Zuleika Dobson - Max Beerbohm (good e books to read txt) 📗

not imagine that they think out and appoint everything that is to befall us, down to the smallest detail. Generally, they just draw a sort of broad outline, and leave us to fill it in according to our taste. Thus, in the matters of which this book is record, it was they who made the Warden invite his granddaughter to Oxford, and invite the Duke to meet her on the evening of her arrival. And it was they who prompted the Duke to die for her on the following (Tuesday) afternoon. They had intended that he should execute his resolve after, or before, the boat-race of that evening. But an oversight upset this plan. They had forgotten on Monday night to uncage the two black owls; and so it was necessary that the Duke’s death should be postponed. They accordingly prompted Zuleika to save him. For the rest, they let the tragedy run its own course⁠—merely putting in a felicitous touch here and there, or vetoing a superfluity, such as that Katie should open Zuleika’s letter. It was no part of their scheme that the Duke should mistake Mélisande for her mistress, or that he should run away from her, and they were genuinely sorry when he, instead of the Master of Balliol, came to grief over the orange-peel.

Them, however, the Duke cursed as he fell; them again as he raised himself on one elbow, giddy and sore; and when he found that the woman bending over him was not she whom he dreaded, but her innocent maid, it was against them that he almost foamed at the mouth.

“Monsieur le Duc has done himself harm⁠—no?” panted Mélisande. “Here is a letter from Miss Dobson’s part. She say to me, ‘Give it him with your own hand.’ ”

The Duke received the letter and, sitting upright, tore it to shreds, thus confirming a suspicion which Mélisande had conceived at the moment when he took to his heels, that all English noblemen are mad, but mad, and of a madness.

“Nom de Dieu,” she cried, wringing her hands, “what shall I tell to Mademoiselle?”

“Tell her⁠—” the Duke choked back a phrase of which the memory would have shamed his last hours. “Tell her,” he substituted, “that you have seen Marius sitting among the ruins of Carthage,” and limped quickly away down the Turl.

Both his hands had been abraded by the fall. He tended them angrily with his handkerchief. Mr. Druce, the chemist, had anon the privilege of bathing and plastering them, also of balming and binding the right knee and the left shin. “Might have been a very nasty accident, your Grace,” he said. “It was,” said the Duke. Mr. Druce concurred.

Nevertheless, Mr. Druce’s remark sank deep. The Duke thought it quite likely that the gods had intended the accident to be fatal, and that only by his own skill and lightness in falling had he escaped the ignominy of dying in full flight from a lady’s-maid. He had not, you see, lost all sense of free will. While Mr. Druce put the finishing touches to his shin, “I am utterly purposed,” he said to himself, “that for this death of mine I will choose my own manner and my own⁠—well, not ‘time’ exactly, but whatever moment within my brief span of life shall seem aptest to me. Unberufen,” he added, lightly tapping Mr. Druce’s counter.

The sight of some bottles of Cold Mixture on that hospitable board reminded him of a painful fact. In the clash of the morning’s excitements, he had hardly felt the gross ailment that was on him. He became fully conscious of it now, and there leapt in him a hideous doubt: had he escaped a violent death only to succumb to “natural causes”? He had never hitherto had anything the matter with him, and thus he belonged to the worst, the most apprehensive, class of patients. He knew that a cold, were it neglected, might turn malignant; and he had a vision of himself gripped suddenly in the street by internal agonies⁠—a sympathetic crowd, an ambulance, his darkened bedroom; local doctor making hopelessly wrong diagnosis; eminent specialists served up hot by special train, commending local doctor’s treatment, but shaking their heads and refusing to say more than “He has youth on his side”; a slight rally at sunset; the end. All this flashed through his mind. He quailed. There was not a moment to lose. He frankly confessed to Mr. Druce that he had a cold.

Mr. Druce, trying to insinuate by his manner that this fact had not been obvious, suggested the Mixture⁠—a teaspoonful every two hours. “Give me some now, please, at once,” said the Duke.

He felt magically better for the draught. He handled the little glass lovingly, and eyed the bottle. “Why not two teaspoonfuls every hour?” he suggested, with an eagerness almost dipsomaniacal. But Mr. Druce was respectfully firm against that. The Duke yielded. He fancied, indeed, that the gods had meant him to die of an overdose.

Still, he had a craving for more. Few though his hours were, he hoped the next two would pass quickly. And, though he knew Mr. Druce could be trusted to send the bottle round to his rooms immediately, he preferred to carry it away with him. He slipped it into the breast-pocket of his coat, almost heedless of the slight extrusion it made there.

Just as he was about to cross the High again, on his way home, a butcher’s cart dashed down the slope, recklessly driven. He stepped well back on the pavement, and smiled a sardonic smile. He looked to right and to left, carefully gauging the traffic. Some time elapsed before he deemed the road clear enough for transit.

Safely across, he encountered a figure that seemed to loom up out of the dim past. Oover! Was it but yesternight that Oover dined with him? With the sensation of a man groping among archives, he began to apologise to the Rhodes Scholar for having left him so abruptly at the Junta. Then, presto!⁠—as though