the news which mr. william bowker had heard from inspector blackett troubled its recipient considerably, and it was not until he had thought it over deeply and consumed a large quantity of tobacco in the process, that he arrived at any settled determination as to what was the right course to be pursued by him. his first idea was to make geoffrey ludlow acquainted with the whole story, and let him act as he thought best; but a little subsequent reflection changed his opinion on this point. geoff was very weak in health, certainly in no fit state to leave his bed; and yet if he heard that margaret was found, that her address was known, above all that she was ill, bowker knew him well enough to be aware that nothing would prevent him at once setting out to see her, and probably to use every effort to induce her to return with him. such a course would be bad in every way, but in the last respect it would be fatal. for one certain reason bowker had almost hoped that nothing more might ever be heard of the wretched woman who had fallen like a curse upon his friend's life. he knew geoffrey ludlow root and branch, knew how thoroughly weak he was, and felt certain that, no matter how grievous the injury which margaret had done him, he had but to see her again--to see her more especially in sickness and misfortune--to take her back to his heart and to his hearth, and defy the counsel of his friends and the opinion of the world. that would never do. geoff had been sufficiently dragged down by this unfortunate infatuation; but he had a future which should be independent of her, undimmed by any tarnish accruing to him from those wondrous misspent days. so old bowker firmly believed; and to accomplish that end he determined that none of inspector blackett's news should find its way to geoffrey's ears, at all events until he, bowker, had personally made himself acquainted with the state of affairs.
it must have been an impulse of the strongest friendship and love for geoff that induced william bowker to undertake this duty; for it was one which inspired him with aversion, not to say horror. at first he had some thoughts of asking charley potts to do it; but then he bethought him that charley, headstrong, earnest, and impulsive as he was, was scarcely the man to be intrusted with such a delicate mission. and he remembered, moreover, that charley was now to a great extent _lié_ with geoff's family, that he had been present at geoff's first meeting with margaret, that he had always spoken against her, and that now, imbued as he was likely to be with some of the strong feelings of old mrs. ludlow, he would be certain to make a mess of the mission, and, without the least intention of being offensive, would hurt some one's feelings in an unmistakable and unpardonable manner. no; he must go himself, horribly painful as it would be to him. his had been a set gray life for who should say how many years; he had not been mixed up with any woman's follies or griefs in ever so slight a degree, he had heard no woman's voice in plaintive appeal or earnest confession, he had seen no woman's tears or hung upon no woman's smile, since--since when? since the days spent with _her_. ah, how the remembrance shut out the present and opened up the long, long vistas of the past! he was no longer the bald-headed, grizzle-bearded, stout elderly man; he was young bowker, from whom so much was expected; and the common tavern-parlour in which he was seated, with its beer-stained tables and its tobacco-reek faded away, and the long dusty roads of andalusia, the tinkling bells of the mules, the cheery shouts of the sunburnt _arrieros_, the hard-earned pull at the _bota_, and the loved presence, now vanished for ever, rose in his memory.
when his musings were put to flight by the entrance of the waiter, he paid his score, and summoning up his resolution he went out into the noisy street, and mounting the first omnibus was borne away to his destination. he found the place indicated to him by blackett--a small but clean and decent street--and soon arrived at mrs. chapman's house. there, at the door, he stopped, undecided what to do. he had not thought of any excuse for demanding an interview with mrs. chapman's lodger, and, on turning the subject over in his mind, he could not imagine any at all likely to be readily received. see margaret he must; and to do that, he thought he must take her unprepared and on a sudden: if he sent up his name, he would certainly be refused admittance. his personal appearance was far too bohemian in its character to enable him to pass himself off as her lawyer, or any friend of her family; his only hope was to put a bold front on it, to mention her name, and to walk straight on to her room, leaving it to chance to favour his efforts.
he entered the shop--a dull dismal little place, with a pair of stays lying helplessly in the window, and a staring black-eyed torso of a female doll, for cap-making purposes, insanely smiling on the counter. such a heavy footfall as mr. bowker's was seldom heard in those vestal halls; such a grizzly-bearded face as mr. bowker's was seldom seen in such close proximity to the cap-making dummy; and little mrs. chapman the milliner came out "all in a tremble," as she afterwards expressed it, from her inner sanctum, which was about as big and as tepid as a warm-bath, and in a quavering voice demanded the intruder's business. she was a mild-eyed, flaxen-haired, quiet, frightened little woman, and old bowker's heart softened towards her, as he said, "you have a friend of mine lodging with you, ma'am, i think--mrs. lambert?"
"o, dear; then, if you're a friend of mrs. lambert's, you're welcome here, i can assure you, sir!" and the little woman looked more frightened than ever, and held up her hands half in fear, half in relief.
"ah, she's been ill, i hear," said bowker, wishing to have it understood that he was thoroughly _en rapport_ with the lodger.
"ill!--i'm thankful you've come, sir!--no one, unless they saw her, would credit how ill she is--i mean to be up and about, and all that. she's better to-day, and clearer; but what she have been these few days past, mortal tongue cannot tell--all delirium-like, and full of fancies, and talking of things which set hannah--the girl who does for me--and me nearly out of our wits with fright. so much so, that six-and-sixpence a-week is--well, never mind, poor thing; it's worse for her than for us; but i'm glad, at any rate, some friend has come to see her."
"i'll go and do so at once, mrs. chapman," said bowker. "i know my way; the door straight opposite to the front of the stairs, isn't it? thank you; i'll find it;" and with the last words yet on his tongue, mr. bowker had passed round the little counter, by the little milliner, and was making the narrow staircase creak again with his weight.
he opened the door opposite to him, after having knocked and received no answer, and peered cautiously in. the daylight was fading, and the blind of the window was half down, and bowker's eyesight was none of the best now, so that he took some little time before he perceived the outline of a figure stretched in the white dimity-covered easy-chair by the little pembroke table in the middle of the room. although some noise had been made by the opening of the door, the figure had not moved; it never stirred when bowker gave a little premonitory cough to notify his advent; it remained in exactly the same position, without stirring hand or foot, when bowker said, "a friend has come to see you, mrs.--lambert." then a dim undefined sense of terror came upon william bowker, and he closed the door silently behind him, and advanced into the room. immediately he became aware of a faint sickly smell, a cloying, percolating odour, which seemed to fill the place; but he had little time to think of this, for immediately before him lay the form of margaret, her eyes closed, her features rigid, her long red hair falling in all its wild luxuriance over her shoulders. at first william thought she was dead; but, stooping close over her, he marked her slow laboured breathing, and noticed that from time to time her hands were unclenched, and then closed again as tightly as ever. he took a little water from a tumbler on the table and sprinkled it on her face, and laid his finger on her pulse; after a minute or two she opened her eyes, closing them again immediately, but after a time opening them again, and fixing them on bowker's face with a long wistful gaze.
"are you one of them also?" she asked, in a deep hushed voice. "how many more to come and gibber and point at me; or, worse than all, to sit mutely staring at me with pitiless unforgiving eyes! how many more? you are the latest. i have never seen you before."
"o yes you have," said bowker quietly, with her hand in his, and his eyes steadfastly fixed on hers--"o yes you have: you recollect me, my dear mrs. ludlow."
he laid special stress on the name, and as he uttered the words, margaret started, a new light flashed into her beautiful eyes, and she regarded him attentively.
"what was that you said?" she asked; "what name did you call me?"
"what name? why, your own, of course; what else should i call you, my dear mrs. ludlow?"
she started again at the repetition, then her eyes fell, and she said dreamily,
"but that is not my name--that is not my name." bowker waited for a moment, and then said,
"you might as well pretend to have forgotten me and our talk at elm lodge that day that i came up to see geoffrey."
"elm lodge! geoffrey!--ah, good god, now i remember all!" said margaret, in a kind of scream, raising herself in the chair, and wringing bowker's hand.
"hush, my dear madam; don't excite yourself; i thought you would remember all; you--"
"you are mr. bowker!" said margaret, pressing her hand to her head; "mr. bowker, whose story geoff told me: geoff! ah, poor, good geoff! ah, dear, good geoff! but why are you here? he hasn't sent you? geoffrey has not sent you?"
"geoffrey does not know i am here. he has been very ill; too ill to be told of all that has been going on; too ill to understand it, if he had been told. i heard by accident that you were living here, and that you had been ill; and i came to see if i could be of any service to you."
while he had been speaking, margaret had sat with her head tightly clasped between her hands. when he finished, she looked up with a slightly dazed expression, and said, with an evident attempt at controlling her voice, "i see all now; you must pardon me, mr. bowker, for any incoherence or strangeness you may have noticed in my manner; but i have been very ill, and i feel sure that at times my mind wanders a little. i am better now. i was quite myself when you mentioned about your having heard of my illness, and offering me service; and i thank you very sincerely for your kindness."
old william looked at her for a minute, and then said,
"i am a plain-spoken man, mrs. ludlow--for you are mrs. ludlow to me--as i daresay you may have heard, if you have not noticed it yourself; and i tell you plainly that it is out of no kindness to you that i am here now, but only out of love for my dear old friend."
"i can understand that," said margaret; "and only respect you the more for it; and now you are here, mr. bowker, i shall be very glad to say a few words to you,--the last i shall ever say regarding that portion of my life which was passed in--at--you know what i would say; you have heard the story of the commencement of my acquaintance with geoffrey ludlow?"
bowker bowed in acquiescence.
"you know how i left him--why i am here?"
then william bowker--the memory of all his friend's trouble and misery and crushed hopes and wasted life rising up strongly within him--set his face hard, and said, between his clenched teeth, "i know your history from two sources. yesterday, geoffrey ludlow, scarce able to raise himself in his bed, so weak was he from the illness which your conduct brought upon him, told me, as well as he could, of his first meeting with you, his strange courtship, his marriage,--at which i was present,--of his hopes and fears, and all the intricacies of his married life; of the manner in which, finally, you revealed the history of your previous life, and parted from him. supplementing this story, he gave me to read a letter from lord caterham, the brother of the man you call your husband. this man, captain brakespere, flying from the country, had written to his brother, informing him that he had left behind him a woman who was called his mistress, but who was in reality his wife. to find this woman lord caterham made his care. he set the detectives to work, and had her tracked from place to place; continually getting news of, but never finding her. while he lived, lord caterham never slackened from the pursuit; finding his end approaching--"
"his end approaching!--the end of his life do you mean?"
"he is dead. but before he died, he delegated the duty of pursuit, of all men in the world, to geoffrey ludlow,--to geoffrey ludlow, who, in his blind ignorance, had stumbled upon the very woman a year before, had saved her from a miserable death, and, all unknowingly, had fondly imagined he had made her his loving wife."
"ah, my god, this is too much! and geoffrey ludlow knows all this?"
"from geoffrey ludlow's lips i heard it not twenty-four hours since."
margaret uttered a deep groan and buried her face in her hands. when she raised her head her eyes were tear-blurred, and her voice faltered as she said, "i acknowledge my sin, and--so far as geoffrey ludlow is concerned--i deeply, earnestly repent my conduct. it was prompted by despair; it ended in desperation. have those who condemned me--and i know naturally enough i am condemned by all his friends--have those who condemned me ever known the pangs of starvation, the grim tortures of houselessness in the streets? have they ever known what it is to have the iron of want and penury eating into their souls, and then to be offered a comfortable home and an honest man's love? if they have, i doubt very much whether they would have refused it. i do not say this to excuse myself. i have done geoffrey ludlow deadly wrong; but when i listened to his proffered protestations, i gave him time for reflection; when i said 'yes' to his repeated vows, i thought that the dead past had buried its dead, and that no ghost from it would arise to trouble the future. i vowed to myself that i would be true to that man who had so befriended me; and i was true to him. the life i led was inexpressibly irksome and painful to me; the dead solemn monotony of it goaded me almost to madness at times; but i bore it--bore it all out of gratitude to him--would have borne it till now if _he_ had not come back to lure me to destruction. i do not say i did my duty; i am naturally undomestic and unfitted for household management; but i brought no slur on geoffrey ludlow's name in thought or deed until that man returned. i have seen him, mr. bowker; i have spoken to him, and he spurned me from him; and yet i love him as i loved him years ago. he need only raise his finger, and i would fly to him and fawn upon him, and be grateful if he but smiled upon me in return. they cannot understand this--they cannot understand my disregard of the respectabilities by flinging away the position and the name and the repute, and all that which they had fitted to me, and which clung to me, ah, so irritatingly; but if all i have heard be true you can understand it, mr. bowker,--you can.--is geoffrey out of danger?"
the sudden change in the tone of her voice, as she uttered the last sentence, struck on bowker's ear, and looking up, he noticed a strange light in her eyes.
"geoffrey is out of danger," he replied; "but he is still very weak, and requires the greatest care."
"and requires the greatest care!" she repeated. "well, he'll get it, i suppose; but not from me. and to think that i shall never see him again! poor geoffrey! poor, good geoffrey! how good he was, and how grave!--with those large earnest eyes of his, and his great head, and rough curling brown hair, and--the cruel cold, the pitiless rain, the cruel, cruel cold!" as she said these words, she crept back shivering into her chair, and wrapped her dress round her. william bowker bent down and gazed at her steadily; but after an instant she averted her face, and hid it in the chair. bowker took her hand, and it fell passively into his own; he noticed that it was burning.
"this will not do, mrs. ludlow!" he exclaimed; "you have over-excited yourself lately. you want rest and looking after--you must--" he stopped; for she had turned her head to him again and was rocking herself backwards and forwards in her chair, weeping meanwhile as though her heart would break. the sight was too much for william to bear unaided, and he opened the door and called mrs. chapman.
"ah, sir," said the good little woman when she entered the room, "she's off again, i see. i knew she was, for i heard that awful sobbing as i was coming up the stairs. o, that awful sobbing that ive laid awake night after night listening to, and that never seemed to stop till daylight, when she was fairly wore out. but that's nothing, sir, compared to the talk when she's beside herself. then she'd go on and say--"
"yes, yes, no doubt, mrs. chapman," interrupted bowker, who did not particularly wish to be further distressed by the narration of margaret's sadness; "but this faintness, these weeping fits, are quite enough to demand the instant attention of a medical man. if you'll kindly look to her now, i'll go off and fetch a doctor; and if there's a nurse required--as ive little doubt there will be--you won't mind me intruding further upon you? no; i knew you'd say so. mrs. lambert's friends will ever be grateful to you; and here's something just to carry you on, you know, mrs. chapman--rent and money paid on her account, and that sort of thing." the something was two sovereigns, which had lain in a lucifer-match box used by mr. bowker as his bank, and kept by him in his only locked drawer for six weeks past, and which had been put aside for the purchase of a "tweed wrapper" for winter wear.
deliberating within himself to what physician of eminence he should apply, and grievously hampered by the fact that he was unable to pay any fee in advance, bowker suddenly bethought him of dr. rollit, whose great love of art and its professors led him, "in the fallow leisure of his life," to constitute himself a kind of honorary physician to the brotherhood of the brush. to him bowker hastened, and, without divulging margaret's identity, explained the case, and implored the doctor to see her at once. the doctor hesitated for a moment, for he was at his easel and in a knot. he had "got something that would not come right," and he scarcely seemed inclined to move until he had conquered his difficulty; but after explaining the urgency of the case, old bowker took the palette and sheaf of brushes from the physician's hand and said, "i think we can help each other at this moment, doctor: go you and see the patient, and leave me to deal with this difficulty. you'll find me here when you come back, and you shall then look at your canvas."
but when dr. rollit, after a couple of hours' absence, returned, he did not look at his picture--at least on his first entry. he looked so grave and earnest that william bowker, moving towards him to ask the result of his visit, was frightened, and stopped.
"what is the matter?" he asked; "you seem--"
"i'm a little taken aback--that's all, old friend," said the doctor; "you did not prepare me to find in my patient an old acquaintance--you did not know it, perhaps?"
"by jove! i remember now: charley potts said--what an old ass i am!"
"i was called in by potts and ludlow, or rather called out of a gathering of the titians, to attend mrs. lambert, as the landlady called her, nearly two years ago. she is not much altered--outwardly--since i left her convalescent."
"you lay a stress on 'outwardly'--what is the inner difference?"
"simply that her health is gone, my good fellow; her whole constitution utterly shattered; her life not worth a week's purchase."
"surely you're wrong, doctor. up to within the last few weeks her health has been excellent."
"my dear william bowker, i, as an amateur, meddle with your professional work; but what i do is on the surface, and the mistakes i make are so glaring, that they are recognisable instantly. you might meddle, as an amateur, with mine, and go pottering on until you'd killed half a parish, without any body suspecting you. the disease i attended mrs.----- there! it's absurd our beating about the bush any longer--mrs. ludlow for was rheumatic fever, caught from exposure to cold and damp. the attack i now find left behind it, as it generally does, a strong predisposition to heart-disease, which, from what i learn from her, seems to have displayed itself in spasms and palpitations very shortly afterwards."
"from what you learn from her? she was sensible, then, when you saw her?"
"she was sensible before i left her; ay, and that's the deuce of it. partly to deaden the pain of these attacks, partly, as she said herself just now, to escape from thought, she has had recourse to a sedative, morphia, which she has taken in large quantities. i smelt it the instant i entered her room, and found the bottle by her side. under this influence she is deadened and comatose; but when the reaction comes--poor creature! poor creature!" and the kind-hearted doctor shook his head sadly.
"do you consider her in absolute danger?" asked bowker, after a pause.
"my dear fellow it is impossible to say how long she may last; but--though i suppose that's out of the question now, eh?--people will talk, you know, and ive heard rumours;--but if her husband wished to see her, i should say fetch him at once."
"if her husband wished to see her!" said old bowker to himself, as he walked away towards his lodgings,--"if her husband wished to see her! he don't--at least the real one don't, i imagine; and geoff mustn't; though, if he knew it, nothing would keep him away. but that other--captain brakespere--he ought to know the danger she's in; he ought to have the chance of saying a kind word to her before--he must be a damned villain!" said old william, stopping for an instant, and pondering over the heads of the story; "but he deserves that chance, and he shall have it."
pursuant to his determination, mr. bowker presented himself the next day at long's hotel, where he recollected mr. blackett had informed him that captain brakespere was stopping. the porter, immediately divining from mr. bowker's outward appearance that he meditated a raid upon coats, hats, or any thing that might be lying about the coffee-room, barricaded the entrance with his waistcoat, and parleyed with the visitor in the hall. inquiring for captain brakespere, mr. bowker was corrected by the porter, who opined "he meant lord catrum." the correction allowed and the inquiry repeated, the porter replied that his "lordship had leff," and referred the inquirer to st. barnabas square.
to st. barnabas square mr. bowker adjourned, but there learned that lord caterham had left town with mr. barford, and would not be back for some days.
and meanwhile the time was wearing by, and margaret's hold on life was loosening day by day. would it fail altogether before she saw the man who had deceived her so cruelly? would it fail altogether before she saw the man whom she had so cruelly deceived?
