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A Rolling Stone, Vol. I

Chapter XXI

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Chapter XXI.

‘Thee never more the sunshine shall awake,
Beaming all redly through the lattice pane;
The steps of friends thy slumbers may not break,
Nor fond familiar voice arouse again.
Death's silent shadow veils thy darkened brow
Why did'st thou linger? thou art happier now.’

At nine o'clock in the morning the light and warmth of his room, which was on the sunny side of the house, and the unrelaxing attentiveness of a buzzing fly awoke Mr. Borage. As soon as he could collect his thoughts he reflected how passing strange it was that he should have slept for ten hours at a stretch. He had gone to bed in the fullest expectation of a night of unrest. After being pulled hither and thither in agitating games, after being tormented and teased in every manner, it had been every way likely that his excited mind and unstrung nerves would have rebelled against the soothing power of sleep. While meditating on this he became aware of unusual commotion in the house. A sound of hastening feet, of quick speaking, in the lowered tones which belong to grave and important matters, and, after a short silence, an exclamation—a cry of page 282 distress, it must have been, from the tone. He was sure it was Mrs. Sherlock who had cried out. Mr. Borage felt curious, and had he not been subject to that distressing moral and mental failing which, to many persons, makes it extremely difficult to get out of bed at a moment's notice, he would have risen and inquired what was the matter.

Quietness again for a few seconds, and then it was as if two persons, wearing very thick-soled boots, had made a stampede down the passage towards his dormitory. They stopped at the door, and immediately afterwards there descended upon it a blow which would have driven in the panel had its strength been commensurate with the noise it produced.

‘Mr. Borage, get up! Come, come!’ cried Mrs. Sherlock, and another blow shook the door.

Nothing is more disagreeable to a late riser than summary order to leave his couch. He may have resolved long ago that he must, and ought to, and will get up; he may be wondering why he does not get up; he may even be on the very point of arising; but let some one advise or exhort him to this step, and immediately he is confirmed in his evil way. When thus summoned, Mr. Borage resolved that he would not get up just yet.

‘I never saw such a man!’ indignantly continued Mrs. Sherlock. ‘Talk about not sleeping! here he is as fast as a church at nine o'clock. Mr. Borage,—I say, Mr. Borage!’

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‘All men are alike,’ complained the irate landlady. ‘They hang about you when they're not wanted; but when one's in trouble and needs support they're not to be found.—Mr. Borage!’

‘Mamma, we are wasting time,’ cried Rosa. ‘We ought not to lose a moment. I'll go. I'll run all the way.’

‘Rosa, you can't; you've that dear child to get out of the room, and dress, and look after. You ought to see about that directly. Where Sherlock's gone to goodness knows—I sent Mary to look for him, and she hasn't come back—and James has been off to his work this hour. There's only Mr. Borage, and he shall go! I'll make him!’

The blow that accompanied this speech was terrific.

Mr. Borage's perceptions were not of the keenest, but he fancied that Rosa spoke as if she were crying. He determined at once to get up. Mrs. Sherlock might have battered at his door much longer without producing this salutary resolution. He knew she was addicted to making much ado about nothing. But if Rosa were in distress, there must be something amiss, and if he could help her he would yield to no one in activity.

His awkward attempts to dress himself in about a tenth of the time he usually gave to that work soon apprised Mrs. Sherlock that he was actually awake and moving about in his room. She gave a cry of indignation.

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‘Well, I declare he's been up all this while! Mr. Borage, you call yourself a gentleman, I suppose. I call you an ungrateful hard-hearted man. Are your feelings withered up? I hope when you are in distress people won't listen to you.’

‘Mrs. Sherlock!’ said the injured man, goaded into answering, and putting on his coat with such violence that the seams cracked, ‘give me time to dress myself.’

‘Dress! who thinks of dress this morning?’ melodramatically exclaimed Mrs. Sherlock.

Mr. Borage emerged from his room, looking as if his clothes had been flung on him by some machine. ‘What's the matter?’ he demanded, staring at Mrs. Sherlock, who was out of breath.

‘Matter! run—fly for a doctor,’ gasped the landlady.

‘Doctor? who's ill?’ asked Mr. Borage.

‘Man! never mind; go!’ said Mrs. Sherlock, pushing him.

Mr. Borage looked for Rosa, hoping that she would enlighten him, but she had gone, and Mrs. Sherlock, apparently, was hardly able to speak now that she had got possession of him. ‘The first doctor you can find,’ she gasped in his ear.

‘My hat, where is it?’ cried Mr. Borage.

‘Go without it,’ ordered Mrs. Sherlock.

But he seized an old felt one of Sherlock's which, being too large, fell over his ears. Mrs. Sherlock rushed before him, and set the front door wide open, page 285 and also the garden gate, that he might have a clear course, and Mr. Borage shot through.

He was very swift-footed, so he had put quite a long distance between him and the lodging-house before it flashed upon him that he was running in exactly the opposite direction to that he ought to have taken. ‘Mrs. Sherlock's violence has quite unsettled my mind,’ he thought. He was just preparing to turn round and run the other way when he saw a doctor's carriage driving to meet him, as it were. He ran into the middle of the street, and called to the driver to stop, throwing up his arms with such wild gestures that the frightened horse plunged and reared. The driver used vigorous language; and the doctor, a man of choleric temperament, thrust forth his head, and rated Mr. Borage soundly.

‘I beg pardon,’ said that gentleman in confusion, ‘I was in such a hurry I couldn't help it. You are wanted at Mrs. Sherlock's; something dreadful has happened.’

‘Something dreadful?’ said the doctor, ‘what is it?’

‘That's just what I don't know,’ said Mr. Borage. ‘Mrs. Sherlock wouldn't, or couldn't tell me. All I know is that a doctor's wanted as soon as possible.’

‘Well, that will do,’ said the doctor, giving the order to his servant, and with something like a groan falling back again upon the padded seat of his buggy. He had been summoned at three that morning, and page 286 after attending to a case, a disagreeable and trying one, was going home with the intention of doctoring himself. Although a healer by profession, he could seldom find time to cure his own ailments, and lately he had been so constantly employed in patching up other people's constitutions that his own was sadly in need of repair. If it were possible to arrange such matters a doctor ought never to be unwell. His patients resent it as an insult to themselves. On seeing their adviser stricken down they are apt to doubt the efficacy of his prescriptions, and to think, if they do not say so, that a physician who cannot keep himself in health is not likely to be of much use to other sufferers. Thus it is very difficult for an ailing doctor to find sympathy.

The doctor had felt so worn out, so racked with rheumatic pains, and so much weakened by loss of sleep and want of food that he had determined, for one day, to stay at home and treat his own case, which, after all, was more important than any other to him. He had recommended his patients to the care of another member of the profession, one whose method he could conscientiously approve of, as being inferior only to his own, and with whom he had long since made a treaty of reciprocity. It vexed him so much that Mr. Borage's unseasonable interruption had compelled him to forego the peaceful pleasures he had been anticipating that he scolded that unlucky person whom he had taken into his carriage all the way to Mrs. Sherlock's.

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‘You are one of the vague people, Mr. Borage,’ he said, ‘who make half the troubles of this world. Do you mean to say you have not the slightest idea of what has occurred?’

‘Upon my word, doctor, I haven't,’ said Mr. Borage.

‘So, for all I know, you may be taking me all this way because some child has swallowed a button, or because some one has cut his finger a little deeper than ordinarily.’

‘Well, I can't help it if I am,’ said Mr. Borage valiantly, ‘only if you'd seen Mrs. Sherlock, you would have thought something serious had happened; and I hope something has—no, I don't mean that: I hope you'll see I've only done what's proper.’

‘I'm sick of being jolted up and down these roads,’ complained the disquieted physician. ‘People will see the doctor, whether they're ill or not; and when they do see him, and he gives them a little wholesome advice, they take offence and think him an unfeeling old bear because he won't coddle and pet them when there's nothing amiss with them but whims. I suppose you've not chosen a profession yet, Mr. Borage?’

‘Why, I don't know that there's any need,’ said Mr. Borage, who was plentifully supplied with this world's dross, his father having done very well at Bendigo.

‘Well, don't be a doctor, unless you're fond of watchings and fastings and ingratitude,’ growled his companion. A few days before he had eulogised the medical profession as the noblest of all, and had page 288 declared that he never wearied of his labours. But at that time he had enjoyed good spirits and an immunity from rheumatic twinges; and, moreover, had just effected a great cure on the person of an old lady who had been bedridden for seven years.

As may be guessed Mrs. Sherlock was watching with intense anxiety for the doctor's arrival. She heard footsteps on the verandah, and darted to the door. It was only Mr. Wishart, who had spent the last night at a friend's house, and was now returning to his lodgings.

‘Good morning, Mrs. Sherlock,’ he began cheerily; but was stopped by a sight of her perturbed face and disordered cap, which, by some unexplained sympathy with its wearer, was always awry when she was grieved or vexed in spirit. ‘What has happened?’ he asked. ‘Why, Mrs. Sherlock, you are in trouble, are you not?’

‘Oh, Mr. Wishart, I'd have given worlds to have had you here! As usual, in such mishaps, not a man about the place, except that poor, simple Mr. Borage, who has run like an antelope for a doctor; but its odd to me if he brings one in any reasonable time.’

‘But, Mrs. Sherlock, what do you want the doctor for? Is any one of your family or of the lodgers ill?’

‘Ill!’ said Mrs. Sherlock, sitting down, and rocking herself to and fro. ‘Such a dreadful thing to happen in my house! It breaks my heart to page 289 speak of it’—and the poor woman corroborated this by shedding a flood of tears. ‘The most beautiful young lady I ever saw. She took lodgings for herself and her child, and she left him with me while she went away to do some business in the town. It was late when she came back, and I was busy with a party of friends we had last night, so I had no chance to see her, except for a minute or two at a time; but I noticed that she looked very ill. And this morning’—Mrs. Sherlock's voice became choked and husky—‘when Rosa went into her room, as she'd told her before, to get up the little boy—there she was lying cold and white—I can't speak of it.’

‘Dead!’ exclaimed Mr. Wishart.

‘Oh, sir, I assure you I never felt so shocked and grieved before. The child too, poor dear lamb, had left his little crib and got into the chair close by his mother's pillow, as if he'd known how it was with her; and there we found him asleep. A beautiful picture they made. I think now, after I've seen her face, I know what is meant by “as beautiful as an angel.”’ She continued, without waiting to hear Mr. Wishart's words of sympathy, ‘But I've not told you all. Being hurried so during the little time she was in the house I neglected to ask her name, and strange enough, she never gave it. I know no more than you do who she is or where she came from. She was a stranger in the town; she came to me straight from some hotel—which one I don't know—where she'd only stayed page 290 one night. Who's to find out the address of her family, and what's to be done with the child?’

Mr. Wishart opened his eyes very wide, as his habit was when surprised, and pondered for a moment. ‘You have no idea whether she was a traveller from England, or Australia, or some other part of this country?’

‘She may have come from Melbourne, for she said her maid had left her when she was there.’

‘And the steamer from Melbourne and Southern ports was in yesterday. You might find out her name from looking in the passenger list, and making inquiries of others who were on board.’

‘Yes; I've looked at the passenger list; but there are several names, any one of which might be hers for all I can tell. The steamer's gone again, or I might have asked Captain Waller. I knew him well when he was second officer on the Rona and I was stewardess. He would have helped me. However, I'll send a telegram to Wellington—that's it, and he'll get it when he calls there the day after to-morrow.’

‘That would be best, and as it is hardly possible this lady can have travelled far without letting her name be known, I think you need not distress yourself It is easy to trace a person nowadays. It is a great misfortune for her child.’

‘You may say so, sir. He's crying now, poor motherless child!’

And just at that moment Harry ran into the page 291 room. Of what had befallen him he was yet ignorant. He only knew he had been taken away from his mother while he was asleep, and that now her room was shut up, and they would not let him go in.

‘Is that the little boy?’ said Mr. Wishart. ‘What a beautiful child! Depend upon it, Mrs. Sherlock, he will be claimed before long. If his father is living I don't think he will allow him to be lost for any length of time.’

‘His father's alive; yes, she said so,’ answered Mrs. Sherlock. ‘Come here, Harry, come to me.’

Harry came towards her, but stopping just out of reach, said, with a bold defiant air, and with his large bright eyes fixed on her face, ‘No; I hate you! you won't let me go to mamma. You have shut mamma up, and I can't get to her.’

‘Oh, poor dear!’ said Mrs. Sherlock, breaking down again.

The boy looked at her intently, then his lip quivered, and with a passionate outburst of grief he flung himself on the sofa beside Mr. Wishart. Some consciousness that his mother was lost to him had found its way into his mind; but as yet he did not fully understand.

Mr. Wishart, who was fond of children, gently raised him, and smoothed away the thick dark hair from his tear-stained face. ‘Don't cry,’ he said. ‘It would grieve your mother if she heard you.’

‘If mamma heard she would come quick!’—he page 292 said with much emphasis, and a glance at Mrs. Sherlock—‘and she would let me stay with her.’

‘But you know you can't always be with her. Some people have no mothers; I don't remember having one. Perhaps it isn't right you should go to her just now. You shall stay with me; we will be friends.’

‘Will you take me to mamma?’ whispered Harry, putting his lips almost close to Mr. Wishart's ear, so that Mrs. Sherlock might not hear the request. ‘She won't; but you will, won't you?’

‘No, I can't do that; but you shall see what I can do for a good boy.’

‘I'll be good if you take me.’

‘And not if I don't? That's not quite fair, Harry. Mrs. Sherlock, if you've no objection, I'll take this young barbarian off your hands for an hour or two. I think the best way is to get him outside, where he'll find something to amuse him.’

‘Well, it's very good of you, I'm sure,’ said Mrs. Sherlock. ‘It's heartrending, the way he goes on.’

Mr. Wishart took his charge into the town, and they walked about the streets, where Harry saw so many interesting things that he soon forgot his sorrow. As Mr. Wishart seemed to be just as interested as he was in the crowds of people, the strong horses drawing heavily-laden drays or bright shining carriages, and the beautiful dogs—which Harry was always wanting to stroke or pat on the head,—he thought him, next to his mother, nicer and more page 293 companionable than any one else. They went on the wharf, and saw the steamers and ships unloading there; they bought fruit at one shop and toys at another—splendid toys; a steamer with a funnel red as fire, and a waggon with two horses. What a day of pleasure they had!

Mr. Wishart was well pleased in his turn with his intelligent little companion. The boy had many quaint, unchildlike ways of thought and speech. He was different from most children; he had none of the babyish forms of expression which, it is to be suspected, are taught children by their mothers and nurses, and are no more natural to them than Hebrew. He was so handsome, too, and winning in his manner, when he chose to be gracious; and those who can resist the charm of a beautiful graceful child may be considered proof against all personal attractions. Mr. Wishart was by no means one of this sort.

‘I think, if this boy were mine,’ he said to Mrs. Sherlock, when he returned, ‘and he were lost, I'd find him though I might have to search through the whole world.’

Mrs. Sherlock drew Mr. Wishart into her sittingroom, and gave him an account of the doctor's visit. She had hoped against hope that he might find some spark of life lingering yet. It might be a trance, she had thought; she had read of such things. But the doctor had soon dispelled these vain hopes.

‘Had I been here hours ago,’ he said, ‘I could page 294 have done nothing. She is beyond our reach. A stranger, did you say? very lovely and young to be called away so suddenly. But “those whom the gods love die young.”’

‘Which I thought a strange remark for him to make,’ said Mrs. Sherlock, who was reporting verbatim.

Mr. Wishart had disquieted her by saying that probably there would be an inquest. Much to her comfort the doctor would be able to certify to the cause of death. Not from his own suspicions only, nor from what Mrs. Sherlock could tell him, which was little enough, though she was able to describe the lady's appearance and manner with great minuteness, and to repeat every one of the few sentences she had uttered, not forgetting the avowal she had made of her uncertain hold on life. They had better evidence than this. They had looked in the writingcase she had used the night before, and had found there a letter from a doctor in Melbourne, whom she must have consulted some time before. It contained a plain statement of her case, telling her that the form of heart disease she suffered from was incurable. She might, by a careful way of life, ward off the fatal termination for some time, but it might come suddenly, when she little expected it. The letter was a kind and sensible one, the writer evidently having taken more than a passing interest in the ‘case.’ Unfortunately the envelope had not been preserved, and he had addressed his correspondent as ‘Madam,’ so page 295 there was no clue to her name. But there was his own, and the address in full, and possibly, on being written to, he would be able to tell them who she was.

Before leaving, the doctor had relieved his feelings by lecturing Mrs. Sherlock with such severity that, for about the twentieth time that day, she burst into tears. Her carelessness in neglecting to ascertain the name and condition of her lodger (a fault which no woman of shrewd sense and businesslike habits would have been guilty of), and her neglect of that lady, when, by her own confession, she knew her to be seriously ill and disturbed in mind, were the subjects of his recriminations, and he concluded with solemn warnings and injunctions, leaving Mrs. Sherlock in a painfully lachrymose condition.

When her feelings were somewhat calmed, she began, as the doctor had advised, to examine the dead lady's effects, in the hope of finding her name on some of them. She opened the trunks, and emptied them of their contents. There was nothing but a large and elegantly made outfit for a lady and child. Everything was marked, but only with the initials E. M. She found a Bible and prayer-book, but in neither of these was there any name. In a case which opened with a key attached to the lady's watch-chain was some valuable jewellery, and a large sum of money in bank notes, enough to have supplied her needs while travelling for a considerable time.

‘She must have been a lady of property,’ said page 296 Mrs. Sherlock. ‘Some of the dresses are fit for a duchess. Whatever is to be done with them?’

‘We can do nothing with them. As you are aware, no doubt, there is a person appointed by the Government to take charge of the property of those who have died intestate, and whose relatives are not known. Most likely all these things will be sold, and the money will remain in the hands of the Government until some one can prove he has a right to it. But we may succeed in finding out her relatives.’

Mr. Wishart had said ‘we’ unconsciously, or at least without thinking that the use of the pronoun implied that he was going to interest himself in the matter. The young lady lying in the closed and hushed room not very far from his own was nothing to him; he had not even seen her face. He might, and did feel sorrow for the peculiar circumstances of her death, and for the little child whom she had left to the compassion of strangers; but there was no reason why he, more than another, should take upon himself the care of this child. Yet this was what he had almost resolved to do. He acted upon impulse; and provided impulses were always as good and kind as those which found their way into his heart, it would be a blessing to humanity if they were more frequently obeyed. Mr. Wishart could no more help being romantic than most of us can help being prosaic and commonplace. His imagination would gloss over plain probabilities with fanciful visions.

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He saw himself presenting his ward to the delighted relatives who had mourned him as lost. That might be years hence; if it should be never, what then? His fancy supplied this blank also with a delightful vista, reaching far into the future. He said nothing of this, however, only charging Mrs. Sherlock to tend the child well, assuring her he would do all he could to assist her, whatever difficulty might arise out of the affair.

End of Vol. 1.

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