The Challenge of Love. Victorian Romance Novel
normal position.
“Yes, that’s all right, sir.”
“Sykes, a glass of brandy and water.”
Dr. Threadgold lingered at the door.
“I say, sir, I am confoundedly obliged to you.”
Wolfe smiled.
“Oh, that’s all part of the campaign. I shall have to tie you up to keep that shoulder quiet. What about your forehead?”
“A little gravelling, isn’t it?”
“Yes, nothing serious. I’ll wash it, and patch you up with a bit of plaster. By the way, though——”
He remembered suddenly that he was in Dr. Threadgold’s consulting-room, and that a hot and rather humiliated little man was fidgeting on the hearthrug.
“Dr. Threadgold will tell you what precautions you ought to take.”
“Oh, all right,” said the baronet, gulping brandy and water.
Half an hour later Mr. Ruston was driving Sir George Griggs homeward in his gig. It was still raining hard, and the wet streets of Navestock were deserted. The big man had so far recovered himself that he was able to see the humour of much that had passed.
“What a confounded old woman! I always knew Threadgold was a duffer. I wouldn’t have come within a mile of him only I knew Odgers of Hinkley was in London.”
“Well, that other chap——”
“Jove, that’s the sort of man for me. Plenty of grip there. I can’t stand these counter-bouncing little beasts like Threadgold. He’s only fit to slosh people with treacle and water.”
“Mrs. T. ought to run the practice.”
“Sophia Pudson—don’t, my dear chap, don’t! That woman’s face always acts on me like an emetic. You should hear old Johnson’s parrot next door shouting ‘Monte, Monte,’ all day in summer. A man like Threadgold ought to be shot for marrying such a woman.”
And the gig, with its lamps flaring through the rain, rolled out of South Street into the wet night.
At Prospect House Wolfe sat on the sofa in the consulting-room, smoking a clay pipe. There had been a slight scene after Sir George’s departure. Dr. Montague Threadgold had got upon his dignity and spoken with some heat.
“Mr. Wolfe, sir. I reproach myself with having allowed you to behave with such rashness. A swollen joint like that ought to be treated with the extremest caution.”
Wolfe had a big heart and no pettiness. He was rather sorry for Dr. Threadgold.
“Well, sir, I felt convinced——”
“When you are a little older, Mr. Wolfe, you will not be convinced so easily. Experience teaches a doctor to be cautious.”
Dr. Threadgold retired to the drawing-room, where his wife was sitting before the fire. The faint tinkle of a piano came from the next house, and the mellow piping of a flute. The Misses Johnson and the Rev. Charles Chipperton of St. Jude’s were playing old Johnson, the wine merchant, to sleep.
Mrs. Threadgold looked up with one of her expressionless smiles. If you could ascribe any colour to smiles, Mrs. Threadgold’s resembled the yellowish wool in her lap.
“Everything quite successful, Montague?”
“Most successful, my dear.”
“A serious accident?”
“Dislocated shoulder. Mr. Wolfe and I reduced it.”
Mrs. Threadgold looked gratified.
“I thought the young man ought to profit by your experience, Montague, so I sent him after you.”
“Exactly, my dear, exactly.”
“Rather a raw young man, and very ugly, but I have no doubt that you will polish him and improve his manners.”
Dr. Threadgold poked the fire rather testily.
“Mr. Wolfe,” he said, “seems to be a young man of some ability. But a little forward, a little inclined to be above himself. I shall have to modify that.”
CHAPTER THREE
People with a sense of the picturesque, who drove for the first time over Tarling Moor and saw Navestock—the town of the southern midlands—lying far-away in the green valley below them, thought of it as a dream town, hidden away among innocent, wooded hills. Even in later years, when a more restless generation began to run about the world in a mad hurry to admire anything that was “antique” and “quaint,” Navestock remained the quintessence of “quaintness.”
Artists came to paint its old inns, its stretches of red roof, and the mellow gloom of its alleys. It still kept much of its mystery, much of its crowded colour, much of the “quaintness” that earnest and dreamy persons seek so loyally.
From the distance Navestock looked like a red heart transfixed by a silver bodkin, red roofs on either side of the River Wraith. It was compact, and crowded, all mellowed to a warm maturity, from the garden houses on Peachy Hill to the hovels by the river alleys. The Builder Beast of the late ’sixties and the ’seventies had not then scented the town and scattered filth in the fields and gardens.
Those people who were in search of old-world quaintness found pieces of many centuries jumbled together like the pieces of a puzzle. Georgian gentlemen might still have strutted in the market square, their coats of red and green and blue brightening the grey cobbles, the powdered heads the colour of the clouds that floated over the town. In Bung Row and Bastard Alley by the river loitered those broad-hipped, snub-nosed slatterns whom Hogarth would have painted. If you desired a setting for some sweet serial in a Sunday magazine, you had but to walk past the Brandon Almshouses and along Green Street where the timber and plaster houses overhung the road. Noble young cavaliers came riding by, and sweet Dorothies flung red roses out of the casement windows. Then bells tolled by St. Jude’s Church, and Grey Friars came sweeping along, two by two, hairy, barefooted men, with hungry faces and wolves’ eyes. Let but a trumpet blow and young Mortimer clashed by in full war gear upon his great white horse, the tall spears of his men-at-arms moving after him like the masts of ships in a Dutch town. One artist, who came to paint Navestock’s queer corners, swore that if he watched the green doors in the red houses at Vernor’s End, he saw sentimental young women in huge bonnets and loose muslin gowns glide out and shake their curls at him in the sunlight. But this artist was a very impressionable man. He painted Navestock as a town of horsemen and of coaches, of blue wagons thundering along the narrow streets at the tails of huge, black horses. He painted it also as a town of gables and dormer windows, of high brick walls with roses and fruit trees showing over the tops thereof, of rich unsuspected gardens, of still more unsuspected foul, back yards. Strangers thought Navestock a sweet, innocent, peaceful old place where quiet and kindly people lived quiet and kindly lives.
It is to be feared that Romance hides a number of dirty garments under her gay-coloured cloak, and that Navestock was a thoroughly dirty and corrupt old town. She may have had pots of musk in her windows, but her back yards, her alleys, and her lanes were full of many odours. Nor was the town’s morality particularly clean. In the river alleys children swarmed like cockroaches, and family relationships were a matter of speculation. Inns and little beer-houses were plentiful. They leered at people round unsuspected corners and winked knowingly at the thirsty.
Behind the gardens belonging to the houses on the north side of Mulberry Green ran Snake Lane, and from Snake Lane a passage branched off between high brick walls that were topped with broken glass. A black door, with “Surgery” painted upon it in white letters, opened out of this passage. Daily, between the hours of nine and ten and six and seven, the sickly lees of the life of this