CHAPTER IX
THE EPISODE OF THE LADY WHO WAS VERY EXCLUSIVE
The Matabele revolt gave Hilda a prejudice against Rhodesia. I
will confess that I shared it. I may be hard to please; but it
somehow sets one against a country when one comes home from a ride
to find all the other occupants of the house one lives in
massacred. So Hilda decided to leave South Africa. By an odd
coincidence, I also decided on the same day to change my residence.
Hilda's movements and mine, indeed, coincided curiously. The
moment I learned she was going anywhere, I discovered in a flash
that I happened to be going there too. I commend this strange case
of parallel thought and action to the consideration of the Society
for Psychical Research.
So I sold my farm, and had done with Rhodesia. A country with a
future is very well in its way; but I am quite Ibsenish in my
preference for a country with a past. Oddly enough, I had no
difficulty in getting rid of my white elephant of a farm. People
seemed to believe in Rhodesia none the less firmly because of this
slight disturbance. They treated massacres as necessary incidents
in the early history of a colony with a future. And I do not deny
that native risings add picturesqueness. But I prefer to take them
in a literary form.
"You will go home, of course?" I said to Hilda, when we came to
talk it all over.
She shook her head. "To England? Oh, no. I must pursue my Plan.
Sebastian will have gone home; he expects me to follow."
"And why don't you?"
"Because--he expects it. You see, he is a good judge of character;
he will naturally infer, from what he knows of my temperament, that
after this experience I shall want to get back to England and
safety. So I should--if it were not that I know he will expect it.
As it is, I must go elsewhere; I must draw him after me."
"Where?"
"Why do you ask, Hubert?"
"Because--I want to know where I am going myself. Wherever you go,
I have reason to believe, I shall find that I happen to be going
also."
She rested her little chin on her hand and reflected a minute.
"Does it occur to you," she asked at last, "that people have
tongues? If you go on following me like this, they will really
begin to talk about us."
"Now, upon my word, Hilda," I cried, "that is the very first time I
have ever known you show a woman's want of logic! I do not propose
to follow you; I propose to happen to be travelling by the same
steamer. I ask you to marry me; you won't; you admit you are fond
of me; yet you tell me not to come with you. It is _I_ who suggest
a course which would prevent people from chattering--by the simple
device of a wedding. It is YOU who refuse. And then you turn upon
me like this! Admit that you are unreasonable."
"My dear Hubert, have I ever denied that I was a woman?"
"Besides," I went on, ignoring her delicious smile, "I don't intend
to FOLLOW you. I expect, on the contrary, to find myself beside
you. When I know where you are going, I shall accidentally turn up
on the same steamer. Accidents WILL happen. Nobody can prevent
coincidences from occurring. You may marry me, or you may not; but
if you don't marry me, you can't expect to curtail my liberty of
action, can you? You had better know the worst at once; if you
won't take me, you must count upon finding me at your elbow all the
world over--till the moment comes when you choose to accept me."
"Dear Hubert, I am ruining your life!"
"An excellent reason, then, for taking my advice, and marrying me
instantly! But you wander from the question. Where are you going?
That is the issue now before the house. You persist in evading
it."
She smiled, and came back to earth. "Oh, if you MUST know, to
India, by the east coast, changing steamers at Aden."
"Extraordinary!" I cried. "Do you know, Hilda, as luck will have
it, _I_ also shall be on my way to Bombay by the very same
steamer!"
"But you don't know what steamer it is?"
"No matter. That only makes the coincidence all the odder.
Whatever the name of the ship may be, when you get on board, I have
a presentiment that you will be surprised to find me there."
She looked up at me with a gathering film in her eyes. "Hubert,
you are irrepressible!"
"I am, my dear child; so you may as well spare yourself the
needless trouble of trying to repress me."
If you rub a piece of iron on a loadstone, it becomes magnetic.
So, I think, I must have begun to acquire some part of Hilda's own
prophetic strain; for, sure enough, a few weeks later, we both of
us found ourselves on the German East African steamer Kaiser
Wilhelm, on our way to Aden--exactly as I had predicted. Which
goes to prove that there is really something after all in
presentiments!
"Since you persist in accompanying me," Hilda said to me, as we sat
in our chairs on deck the first evening out, "I see what I must do.
I must invent some plausible and ostensible reason for our
travelling together."
"We are not travelling together," I answered. "We are travelling
by the same steamer; that is all--exactly like the rest of our
fellow-passengers. I decline to be dragged into this imaginary
partnership."
"Now do be serious, Hubert! I am going to invent an object in life
for us."
"What object?"
"How can I tell yet? I must wait and see what turns up. When we
tranship at Aden, and find out what people are going on to Bombay
with us, I shall probably discover some nice married lady to whom I
can attach myself."
"And am I to attach myself to her, too?"
"My dear boy, I never asked you to come. You came unbidden. You
must manage for yourself as best you may. But I leave much to the
chapter of accidents. We never know what will turn up, till it
turns up in the end. Everything comes at last, you know, to him
that waits."
"And yet," I put in, with a meditative air, "I have never observed
that waiters are so much better off than the rest of the community.
They seem to me--"
"Don't talk nonsense. It is YOU who are wandering from the
question now. Please return to it."
I returned at once. "So I am to depend on what turns up?"
"Yes. Leave that to me. When we see our fellow-passengers on the
Bombay steamer, I shall soon discover some ostensible reason why we
two should be travelling through India with one of them."
"Well, you are a witch, Hilda," I answered. "I found that out long
ago; but if you succeed between here and Bombay in inventing a
Mission, I shall begin to believe you are even more of a witch than
I ever thought you."
At Aden we changed into a P. and O. steamer. Our first evening out
on our second cruise was a beautiful one; the bland Indian Ocean
wore its sweetest smile for us. We sat on deck after dinner. A
lady with a husband came up from the cabin while we sat and gazed
at the placid sea. I was smoking a quiet digestive cigar. Hilda
was seated in her deck chair next to me.
The lady with the husband looked about her for a vacant space on
which to place the chair a steward was carrying for her. There was
plenty of room on the quarter-deck. I could not imagine why she
gazed about her with such obtrusive caution. She inspected the
occupants of the various chairs around with deliberate scrutiny
through a long-handled tortoise-shell optical abomination. None of
them seemed to satisfy her. After a minute's effort, during which
she also muttered a few words very low to her husband, she selected
an empty spot midway between our group and the most distant group
on the other side of us. In other words, she sat as far away from
everybody present as the necessarily restricted area of the
quarter-deck permitted.
Hilda glanced at me and smiled. I snatched a quick look at the
lady again. She was dressed with an amount of care and a smartness
of detail that seemed somewhat uncalled for on the Indian Ocean. A
cruise on a P. and O. steamer is not a garden party. Her chair was
most luxurious, and had her name painted on it, back and front, in
very large letters, with undue obtrusiveness. I read it from where
I sat, "Lady Meadowcroft."
The owner of the chair was tolerably young, not bad looking, and
most expensively attired. Her face had a certain vacant, languid,
half ennuyee air which I have learned to associate with women of
the nouveau-riche type--women with small brains and restless minds,
habitually plunged in a vortex of gaiety, and miserable when left
for a passing moment to their own resources.
Hilda rose from her chair, and walked quietly forward towards the
bow of the steamer. I rose, too, and accompanied her. "Well?" she
said, with a faint touch of triumph in her voice when we had got
out of earshot.
"Well, what?" I answered, unsuspecting.
"I told you everything turned up at the end!" she said, confidently.
"Look at the lady's nose!"
"It does turn up at the end--certainly," I answered, glancing back
at her. "But I hardly see--"
"Hubert, you are growing dull! You were not so at Nathaniel's. . . .
It is the lady herself who has turned up, not her nose--though I
grant you THAT turns up too--the lady I require for our tour in
India; the not impossible chaperon."
"Her nose tells you that?"
"Her nose, in part; but her face as a whole, too, her dress, her
chair, her mental attitude to things in general."
"My dear Hilda, you can't mean to tell me you have divined her
whole nature at a glance, by magic!"
"Not wholly at a glance. I saw her come on board, you know--she
transhipped from some other line at Aden as we did, and I have been
watching her ever since. Yes, I think I have unravelled her."
"You have been astonishingly quick!" I cried.
"Perhaps--but then, you see, there is so little to unravel! Some
books, we all know, you must 'chew and digest'; they can only be
read slowly; but some you can glance at, skim, and skip; the mere
turning of the pages tells you what little worth knowing there is
in them."
"She doesn't LOOK profound," I admitted, casting an eye at her
meaningless small features as we paced up and down. "I incline to
agree you might easily skim her."
"Skim her--and learn all. The table of contents is SO short. . . .
You see, in the first place, she is extremely 'exclusive'; she
prides herself on her 'exclusiveness': it, and her shoddy title,
are probably all she has to pride herself upon, and she works them
both hard. She is a sham great lady."
As Hilda spoke, Lady Meadowcroft raised a feebly querulous voice.
"Steward! this won't do! I can smell the engine here. Move my
chair. I must go on further."
"If you go on further that way, my lady," the steward answered,
good-humouredly, but with a man-servant's deference for any sort of
title, "you'll smell the galley, where they're cooking the dinner.
I don't know which your ladyship would like best--the engine or the
galley."
The languid figure leaned back in the chair with an air of
resignation. "I'm sure I don't know why they cook the dinners up
so high," she murmured, pettishly, to her husband. "Why can't they
stick the kitchens underground--in the hold, I mean--instead of
bothering us up here on deck with them?"
The husband was a big, burly, rough-and-ready Yorkshireman--stout,
somewhat pompous, about forty, with hair wearing bald on the
forehead: the personification of the successful business man. "My
dear Emmie," he said, in a loud voice, with a North Country accent,
"the cooks have got to live. They've got to live like the rest of
us. I can never persuade you that the hands must always be
humoured. If you don't humour 'em, they won't work for you. It's
a poor tale when the hands won't work. Even with galleys on deck,
the life of a sea-cook is not generally thowt an enviable position.
Is not a happy one--not a happy one, as the fellah says in the
opera. You must humour your cooks. If you stuck 'em in the hold,
you'd get no dinner at all--that's the long and the short of it."
The languid lady turned away with a sickly, disappointed air.
"Then they ought to have a conscription, or something," she said,
pouting her lips. "The Government ought to take it in hand and
manage it somehow. It's bad enough having to go by these beastly
steamers to India at all, without having one's breath poisoned by--"
the rest of the sentence died away inaudibly in a general murmur
of ineffective grumbling.
"Why do you think she is EXCLUSIVE?" I asked Hilda as we strolled
on towards the stern, out of the spoilt child's hearing.
"Why, didn't you notice?--she looked about her when she came on
deck to see whether there was anybody who WAS anybody sitting
there, whom she might put her chair near. But the Governor of
Madras hadn't come up from his cabin yet; and the wife of the chief
Commissioner of Oude had three civilians hanging about her seat;
and the daughters of the Commander-in-Chief drew their skirts away
as she passed. So she did the next best thing--sat as far apart as
she could from the common herd: meaning all the rest of us. If you
can't mingle at once with the Best People, you can at least assert
your exclusiveness negatively, by declining to associate with the
mere multitude."
"Now, Hilda, that is the first time I have ever known you to show
any feminine ill-nature!"
"Ill-nature! Not at all. I am merely trying to arrive at the
lady's character for my own guidance. I rather like her, poor
little thing. Don't I tell you she will do? So far from objecting
to her, I mean to go the round of India with her."
"You have decided quickly."
"Well, you see, if you insist upon accompanying me, I MUST have a
chaperon; and Lady Meadowcroft will do as well as anybody else. In
fact, being be-ladied, she will do a little better, from the point
of view of Society, though THAT is a detail. The great matter is
to fix upon a possible chaperon at once, and get her well in hand
before we arrive at Bombay."
"But she seems so complaining!" I interposed. "I'm afraid, if you
take her on, you'll get terribly bored with her."
"If SHE takes ME on, you mean. She's not a lady's-maid, though I
intend to go with her; and she may as well give in first as last,
for I'm going. Now see how nice I am to you, sir! I've provided
you, too, with a post in her suite, as you WILL come with me. No,
never mind asking me what it is just yet; all things come to him
who waits; and if you will only accept the post of waiter, I mean
all things to come to you."
"All things, Hilda?" I asked, meaningly, with a little tremor of
delight.
She looked at me with a sudden passing tenderness in her eyes.
"Yes, all things, Hubert. All things. But we mustn't talk of
that--though I begin to see my way clearer now. You shall be
rewarded for your constancy at last, dear knight-errant. As to my
chaperon, I'm not afraid of her boring me; she bores herself, poor
lady; one can see that, just to look at her; but she will be much
less bored if she has us two to travel with. What she needs is
constant companionship, bright talk, excitement. She has come away
from London, where she swims with the crowd; she has no resources
of her own, no work, no head, no interests. Accustomed to a whirl
of foolish gaieties, she wearies her small brain; thrown back upon
herself, she bores herself at once, because she has nothing
interesting to tell herself. She absolutely requires somebody else
to interest her. She can't even amuse herself with a book for
three minutes together. See, she has a yellow-backed French novel
now, and she is only able to read five lines at a time; then she
gets tired and glances about her listlessly. What she wants is
someone gay, laid on, to divert her all the time from her own
inanity."
"Hilda, how wonderfully quick you are at reading these things! I
see you are right; but I could never have guessed so much myself
from such small premises."
"Well, what can you expect, my dear boy? A girl like this, brought
up in a country rectory, a girl of no intellect, busy at home with
the fowls, and the pastry, and the mothers' meetings--suddenly
married offhand to a wealthy man, and deprived of the occupations
which were her salvation in life, to be plunged into the whirl of a
London season, and stranded at its end for want of the diversions
which, by dint of use, have become necessaries of life to her!"
"Now, Hilda, you are practising upon my credulity. You can't
possibly tell from her look that she was brought up in a country
rectory."
"Of course not. You forget. There my memory comes in. I simply
remember it."
"You remember it? How?"
"Why, just in the same way as I remembered your name and your
mother's when I was first introduced to you. I saw a notice once
in the births, deaths, and marriages--'At St. Alphege's,
Millington, by the Rev. Hugh Clitheroe, M.A., father of the bride,
Peter Gubbins, Esq., of The Laurels, Middleston, to Emilia Frances,
third daughter of the Rev. Hugh Clitheroe, rector of Millington.'"
"Clitheroe--Gubbins; what on earth has that to do with it? That
would be Mrs. Gubbins: this is Lady Meadowcroft."
"The same article, as the shopmen say--only under a different name.
A year or two later I read a notice in the Times that 'I, Ivor de
Courcy Meadowcroft, of The Laurels, Middleston, Mayor-elect of the
Borough of Middleston, hereby give notice, that I have this day
discontinued the use of the name Peter Gubbins, by which I was
formerly known, and have assumed in lieu thereof the style and
title of Ivor de Courcy Meadowcroft, by which I desire in future to
be known.'
"A month or two later, again I happened to light upon a notice in
the Telegraph that the Prince of Wales had opened a new hospital
for incurables at Middleston, and that the Mayor, Mr. Ivor
Meadowcroft, had received an intimation of Her Majesty's intention
of conferring upon him the honour of knighthood. Now what do you
make of it?"
"Putting two and two together," I answered, with my eye on our
subject, "and taking into consideration the lady's face and manner,
I should incline to suspect that she was the daughter of a poor
parson, with the usual large family in inverse proportion to his
means. That she unexpectedly made a good match with a very wealthy
manufacturer who had raised himself; and that she was puffed up
accordingly with a sense of self-importance."
"Exactly. He is a millionaire, or something very like it; and,
being an ambitious girl, as she understands ambition, she got him
to stand for the mayoralty, I don't doubt, in the year when the
Prince of Wales was going to open the Royal Incurables, on purpose
to secure him the chance of a knighthood. Then she said, very
reasonably, 'I WON'T be Lady Gubbins--Sir Peter Gubbins!' There's
an aristocratic name for you!--and, by a stroke of his pen, he
straightway dis-Gubbinised himself, and emerged as Sir Ivor de
Courcy Meadowcroft."
"Really, Hilda, you know everything about everybody! And what do
you suppose they're going to India for?"
"Now, you've asked me a hard one. I haven't the faintest
notion. . . . And yet . . . let me think. How is this for a
conjecture? Sir Ivor is interested in steel rails, I believe, and
in railway plant generally. I'm almost sure I've seen his name in
connection with steel rails in reports of public meetings. There's
a new Government railway now being built on the Nepaul frontier--one
of these strategic railways, I think they call them--it's mentioned
in the papers we got at Aden. He MIGHT be going out for that. We
can watch his conversation, and see what part of India he talks
about."
"They don't seem inclined to give us much chance of talking," I
objected.
"No; they are VERY exclusive. But I'm very exclusive, too. And I
mean to give them a touch of my exclusiveness. I venture to
predict that, before we reach Bombay, they'll be going down on
their knees and imploring us to travel with them."
At table, as it happened, from next morning's breakfast the
Meadowcrofts sat next to us. Hilda was on one side of me; Lady
Meadowcroft on the other; and beyond her again, bluff Yorkshire Sir
Ivor, with his cold, hard, honest blue North Country eyes, and his
dignified, pompous English, breaking down at times into a North
Country colloquialism. They talked chiefly to each other. Acting
on Hilda's instructions, I took care not to engage in conversation
with our "exclusive" neighbour, except so far as the absolute
necessities of the table compelled me. I "troubled her for the
salt" in the most frigid voice. "May I pass you the potato salad?"
became on my lips a barrier of separation. Lady Meadowcroft marked
and wondered. People of her sort are so anxious to ingratiate
themselves with "all the Best People" that if they find you are
wholly unconcerned about the privilege of conversation with a
"titled person," they instantly judge you to be a distinguished
character. As the days rolled on, Lady Meadowcroft's voice began
to melt by degrees. Once, she asked me, quite civilly, to send
round the ice; she even saluted me on the third day out with a
polite "Good-morning, doctor."
Still, I maintained (by Hilda's advice) my dignified reserve, and
took my seat severely with a cold "Good-morning." I behaved like a
high-class consultant, who expects to be made Physician in Ordinary
to Her Majesty.
At lunch that day, Hilda played her first card with delicious
unconsciousness--apparent unconsciousness; for, when she chose, she
was a consummate actress. She played it at a moment when Lady
Meadowcroft, who by this time was burning with curiosity on our
account, had paused from her talk with her husband to listen to us.
I happened to say something about some Oriental curios belonging to
an aunt of mine in London. Hilda seized the opportunity. "What
did you say was her name?" she asked, blandly.
"Why, Lady Tepping," I answered, in perfect innocence. "She has a
fancy for these things, you know. She brought a lot of them home
with her from Burma."
As a matter of fact, as I have already explained, my poor dear aunt
is an extremely commonplace old Army widow, whose husband happened
to get knighted among the New Year's honours for some brush with
the natives on the Shan frontier. But Lady Meadowcroft was at the
stage where a title is a title; and the discovery that I was the
nephew of a "titled person" evidently interested her. I could feel
rather than see that she glanced significantly aside at Sir Ivor,
and that Sir Ivor in return made a little movement of his shoulders
equivalent to "I told you so."
Now Hilda knew perfectly well that the aunt of whom I spoke WAS
Lady Tepping; so I felt sure that she had played this card of
malice prepense, to pique Lady Meadowcroft.
But Lady Meadowcroft herself seized the occasion with inartistic
avidity. She had hardly addressed us as yet. At the sound of the
magic passport, she pricked up her ears, and turned to me suddenly.
"Burma?" she said, as if to conceal the true reason for her change
of front. "Burma? I had a cousin there once. He was in the
Gloucestershire Regiment."
"Indeed?" I answered. My tone was one of utter unconcern in her
cousin's history. "Miss Wade, will you take Bombay ducks with your
curry?" In public, I thought it wise under the circumstances to
abstain from calling her Hilda. It might lead to misconceptions;
people might suppose we were more than fellow-travellers.
"You have had relations in Burma?" Lady Meadowcroft persisted.
I manifested a desire to discontinue the conversation. "Yes," I
answered, coldly, "my uncle commanded there."
"Commanded there! Really! Ivor, do you hear? Dr. Cumberledge's
uncle commanded in Burma." A faint intonation on the word
commanded drew unobtrusive attention to its social importance.
"May I ask what was his name?--my cousin was there, you see." An
insipid smile. "We may have friends in common."
"He was a certain Sir Malcolm Tepping," I blurted out, staring hard
at my plate.
"Tepping! I think I have heard Dick speak of him, Ivor."
"Your cousin," Sir Ivor answered, with emphatic dignity, "is
certain to have mixed with nobbut the highest officials in Burma."
"Yes, I'm sure Dick used to speak of a certain Sir Malcolm. My
cousin's name, Dr. Cumberledge, was Maltby--Captain Richard
Maltby."
"Indeed," I answered, with an icy stare. "I cannot pretend to the
pleasure of having met him."
Be exclusive to the exclusive, and they burn to know you. From
that moment forth Lady Meadowcroft pestered us with her endeavours
to scrape acquaintance. Instead of trying how far she could place
her chair from us, she set it down as near us as politeness
permitted. She entered into conversation whenever an opening
afforded itself, and we two stood off haughtily. She even ventured
to question me about our relation to one another: "Miss Wade is
your cousin, I suppose?" she suggested.
"Oh, dear, no," I answered, with a glassy smile. "We are not
connected in any way."
"But you are travelling together!"
"Merely as you and I are travelling together--fellow-passengers on
the same steamer."
"Still, you have met before."
"Yes, certainly. Miss Wade was a nurse at St. Nathaniel's, in
London, where I was one of the house doctors. When I came on board
at Cape Town, after some months in South Africa, I found she was
going by the same steamer to India." Which was literally true. To
have explained the rest would have been impossible, at least to
anyone who did not know the whole of Hilda's history.
"And what are you both going to do when you get to India?"
"Really, Lady Meadowcroft," I said, severely, "I have not asked
Miss Wade what she is going to do. If you inquire of her point-
blank, as you have inquired of me, I dare say she will tell you.
For myself, I am just a globe-trotter, amusing myself. I only want
to have a look round at India."
"Then you are not going out to take an appointment?"
"By George, Emmie," the burly Yorkshireman put in, with an air of
annoyance, "you are cross-questioning Dr. Cumberledge; nowt less
than cross-questioning him!"
I waited a second. "No," I answered, slowly. "I have not been
practising of late. I am looking about me. I travel for
enjoyment."
That made her think better of me. She was of the kind, indeed, who
think better of a man if they believe him to be idle.
She dawdled about all day on deck chairs, herself seldom even
reading; and she was eager now to drag Hilda into conversation.
Hilda resisted; she had found a volume in the library which
immensely interested her.
"What ARE you reading, Miss Wade?" Lady Meadowcroft cried at last,
quite savagely. It made her angry to see anybody else pleased and
occupied when she herself was listless.
"A delightful book!" Hilda answered. "The Buddhist Praying Wheel,
by William Simpson."
Lady Meadowcroft took it from her and turned the pages over with a
languid air. "Looks awfully dull!" she observed, with a faint
smile, at last, returning it.
"It's charming," Hilda retorted, glancing at one of the
illustrations. "It explains so much. It shows one why one turns
round one's chair at cards for luck; and why, when a church is
consecrated, the bishop walks three times about it sunwise."
"Our Bishop is a dreadfully prosy old gentleman," Lady Meadowcroft
answered, gliding off at a tangent on a personality, as is the wont
of her kind; "he had, oh, such a dreadful quarrel with my father
over the rules of the St. Alphege Schools at Millington."
"Indeed," Hilda answered, turning once more to her book. Lady
Meadowcroft looked annoyed. It would never have occurred to her
that within a few weeks she was to owe her life to that very
abstruse work, and what Hilda had read in it.
That afternoon, as we watched the flying fish from the ship's side,
Hilda said to me abruptly, "My chaperon is an extremely nervous
woman."
"Nervous about what?"
"About disease, chiefly. She has the temperament that dreads
infection--and therefore catches it."
"Why do you think so?"
"Haven't you noticed that she often doubles her thumb under her
fingers--folds her fist across it--so--especially when anybody
talks about anything alarming? If the conversation happens to turn
on jungle fever, or any subject like that, down goes her thumb
instantly, and she clasps her fist over it with a convulsive
squeeze. At the same time, too, her face twitches. I know what
that trick means. She's horribly afraid of tropical diseases,
though she never says so."
"And you attach importance to her fear?"
"Of course. I count upon it as probably our chief means of
catching and fixing her."
"As how?"
She shook her head and quizzed me. "Wait and see. You are a
doctor; I, a trained nurse. Before twenty-four hours, I foresee
she will ask us. She is sure to ask us, now she has learned that
you are Lady Tepping's nephew, and that I am acquainted with
several of the Best People."
That evening, about ten o'clock, Sir Ivor strolled up to me in the
smoking-room with affected unconcern. He laid his hand on my arm
and drew me aside mysteriously. The ship's doctor was there,
playing a quiet game of poker with a few of the passengers. "I beg
your pardon, Dr. Cumberledge," he began, in an undertone, "could
you come outside with me a minute? Lady Meadowcroft has sent me up
to you with a message."
I followed him on to the open deck. "It is quite impossible, my
dear sir," I said, shaking my head austerely, for I divined his
errand. "I can't go and see Lady Meadowcroft. Medical etiquette,
you know; the constant and salutary rule of the profession!"
"Why not?" he asked, astonished.
"The ship carries a surgeon," I replied, in my most precise tone.
"He is a duly qualified gentleman, very able in his profession, and
he ought to inspire your wife with confidence. I regard this
vessel as Dr. Boyell's practice, and all on board it as virtually
his patients."
Sir Ivor's face fell. "But Lady Meadowcroft is not at all well,"
he answered, looking piteous; "and--she can't endure the ship's
doctor. Such a common man, you know! His loud voice disturbs her.
You MUST have noticed that my wife is a lady of exceptionally
delicate nervous organisation." He hesitated, beamed on me, and
played his trump card. "She dislikes being attended by owt but a
GENTLEMAN."
"If a gentleman is also a medical man," I answered, "his sense of
duty towards his brother practitioners would, of course, prevent
him from interfering in their proper sphere, or putting upon them
the unmerited slight of letting them see him preferred before
them."
"Then you positively refuse?" he asked, wistfully, drawing back.
I could see he stood in a certain dread of that imperious little
woman.
I conceded a point. "I will go down in twenty minutes," I admitted,
looking grave,--"not just now, lest I annoy my colleague,--and I
will glance at Lady Meadowcroft in an unprofessional way. If I
think her case demands treatment, I will tell Dr. Boyell." And I
returned to the smoking-room and took up a novel.
Twenty minutes later I knocked at the door of the lady's private
cabin, with my best bedside manner in full play. As I suspected,
she was nervous--nothing more--my mere smile reassured her. I
observed that she held her thumb fast, doubled under in her fist,
all the time I was questioning her, as Hilda had said; and I also
noticed that the fingers closed about it convulsively at first, but
gradually relaxed as my voice restored confidence. She thanked me
profusely, and was really grateful.
On deck next day she was very communicative. They were going to
make the regular tour first, she said, but were to go on to the
Tibetan frontier at the end, where Sir Ivor had a contract to
construct a railway, in a very wild region. Tigers? Natives? Oh,
she didn't mind either of THEM; but she was told that that
district--what did they call it? the Terai, or something--was
terribly unwholesome. Fever was what-you-may-call-it there--yes,
"endemic"--that was the word; "oh, thank you, Dr. Cumberledge."
She hated the very name of fever. "Now you, Miss Wade, I suppose,"
with an awestruck smile, "are not in the least afraid of it?"
Hilda looked up at her calmly. "Not in the least," she answered.
"I have nursed hundreds of cases."
"Oh, my, how dreadful! And never caught it?"
"Never. I am not afraid, you see."
"I wish _I_ wasn't! Hundreds of cases! It makes one ill to think
of it! . . . And all successfully?"
"Almost all of them."
"You don't tell your patients stories when they're ill about your
other cases who died, do you?" Lady Meadowcroft went on, with a
quick little shudder.
Hilda's face by this time was genuinely sympathetic. "Oh, never!"
she answered, with truth. "That would be very bad nursing! One's
object in treating a case is to make one's patient well; so one
naturally avoids any sort of subject that might be distressing or
alarming."
"You really mean it?" Her face was pleading.
"Why, of course. I try to make my patients my friends; I talk to
them cheerfully; I amuse them and distract them; I get them away,
as far as I can, from themselves and their symptoms."
"Oh, what a lovely person to have about one when one's ill!" the
languid lady exclaimed, ecstatically. "I SHOULD like to send for
you if I wanted nursing! But there--it's always so, of course,
with a real lady; common nurses frighten one so. I wish I could
always have a lady to nurse me!"
"A person who sympathises--that is the really important thing,"
Hilda answered, in her quiet voice. "One must find out first one's
patient's temperament. YOU are nervous, I can see." She laid one
hand on her new friend's arm. "You need to be kept amused and
engaged when you are ill; what YOU require most is--insight--and
sympathy."
The little fist doubled up again; the vacant face grew positively
sweet. "That's just it! You have hit it! How clever you are! I
want all that. I suppose, Miss Wade, YOU never go out for private
nursing?"
"Never," Hilda answered. "You see, Lady Meadowcroft, I don't nurse
for a livelihood. I have means of my own; I took up this work as
an occupation and a sphere in life. I haven't done anything yet
but hospital nursing."
Lady Meadowcroft drew a slight sigh. "What a pity!" she murmured,
slowly. "It does seem hard that your sympathies should all be
thrown away, so to speak, on a horrid lot of wretched poor people,
instead of being spent on your own equals--who would so greatly
appreciate them."
"I think I can venture to say the poor appreciate them, too," Hilda
answered, bridling up a little--for there was nothing she hated so
much as class-prejudices. "Besides, they need sympathy more; they
have fewer comforts. I should not care to give up attending my
poor people for the sake of the idle rich."
The set phraseology of the country rectory recurred to Lady
Meadowcroft--"our poorer brethren," and so forth. "Oh, of course,"
she answered, with the mechanical acquiescence such women always
give to moral platitudes. "One must do one's best for the poor, I
know--for conscience' sake and all that; it's our duty, and we all
try hard to do it. But they're so terribly ungrateful! Don't you
think so? Do you know, Miss Wade, in my father's parish--"
Hilda cut her short with a sunny smile--half contemptuous
toleration, half genuine pity. "We are all ungrateful," she said;
"but the poor, I think, the least so. I'm sure the gratitude I've
often had from my poor women at St. Nathaniel's has made me
sometimes feel really ashamed of myself. I had done so little--and
they thanked me so much for it."
"Which only shows," Lady Meadowcroft broke in, "that one ought
always to have a LADY to nurse one."
"Ca marche!" Hilda said to me, with a quiet smile, a few minutes
after, when her ladyship had disappeared in her fluffy robe down
the companion-ladder.
"Yes, ca marche," I answered. "In an hour or two you will have
succeeded in landing your chaperon. And what is most amusing,
landed her, too, Hilda, just by being yourself--letting her see
frankly the actual truth of what you think and feel about her and
about everyone!"
"I could not do otherwise," Hilda answered, growing grave. "I must
be myself, or die for it. My method of angling consists in showing
myself just as I am. You call me an actress, but I am not really
one; I am only a woman who can use her personality for her own
purposes. If I go with Lady Meadowcroft, it will be a mutual
advantage. I shall really sympathise with her for I can see the
poor thing is devoured with nervousness."
"But do you think you will be able to stand her?" I asked.
"Oh, dear, yes. She's not a bad little thing, au fond, when you
get to know her. It is society that has spoilt her. She would
have made a nice, helpful, motherly body if she'd married the
curate."
As we neared Bombay, conversation grew gradually more and more
Indian; it always does under similar circumstances. A sea voyage
is half retrospect, half prospect; it has no personal identity.
You leave Liverpool for New York at the English standpoint, and are
full of what you did in London or Manchester; half-way over, you
begin to discuss American custom-houses and New York hotels; by the
time you reach Sandy Hook, the talk is all of quick trains west and
the shortest route from Philadelphia to New Orleans. You grow by
slow stages into the new attitude; at Malta you are still
regretting Europe; after Aden, your mind dwells most on the hire of
punkah-wallahs and the proverbial toughness of the dak-bungalow
chicken.
"How's the plague at Bombay now?" an inquisitive passenger inquired
of the Captain at dinner our last night out. "Getting any better?"
Lady Meadowcroft's thumb dived between her fingers again. "What!
is there plague in Bombay?" she asked, innocently, in her nervous
fashion.
"Plague in Bombay!" the Captain burst out, his burly voice
resounding down the saloon. "Why, bless your soul, ma'am, where
else would you expect it? Plague in Bombay! It's been there these
five years. Better? Not quite. Going ahead like mad. They're
dying by thousands."
"A microbe, I believe, Dr. Boyell," the inquisitive passenger
observed deferentially, with due respect for medical science.
"Yes," the ship's doctor answered, helping himself to an olive.
"Forty million microbes to each square inch of the Bombay
atmosphere."
"And we are going to Bombay!" Lady Meadowcroft exclaimed, aghast.
"You must have known there was plague there, my dear," Sir Ivor put
in, soothingly, with a deprecating glance. "It's been in all the
papers. But only the natives get it."
The thumb uncovered itself a little. "Oh, only the natives!" Lady
Meadowcroft echoed, relieved; as if a few thousand Hindus more or
less would hardly be missed among the blessings of British rule in
India. "You know, Ivor, I never read those DREADFUL things in the
papers. _I_ read the Society news, and Our Social Diary, and
columns that are headed 'Mainly About People.' I don't care for
anything but the Morning Post and the World and Truth. I hate
horrors. . . . But it's a blessing to think it's only the
natives."
"Plenty of Europeans, too, bless your heart," the Captain thundered
out unfeelingly. "Why, last time I was in port, a nurse died at
the hospital."
"Oh, only a nurse--" Lady Meadowcroft began, and then coloured up
deeply, with a side glance at Hilda.
"And lots besides nurses," the Captain continued, positively
delighted at the terror he was inspiring. "Pucka Englishmen and
Englishwomen. Bad business this plague, Dr. Cumberledge! Catches
particularly those who are most afraid of it."
"But it's only in Bombay?" Lady Meadowcroft cried, clutching at the
last straw. I could see she was registering a mental determination
to go straight up-country the moment she landed.
"Not a bit of it!" the Captain answered, with provoking
cheerfulness. "Rampaging about like a roaring lion all over
India!"
Lady Meadowcroft's thumb must have suffered severely. The nails
dug into it as if it were someone else's.
Half an hour later, as we were on deck in the cool of the evening,
the thing was settled. "My wife," Sir Ivor said, coming up to us
with a serious face, "has delivered her ultimatum. Positively her
ultimatum. I've had a mort o' trouble with her, and now she's
settled. EITHER, she goes back from Bombay by the return steamer;
OR ELSE--you and Miss Wade must name your own terms to accompany us
on our tour, in case of emergencies." He glanced wistfully at
Hilda. "DO you think you can help us?"
Hilda made no hypocritical pretence of hanging back. Her nature
was transparent. "If you wish it, yes," she answered, shaking
hands upon the bargain. "I only want to go about and see India; I
can see it quite as well with Lady Meadowcroft as without her--and
even better. It is unpleasant for a woman to travel unattached. I
require a chaperon, and am glad to find one. I will join your
party, paying my own hotel and travelling expenses, and considering
myself as engaged in case your wife should need my services. For
that, you can pay me, if you like, some nominal retaining fee--five
pounds or anything. The money is immaterial to me. I like to be
useful, and I sympathise with nerves; but it may make your wife
feel she is really keeping a hold over me if we put the arrangement
on a business basis. As a matter of fact, whatever sum she chooses
to pay, I shall hand it over at once to the Bombay Plague
Hospital."
Sir Ivor looked relieved. "Thank you ever so much!" he said,
wringing her hand warmly. "I thowt you were a brick, and now I
know it. My wife says your face inspires confidence, and your
voice sympathy. She MUST have you with her. And you, Dr.
Cumberledge?"
"I follow Miss Wade's lead," I answered, in my most solemn tone,
with an impressive bow. "I, too, am travelling for instruction and
amusement only; and if it would give Lady Meadowcroft a greater
sense of security to have a duly qualified practitioner in her
suite, I shall be glad on the same terms to swell your party. I
will pay my own way; and I will allow you to name any nominal sum
you please for your claim on my medical attendance, if necessary.
I hope and believe, however, that our presence will so far reassure
our prospective patient as to make our post in both cases a
sinecure."
Three minutes later Lady Meadowcroft rushed on deck and flung her
arms impulsively round Hilda. "You dear, good girl!" she cried;
"how sweet and kind of you! I really COULDN'T have landed if you
hadn't promised to come with us. And Dr. Cumberledge, too! So
nice and friendly of you both. But there, it IS so much pleasanter
to deal with ladies and gentlemen!"
So Hilda won her point; and what was best, won it fairly.
