All this time Madeline was dwelling with White in a familiar corner of Bohemia—a quarter of the world which is fast disappearing before the brand-new dwellings of artistic gentility—and which, when it finally disappears (as seems inevitable), will take something with it that even respectability can never quite replace.
The dwellers in Bohemia, now rapidly disappearing like the dear old quarter itself, had many faults and not a few vices, but these were all forgotten in the presence of natural charm and irresistible bonhomie. They wore great beards, drank beer, and smoked great pipes; their clothes were seedy and eccentric, their manners rough and merry, their tastes the very reverse of refined; they had very little money, but that little they freely shared among one another; they loved late hours, wild talk, song-singing, and the social glass; they still regarded the theatre as an educational institution, and talked with pagan enthusiasm of the old gods of the stage. They were neither very clever nor very wise, and they have left no literary monuments to keep their memories fresh; but they enjoyed life, and in their own rough way respected the literary craft to which they belonged. For them Bohemia was a pleasant place.
Here Marmaduke White was born, and bred, and was, in due season, to die. All attempts to coax him to cleaner and cosier quarters were unavailing. Although one by one his fellow-Bohemians fell away, corrupted by the heresy of respectability and clean linen; although those who were born in the same quarter with him listened to the new commercial culte and became prosperous men of business; although Jones the novelist drove his brougham and frequented genteel parties, while Brown the painter wore fine raiment, sold his pictures for splendid prices, and put up at a fashionable club, White still remained as he had been—impecunious, irresponsible, generally out-at-elbow. It was his constant complaint that the old landmarks were fast changing. ‘If I live long enough,’ he said, ‘I shall stand on the ruins of the last chop-house and see the last night-house turned into a temperance hotel. The downfall of Bohemia dates from the day when Thackeray became famous, smoked cigars, and built that nice house at Kensington. It is the apotheosis of the Snob. Even at the Garrick, where one used to meet all the talent, the Snob is rampant. There is not a foyer of the old kind in all London. The literary man has become a commercial gent the artist is a spiritualised bagman—even the actor wears fine clothes and goes to swell garden-parties. Sic transit gloria Bohemio! I begin to feel like a man who has endured beyond his due time; a sort of Wandering Jew, the old clothes-man of an extinct existence and a perished creed. I should not so much care if people were much better for the change—but they are not. Fellows are valued now, not for what they are, but for what they earn. The very journals are grown brazen-fronted and rave of Mammon. A great book is a book that makes a great deal of money; a great artist is one who earns a great sum. At my time of life I can’t, set up as a swell, I like my glass of good beer, and my pipe, and my shirt sleeves. When I die my epitaph will be “Et ille in Bohemia fuit”—and I suppose I shall be the last of the race.’
Now the good man, though he had the perennial heart of a boy, was not young. Time, which had dealt gently with his disposition, had thinned his once flowing hair, made his limbs feeble, and set many a crowsfoot under his kindly eyes. Nor where the habits of the Bohemia he still inhabited favourable to longevity. The small hours always found him up, at work or play, and he saw little of the early sunshine. He was always behindhand with his work, always working against time; feeding irregularly, and at unreasonable hours; drinking, alas! more than was good for him, and even consuming that nicotine which would destroy even a Promethean liver. He had saved nothing, so that rest was denied him; and indeed he could not have rested, for he loved labour, in the old, reckless, perfunctory, Bohemian way. His old friends had gradually drifted away from him, died and been buried, or passed up to those shining social heights where dress suits and white linen are provided for aspiring pilgrims. Even managers of theatres, grown genteel too, pitied him. ‘Poor White,’ they would say; ‘he is such a Bohemian!’ So that his occupation partly failed him Good old blank-verse plays were no longer in demand. Brand-new adaptors, fresh from picking the pockets of French authors in Parisian forays, splashed him with the wheels of their triumphal chariots; gorgeous Jew entrepreneurs shook their heads at him. ‘Vat ve vant now, my boy, is realism; plenty of swell clothes, and upholstery, and last cackle; the public don’t vant poetry, and as for blank verse, it ventilates de theatre. They’ll stand Shakespeare now and then, especially when Eugene Aram does it, because it’s genteel; but all de rest of de drama comsh from France.’ In his anxiety to suit the market he too tried pocket-picking, but he lacked the deft rapidity and supreme impudence of the dramatic thief by profession. He took too much trouble with work of this kind, and the public found it old-fashioned.
So it came to pass that from one reason and another, whether because he was physically tired out or intellectually weary of a race in which he was unevenly handicapped, White began to show signs of failing health. Once or twice he took to his bed with some trifling ailment, and on each occasion so weak were his bodily powers that he found it hard work to get up again. He himself attached no importance to those indications of weakness; he was as cheerful to outward seeming, as sanguine, and as full of magnificent ‘subjects,’ as ever. He still sketched out tragedies which no one would produce on such pert subjects as ‘Semiramis,’ ‘Julian the Apostate,’ and ‘Boadicea,’ and infinitely laboured comedies full of the spirit of the Restoration. His style was still that of the last decadence, when Lalor Shiel was a genius and Sheridan Knowles a prophet. He still clung to the superstition which placed Bulwer Lytton in the pantheon of tinsel divinities. But the game was all over. Et ille in Bohemia fuit, that was all.
One night, or rather early one morning, he came home to the old studio in St. John’s Wood, evidently under the influence of violent fever. He had caught cold, he thought, at the wings of the Duchess’s Theatre, and, though he had tried the panacea of hot whisky and water, applied in allopathic doses, it had only seemed to make him worse. He went to bed, and the next day he was unable to rise.
When Madeline went to his bedside she was shocked at his appearance. He looked haggard and old, the great veins on his temple were blue and swollen, and he gasped like one who could hardly get his breath. The ghost of his old smile came to his face as he reached out his trembling hands, which were hot as fire.
‘Don’t be alarmed, my dear,’ he said cheerily, but in a strange, faint voice. ‘I’m not quite myself, but I shall be all right presently. I think it’s the effect of Burnard’s jokes. He was at the “Harum-Scarum” last night, so I’m afraid I partook too freely of pun-salad, which is worse than the nightmare-producing lobster.’
He tried to laugh, but the laugh died away into a moan, and he sank back upon his pillow.
Later on in the day the symptoms became so alarming that a physician was sent for. He made light of the patient’s condition, but wrote him a prescription, and ordered him to be kept as quiet as possible.
Within the next twenty-four hours the symptoms became manifestly those of low or gastric fever. Madeline wrote a hurried line for Forster, who came almost immediately, accompanied by the celebrated Dr. Tain, well known for his kindness to literary men. The good doctor looked somewhat grave, but expressed his opinion that the case would yield to treatment.
From that time forward Madeline scarcely left her guardian’s bedside, ministering to him with infinite tenderness and care. The fever ran its course for fourteen days, during several of which White was more or less insensible. On the morning of the fourteenth day he opened his eyes, saw Madeline seated by his bedside, and smiled brightly.
‘Are you there, my dear?’ he asked. ‘I was dreaming about you. I thought you were a little girl again, and I—dear me, how weak I feel! Have I been very ill?’
‘Very ill,’ answered Madeline. ‘But do not talk; the doctor says you must not. Let me bring your beef-tea.’
The doctor had ordered him to have beef-tea in liberal portions every hour: it was the only way, he said, to combat the fever.
‘I think I shall soon be all right,’ said White, presently. ‘I must take more care of myself for the future, though. I’m getting quite an old fellow, and must go to bed at ten.
When Dr. Tain entered, White looked up and nodded cheerfully.
‘Here I am, you see! Pallida Mors won’t have me this time, after all, and I was thinking that I could eat a mutton chop, well peppered.’
The doctor replied cheerfully, and patted White gently on the shoulder; but Madeline, catching the expression of his face as he turned away, was somewhat troubled.
‘Keep him quiet,’ he whispered to her at the door.
‘I’ll look in again in the afternoon.’
From this intimation it became clear that the doctor was uneasy. Scarcely had he gone when the patient exhibited great restlessness and difficulty of breathing; and when the doctor returned in the afternoon he found him rambling incoherently.
Leaving the sick room, he went into the studio, where Forster, whose attentions had been unremitting, was impatiently waiting.
‘My fears are realised,’ said the physician, gravely.
‘Peritonitis has supervened.’
Before long it became manifest that White was sinking; as the hours progressed he grew weaker and weaker, until the end seemed l............