The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices

He was evidently relieved to turn away, and to take his white face and his wild eyes to a table in a recess among the bottles.  But, though he stood there, compounding the lotion with his back towards them, Goodchild could not, for many moments, withdraw his gaze from the man.  When he at length did so, he found the Doctor observing him, with some trouble in his face.  ‘He is absent,’ explained the Doctor, in a low voice.  ‘Always absent.  Very absent.’

‘Is he ill?’

‘No, not ill.’

‘Unhappy?’

‘I have my suspicions that he was,’ assented the Doctor, ‘once.’

Francis Goodchild could not but observe that the Doctor accompanied these words with a benignant and protecting glance at their subject, in which there was much of the expression with which an attached father might have looked at a heavily afflicted son.  Yet, that they were not father and son must have been plain to most eyes.  The Assistant, on the other hand, turning presently to ask the Doctor some question, looked at him with a wan smile as if he were his whole reliance and sustainment in life.

It was in vain for the Doctor in his easy-chair, to try to lead the mind of Mr. Goodchild in the opposite easy-chair, away from what was before him.  Let Mr. Goodchild do what he would to follow the Doctor, his eyes and thoughts reverted to the Assistant.  The Doctor soon perceived it, and, after falling silent, and musing in a little perplexity, said:

‘Lorn!’

‘My dear Doctor.’

‘Would you go to the Inn, and apply that lotion?  You will show the best way of applying it, far better than Mr. Goodchild can.’

‘With pleasure.’

The Assistant took his hat, and passed like a shadow to the door.

‘Lorn!’ said the Doctor, calling after him.

He returned.

‘Mr. Goodchild will keep me company till you come home.  Don’t hurry.  Excuse my calling you back.’

‘It is not,’ said the Assistant, with his former smile, ‘the first time you have called me back, dear Doctor.’  With those words he went away.

‘Mr. Goodchild,’ said Doctor Speddie, in a low voice, and with his former troubled expression of face, ‘I have seen that your attention has been concentrated on my friend.’

‘He fascinates me.  I must apologise to you, but he has quite bewildered and mastered me.’

‘I find that a lonely existence and a long secret,’ said the Doctor, drawing his chair a little nearer to Mr. Goodchild’s, ‘become in the course of time very heavy.  I will tell you something.  You may make what use you will of it, under fictitious names.  I know I may trust you.  I am the more inclined to confidence to-night, through having been unexpectedly led back, by the current of our conversation at the Inn, to scenes in my early life.  Will you please to draw a little nearer?’

Mr. Goodchild drew a little nearer, and the Doctor went on thus: speaking, for the most part, in so cautious a voice, that the wind, though it was far from high, occasionally got the better of him.

When this present nineteenth century was younger by a good many years than it is now, a certain friend of mine, named Arthur Holliday, happened to arrive in the town of Doncaster, exactly in the middle of a race-week, or, in other words, in the middle of the month of September.  He was one of those reckless, rattle-pated, open-hearted, and open-mouthed young gentlemen, who possess the gift of familiarity in its highest perfection, and who scramble carelessly along the journey of life making friends, as the phrase is, wherever they go.  His father was a rich manufacturer, and had bought landed property enough in one of the midland counties to make all the born squires in his neighbourhood thoroughly envious of him.  Arthur was his only son, possessor in prospect of the great estate and the great business after his father’s death; well supplied with money, and not too rigidly looked after, during his father’s lifetime.  Report, or scandal, whichever you please, said that the old gentleman had been rather wild in his youthful days, and that, unlike most parents, he was not disposed to be violently indignant when he found that his son took after him.  This may be true or not.  I myself only knew the elder Mr. Holliday when he was getting on in years; and then he was as quiet and as respectable a gentleman as ever I met with.