A call : $b The tale of two passionsFord, Ford Madox
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A call : $b The tale of two passions
Ford, Ford Madox
English fiction -- 20th century
“I thought if you’d just come round,” he said in a deep voice, with
extreme embarrassment. Robert Grimshaw was already half out of his
chair, but to his, “What is it?” Mr. Held replied only, “I don’t know
that it’s anything, but I should like you just to come round.”
Robert Grimshaw was in the hall and then in the street beside the
figure of Mr. Held, who, with his dancing and hurrying step and his
swarthy but extreme leanness, had the grotesque appearance of an
untried tragic actor. It wasn’t that Dudley was any worse, he said,
and it wasn’t--no, certainly it wasn’t, that he’d made any attack upon
Pauline. It was simply that he would like Mr. Grimshaw just to come
round.
In the drawing-room in Curzon Street Pauline was sitting chafing
Dudley Leicester’s hands between her own, and Robert Grimshaw never
quite understood what it was that had led the young man to call him
in. By cross-questioning him a great deal later he discovered that
young Mr. Held had conceived a mournful but enormous tenderness for
Pauline. It was, indeed, enough to see how from a distance his enormous
eyes pored like a spaniel’s over her tiny figure, or to see how, like
a sprinter starting to make a record, he would spring from one end
of the drawing-room to fetch her a footstool before she could even
select a chair upon which to sit down. It couldn’t be said that he
did not brood over Dudley Leicester with efficiency and attention,
for that obviously was one of the services he rendered her. But the
whole of his enthusiasm went into his attempts to foresee what in
little things Pauline would be wanting. And, as he explained later to
Robert Grimshaw, that day he had felt--he had felt it in his bones,
in his soul--that Pauline was approaching a crisis, a breakdown of
her personality. It wasn’t anything she had done; perhaps it was
rather what she hadn’t, for she had sat that whole afternoon holding
Leicester’s hand, rubbing it between her own, without speaking, looking
straight in front of her. And suddenly he had a feeling--he couldn’t
explain it. Perhaps, he said, Christian Science had had something to do
with it--helped him to be telepathic.
But, sitting as she always did, perched on the arm of the chair where
Leicester sprawled, Pauline simply turned her head to the door at
Grimshaw’s entry.
“This doctor’s no good,” she said, “and the man he’s called in in
consultation’s no good. What’s to be done?”
And then, like Mr. Held himself, Robert Grimshaw had a “feeling.”
Perhaps it was the coldness of her voice. That day Sir William Wells
had called in a confrère, a gentleman with red hair and an air of
extreme deafness; and, wagging his glasses at his friend, Sir William
had shouted:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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