Hard Cash

What happened in Mrs. Dodd's room may be imagined: and soon both ladies came hastily out to Alfred, and he found himself in the drawing-room seated between them, and holding a hand of each, and playing the man delightfully, soothing and a.s.suring them. Julia believed him at a word, and beamed with unmixed delight and antic.i.p.ation of the joyful meeting.

Mrs. Dodd cost him more trouble: her soft hand trembled still in his, and she put question upon question. But when he told her he with his own eyes had seen Captain Dodd talking to Maxley, and gathered from Maxley he had been s.h.i.+pwrecked on the coast of France, and lost his chronometer and his s.e.xtant, these details commanded credit. Bells were rung: the Captain's dressing-room ordered to be got ready; the cook put on her mettle, and Alfred invited to stay and dine with the long-expected one: and the house of mourning became the house of joy.

"And then it was he who brought the good news," whispered Julia to her mother, "and that is so sweet."

"Yes, dear," said Mrs. Dodd, "he will make even me love him. The L.

14,000! I hope that was not lost in the wreck."

"Oh, mamma! who cares when his own dear, sweet, precious life has been in danger, and is mercifully preserved? Why does he not come? I shall scold him for keeping us waiting. You know I am not a bit afraid of him, though he is papa. Indeed, I am ashamed to say I govern him with a rod of--no matter what. Do, do, do let us all three put on our bonnets, and run and meet him. I want him so to love somebody the very first day."

Mrs. Dodd said, "Well, wait a few minutes, and then, if he is not here, you two shall go. I dare hardly trust myself to meet my darling husband in the open street."

Julia ran to Alfred: "If he does not come in ten minutes, you and I may go and meet him."

"You are an angel," murmured Alfred.

"You are another," said Julia haughtily. "Oh, dear, I can't sit down, and I don't want flattery: I want papa. A waltz! a waltz! then one can go mad with joy without startling propriety. I can't answer for the consequences if I don't let off a little, little happiness."

"That I will," said Mrs. Dodd; "for I am as happy as you, and happier."

She played a waltz.

Julia's eyes were a challenge: Alfred started up and took her ready hand, and soon the gay young things were whirling round, the happiest pair in England.

But in the middle of the joyous whirl, Julia's quick ear, on the watch all the time, heard the gate swing to: she glided like an eel from Alfred's arm and ran to the window. Arrived there, she made three swift vertical bounds like a girl with a skipping rope, only her hands were clapping in the air at the same time; then down the stairs, screaming, "His chest his chest! he is coming, coming, come!"

Alfred ran after her.

Mrs. Dodd, unable to race with such antelopes, slipped quietly out into the little balcony.

Julia had seen two men carrying a trestle with a tarpauling over it, and a third walking beside. Dodd's heavy sea-chest had been more than once carried home this way. She met the men

"Is it his clothes? Then he wasn't so much wrecked after all. Is he with you? Is he coming directly? Why don't you tell me?"

The porters at first wore the stolid impa.s.sive faces of their tribe; but when this bright young creature questioned them, br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with ardour and joy, their countenances fell and they hung their heads.

The little sharp-faced man, who was walking beside the others stepped forward to reply to Julia.

He was interrupted by a terrible scream from the balcony.

Mrs. Dodd was leaning wildly over it, with dilating eyes and quivering hand, that pointed down to the other side of the trestle: "Julia!!

Julia!!"

Julia ran round, and stood petrified, her pale lips apart, and all her innocent joy frozen in a moment.

The tarpauling was scanty there, and a man's hand and part of his arm dangled helpless out.

The hand was blanched, and wore a well-known ring.

CHAPTER XXI

IN the terror and confusion no questions were then asked: Alfred got to David's head, and told Skinner to take his feet; Mrs. Dodd helped, and they carried him up and laid him on her bed. The servant girls cried and wailed, and were of little use: Mrs. Dodd hurried them off for medical aid, and she and Julia, though pale as ghosts, and trembling in every limb, were tearless and almost silent, and did all for the best. They undid a s.h.i.+rt b.u.t.ton that confined his throat: they set his head high, and tried their poor little eau-de-Cologne and feminine remedies; and each of them held an insensible hand in both hers, clasping it piteously and trying to hold him tight, so that Death should not take him away from them.

"My son, where is my son?" sighed Mrs. Dodd.

Alfred threw his arm round her neck: "You have one son here: what shall I do?"

The next minute he was running to the telegraph office for her.

At the gate he found Skinner hanging about, and asked him hurriedly how the calamity had happened. Skinner said Captain Dodd had fallen down senseless in the street, and he had pa.s.sed soon after, recognised him, and brought him home: "I have paid the men, sir; I wouldn't let them ask the ladies at such a time."

"Oh, thank you! thank you, Skinner! I will repay you; it is me you have obliged." And Alfred ran off with the words in his mouth.

Skinner looked after him and muttered: "I forgot _him._ It is a nice mess. Wish I was out of it." And he went back, hanging his head, to Alfred's father.

Mr. Osmond met him. Skinner turned and saw him enter the villa.

Mr. Osmond came softly into the room, examined Dodd's eye, felt his pulse, and said he must be bled at once.

Mrs. Dodd was averse to this. "Oh, let us try everything else first,"

said she. But Osmond told her there was no other remedy: "All the functions we rely on in the exhibition of medicines are suspended."

Dr. Short now drove up, and was ushered in.

Mrs. Dodd asked him imploringly whether it was necessary to bleed. But Dr. Short knew his business too well to be entrapped into an independent opinion where a surgeon had been before him. He drew Mr. Osmond apart, and inquired what he had recommended: this ascertained, he turned to Mrs. Dodd and said, "I advise venesection or cupping."

"Oh, Dr. Short, pray have pity and order something less terrible. Dr.

Sampson is so averse to bleeding."

"Sampson? Sampson? never heard of him."

"It is the chronothermal man," said Osmond.

"Oh, ah! but this is too serious a case to be quacked. Coma with stertor, and a full, bounding pulse, indicates liberal bloodletting. I would try venesection; then cup, if necessary, or leech the temple. I need not say, sir, calomel must complete the cure. The case is simple, and, at present, surgical: I leave it in competent hands." And he retired, leaving the inferior pract.i.tioner well pleased with him and with himself; no insignificant part of a physicians art.

When he was gone, Mr. Osmond told Mrs. Dodd that however crotchety Dr.

Sampson might be, he was an able man, and had very properly resisted the indiscriminate use of the lancet: the profession owed him much. "But in apoplexy the leech and the lancet are still our sheet-anchor."

Mrs. Dodd utter a faint shriek: "Apoplexy! Oh, David! Oh, my darling, have you come home for this?"

Osmond a.s.sured her apoplexy was not necessarily fatal; provided the cerebral blood-vessels were relieved in time by depletion.

The fixed eye and terrible stertorous breathing on the one hand, and the promise of relief on the other, overpowered Mrs. Dodd's reluctance. She sent Julia out of the room on a pretext, and then consented with tears to David's being bled. But she would not yield to leave the room. No; this tender woman nerved herself to see her husband's blood flow, sooner than risk his being bled too much by the hard hand of custom. Let the peevish fools, who make their own troubles in love, compare their slight and merited pangs with this: she was his true lover and his wife, yet there she stood with eye horror-stricken yet unflinching, and saw the stab of the little lancet, and felt it deeper than she would a javelin through her own body, and watched the blood run that was dearer to her than her own.

At the first p.r.i.c.k of the lancet David s.h.i.+vered, and, as the blood escaped, his eye unfixed, and the pupils contracted and dilated, and once he sighed. "Good sign that!" said Osmond.