The Doctor's Wife (Romance Classic). Mary Elizabeth BraddonЧитать онлайн книгу.
every step as he went up, until he came to a landing, midway between the third and fourth stories; here he was obliged to stop for sheer want of breath, for he had been lugging the portmanteau about with him throughout his wanderings in the Temple, and a good many people had been startled by the aspect of a well-dressed young man carrying his own luggage, and staring at the names of the different rows of houses, the courts and quadrangles in the grave sanctuary.
George Gilbert stopped to take breath; and he had scarcely done so, when he was terrified by the apparition of a very dirty boy, who slid suddenly down the baluster between the floor above and the landing, and alighted face to face with the young surgeon. The boy’s face was very black, and he was evidently a child of tender years, something between eleven and twelve, perhaps; but he was in nowise discomfited by the appearance of Mr. Gilbert; he ran up-stairs again, and placed himself astride upon the slippery baluster with a view to another descent, when a door above was suddenly opened, and a voice said, “You know where Mr. Manders, the artist, lives?”
“Yes, sir;—Waterloo Road, sir, Montague Terrace, No. 2.”
“Then run round to him, and tell him the subject for the next illustration in the ‘Smuggler’s Bride.’ A man with his knee upon the chest of another man, and a knife in his hand. You can remember that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And bring me a proof of chapter fifty-seven.”
“Yes, sir.”
The door was shut, and the boy ran down-stairs, past George Gilbert, as fast as he could go. But the door above was opened again, and the same voice called aloud,—“Tell Mr. Manders the man with the knife in his hand must have on top-boots.”
“All right, sir,” the boy called from the bottom of the staircase.
George Gilbert went up, and knocked at the door above. It was a black door, and the names of Mr. Andrew Morgan and Mr. Sigismund Smith were painted upon it in white letters as upon the door-post below.
A pale-faced young man, with a smudge of ink upon the end of his nose, and very dirty wrist-bands, opened the door.
“Sam!”
“George!” cried the two young men simultaneously, and then began to shake hands with effusion, as the French playwrights say.
“My dear old George!”
“My dear old Sam! But you call yourself Sigismund now?”
“Yes; Sigismund Smith. It sounds well; doesn’t it? If a man’s evil destiny makes him a Smith, the least he can do is to take it out in his Christian name. No Smith with a grain of spirit would ever consent to be a Samuel. But come in, dear old boy, and put your portmanteau down; knock those papers off that chair—there, by the window. Don’t be frightened of making ’em in a muddle; they can’t be in a worse muddle than they are now. If you don’t mind just amusing yourself with the ‘Times’ for half an hour or so, while I finish this chapter of the ‘Smuggler’s Bride,’ I shall be able to strike work, and do whatever you like; but the printer’s boy is coming back in half an hour for the end of the chapter.”
“I won’t speak a word,” George said, respectfully. The young man with the smudgy nose was an author, and George Gilbert had an awful sense of the solemnity of his friend’s vocation. “Write away, my dear Sam; I won’t interrupt you.”
He drew his chair close to the open window, and looked down into the court below, where the paint was slowly blistering in the July sun.
Chapter 2.
A Sensation Author.
Mr. Sigismund Smith was a sensation author. That bitter term of reproach, “sensation,” had not been invented for the terror of romancers in the fifty-second year of this present century; but the thing existed nevertheless in divers forms, and people wrote sensation novels as unconsciously as Monsieur Jourdain talked prose. Sigismund Smith was the author of about half-a-dozen highly-spiced fictions, which enjoyed an immense popularity amongst the classes who like their literature as they like their tobacco—very strong. Sigismund had never in his life presented himself before the public in a complete form; he appeared in weekly numbers at a penny, and was always so appearing; and except on one occasion when he found himself, very greasy and dog’s-eared at the edges, and not exactly pleasant to the sense of smell, on the shelf of a humble librarian and newsvendor, who dealt in tobacco and sweetstuff as well as literature, Sigismund had never known what it was to be bound. He was well paid for his work, and he was contented. He had his ambition, which was to write a great novel; and the archetype of this magnum opus was the dream which he carried about with him wherever he went, and fondly nursed by night and day. In the meantime he wrote for his public, which was a public that bought its literature in the same manner as its pudding—in penny slices.
There was very little to look at in the court below the window; so George Gilbert fell to watching his friend, whose rapid pen scratched along the paper in a breathless way, which indicated a dashing and Dumas-like style of literature, rather than the polished composition of a Johnson or an Addison. Sigismund only drew breath once, and then he paused to make frantic gashes at his shirt-collar with an inky bone paper-knife that lay upon the table.
“I’m only trying whether a man would cut his throat from right to left, or left to right,” Mr. Smith said, in answer to his friend’s look of terror; “it’s as well to be true to nature; or as true as one can be, for a pound a page—double-column pages, and eighty-one lines in a column. A man would cut his throat from left to right: he couldn’t do it in the other way without making perfect slices of himself.”
“There’s a suicide, then, in your story?” George said, with a look of awe.
“A suicide!” exclaimed Sigismund Smith; “a suicide in the ‘Smuggler’s Bride!’ why, it teems with suicides. There’s the Duke of Port St. Martin’s, who walls himself up alive in his own cellar; and there’s Leonie de Pasdebasque, the ballet-dancer, who throws herself out of Count Cæsar Maraschetti’s private balloon; and there’s Lilia, the dumb girl,—the penny public like dumb girls,—who sets fire to herself to escape from the—in fact, there’s lots of them,” said Mr. Smith, dipping his pen in his ink, and hurrying wildly along the paper.
The boy came back before the last page was finished, and Mr. Smith detained him for five or ten minutes; at the end of which time he rolled up the manuscript, still damp, and dismissed the printer’s emissary.
“Now, George,” he said, “I can talk to you.”
Sigismund was the son of a Wareham attorney, and the two young men had been schoolfellows at the Classical and Commercial Academy in the Wareham Road. They had been schoolfellows, and were very sincerely attached to each other. Sigismund was supposed to be reading for the Bar; and for the first twelve months of his sojourn in the Temple the young man had worked honestly and conscientiously; but finding that his legal studies resulted in nothing but mental perplexity and confusion, Sigismund beguiled his leisure by the pursuit of literature.
He found literature a great deal more profitable and a great deal easier than the study of Coke upon Lyttleton, or Blackstone’s Commentaries; and he abandoned himself entirely to the composition of such works as are to be seen, garnished with striking illustrations, in the windows of humble newsvendors in the smaller and dingier thoroughfares of every large town. Sigismund gave himself wholly to this fascinating pursuit, and perhaps produced more sheets of that mysterious stuff which literary people call “copy” than any other author of his age.
It would be almost impossible for me adequately to describe the difference between Sigismund Smith as he was known to the very few friends who knew anything at all about him, and Sigismund Smith as he appeared on paper.
In the narrow circle of his home Mr. Smith was a very mild young man, with the most placid blue eyes that ever looked