Читать книгу Birds of Prey - M. E. Braddon - Страница 10

"I suppose he couldn't get a cab," she exclaimed, as the knock startled her from her listening attitude—for however intently a midnight watcher may be listening for the returning wanderer's knock, it is not the less startling when it comes. "And he has walked home through the wet, and now he'll have a violent cold, I daresay," added Georgy peevishly.

"Then it's lucky for him he's in a doctor's house," answered Mr. Sheldon, with a smile. He was a handsome man, no doubt, according to the popular idea of masculine perfection, but he had not a pleasant smile. "I went through the regular routine, you know, and am as well able to see a patient safely through a cold or fever as I am to make him a set of teeth."

Mr. Halliday burst into the room at this moment, singing a fragment of the "Chough and Crow" chorus, very much out of tune. He was in boisterously high spirits, and very little the worse for liquor. He had only walked from Covent Garden, he said, and had taken nothing but a tankard of stout and a Welsh rarebit. He had been hearing the divinest singing—boys with the voices of angels—and had been taking his supper in a place which duchesses themselves did not disdain to peep at from the sacred recesses of a loge grillee, George Sheldon had told him. But poor country-bred Georgina Halliday would not believe in the duchesses, or the angelic singing boys, or the primitive simplicity of Welsh rarebits. She had a vision of beautiful women, and halls of dazzling light, where there was the mad music of perpetual Post-horn Galops, with a riotous accompaniment of huzzas and the popping of champagne corks—where the sheen of satin and the glitter of gems bewildered the eye of the beholder. She had seen such a picture once on the stage, and had vaguely associated it with all Tom's midnight roisterings ever afterwards.

The roisterer's garments were very wet, and it was in vain that his wife and Philip Sheldon entreated him to change them for dry ones, or to go to bed immediately. He stood before the fire relating his innocent adventures, and trying to dispel the cloud from Georgy's fair young brow; and, when he did at last consent to go to his room, the dentist shook his head ominously.

"You'll have a severe cold to-morrow, depend upon it, Tom, and you'll have yourself to thank for it," he said, as he bade the good-tempered reprobate good night. "Never mind, old fellow," answered Tom; "if I am ill, you shall nurse me. If one is doomed to die by doctors' stuff, it's better to have a doctor one does know than a doctor one doesn't know for one's executioner."

After which graceful piece of humour Mr. Halliday went blundering up the staircase, followed by his aggrieved wife.

Philip Sheldon stood on the landing looking after his visitors for some minutes. Then he went slowly back to the sitting-room, where he replenished the fire, and seated himself before it with a newspaper in his hand.

"What's the use of going to bed, if I can't sleep?" he muttered, in a discontented tone.