Dr. Wainwright's Patient: A Novel

I. Captain Derinzy's Retreat. II. A Visitor Expected. III. During Office-hours. IV. After Office-hours. V. Family Politics. VI. Mrs. Stothard. VII. Friends In Council. VIII. Corridor No. 4. IX. Dear Annette. X. Madame Clarisse. XI. Behind the Scenes. XII. A Conquest. XIII. Another Conquest. XIV. Paul at Home. XV. On the Alert. XVI. The Colonel's Correspondent. XVII. Well Met. XVIII. Soundings. XIX. Two in Pursuit. XX. Farther Soundings. XXI. Father and Son. XXII. L'homme Propose. XXIII. Poor Paul. XXIV. George's Determination. XXV. Warned. XYXVI. Am Rhein. XXVII. Patrician and Proletary. XXVIII. Daisy's Letter. XXXIX. Relenting. XXX. Daisy's Recantation. XXXI. Suspense. XXXII. Madame Vaughan. XXXIII. Certainty.

DR. WAINWRIGHT'S PATIENT.

CHAPTER I. CAPTAIN DERINZY'S RETREAT.

Beachborough, where, in obedience to the strident voice of the railway porter--voice combining the hardness of the Dorset with the drawl of the Devon dialect--you, if you be so disposed, "Change for Sandington Cove and Waverley," is a very different place from what it was even ten years ago. To be sure the sea is there, and the beach, and the fishing-luggers with the red sails; but in everything else what changes! Now there is, as has been said, a railway-station, a forlorn little oasis of white planking in a desert of sandy heath, inhabited by a clerk--a London young man, who "went too fast" in the metropolis, and has been relegated to Beachborough as a good healthy place where there is no chance of temptation--and a porter, a native of the place, a muscular person great at wrestling, who is always inviting the male passers-by of his acquaintance to "come on," and supplying them, on their doing so, with a very ugly throw known as a "back-fall." There are not many passers-by, for the newly-formed road leads to no where in particular, and those who tramp through its winter slush, or struggle through its summer dust, are generally either tradesmen of the place anxious about overdue parcels, or servants, sent to make inquiries about the trains, from some of the houses on the Esplanade.

The Esplanade! Heavens! if old Miss Gollop, who lived at the Baths, and who used to supply very hot water and very damp towels, and the greatest number of draughts ever known to be got together into one small room, to the half-dozen county families to whom Beachborough was then known as a watering-place--if old Miss Gollop could revisit the glimpses of the moon, and by its light look upon the Esplanade, it would, I am certain, be impossible for that worthy old lady to recognise it as Mussared's Meadow, where she picked cowslips and sucked sorrel when she was a girl, and which was utterly untainted by the merest suspicion of brick and mortar when she died twenty years ago. She would not recognise it any more than in The Dingo Arms--that great white-faced establishment, with its suites of apartments, its coffee-room, wine-office, private bar, and great range of stabling, patronised by, and in its sanctum sanctorum bearing an heraldic emblazonment of the arms of, Sir Hercules Dingo Dingo, Bart., bloody hand, four-quartered shield and all--she would have recognised The Hoy, a tiny "public" where they used to sell the hardest beer and the most stomach-ache-provoking cider, and which in her day was the best tavern in the village. The white-faced terrace has sprung up in Mussared's Meadow; the Esplanade in front of it is a seawall and a delightful promenade for the Misses Gimp's young ladies, who are the admiration of Dingo Terrace, and who have deadly rivals in Madame de Flahault's demoiselles, whose piano-playing is at once the delight and the curse of Powler Square; the cliffs, once so gaunt and barren and forlorn, are dotted over with cottages and villakins, all green porch and plate-glass windows; the old barn-like church has had a fresh tower put on to him, and a fresh minister--one with his ecclesiastical millinery of the newest cut, and up to the latest thing in genuflexions--put into him; there is a Roman Catholic chapel close to the old Wesleyan meeting-house; and they have modernised and spoiled the picturesque tower where Captain Derinzy wore away a portion of his days. Great improvements, no doubt. Pavement and gas, and two policemen, and a railway, and a ritualistic incumbent, and shops with plate-glass windows, where you can get Holloway's pills and Horniman's teas, and all the things without which no gentleman's table is complete. But the events of my story happened ten years ago, when the inhabitants of Beachborough--shopkeepers, fisher-people, villagers, and lace-makers--were like one family, and loved and hated and reviled and back-bit each other as the members of one family only can.

We shall get a little insight into the village politics if we drop in for a few minutes at Mrs. Powler's long one-storied, thatched-roof cottage, standing by itself in the middle of the little High Street. Mrs. Powler is a rich and childless old widow, Powler deceased having done a little in the vending of home-manufactured lace, and a great deal in the importing, duty-free, of French lace and brandy. It was Powler's run when Bill Gollop, the black sheep of the Gollop family, was shot by the revenue-officer down by Wastewater Hole, a matter which Powler is scarcely thought to have compromised by giving a new organ to Bedminster church. However, he has been dead some years, and his widow is very rich and tolerably hospitable; and her little thatched cottage--she never lived in any other house--is the centre and focus of Beachborough gossip.

It is just about Mrs. Powler's supper-time, which is very early in the summer, and she has guests to supper. There is no linen in all Beachborough so white as Mrs. Powler's, no such real silver plate, no such good china or glass. The Beachborough glass generally consists of fat thick goblets on one stump-leg, or dumpy heavy wineglasses with a pattern known as "the pretty" halfway up their middle, which, like the decanters, are heavy and squat, and require a strong wrist to lift them. But Mrs. Powler had thin, blown, delicate glasses, and elegant goblets with curling snakes for their handles, and drinking-cups in amber and green colours, all of which were understood to have come from "abroad," and were prized by her and respected by her neighbours accordingly. There never was a bad lobster known in Beachborough; and it is probable that Mrs. Powler's were no better than her neighbours', but she certainly had a wondrous knack of showing them off to the best advantage, setting-off the milk-white of the inside and the deepred of the shell with layers of crisp curling parsley, as a modern belle sets off her complexion with artfully-arranged bits of tulle and blonde. Nor was her boiled beef to be matched within ten miles round. "I du 'low that other passons' biled beef to Mrs. Fowler's is sallt as brine and soft as butter," Mrs. Jupp would confess; and Mrs. Jupp was a notable housewife, and what the vulgar call "nuts" on her own cooking. There is a splendid proof of it on the table now, cold and firm and solid. Mr. Jupp has just helped himself to a slice, and it is his muttered praise that has called forth the tribute of general admiration from his better-half. Mr. Hallibut, the fish-factor and lace-dealer from Bedminster, is still occupied with the lobster; for he has a ten-mile drive home before him, and any fear of indigestion he laughs to scorn, knowing how he can "settle" that demon with two or three raw "nips" and one or two steaming tumblers of some of that famous brandy which the deceased Powler imported duty-free from abroad, and a bottle of which is always to be found for special friends in the old oak armoire, which stands under the Lord's-Prayer sampler which Mrs. Powler worked when she was a little girl.

Mrs. Powler is in the place of honour opposite the window. A little woman, with a dark-skinned deeply-lined face, and small sparkling black eyes, the fire in which remains undimmed by the seventy years through which they have looked upon the world, though their sight is somewhat failing. She wears a fierce black front, and a closely-fitting white lace cap over it, and an open raspberry-tart-like miniature of her deceased lord--a rather black and steelly-looking daguerreotype--gleams on her chest. Mrs. Powler likes her drinks, as she does not scruple to confess, and has been sipping from a small silver tankard of cider.

"Who was that just went passt the windor, Jupp?" she said, after a short period of tankard abstraction. "My eyes isn't what they was, and I du 'low I couldn't see, though I'm settin' right oppo-site like."

"Heart alive!" struck in Mrs. Jupp, after a moment's silence, and seeing it was perfectly impossible her better-half could sufficiently masticate the piece of cold beef on which he was engaged in anything like time for a reply--"heart alive! to hear you talk of your eyes, Mrs. Powler! Why, there's many a young gal would give anythin' for such a pair in her head, either for show or for use, either!"

"I should think so," said Mr. Jupp, who had by this time cleared his mouth and moistened his palate with the contents of the cider-tankard--"I should think so!" and Mr. Jupp, who was of a convivial turn, began to troll, "Eyes black--as sloes, and--bo-o-oo-som rounded----"

"Mr. Jupp," interrupted Mrs. Jupp, a tall, thin, horse-faced woman, with projecting buck-teeth, and three little sausage curls of iron-gray hair flattened down on either side her forehead, "reck'lect where you are, if you please, and keep your ditties to yourself."

"Well, niver mind my eyes," said Mrs. Powler; she desired to make peace, but she was a rich woman and in her own house, and consequently spoke in a dictatorial way--"niver mind my eyes, nor anything else for the matter of that, but tell who it was that went passt."

"It was the Captain, my dear madam, the Captain," replied Mr. Jupp, freshly attacking the cold beef, and consoling himself for his snubbing with his supper. "You had no great loss in not seeing him, ma'am: it was only the Captain."

"What! Prinsy, Drinsy, what's his name?" said Mr. Hallibut, taking a clean plate, and delicately clearing his lips and fingers from lobster remains on the corner of the tablecloth. "I'll trouble you, Jupp!--Is he still here?"

"His name's Derinzy, Mr. Hollybut," said Mrs. Jupp--"De-rin-zy; it's a French name." Mrs. Jupp had been a lady's-maid once on a time, and prided herself on her manners and education.

"And mine's Hallibut, and not Hollybut, Mrs. Jupp," said the fish-factor jocosely; "and I'll trouble J-u double p--which I take it is an English name--for some of the inside fat--next the marrer-bone there!"

"Dear heart!" interrupted Mrs. Powler, feeling her position as hostess and richest of the company was being made scarcely sufficient of; "how you do jangle, all of you! Not but what," added the old lady, with singular inconsequence--"not but what I'm no scholard, and don't see the use of French names, while English is good enough for me."