Love in Chief

Love in Chief by R.K. Weekes (1904)

Dr. Maude's surgery at Monkswell draws a handful of ailing villagers, including Mrs. Searle, whose baby wheezes from bronchitis and whose cottage's landlord, old Fane, refuses to install a copper for washing. A consumptive young vagrant calling himself John Smith, actually Lucian de Saumarez, a penniless writer and former actor, charms the Searles before his own examination reveals him riddled with disease and homeless. Dr. Maude, suspicious of him, sends him off to walk to the workhouse infirmary; Lucian collapses from a hemorrhage under a railway arch and is found, taken for drunk, by the wealthy MP Noel Farquhar, who carries him home to The Lilacs and revives him through Arab-taught massage. Lucian wakes to find Farquhar has secretly read the love letter he has carried for nine years since his wife Marguerite's death, and senses behind Farquhar's public reputation for incorruptible virtue and philanthropy a hidden, harder nature. Farquhar nurses Lucian back to health and keeps him on as a guest, sparring with him in talk that gradually exposes Farquhar's true self: he confesses he is half Russian, son of nihilist parents he conceals, and that his celebrated honesty and charity are calculated strategy toward a Cabinet career, laced with real arrogance, strength, and capacity for cruelty, as his scarred arm (burned and ant-bitten in Africa) attests. Meanwhile Farquhar tries to help Mrs. Searle by paying for a copper at Burnt House, but landlord Eumenes Fane simply raises the rent to absorb the benefit. Fane's grown children, Bernard and Dolly, live apart from society due to old scandal; Dolly, beautiful, proud, and starved for experience, bluntly questions Farquhar about whether she could succeed as an actress and begins testing her own power over him and over propriety. Dolly and Bernard start attending church and visiting society, meeting Mrs. Merton and her circle. Lucian, now effectively Farquhar's dependent and odd-job companion, befriends Dolly while helping her make violet perfume, and clumsily proposes to her, admitting he is already a widower of nine years with no real prospects. Farquhar also declares love to Dolly in a scene by a stile, seizing a kiss from her by force; she refuses him but is troubled by the force of his will, and asks for three months to decide between him, Lucian, and her own ambitions, agreeing to correspond with both suitors meanwhile. That night Farquhar, feverish, reveals in delirium both his jealousy of Lucian's rival courtship and his continued fixation on Dolly; he and Lucian, after near-quarreling over her, settle into wary camaraderie, with Farquhar offering Lucian a partnership managing a Belgian granite quarry he has bought. A new figure, the languid, chivalrous army officer Lal Laurenson, appears after a motoring accident involving Bernard; Dolly meets him again while nursing a sick cottage baby and is struck by his quiet, scrupulous decency, so unlike Farquhar's calculation or Lucian's raffishness. Bernard, meanwhile, courts Lal's strait-laced reforming sister Angela, deliberately taking up temperance to please her. Dolly, realizing she loves Lal, is devastated when she sees him entering a disreputable public house in Swanborough and cuts him dead, not knowing he was there on an errand of mercy to retrieve a runaway girl for his secret charitable work; the gambler Hugh Meryon, an old friend of Lal's, explains the truth to Dolly afterward, winning back her good opinion. In the meantime, at Farquhar's Belgian quarry, the American manager Charlesworth warns of labor unrest and sabotage threats from the workmen, and Farquhar, Lucian, and Charlesworth agree to stand watch together over the dangerous final blasting of a valuable granite block. Bernard formally proposes to Angela by letter, asking her to signal her answer with white or red roses at dinner; she chooses white, with Lal's encouragement, just as Dolly and Bernard arrive as dinner guests.

By R.K. Weekes · First published 1904 · Genre: Romance, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction · 20 chapters · 72,255 words

First lines

The waiting-room of Dr. Maude's surgery at Monkswell was sparely furnished with guests, mainly because the December weather was of that mild and unseasonable type commonly called unhealthy. The darkness outside was pierced by a fine, invisible rain, borne on a south wind, and the waiting-room, though heat as well as light was spread only by a single gas-burner, was not cold. One patient was with the doctor; the details of his complaint could have been overheard by the others if they had cared to listen, but they did not; sufficient unto them were their own diseases. Five centres of self-complacent misery were sitting on a cane-seated bench; the sixth person was leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets. The only other representative of the male sex was eight years old, and had come to have a tooth out; too stolid to feel nervous, he sat sucking peppermints. His mother, in a decent black mantilla and a square-fronted bonnet trimmed with red chrysanthemums, was talking to a girl with a baby about wrongs invisible to the unjaundiced eye. The young mother's dark eyes and delicate features had the remains of real beauty, though two years of matrimony had made her middle-aged; her pretty young sister, sitting beside her, showed what she must have been. The baby was not handsome; its pinkish-purple face was framed in a yellow woollen hood, and the colour which should have tinged its cheeks had settled upon its ugly little button of a nose and on its chin. It wheezed; the mother coughed loosely; the girl stared before her; the young man also coughed, but inobtrusively. He did not give to phthisis its due dignity.

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love triangle · Edwardian fiction · social class · tuberculosis · philanthropy · moral ambiguity · political ambition · character study · romantic rivalry · poverty · deception · English village

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