Bessy Rane sat at the large window of her dining-room in the coming twilight. Some twelve months had elapsed since her marriage, and summer was round again. Her work had dropped on her lap: it was that of stitching some wristbands for her husband: and she sat inhaling the sweet scent of the flowers, and watching Jelly\'s movements in Mrs. Cumberland\'s dining-room, facing her. Jelly had a candle in her hand, apparently searching for something. Bessy leaned forward to pluck a sprig of sweet verbena, and sat on tranquilly.
At the table behind her sat Dr. Rane, writing as fast as the waning light would permit him. Some unusual and peculiar symptoms had manifested themselves in a patient he had been recently attending, and he was making them and the case into a paper for a medical publication, in the hope that it would bring him back a remunerative guinea or two.
"Oliver, I am sure you can\'t see," said Bessy presently, looking round.
"It is almost blindman\'s holiday, dear. Will you ring for the lamp?"
Mrs. Rane rose. But, instead of ringing for the lamp, she went up to him, and put her hand on his shoulder persuasively.
"Take a quarter-of-an-hour\'s rest, Oliver. You will find all the benefit of it; and it is not quite time to light the lamp. Let us take a stroll in the garden."
"You are obstructing what little light is left, Bessy; standing between me and the window."
"Of course I am. I\'m doing it on purpose. Come, Oliver! You ought to know a great deal better than I do that it is bad to try the eyes, sir. Please, Oliver."
Yielding to her entreaties, he pushed the paper from him with a sigh of weariness, and they stepped from the window into the garden. Bessy passed her hand within his arm; and, turning towards the more secluded paths, they began to converse with one another in low tones.
Many a twilight half-hour had they thus paced together of late, talking together of what was and of what might be. The first year of their marriage had not been one of success in a pecuniary point of view; for Dr. Rane\'s practice did not improve. He earned barely sufficient for their moderate wants. Bessy, as cash-keeper, had a difficulty in making both ends meet. But the fact was not known; never a syllable of it transpired from either of them. Dr. Rane was seen out and about a great deal, going to and fro amongst his patients; and the world did not suspect that his returns were so small.
The new surgeon, Seeley, had stepped into all Mr. Alexander\'s practice, and was flourishing. Dr. Rane\'s, as before, was chiefly confined to the lower classes, especially those belonging to the North Works; and from certain circumstances, these men were not so supplied with funds as they had been, and consequently were not so well able to pay him. That Dr. Rane was bitterly mortified at not getting on better, for his wife\'s sake as well as his own, could not be mistaken. Bessy preached of hope cheerfully; of a bright future yet in store; but he had lost faith in it.
It seemed to Dr. Rane that everything was a failure. The medical book he had been engaged upon with persevering industry at the time of his marriage, from which he had anticipated great things both in fame and fortune, had not met with success. He had succeeded in getting it published; but as yet there were no returns. He had sacrificed a sum of money towards its publication; not a very large sum, it is true, but larger than they could afford, and no one but themselves knew how it had crippled them. Bessy said it would come back some day with interest; for the present they had only to keep up a good heart and live frugally.
Poor Bessy herself had one grief that she never spoke of even to him--the want of offspring. There had been no prospect of it whatever; and she so loved children! As week after week, month after month went by, her disappointment was very keen. She was beginning to grow a little reconciled to it now; and became only the more devoted to her husband.
Mrs. Rane was an excellent manager in the household, spending the smallest fraction that she could, consistently with comfort. It had not yet come to the want of that. At the turn of the previous winter old Phillis became ill and had to leave; and Bessy had since kept only Molly Green. By a fortunate chance Molly understood cooking; she had become a really excellent servant. At the small expense they lived at now, Dr. Rane might perhaps have managed to continue to meet it whilst he waited patiently for better luck; but he did not intend to do anything of the sort. His only anxiety was to remove to another place, as far away from Dallory Ham as possible.
Whether this thirst for migration would have arisen had his practice become successful, cannot be told. We can only record things as they were. With the disappointment--and other matters--lying upon him, the getting away from Dallory had grown into a wild, burning desire, that never left him by night or day. That one fatal mistake of his life seemed to hang over him like a curse. It is true that when he penned the letter so disastrous in its result, he had no more intention in his heart of slaying or killing than had the paper he wrote on; he had only thought of putting Alexander into disfavour at Dallory Hall; but it had turned out otherwise, and Dr. Rane felt that he had a life to answer for. He might have borne this; and at any rate his running away from Dallory would neither lessen the heart\'s burden nor add to it; but what he could not bear was the prospect of detection. Not a day passed but he saw some one or other whose face tacitly reminded him that such discovery might take place. He felt sure that Mrs. Gass still suspected him of having written the letter; he knew that his mother doubted it; he gathered a half suspicion of Jelly; he had more than half one of Richard North; and how many others there might be he knew not. Ever since the time when he had returned from his marriage trip, he thought there had been an involuntary constraint in Richard\'s manner to him; it could not be fancy. As to Jelly, the way he sometimes caught her green eyes observing him, was enough to give the shivers to a nervous man, which Dr. Rane was not. How he could have committed the fatal mistake of putting that copy of the miserable letter into his pocketbook, he never knew. He had tried his writing and his sentences on two or three pieces of paper, but he surely thought he had torn all up and burnt the pieces. Over and over again, looking back upon his carelessness, he said to himself that it was Fate. Not carelessness, in one sense of the word. Carelessness if you will, but a carelessness that he could not go from in the arbitrary dominions of Fate. Fate had been controlling him with her iron hand, to bring his crime home to him; and he could not escape it. Whatever it might have been, however--Fate, or want of caution--it had led to his being a suspected man by some few around him; and continue to live amongst them he would not. Dr. Rane was a proud man, liking in an especial degree to stand well in the estimation of his fellows; to have such a degradation as this brought publicly home to him would well-nigh kill him with shame. Rather than face it he would have run away to the remotest quarter of the habitable globe.
And he had quite imbued Bessy with the wish for change. She only thought as he thought. Never suspecting the true reason of his wish to get away and establish himself elsewhere, she only saw how real it was. Of this they talked, night after night, pacing the garden paths. "There seems to have been a spell of ill-luck attending me ever since I settled in this place," he would say to her; "and I know it won\'t be lifted whilst I stop here." He was saying it this very night.
"I hate the place, Bessy," he observed, looking up at the bright evening star that began to show itself in the clear blue sky. "But for my mother and you I should never have stayed in it. I wish I had the money to buy a practice elsewhere. As it is, I must establish one."
"Yes," acquiesced Bessy. "But where? The great thing is--what other place to decide upon."
Of course that was the chief thing. Dr. Rane looked down and kept silence, pondering various matters in his mind. He thought it had better be London. A friend of his, one Dr. Jones, who had been a fellow-student in their hospital days, was doing a large practice as a medical man in the neighbourhood of New York: he wanted assistance, and had proposed to Dr. Rane to go over and join him. Nothing in the world would Dr. Rane have liked better; and Bessy was willing to go where he went, even to quit her native land for good; but Dr. Jones did not offer this without an equivalent, and the terms he named, five hundred pounds, were quite beyond the reach of Oliver Rane. So he supposed it must be London. With the two hundred pounds that he hoped to get for the goodwill of his own practice in Dallory Ham--at this very moment he was trying to negociate with a gentleman for it in private---he should set up in London, or else purchase a small share in an established practice. Anything, anywhere, to get away, and to leave the nightmare of daily-dreaded discovery behind him!
"Once we are away from this place, Bessy, we shall get on. I feel sure of it. You won\'t long have to live like a hermit, from dread of the cost of entertaining company, or to look at every sixpence before you lay it out."
"I don\'t mind it, Oliver. You know how sorry I should be if you thought of giving up our home here for my sake."
"But I don\'t; it\'s for my own as well," he hastily added. "You can\'t realize what it is, Bessy, for a clever medical man--and I am that--to be beaten back for ever into obscurity; to find no field for his talents; to watch others of this generation rising into note and usefulness. I have not got on here! Madam has schemed to prevent it. Why she should have patronized Alexander; why she should patronize Seeley; not for their sakes, but to oppose me; I have never been able to imagine. Unless it was that my mother, when Fanny Gass, and Mr. North were intimate as brother and sister in early life."
"And madam despises the Gass family and ours equally. It was a black-letter day for us all when papa married her."
"That is no reason why she sh............