ALL night Sir Charles Repton had tossed in an uneasy slumber; all night his faithful wife Maria had sat up watching him. She dared not trust a trained nurse; she dared not trust a single member of the household, for he muttered as he slept strange things concerning the governance of England, and stranger things concerning his own financial schemes. At one moment, it was about half-past four in the morning,—much at the time when Demaine, seventy miles away, upon the bosom of the ocean, had woken to see the sun—his predecessor in the Wardenship of the Court of Dowry (and still the titular holder of that office) had started suddenly up in bed, and violently denounced a man with an Austrian name as having cheated him by obtaining prior information upon the Budget. He asked rapidly in his mania why Consols had gone up in the first week of April, and would not be pacified until his wife, with the tact that is born of affection, had assumed the r?le of the unpleasing foreigner and had confessed all. Then and then only was he pacified and fell into the first true sleep he had enjoyed for twenty-four hours. He[259] slept until eleven, and she, brave woman that she was, snatched some little sleep at his side, but only upon the edge of sleep as it were, waking at any moment to shield him from the consequences of his disease.
When he woke she herself made it her duty to go downstairs and fetch him his breakfast, but though his repose had recruited his body, his dear mind was still unhinged.
He would have it that the Royal Family when they invested in some concern were not registered under their true names, and he began a long wild rambling harangue about the death duties and some new story about yet another outlandish name, and the insufficiency of the taxes for which it was responsible. The whole thing was described in a manner so clear and sensible as added to the horror of the contrast between his sanity and that other dreadful mood.
By noon, still lying in his bed, he was contrasting to her wearied ear the cost of the Tubes in London as against those in Paris, and making jokes about “boring through the London clay.” He went on to ask why a friend of his had drawn his salary as a Minister for some little time after his death, and suddenly went off at a tangent upon the noble self-sacrifice of Lord Axton in exiling himself to a tropic clime, threatening that unfortunate peer with certain bankruptcy and possible imprisonment unless a report upon the Bitsu Marsh were favourable. Then for a blessed half-hour he was silent.
[260]At the end of it he called for a pen and paper, and wrote a number of short notes. Luckily he gave them to her to be posted; she read but a few, and with trembling hands she burned them all, even the stamps, though she knew how particular he had been in the old days on that detail.
He dressed and came down. She persuaded him—oh how lovingly,—to sit in his favourite room overlooking the Park. She forgot that it overlooked the crowded throng, and from close upon one until late in the afternoon this devoted angel clung to him while he poured out meaningless denunciations of all his world, up hill and down dale, relieved from time to time (a relief to him but not to her) by a sudden throwing up of the window, and an address to the passers-by.
He warned more than one omnibus as it passed, of an approaching combine between the various lines, and urged the shareholders to buy while yet there was time. At one awful moment he had begun excitedly to point out the figure of a Bishop upon the opposite pavement and to begin a full biography of that hierarch, when she thought it her duty to slam down the window and to bear the weight of his anger rather than permit the scene.
Small knots of people gathered outside the house, but the police had been warned and they were easily dispersed, with no necessity for violence beyond the loss of a tooth or two on the part of the crowd.
[261]As though her task were not enough, the house was full of the noise of bells, message after message calling for news and for information, but she had already given orders to the secretary to write out whatever commonplace messages might occur to him, and he faithfully performed his duty.
In her confusion she could see no issue but to try yet another night’s sleep, and when he carried his hand to his head as he now and then did, when the touch of pain stung him, she comforted herself with this assurance, that a paroxysm of such violence could not long endure.
I say a paroxysm of such violence, though there was nothing violent in the man’s demeanour: the horror lay in the cold contrast between the pleasant easy tone in which the things were said and the things that were said in that pleasant easy tone, while the violence was no more than the violence of contrast between his absurd affirmations and the quiet current of the national life.
The printing of one-tenth of those simple, easily delivered words might have ruined the country. We owe it to Lady Repton—and I trust it will never be forgotten—that no syllable of them all was printed, and that the greater part of them were not even heard by any other ear than her own.
She had persuaded him to an early dinner; she had even put it at the amazing hour of half-past seven. She had ordered such food as she knew he best loved, and the wine that soothed him most—which[262] happened to be a Norman champagne. She was particular to request a full service of attendance, for her experience told her that in such surroundings he was ever at his best.
Another attack of pain in the head seized him and passed. She sat doggedly, and endured. This admirable wife after her day-long watch was exhausted and heart-sick. She saw no issue anywhere. She sat by her husband’s side, starting nervously at the least sound from below, and listening to his impossible commentaries upon contemporary life, his hair-raising stories of his friends, his colleagues and even of her own religious pastors, and his bouts of self-revelations, or rather let us hope, of diseased imaginings, when there was put into her hand an express letter.
The superscription was peculiar; it ran:
To the Rt. Hon.
To the
The Lady C. Repton, M.V.O.
She opened it in wonderment. Its contents were far simpler than its exterior: they ran as follows:
“Madam,—Your husband’s case noted as per enclosed cutting. I know what is wrong with him and I can cure him. My price is five hundred dollars ($500.00) one hundred pounds (￡100). The operation is warranted not to take more than ten minutes of his valuable time.
[263]“Will call upon you when you are through tea and he is quite rested, somewheres round eight o’clock.
“Yrs. etc.,         Scipio Knickerbocker”
Caught in the fold of this short note was a newspaper paragraph and a card printed in gold letters upon imitation ivory:
Dr. Scipio Knickerbocker, M.D.
415 Tenth St.
London, Ont.
And the Savoy Hotel.
Had she been alone she would have prayed for guidance.
Eight o’clock, of all hours! And what was “Ont.”?
Drowning women catch at straws. Under no other conceivable circumstances would Lady Repton have caught at such a wretched straw as this. But the faculty had deserted her, she had no remedy; she saw, she knew, everybody knew, that her husband was mad; she divined from twenty indications and especially from the suddenness of the pain, that the madness was some simple case of mechanical pressure. And suppose this man really knew how to cure him? She dared not ask her husband to put yet earlier the hour of his meal, at which he had already grumbled; beside which, it was too late. The incomprehensible Scipio would arrive.
She was still in an agony of doubt when she accompanied her husband (who as he went down[264] the stairs and entered the dining-room was chatting gaily upon the amours of a prominent member of the Opposition) and as their lonely meal proceeded in the presence of those great over-dressed mutes, their servants, to all her other anxieties was added her irresolution upon the prime question, whether she should or should not accept the desperate aid of an utterly unknown man, perhaps an adventurer.
Just as Sir Charles had finished his soup, and with it his amusing little story about the Baronetcy which though it had been paid for by the son and heir (who was solvent) came out after all in the Birthday List as a Knighthood,—just as he had finished his soup I say, he gave a loud cry and put both hands to his head just behind the ears.
“Crickey how it hurts, William!” he remarked to the butler.
“Yes, Sir Charles,” said the butler in the tone of a hierarch at his devotions.
“It’s gone now,” said the Baronet, with a sigh of relief, “but it does hurt when it comes! What’s the fish?” and he continued his meal.
He drank a great gulp of wine and was better.... “It’s dry,” he said doubtfully, “it’s too dry ... but there are advantages to that. You know why they make wine dry, William?”
“Yes, Sir Charles.”
“Oh! you do, do you? You’re getting too smart. You couldn’t tell me, I’ll bet brazils!”
[265]“No, Sir Charles.”
“Why,” said Repton with a merry wink, “it’s to save your mouth next morning!” Then up went his hands to his head again and he groaned.
“Is your head hurting you again, darling?” said Lady Repton when she saw the gesture repeated.
“Yes, damnably,” said Sir Charles in a loud tone. “It’s hurting just under both ears, just where Sambo gave ... ah! that’s better ... (a gasp) ... gave the Tomtit that nasty one in the big fight I went to see last week—the night I telephoned home to say that I was kept at the House,” he added by way of explanation.
The servants stood around like posts, and Lady Repton endured her agony.
“I think what I should have enjoyed most,” mused Sir Charles after this revelation, “would have been to run across old Prout just as I came out of that Club. Not that he knows anything about such things, but still, it was a pretty lousy place. Besides which, the people I was with! It would have been fun to see old Prout sit up. Shouldn’t wonder if he’d refused to let me speak at the Parson’s Show after that; and in that case,” ended Sir Charles significantly tapping his trousers pocket, “there’d be an end to the wherewith!” He nodded genially to his wife. “There’d be a drying up of the needful! Wouldn’t there, William?” he suddenly demanded of the gorgeous domestic, who was at that moment pouring him out some wine.
[266]“Yes, Sir Charles,” said the hireling in a tone of the deepest respect.
“That’s what keeps ’em going, my dear,” he said, “and here’s to you,” he added, lifting his glass. “Are you put out about something?” he said, with real kindness in his voice.
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” said that really Christian woman, nearly bursting into tears.
“I’m really very sorry if I’ve hurt your feelings in any way, my dear,” said Charles Repton.
No symptom of his malady was more distressing than this unmanly softness, it was so utterly different from his daily habit.
“I’d never dream of wounding her ladyship intentionally; would I, William?” he asked again.
“No, Sir Charles,” said William.
“I think we’d better go upstairs, dear,” said the unfortunate lady. “Oh dear!” she sighed as a sudden peal rang through the house, and then subsiding, she said: “Oh it’s only a bell!”
“Her ladyship’s nervous to-night, William,” said Repton as one man should to another.
“Yes, Sir Charles,” repeated William in a grave monotone.
A card was brought in upon a salver of enormous dimensions and of remarkable if hideous workmanship.
Lady Repton recognised the name.
“I must go out a moment. I’ll be back in a moment, Charles.” She looked at him with a world[267] of anxiety and affection, and left him chatting gaily to the servant.
Scipio Knickerbocker stood without.
Any doubts upon the matter were settled not only by his appearance but by his first phrase which ran in a singular intonation:
“Lady C. Repton? I am Scipio Knickerbocker, M.D. (Phillipsville), Ma’am,”—and he bowed. He was an exceedingly small man; he wore very long hair beautifully parted in the middle; his jaw was so square, deep and thrust forward as to be a positive malformation, but to convey at the same time an impression of indomitable will, not to say mulish obstinacy. His arms and legs were evidently too thin for health, and the development of his chest was deplorable. He was dressed in exceedingly good grey cloth, but hi............