William Monk 07 - Weighed in the Balance

encouragement …” She did not know how to finish.
    Dagmar looked startled and seemed about to dismiss the idea.
    “Someone who is less close, less obviously anxious, may be helpful,” Hester urged.
    “Yes …” Dagmar agreed hopefully. “Yes, perhaps she may. I shall ask him.”
    The following day, Victoria Stanhope, still thin, still pale and moving with slight awkwardness, paid a call upon Hester, who conducted her to Robert.
    Dagmar had remained uncertain about the suitability of a young, single woman’s visiting in such circumstances, but when she saw Victoria, her shyness and her obvious disability, she changed her mind. And apart from that, the girl’s dress immediately proclaimed her lack of means or social position. The fact that she spoke with dignity and intelligence made her otherwise most agreeable. The name Stanhope was familiar to Dagmar, but she did not immediately place it.
    Victoria stood on the landing beside Hester. Now that the moment had come, her courage failed her.
    “I can’t go in,” she whispered. “What can I say to him? He won’t remember me, and if he does, it will only be that I rebuffed him. Anyway”—she gulped and turned, white-faced, to Hester—“what about my family? He’ll remember that, and he won’t want to have anything to do with me. I can’t—”
    “Your family’s situation is nothing to do with you,” Hester said gently, putting her hand on Victoria’s arm. “Robert is far too fair to make such a judgment. Go in there thinking of his need, not your own, and I promise you, you will have nothing at the end which you can look back on with regret.” Themoment she had said it, she realized how bold she had been, but Victoria’s smile prevented her from withdrawing it.
    Victoria took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh, then knocked on the door again.
    “May I come in?”
    Robert looked at her with curiosity. Hester had prepared him for the visit, naturally, and had been surprised how clearly he had recalled their one brief encounter over a year before.
    “Please do, Miss Stanhope,” he said with a slight smile. “I apologize for the hospitality I can offer, but I am at a slight disadvantage right at the moment. Please sit down. That chair”—he pointed to the one beside the bed—“is quite comfortable.”
    She walked in and sat down. For a moment her fingers moved as if to rearrange her skirts. The new concertina-type steel hoops could be quite awkward, even if they were better than the old bone ones. Then, with an effort of will, she ignored them and let them fall as they would.
    Hester waited for the inevitable “How are you feeling?” Even Robert looked prepared for the traditional answer.
    “I imagine now you are over the fever and most of the pain, you are thoroughly bored,” Victoria said with a little shake of her head.
    Robert was startled, then his face broke into a wide smile.
    “I didn’t expect you to say that,” he admitted. “Yes, I am. And terribly tired of assuring everyone that I feel all right—far, far better than I did a week ago. I read, of course, but sometimes I can hear the silence prickling in my ears, and I find my attention wandering. I want a sound of some sort, and something that responds to me. I am weary of being done to, and not
doing.”
He blushed suddenly, realizing how forthright he had been to a young woman who was almost a complete stranger. “I’m sorry! You didn’t come here out of kindness just to hear me complain. Everyone has been very good, really.”
    “Of course they have,” she agreed, smiling back, tentativelyat first. “But this is something they cannot alter. What have you been reading?”
    “Dickens’s
Hard Times,”
he replied with a grimace. “I admit, it doesn’t cheer me much. I care about its people,” he added quickly, “but I’m not happy for them. I go to sleep and dream I live in Coketown.”
    “May I bring you something different?” she offered. “Perhaps something happy? Are you”—she drew a deep breath—“are you familiar with Edward Lear’s
Book of Nonsense?”
    His eyebrows rose. “No. But I think I might like it. It sounds like an excellent refuge from the world of Coketown.”
    “It is,” she promised. “You’ll find in it the Dong with the Luminous Nose, and Jumblies, who went to sea in a sieve, and all sorts of other oddities, like Mr. Daddy Longlegs and Mr. Floppy Fly, who played at battlecock and shuttledore in the