The Challenge of Love. Victorian Romance Novel

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СКАЧАТЬ of Navestock and its neighbourhood, bringing children into the world with unction and patting them on the head three years later, with still greater unction; uttering sweet, shallow solemnities at bedsides; drinking his port at dinners and twinkling through sly, beaming spectacles; subscribing his guinea to all charities, and living very fatly behind the heavy rep curtains of Prospect House.

      Dr. Threadgold’s chubby hand disappeared into Wolfe’s great fist. Urbanity hid some of the elder man’s condescension. He looked through his round spectacles at Wolfe and seemed a little bothered by the surgeon’s height and by the grave and steady way he had of staring people in the face.

      “A wet journey, I’m afraid.” Dr. Threadgold always looked on the point of saying “my young friend.” “It is a disgrace that there is no branch line to Navestock, a positive disgrace. But privilege, vested interests—ah, well, I’m a bit of a Liberal, Mr. Wolfe. And luggage—what about your luggage?”

      “I think I heard it going upstairs.”

      “Ah—to be sure. I expect you would like some supper. We take that informal meal at half-past seven—precisely.”

      “Very good, sir.”

      “Ah—let me see—your room, yes—Sykes will show you your room. You will find Mrs. Threadgold and myself in the drawing-room. No, no professional questions to-night. They can stand over till the morning.”

      Threadgold had begun to talk very fast, as though his composure had run away from him, and he was trying to catch it again. His affability appeared a little hurried and out of breath. All because this tall and rather ugly young man had a reserved air, and steady, watchful eyes.

      “Sykes—Sykes——”

      “Yes, sir.”

      “Conduct Mr. Wolfe to his room, Sykes.”

      And Sykes led the way up three long flights of stairs.

      John Wolfe’s room was on the top floor of Prospect House, a room whose single window opened upon a leaded gutter and the brick face of a parapet. By standing on one of the chairs he could have seen over the parapet and, by daylight, the mulberry trees and the green below. The furniture of the room was very simple, a three-cornered mahogany washstand with a blue Spode jug and basin, a wooden bedstead, painted yellow, a chest of drawers of the same colour, a couple of chairs, and for a dressing-table a plain deal table draped with pink glazed calico and muslin, rather dirty. Over the bed hung a text, “My God, Thou seest me.” The carpet was in four strips, arranged about the bed.

      Wolfe stood in the middle of the room, and his head came within six inches of the ceiling. He looked round critically, with just the slightest twitching of the upper lip. The text over the bed interested him. He went and unpinned it, and turned it with its face to the wall.

      He moved next to the little Georgian fireplace, put a boot into the opening and felt for the register.

      “Down—of course!”

      Wolfe kicked it up, and a shower of soot descended upon the white shavings and the pink paper fronting that decorated the grate.

      “I’ll wager that man’s an old duffer. Fussy and amiable. I wonder what sort of life they lead down here? Quiet and sleepy and harmless.”

      He laughed and turned to the portmanteau that the fat boy had left at the bottom of the bed. Nor was his unpacking a very lengthy business. Out of the portmanteau came two shirts, rather ragged; a pair of slippers; a washing-bag; a comb and brush; a pair of boots that had been re-capped at the toes; a razor; a strop; a brown leather instrument case; a meerschaum pipe wrapped up in a paper bag; two pairs of trousers; a tail coat; two night-shirts, with the buttons showing metal; five collars; a tie, and two or three well-worn books. Wolfe packed most of these possessions away in the chest of drawers before he went to the wash-hand stand and washed himself in the blue Spode basin.

      As he stood by the dressing-table where the maid had left the candle, his hand went reflectively into the breast pocket of his coat and pulled out a faded green silk purse. He shook the contents out on to the dressing-table, and counted one sovereign and nine shillings in silver. An investigation of his trousers pockets disclosed the sum of ninepence in coppers. Wolfe eyed the money thoughtfully, picked it up piece by piece, and put it back, all save the coppers, into the green silk purse.

      This green silk purse had shared with Wolfe all the lean years of his student’s life. No romantic associations belonged to it. He had bought the purse seven years ago at a little fancy shop in Islington, in the days when, as a young man of twenty-one, he had taken the £100 a Quaker aunt had left him. Those seven years would have killed or crushed a man with less toughness and less heart, for no fanatical or mediæval scholar could have suffered more in the pursuit of philosophy. One shirt, one pair of boots, one meal a day; heroic hoarding to pay for fees and books; a genuine garret to cook and sleep in. He had not only to learn, but to earn money to learn with. For three years he had acted as night dispenser at a surgery. More than once he had spent a part of the summer travelling the country with an itinerant “boxing booth” and acting as “bruiser” at country fairs. He had sung songs in London taverns for a shilling and a pot of porter a night, and worked for three months as a navvy in the cuttings and on the embankments of a new south-country railway. At the hospital he had been called “The Wolf,” and the name had suited his lean, predatory look. A quiet man, the best “heavy weight” in the London hospitals, clean to the point of ferocity in his living, shabby, a hater of snobs, he had a few good friends, and a fair number of shy enemies.

      Those seven years had left their mark upon the man, and upon his belongings. He was hard, grim, straight as his own “left,” absolutely fearless, an enthusiast who had fought through. Wolfe had been thorough. He had not scraped a little knowledge and the lowest possible qualification, and then disappeared to make a little money. He had served as house-surgeon and resident obstetric surgeon, and had spent some months studying that elemental science—public health. Wolfe was a sound man, a man who could not bear not to know what could be known.

      Yet he had come by more things than knowledge and thoroughness. No true man who has struggled and suffered loses in heart by these strugglings and sufferings. For these things are life, and without them a man does not understand half the things that he sees. Insight, sympathy, humour, a deep tenderness, you find them in the men who have come with sound hearts through the rough and tumble.

      And now, at the end of these seven years, John Wolfe found himself in Navestock town as assistant to Dr. Montague Threadgold. Experience in general practice and money to save for a career—these were his necessities. If Navestock had known the contents of John Wolfe’s portmanteau and his green silk purse, it would have attached no great importance to the fact that Dr. Montague Threadgold had taken a new assistant.

      “Old Monte’s got another bottle-washer!”

      Yet the man who was descending Dr. Threadgold’s stairs and pausing to decide which was the door of Dr. Threadgold’s drawing-room, was fated to shake the torpor out of the bones of that most corrupt of towns. The great, outer world had dropped a live shell into Navestock market-place.

      A high-pitched, serene squeak of a voice gave Wolfe the clue as to the position of Dr. Threadgold’s drawing-room door.

      “Montague,” it said, “Montague, be so good as to put two more lumps of coal on the fire.”

      And Wolfe heard the scoop of a shovel as he put his hand to the white china handle.

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