Again a shock, a chasm—his brain had mocked him.
Dreadful when that potent servant begins to mutiny, and instead of honest work for its master finds pastime for itself in fearful sport.
“My God! what am I thinking of?” he said, with a kind of chill, looking back over his shoulder.
His tired horse was plucking a mouthful of grass that grew at the foot of a tree.
“We are both used up,” he said, letting his horse, at a quicker pace, pursue its homeward path. “Poor fellow, you are tired as well as I. I’ll be all right, I dare say, in the morning if I could only sleep. Something wrong—something a little wrong—that sleep will cure—all right tomorrow.”
He looked up as he passed toward the windows of his and Alice’s room. When he was out a piece of the shutter was always open. But if so tonight there was no light in the room, and with a shock and a dreadful imperfection of recollection, the scene which occurred on the night past returned.
“Yes, my God! so it was,” he said, as he stopped at the yard gate. “Alice—I forget—did I see Alice after that, did I—did they tell me—what is it?”
He dismounted, and felt as if he were going to faint. His finger was on the latch, but he had not courage to raise it. Vain was his effort to remember. Painted in hues of light was that dreadful crisis before his eyes, but how had it ended? Was he going quite mad?
“My God help me,” he muttered again and again. “Is there anything bad. I can’t recall it. Is there anything very bad?”
“Open the door, it is he, I’m sure, I heard the horse,” cried the clear voice of Alice from within.
“Yes, I, it’s I,” he cried in a strange rapture.
And in another moment the door was open, and Charles had clasped his wife to his heart.
“Darling, darling, I’m so glad. You’re quite well?” he almost sobbed.
“Oh, Ry, my own, my own husband, my Ry, he’s safe, he’s quite well. Come in. Thank God, he’s back again with his poor little wife, and oh, darling, we’ll never part again. Come in, come in, my darling.”
Old Mildred secured the door, and Tom took the horse round to the stable, and as she held her husband clasped in her arms, tears, long denied to her, came to her relief, and she wept long and convulsingly.
“Oh, Ry, it has been such a dreadful time; but you’re safe, aren’t you?”
“Quite. Oh! yes, quite darling—very well.”
“But, Oh, Ry, you look so tired. You’re not ill, are you, darling?”
“Not ill, only tired. Nothing, not much, tired and stupid, want of rest.”
“You must have some wine, you look so very ill.”
“Well, yes, I’m tired. Thanks, Mildred, that will do,” and he drank the glass of sherry she gave him.
“A drop more?” inquired old Mildred, holding the decanter stooped over his glass.
“No, thanks, no, I—it tastes oddly—or perhaps I’m not quite well after all.”
Charles now felt his mind clear again, and his retrospect was uncrossed by those spectral illusions of the memory that seem to threaten the brain with subjugation.
Better the finger of death than of madness should touch his brain, perhaps. His love for his wife, not dethroned, only in abeyance, was restored. Such dialogues as theirs are little interesting to any but the interlocutors.
With their fear and pain, agitated, troubled, there is love in their words. Those words, then, though in him, troubled with inward upbraidings, in her with secret fears and cares, are precious. There may not be many more between them.
XLIV
The Wykeford Doctor
A few days had passed and a great change had come. Charles Fairfield, the master of the Grange, lay in his bed, and the Wykeford doctor admitted to Alice that he could not say what might happen. It was a very grave case—fever—and the patient could not have been worse handled in those early days of the attack, on which sometimes so much depends.
People went to and fro on tiptoe, and talked in whispers, and the patient moaned, and prattled, unconscious generally of all that was passing. Awful hours and days of suspense! The Doctor said, and perhaps he was right, to kind Lady Wyndale, who came over to see Alice, and learned with consternation the state of things, that, under the special circumstances, her nerves having been so violently acted upon by terror, this diversion of pain and thought into quite another channel might be the best thing, on the whole, that could have happened to her.
It was now the sixth day of this undetermined ordeal.
Alice watched the Doctor’s countenance with her very soul in her eyes, as he made his inspection, standing at the bedside, and now and then putting a question to Dulcibella or to Alice, or to the nurse whom he had sent to do duty in the sickroom from Wykeford.
“Well?” whispered poor Alice, who had accompanied him downstairs, and pale as death, drew him into the sitting-room, and asked her question.
“Well, Doctor, what do you think today?”
“Not much to report. Very little change. We must have patience, you know, for a day or two; and you need not to be told, my dear ma’am, that good nursing is half the battle, and in better hands he need not be; I’m only afraid that you are undertaking too much yourself. That woman, Marks, you may rely upon, implicitly; a most respectable and intelligent person; I never knew her to make a mistake yet, and she has been more than ten years at this work.”
“Yes, I’m sure she is. I like her very much. And don’t you think him a little better?” she pleaded.
“Well, you know, as long as he holds his own and don’t lose ground, he is better; that’s all we can say; not to be worse, as time elapses, is in effect, to be better; that you may say.”
She was looking earnestly into the clear blue eyes of the
