.

At last, when she was deeply involved in Arthur's teething, I murmured a few words and stood up to go.

"You will promise faithfully, won't you, to look in again to-morrow."

I said that a telephone message would summon me at any moment. As I held out my hand I heard a loud splash.

"Now, Dr. Giles, you are wondering what _that_ is," said Mrs. Robinson gleefully.

I looked round and saw at the further end of the immense be-mirrored double drawing-room a grove of begonias, and heard a faint trickle of water.

"It's an aquarium," said Mrs. Robinson triumphantly, and she looked archly at me. "Shall we tell Dr. Giles about it, Blanche?"

"It has a goldfish in it," said Blanche, opening her lips for the first time.

"That was the splash you heard," continued Mrs. Robinson, as if she were imparting a secret. "That splash was made by the goldfish."

I gave up any thought I may have had of paying other professional calls that morning, and allowed Mrs. Robinson to lead me to the aquarium.

As aquariums in back drawing-rooms go it was a very superior aquarium, designed especially for the house, so Mrs. Robinson informed me, by a very superior young man at Maple's----quite a gentleman.

The aquarium had gravel upon its shallow bottom, and large pointed sh.e.l.ls strewed upon the gravel. The water trickled in through a narrow grating on one side, and trickled out through another on the other side.

An array of flowering begonias arranged round the irregularly shaped basin, gave the whole what Maple's young man had p.r.o.nounced to be "a natural aspect," and effectually hid the two gratings while affording an unimpeded view of the sh.e.l.ls, and the inmate.

In the shallow water, motionless, save for his opening and shutting gills, and a faint movement of his tail, was poised a large obese goldfish.

I looked at him through the gilt wire-netting stretched across the basin a few inches above the surface of the water, and it seemed as if he looked at me.

I wondered with vague repugnance how anyone could regard him as a pet.

To me he was wholly repulsive, swollen, unhealthy looking.

"He knows me," said Mrs. Robinson, with a vain attempt at modesty. "He has taken a fancy to me. Cupboard love I'm afraid, Dr. Giles. You see I feed him every day. He just swims about or stays still if I am near, like I am now, and he can see me. But if I am some way off and he can't see me he tries to jump out to get to me. He never tries to jump when I am near him. I call him Goldy, Dr. Giles, and I'm just as fond of him as he is of me. Isn't it touching that a dumb creature should have such affection? If it were a dog or a cat of course I could understand it, and I once heard of a wolf that was loving, but I have always supposed till now that fishes were cold by nature. I daresay, dear Dr.

Whittington told you about him? No! Well I am surprised, for he took such an interest in Goldy. It was Dr. Whittington who made me put the wire-netting over the aquarium. He said 'Some day that poor fellow will jump out in your absence to try and get to you, and you will find him dead on the carpet.' So we put the wire-netting across."

"He jumps," said the young girl gazing intently at the goldfish. "When we sit playing cards in the evening he jumps again and again. But the wire always throws him back."

I looked for the first time at Mrs. Robinson's daughter-in-law; her colourless young face bent over the aquarium with an expression of horror. And as I looked the luncheon bell rang, and with it arose a clamour of invitation from Mrs. Robinson that I should stay for the meal. Pot luck! Quite informal! etc., etc., but I wrenched myself away.

A few days later I called on my predecessor, Dr. Whittington, and found him sitting in his garden at East Sheen. He was, as always, communicative and genial, but it was evident that his interest in his late patients had migrated to his roses.

"Mrs. Robinson is an egregious goose, my dear Giles, as you must have already perceived, but she is a goose that lays golden eggs. You simply can't go too often to please them. I went nearly every day, and they constantly asked me to dinner. They have an excellent cook."

"They adored you," I said.

"They did; and some great writer has said somewhere that we must pay the penalty for our deepest affections. I--ahem! exacted the penalty; you see part of the results in my Malmaisons, and I advise you to follow in my footsteps. They are made of money."

"They look it."

"And they are, if I may say so, a private preserve. They know n.o.body. I always thought that everybody knew somebody, at any rate every one who is wealthy, but they don't seem to know a soul. If you dine there you'll meet a High Church parson whom they sit under, or the family solicitor, or a servile female imbecile who was Arthur's governess, and laughs at everything he says--no one else."