The House by the Church-Yard Part 73

Dangerfield.

Just then up came the meek little Mrs. Sturk, and the gentleman greeted her with a 'Well, Madam, I have not left his bedside since you went down; and I think he looks a little better--just a little--eh?'

'I trust and pray, Sir, that when the doctor--' began Mrs. Sturk, and stopped short, for Mr. Dangerfield frowned quickly, and pointed towards Miss Mag, who was now, after her wont, looking round the room for matter of interest.

'And is Pell comin' out to-night?' asked Miss Mag quickly.

'No, truly. Madam,' answered the gentleman: 'Dr. Pell's not comin'--is he, Mrs. Sturk?'

'Dr. Pell!--oh, la--no, Sir. No, my dear.' And, after a pause, 'Oh, ho.

I wish it was over,' she groaned, with her hand pressed to her side, looking with a kind of agony on Sturk.

'_What over_?' asked Miss Mag.

Just then a double-knock came to the hall-door, and Mr. Dangerfield signed sternly to Mrs. Sturk, who first stood up, with her eyes and mouth wide open, and then sat down, like a woman going to faint.

But the maid came up and told Miss Mag that her mother and Lieutenant O'Flaherty were waiting on the steps for her; and so, though loath to go unsatisfied, away she went, with a courtesy to Mr. Dangerfield and a kiss to Mrs. Sturk, who revived on hearing it was only her fat kindly neighbour from over the way, instead of Black Doctor Dillon, with his murderous case of instruments.

The gentleman in the silver spectacles accompanied her to the lobby, and offered his hand; but she dispensed with his attendance, and jumped down the stairs with one hand to the wall and the other on the banisters, nearly a flight at a time; and the cackle of voices rose from the hall door, which quickly shut, and the fair vision had vanished.

Dangerfield's silver spectacles gleamed phosphorically after her from under his lurid forehead. It was not a pleasant look, and his mouth was very grim. In another instant he was in the room again, and glanced at his watch.

''Tis half-past nine,' he said, in a quiet tone, but with a gleam of intense fury over his face, 'and that--that--doctor named _nine_.'

Dangerfield waited, and talked a little to Mrs. Sturk and the maid, who were now making preparations, in short sentences, by fits and starts of half-a-dozen words at a time. He had commenced his visit ceremoniously, but now he grew brusque, and took the command: and his tones were prompt and stern, and the women grew afraid of him.

Ten o'clock came. Dangerfield went down stairs, and looked from the drawing-room windows. He waxed more and more impatient. Down he went to the street. He did not care to walk towards the King's House, which lay on the road to Dublin; he did not choose to meet his boon companions again, but he stood for full ten minutes, with one of Dr. Sturk's military cloaks about him, under the village tree, directing the double-fire of his spectacles down the street, with an incensed steadiness, unrewarded, unrelieved. Not a glimmer of a link; not a distant rumble of a coach-wheel. It was a clear, frosty night, and one might hear a long way.

If any of the honest townsfolk had accidentally lighted upon that m.u.f.fled, glaring image under the dark old elm, I think he would have mistaken it for a ghost, or something worse. The countenance at that moment was not prepossessing.

Mr. Dangerfield was not given to bl.u.s.ter, and never made a noise; but from his hollow jaws he sighed an icy curse towards Dublin, which had a keener edge than all the roaring blasphemies of Donnybrook together; and, with another shadow upon his white face, he re-entered the house.

'He'll not come to-night, Ma'am,' he said with a cold abruptness.

'Oh, thank Heaven!--that is--I'm so afraid--I mean about the operation.'

Dangerfield, with his hands in his pockets, said nothing. There was a sneer on his face, white and dark, somehow. That was all. Was he baffled, and was Dr. Sturk, after all, never to regain his speech?

At half-past ten o'clock, Mr. Dangerfield abandoned hope. Had it been Dr. Pell, indeed, it would have been otherwise. But Black Dillon had not a patient; his fame was in the hospitals. There was nothing to detain him but his vices, and five hundred pounds to draw him to Chapelizod. He had not come. He must be either brained in a row, or drunk under a table. So Mr. Dangerfield took leave of good Mrs. Sturk, having told her in case the doctor should come, to make him wait for his arrival before taking any measures, and directing that he should be sent for immediately.

So Mr. Dangerfield got into his white surtout silently in the hall, and shut the door quickly after him, and waited, a grim sentry, under the tree, with his face towards Dublin. Father Time had not blunted the white gentleman's perceptions, touched his ear with his numb fingers, or blown the smoke of his tobacco-pipe into his eyes. He was keen of eye, sharp of hearing; but neither sight nor sound rewarded him, and so he turned, after a few minutes, and glided away, like a white ghost, toward the Bra.s.s Castle.

In less than five minutes after, the thunder of a coach shook Dr.

Sturk's windows, followed by a rousing peal on the hall-door, and Dr.

Dillon, in dingy splendours, and a great draggled wig, with a gold-headed cane in his bony hand, stepped in; and, diffusing a reek of whiskey-punch, and with a case of instruments under his arm, pierced the maid, who opened the door, through, with his prominent black eyes, and frightened her with his fiery face, while he demanded to see Mrs. Sturk, and lounged, without ceremony, into the parlour; where he threw himself on the sofa, with one of his bony legs extended on it, and his great ugly hand under his wig scratching his head.

CHAPTER Lx.x.xVII.

IN WHICH TWO COMRADES ARE TETE-A-TETE IN THEIR OLD QUARTERS, AND DOCTOR STURK'S CUE IS CUT OFF, AND A CONSULTATION COMMENCES.

The buzz of a village, like the hum of a city, represents a very wonderful variety of human accent and feeling. It is marvellous how few families thrown together will suffice to furnish forth this _dubia coena_ of sweets and bitters.

The roar of many waters--the ululatus of many-voiced humanity--marvellously monotonous, considering the infinite variety of its ingredients, booms on through the dark. The story-teller alone can take up the score of the mighty medley, and read at a glance what every fife and fiddle-stick is doing. That pompous thrum-thrum is the talk of the great white Ma.r.s.eilles paunch, pietate gravis; the whine comes from Lazarus, at the area rails; and the ba.s.s is old Dives, roaring at his butler; the piccolo is contributed by the studious school-boy, whistling over his Latin Grammar; that wild, long note is poor Mrs. Fondle's farewell of her dead boy; the ugly barytone, rising from the tap-room, is what Wandering Willie calls a sculduddery song--shut your ears, and pa.s.s on; and that clear soprano, in nursery, rings out a shower of innocent idiotisms over the half-stripped baby, and suspends the bawl upon its lips.

So, on this night, as usual, there rose up toward the stars a throbbing murmur from our village--a wild chaos of sound, which we must strive to a.n.a.lyse, extracting from the hurly-burly each separate tune it may concern us to hear.

Captain Devereux was in his lodging. He was comparatively tranquil now; but a savage and impious despair possessed him. Serene outwardly--he would not let the vulgar see his scars and sores; and was one of those proud spirits who build to themselves desolate places.

Little Puddock was the man with whom he had least reserve. Puddock was so kindly, and so true and secret, and cherished beside, so great an admiration for him, that he greeted him rather kindly at a moment when another visitor would have fared scurvily enough. Puddock was painfully struck with his pallor, his wild and haggard eye, and something stern and brooding in his handsome face, which was altogether new and shocking to him.

'I've been _thinking_, Puddock,' he said; 'and thought with me has grown strangely like despair--and that's all. Why, man, _think_--what is there for me?--all my best stakes I've lost already; and I'm fast losing myself. How different, Sir, is my fate from others? Worse men than I--every way incomparably worse--and d---- them, _they_ prosper, while I go down the tide. 'Tisn't just!' And he swore a great oath. ''Tis enough to make a man blaspheme. I've done with life--I hate it. I'll volunteer.

'Tis my first thought in the morning, and my last at night, how well I'd like a bullet through my brain or heart. D---- the world, d---- feeling, d---- memory. I'm not a man that can always be putting prudential restraints upon myself. I've none of those plodding ways. The cursed fools that spoiled me in my childhood, and forsake me now, have all to answer for--I charge them with my ruin.' And he launched a curse at them (meaning his aunt) which startled the plump soul of honest little Puddock.

'You must not talk that way, Devereux,' he said, still a good deal more dismayed by his looks than his words. 'Why are you so troubled with vapours and blue devils?'

'Nowhy!' said Devereux, with a grim smile.

'My dear Devereux, I say, you mustn't talk in that wild way. You--you talk like a ruined man!'

'And I so comfortable!'

'Why, to be sure, d.i.c.k, you have had some little rubs, and, maybe, your follies and your vexations; but, hang it, you are young; you can't get experience--at least, so I've found it--without paying for it. You mayn't like it just now; but it's well worth the cost. Your worries and miscarriages, dear Richard, will make you steady.'

'Steady!' echoed Devereux, like a man thinking of something far away.

'Ay, d.i.c.k--you've sown your wild oats.'

On a sudden, says the captain, 'My dear little Puddock,' and he took him by the hand, with a sort of sarcastic flicker of a smile, and looked in his face almost contemptuously; but his eyes and his voice softened before the unconscious bonhomie of the true little gentleman. 'Puddock, Puddock, did it never strike you, my boy, that Hamlet never strives to speak a word of comfort to the forlorn old Dane? He felt it would not do. Every man that's worth a b.u.t.ton knows his own case best; and I know the secrets of my own prison-house. Sown my wild oats! To be sure I have, Puddock, my boy; and the new leaf I've turned over is just this; I've begun to reap them; and they'll grow, my boy, and grow as long as gra.s.s grows; and--Macbeth has his dagger, you know, and I've my sickle--the handle towards my hand, that you can't see; and in the sweat of my brow, I must cut down and garner my sheaves; and as I sowed, so must I reap, and grind, and bake, the black and bitter grist of my curse. Don't talk nonsense, little Puddock. Wasn't it Gay that wrote the "Beggar's Opera?" Ay! Why don't you play Macheath? Gay!--Ay--a pleasant fellow, and his poems too. He writes--don't you remember--he writes,

'So comes a reckoning when the banquet's o'er-- The dreadful reckoning, and men smile no more.'

'Puddock, throw up that window, the room's too hot--or stay never mind; read a book, Puddock, you like it, and I'll stroll a little along the path, and find you when I come back.'

'Why it's dark,' remonstrated his visitor.

'Dark? I dare say--yes, of course--very dark--but cool; the air is cool.'

He talked like a man who was thinking of something else; and Puddock thought how strangely handsome he looked, with that pale dash of horror, like King Saul when the evil spirit was upon him; and there was a terrible misgiving in his mind. The lines of the old ballad that Devereux used to sing with a sort of pathetic comicality were humming in his ear,--

'He walked by the river, the river so clear-- The river that runs through Kilkenny; His name was Captain Wade, And he died for that fair maid.'

and so following. What could he mean by walking, at that hour, alone, by the river's brink? Puddock, with a sinking and flutter at his heart, unperceived, followed him down stairs, and was beside him in the street.

'The path by the river?' said Puddock.