Studies in love and in terror Part 26

"Thank you," said c.o.xeter very seriously, "I'm much obliged to you for telling me this. I can see the sense of what you say."

"You know, in spite of her quiet manner, Mrs. Archdale's a nervous, sensitive woman"--the doctor was looking narrowly at c.o.xeter as he spoke.

"She was perfectly calm and--and very brave at the time----"

"That means nothing! Pluck's not a matter of nerve--it ought to be, but it isn't! But I admit you're a remarkable example of the presence of the one coupled with the absence of the other. You don't seem a penny the worse, and yet it must have been a very terrible experience."

"You see, it came at the end of my holiday," said c.o.xeter gravely, "and, as a matter of fact"--he hesitated--"I feel quite well, in fact, remarkably well. Do you see any objection to my calling again, I mean to-day, on Mrs. Archdale? I might put what you have just said before her."

"Yes, do! Do that by all means! Seeing how well you have come through it"--the doctor could not help smiling a slightly satirical smile--"ought to be a lesson to Mrs. Archdale. It ought to show her that after all she is perhaps making a great deal of fuss about nothing."

"Hardly that," said c.o.xeter with a frown.

They had now come to the corner of Queen Anne Street. He put out his hand hesitatingly. The doctor took it, and, oddly enough, held it for a moment while he spoke.

"Think over what I've said, Mr. c.o.xeter. It's a matter of hours. Mrs.

Archdale ought to be taken in hand at once." Then he went off, crossing the street. "Pity the man's such a dry stick," he said to himself; "now's his chance, if he only knew it!"

John c.o.xeter walked straight on. He had written the day before to say that he would be at his office as usual this morning, but now the fact quite slipped his mind.

Wild thoughts were surging through his brain; they were running away with him and to such unexpected places!

The Monument? He had never thought of going up the Monument; he would formerly have thought it a sad waste of time, but now the Monument became to John c.o.xeter a place of pilgrimage, a spot of secret healing.

A man had once told him that the best way to see the City was at night, but that if you were taking a lady you should choose a Sunday morning, and go there on the top of a 'bus. He had thought the man who said this very eccentric, but now he remembered the advice and thought it well worth following.

By the time c.o.xeter turned into Cavendish Square he had travelled far further than the Monument. He was in Richmond Park; Nan's hand was thrust through his arm, as it had been while they had watched the first boat fill slowly with the women and children.

To lovers who remember, the streets of a great town, far more than country roads and lanes, hold over the long years precious, poignant memories, for a background of stones and mortar has about it a character of permanence which holds captive and echoes the scenes and words enacted and uttered there.

c.o.xeter has not often occasion to go the little round he went that morning, but when some accidental circ.u.mstance causes him to do so, he finds himself again in the heart of that kingdom of romance from which he was so long an alien, and of which he has now become a naturalized subject. As most of us know, many ways lead to the kingdom of romance; c.o.xeter found his way there by a water-way.

And so it is that when he reaches the turning into Queen Anne Street there seems to rise round him the atmosphere of what Londoners call the City--the City as it is at night, uncannily deserted save for the ghosts and lovers who haunt its solitary thoroughfares after the bustle of the day is stilled. It was then that he and Nan first learnt to wander there. From there he travels on into golden sunlight; he is again in Richmond Park as it was during the whole of that beautiful October.

Walking up the west side of Cavendish Square, c.o.xeter again becomes absorbed in his great adventure,--a far greater adventure than that with which his friends and acquaintances still a.s.sociate his name. With some surprise, even perhaps with some discomfiture, he sees himself--for he has not wholly cast out the old Adam--he sees himself as he was that memorable morning, carried, that is, wholly out of his usual wise, ponderate self. Perhaps he even wonders a little how he could ever have found courage to do what he did--he who has always thought so much, in a hidden way, of the world's opinion and of what people will say.

He could still tell you which lamp-post he was striding past when he realized, with a thrill of relief, that in any case Nan Archdale would not treat him as would almost certainly do one of those women whom he had honoured with his cold approval something less than a week ago. Any one of those women would have regarded what he was now going to ask Nan to do as an outrage on the conventions of life. But Nan Archdale would be guided only by what she herself thought right and seemly....

And then, as he turns again into Wimpole Street, as he comes near to what was once his wife's house, his long steady stride becomes slower.

Unwillingly he is living again those doubtful moments when he knocked at her door, when he gave the surprised maid the confused explanation that he had a message from the doctor for Mrs. Archdale. He hears the young woman say, "Mrs. Archdale is just going out, sir. The doctor thought she ought to take a walk;" and his muttered answer, "I won't keep her a moment...."

Again he feels the exultant, breathless thrill which seized him when she slipped, neither of them exactly knew how, into his arms, and when the sentences he had prepared, the arguments he meant to use, in his hurried rush up the long street, were all forgotten. He hears himself imploring her to come away with him now, at once. Is she not dressed to go out?

Instinct teaches him for the first time to make to her the one appeal to which she ever responds. He had meant to tell her what the doctor had said--to let that explain his great temerity--but instead he tells her only that he wants her, that he cannot go on living apart from her. Is there any good reason why they should not start now, this moment, for Doctors' Commons, in order to see how soon they can be married?

So it is that when John c.o.xeter stands in Wimpole Street, so typical a Londoner belonging to the leisured and conventional cla.s.s that none of the people pa.s.sing by even glance his way, he lives again through the immortal moment when she said, "Very well."

To this day, so transforming is the miracle of love, Nan c.o.xeter believes that during their curious honeymoon it was she who was taking care of John, not he of her.