He settled in England, and married an Englishwoman; she led him a horrid life. Mr Otto -- you don't mind my calling him by his Christian name? I like manly men, James, like you; I only pity Mr Otto. Always delicate, brought up at home, indulged in everything. His stupid mother married again; and he didn't get on with the new family; and he had a private tutor; and he and the tutor went abroad; and there he had it all his own way, and was flattered by everybody. Are you going to sleep, dear?'
'No! No!'
'You see I want you to understand that Mr Otto has his whim and caprices -- and soon gets tired when the novelty of a thing wears off. But, there's another reason for his leaving our place; there's a lady in the case. He hasn't mentioned her name to me: she lives in London or in the neighbourhood, I'm not sure which. Plays divinely on the piano, and is lovely and elegant, and all that. He hasn't openly avowed his admiration -- not having made up his mind yet about her family. She has a married sister, who rather frightens him; clever, and a will of her own, and so on. However, to come to the point, his main reason for trying our place -- What? his main reason must be his health? Nothing of the sort, you dear simple creature! He never expects to be well again. Not that he disbelieves in the cold water cure; but what he really wanted was to try if absence from the young lady would weaken the impression -- or, as he put it, rather funnily, if deluges of cold water could drown his memory of a charming girl. She's not to be disposed of, James, in that way. Wet sheets won't pack her out; and ten tumblers of cold water a day only make her more lively than ever. Well, it's past a joke; he is really going back to her to-morrow. Love -- ah, We know it, don't we? -- love is a wonderful thing! What? Asleep? He is asleep. Snoring, positively snoring. And kicking me. Brute! brute!'
IV Mr Otto Fitzmark reached London, late in the evening.
He was so fatigued by the journey, that he went straight to the rooms prepared for him in Sir John's house. On those occasions when he visited his mother, his step-father arranged -- with absolute shamelessness peculiar to misers -- to receive compensation privately for trouble and expense. When Lady Dowager sometimes complained that her son treated the house as if it were an hotel, she little thought what a defence of his conduct lay hidden in Sir John's guilty pocket.
The next morning, the valet -- a grave, ponderous, and respectable English servant -- came in with coffee and the news, as usual.
'I have had a wretched night, Frederick. Sir John must have got his beastly bed a bargain. What's the news? The last time I was here I was driven away by a row in the family. Any more quarrels this time?'
'The worst row I remember, sir (if I may be allowed to say so), in all our experience,' Frederick answered.
'Is my mother in it?'
'It's said to be Lady Dowager's doing, sir.'
'The devil it is! Give me some more sugar. Did you make this coffee yourself?'
'Certainly, sir.'
'Go to the place in Piccadilly, and buy something that really is coffee: this is muck. Well? what's the new row about?'
'About a woman, sir.'
'You don't mean to say Sir John --'
'I beg your pardon, sir, I ought to have expressed myself more correctly. The woman in question is a She-Doctor.'
'No wonder there's a row! The fair physician is a bony old wretch with a wig and spectacles, of course?'
'That's not the account given to me, sir, by the footman. Except Miss Salome, next door, Sir John's man says she's the prettiest young woman he's seen for many a long day past.'
Otto stared at the valet in astonishment. Frederick went steadily on with his story.
'The lady has lately set up in practice, in the neighbourhood. And, what with her good looks and her lectures, she's turned the people's heads hereabouts, already. The resident medical man has got a red nose, and is suspected of drinking. He's losing his lady-patients as fast as he can. They say Miss Pillico --'
'Miss -- who?'
'The lady's name, sir, is Miss Sophia Pillico.'
'I pity Sophia with all my heart. The sooner she changes her name the better.'
'That's the joke among the women downstairs, sir. I was about to say that Miss Pillico is not content to doctor her own sex only. She considers it a part of the Rights of Women to doctor the men; and she has begun with Sir John --'
Here Frederick incomprehensibly checked himself, and prepared for shaving his master by sharpening the razor.
'Why don't you go on?' said Otto. 'Sophia means to doctor the men; and she's beginning with Sir John --'
He suddenly checked himself, and started up in the bed. His next question seemed to burst out of him irrepressibly. 'You don't mean to say, Frederick, that my mother is jealous?'
The valet, still sharpening the razor, looked up. 'That's the row, sir,' he answered as gravely as ever.
Otto fell back on the bed, and pulled the clothes over his face. Deaf Lady Dowager owned to having arrived at sixty years of age. Sir John's biography (in the past time when he had been Lord Mayor of London) fixed the date of his birth at a period of seventy-four years since.