Beyond the City | Page 6

fingers. "The days for work and healthful exercise, the evenings to
Browning and high discourse, eh, Charles? Good-bye!" She came to the
door with them, and as they glanced back they saw her still standing
there with the yellow bull pup cuddled up under one forearm, and the
thin blue reek of her cigarette ascending from her lips.
"Oh, what a dreadful, dreadful woman!" whispered sister Bertha, as
they hurried down the street. "Thank goodness that it is over."
"But she'll return the visit," answered the other. "I think that we had
better tell Mary that we are not at home."

----


CHAPTER III.
DWELLERS IN THE WILDERNESS.
How deeply are our destinies influenced by the most trifling causes!
Had the unknown builder who erected and owned these new villas
contented himself by simply building each within its own grounds, it is
probable that these three small groups of people would have remained

hardly conscious of each other's existence, and that there would have
been no opportunity for that action and reaction which is here set forth.
But there was a common link to bind them together. To single himself
out from all other Norwood builders the landlord had devised and laid
out a common lawn tennis ground, which stretched behind the houses
with taut- stretched net, green close-cropped sward, and widespread
whitewashed lines. Hither in search of that hard exercise which is as
necessary as air or food to the English temperament, came young Hay
Denver when released from the toil of the City; hither, too, came Dr.
Walker and his two fair daughters, Clara and Ida, and hither also,
champions of the lawn, came the short-skirted, muscular widow and
her athletic nephew. Ere the summer was gone they knew each other in
this quiet nook as they might not have done after years of a stiffer and
more formal acquaintance.
And especially to the Admiral and the Doctor were this closer intimacy
and companionship of value. Each had a void in his life, as every man
must have who with unexhausted strength steps out of the great race,
but each by his society might help to fill up that of his neighbor. It is
true that they had not much in common, but that is sometimes an aid
rather than a bar to friendship. Each had been an enthusiast in his
profession, and had retained all his interest in it. The Doctor still read
from cover to cover his Lancet and his Medical Journal, attended all
professional gatherings, worked himself into an alternate state of
exaltation and depression over the results of the election of officers,
and reserved for himself a den of his own, in which before rows of little
round bottles full of glycerine, Canadian balsam, and staining agents,
he still cut sections with a microtome, and peeped through his long,
brass, old-fashioned microscope at the arcana of nature. With his
typical face, clean shaven on lip and chin, with a firm mouth, a strong
jaw, a steady eye, and two little white fluffs of whiskers, he could never
be taken for anything but what he was, a high-class British medical
consultant of the age of fifty, or perhaps just a year or two older.
The Doctor, in his hey-day, had been cool over great things, but now,
in his retirement, he was fussy over trifles. The man who had operated
without the quiver of a finger, when not only his patient's life but his

own reputation and future were at stake, was now shaken to the soul by
a mislaid book or a careless maid. He remarked it himself, and knew
the reason. "When Mary was alive," he would say, "she stood between
me and the little troubles. I could brace myself for the big ones. My
girls are as good as girls can be, but who can know a man as his wife
knows him?" Then his memory would conjure up a tuft of brown hair
and a single white, thin hand over a coverlet, and he would feel, as we
have all felt, that if we do not live and know each other after death, then
indeed we are tricked and betrayed by all the highest hopes and subtlest
intuitions of our nature.
The Doctor had his compensations to make up for his loss. The great
scales of Fate had been held on a level for him; for where in all great
London could one find two sweeter girls, more loving, more intelligent,
and more sympathetic than Clara and Ida Walker? So bright were they,
so quick, so interested in all which interested him, that if it were
possible for a man to be compensated for the loss of a good wife then
Balthazar Walker might claim to be so.
Clara was