The fears of fever proved to be true. A brain-fever came on, and for a
week Henry was very ill. Although serious, however, the attack was not
considered dangerous, and as every day the physician spoke confidently
of the result, cheerfulness returned to the members of the house.
Except the children, there were none who were bound to Henry by those
near ties which make anxiety last while illness lasts. All were
satisfied to know that he was no worse, or a shade better, and
thankfully rolled anxiety away. All but Nora; and she had to behave like
the rest. She did not dare to ask from hour to hour whether there was a
change; did not dare to meet the physicians, and ask if they were
convinced the danger was passed. No one appeared to consider her
specially interested, or, indeed, except from the unfortunate
circumstance of her fall, interested in any way.
No one except Mrs. Elliott. She saw the anxiety that devoured Nora; she
saw the efforts by which she maintained her constant composure, and she
did all which a kind person can do to relieve a state of mind which,
although visible, shrinks from notice.
“But she will make herself ill,” she thought, “and the sooner she sees
Henry the better. Possibly under these new circumstances the
estrangement will give way.”
At the end of about ten days Henry was pronounced to be convalescent;
and no sooner did the children hear that he was really better than they
became clamorous to see him. Hitherto Mrs. Elliott only, and she under
great restraint, had been allowed to go near his room.
“Now will be the time for Nora,” she thought; but before she had taken
any measures for such a step, Nora herself spoke.
“I do not know if it could be allowed,” she said to Mrs. Elliott, “but I
should be very glad if I might see my cousin. I am haunted by his face
as he lay on the ground. It is dreadful! Nothing, I think, but seeing
him can drive the impression away.”
She spoke quietly but earnestly. She did indeed feel as if she could
scarcely bear for a longer time the torture of her mind.
“I understand that,” Mrs. Elliott said; and promised to see what could
be done.
Henry was attended by two physicians; a great one, who came at stated
times from a distance, and a little one, who devoted almost his whole
time to him.
Mrs. Elliott waited until the following day, when the great physician
came, and then made her request. “As he was satisfied with Henry’s
state, might his little sister and his cousin now be allowed to see
him?”
“To a visit from his little sister,” the physician replied, “there can
be no possible objection. I am afraid the other is a more doubtful
matter. Indeed,” he added, shaking his head, “I cannot take on myself at
present to let him run the risk of agitation.”
Mrs. Elliott looked at him curiously.
“Would his cousin’s presence agitate him? Does he remember what happened
on the ice?” she asked, discreetly.
“Are you not aware,” said the physician, “that during his delirium Mr.
Devereux has constantly spoken of Miss Smith--so constantly, indeed,
that I have every reason to fear he would not see her with calmness.”
“No, I was not aware,” she said, with extreme surprise and curiosity.
The physician looked at her with a smile.
“I see what you imagine; but that is not at all the impression I intend
to convey. My impression would be of a contrary nature. Mr. Devereux
very constantly spoke of and addressed Miss Smith, often calling her
Miss Smythe. Sometimes he addressed her as having injured him, but more
often reproached himself as if he had injured her. It was impossible to
put any meaning to his ravings; but, under the circumstances, I think
you will feel with me that the visit must be delayed.”
Mrs. Elliott was not very clear on this point, but it was not one on
which she could venture to have an opinion.
She told Nora that Annabella was to be allowed to see Henry, as her
visit would be no effort to him; but that any further step was forbidden
for a few days longer. She spoke cheerfully, and Nora could only be
satisfied to wait.
Henry was convalescent, but he did not recover. The joys of
convalescence, such as poets have painted them, were not his. He was
allowed to get up, he was laid on a sofa, he was wheeled to the window;
but all the day long he lay languid, joyless, and indifferent.
When the great physician, who had ceased his constant attendance, came
at the end of five or six days, he found but little improvement. “I
cannot understand it,” he said. “There must be some hidden injury.”
“He would be well if he chose to be well,” said the lesser practitioner
impatiently; “everything depends on the patient. If the patient will
make no exertions, medicine is useless. If Mr. Devereux was in a
hospital, they would turn him out; and the best thing for him, too.”
The little doctor who spoke thus had become much attached to Henry, but
he was provoked with him for not getting well. He had been looking
forward to a display of the progress made under his care, and he was
disappointed.
The great physician asked for Mrs. Elliot.
“I think we will try your remedy,” he said. “The excitement I feared may
prove a help instead of a hindrance. Mr. Devereux must be roused. Let us
try an experiment. If Miss Smith is disposed to visit him, let her do so
this afternoon. I need not recommend care and watchfulness. You will be
on your guard. I leave the matter in your hands.”
Mrs. Elliott undertook it cheerfully. While he was dining, she paid
Henry a visit; and as she left him, observed, quietly, that a few people
were now to be admitted. “I shall bring Nora to see you this afternoon.”
She did not wait for any reply, nor paused to observe the manner in
which the statement was received.
An hour afterwards she fetched Nora and accompanied her to his room. As
they walked along, Nora begged her to remain with her during the visit.
“You see I have got my knitting,” Mrs. Elliott said, smiling. She could
not refuse a request made with great earnestness, but she determined to
use her discretion.
As they appeared at the door, a deep flush for an instant dyed Henry’s
cheek, and then passed away with the rapidity of weakness, and left him
deadly pale. He looked so wan, so weak, so emaciated with illness, that
Nora paused breathless to recover herself from the shock he gave her.
The sight of him was worse than the vision that had haunted her. “And I
the cause!” she now said in her heart.
Accustomed, however, to self-control, the pause of horror was hardly
perceived before she came quietly forward, and then shook hands in
sedate and tranquil fashion. Mrs. Elliott then placed a chair for her
opposite to him at the foot of the sofa, and sat down herself nearer to
the door.
“I hoped I should have found you better,” Nora said, and her voice
trembled a little as she spoke.
“I am better, thank you,” he replied. “Indeed, in a few days I suppose I
shall be quite well.”
His words were cheerful and re-assuring, but the tone of his voice was
most painful. So languid, weak, and weary.
“Do you not wish to get well?” Nora asked, addressing the tone of his
voice, not the words he had said.
“I don’t know. Oh! yes, I suppose I wish to get well. All men do. But
life is a great trouble--a great struggle. Sometimes I feel as if it was
hardly worth while.”
And while he said these sentences, disconnectedly, his eyes rested on
her, looking so large and mournful in his sunken cheeks, so like the
eyes of Sophy in her dying days, that Nora felt struck as with a pang of
death.
“I think you should wish to live,” she said, bending forward towards
him, and speaking earnestly.
“I know I should,” he replied. “I know well that I am not fit to die;
nor is weariness of life a good preparation for death.”
“I did not mean that. I meant--” and here her voice took a tone of
passion in its earnestness--“I meant that you should wish to live for my
sake.” A glow tinged his cheek for a second, but Nora scarcely perceived
it. “If you were to die, what would become of me? Do you not know that I
should have killed you?”
“You have killed me many times,” he answered; and in his voice, also,
there was now a sound touched and altered from its languid tone. “This
time only the stroke would have been welcome.”
“How have I killed you? What have I ever done that you should hate me?”
“Hate! Is it possible you think I hate?”
Up to this time, notwithstanding her great discomfort, Mrs. Elliott, in
obedience to Nora’s wishes, had sat still. But here she felt unable to
maintain her position longer, and softly left the room. Her departure
was unperceived. She had been forgotten.
“It seems like hate,” Nora replied; “and what have I done, and how have
I deserved it? If it has been my unhappy fate to offend you often, and
now to have done you harm; you should pity, and not hate me. You should
pity me; for you cannot tell how I wished to do you good--how I have
longed, in my lonely life, to have you for my friend, and not my enemy.”
Her words were poured out, as she thus pleaded her cause before him,
with a force and quickness uncommon to her. Henry listened with
wide-opened eyes, and made no effort to arrest her.
It is related in Guarini’s “Pastor Fido,” that a hard-hearted young
hunter, who had trampled on love, scorning a young maiden who loved him,
was in a moment of time transformed by the discovery that he had
wounded, and he thought to death, the maiden he was disdaining. In one
instant the hard heart became soft.
It was with some such feeling, and with like suddenness, that Henry was
now transformed. As he listened to Nora’s voice pleading before him, as
he looked into her earnest eyes, the stubborn rebellious feeling which
had made his life miserable, born of passion first, then of pride, gave
way--melted within him.
“Hate!” he cried, and in an altered tone, “is it possible you think I
_hate_?”
And then a new and sudden struggle began within. It was no longer the
struggle of opposing feelings always felt in her presence, but the
struggle against one feeling, which seemed bursting for utterance. The
physician would have been alarmed if he had seen his agitation. His
cheeks were flushed with crimson, and every vein in the now transparent
skin seemed to be quivering beneath its slender covering.
Nora was terrified. She had hitherto been so absorbed by her intense
desire to set all bitterness at rest between them, that she had not
thought of the possibility of agitation. She now looked round, and saw
that Mrs. Elliott was gone.
“You are ill,” she cried, in a fright. “I have done you harm again!” and
she rose quickly from her seat.
“Wait,” he cried, and he stretched out his hand to her.
Pausing irresolute, hardly knowing what she did, she took it; and then
meeting a gaze that seemed designed to read her very soul, she began to
feel and to think;--and she blushed.
The blush loosed the fetters that withheld him.
“You said hate,” he cried, still gazing at her. “It is not hate. Shall I
say what it is--unworthy though I am to feel it?”
A swift bright glow, radiant in its beauty and gladness, flitted over
her unconscious face. It made her look so lovely that Henry could have
risen from his couch and worshipped her. He did spring up and attempted
to rise, but her imploring hand and weakness combined subdued him.
“Is it possible!” he cried, gazing at her. “Do _you not_ hate?”
She smiled and blushed, and slowly shook her head; and so it came to
pass that the barrier between them was broken down.
Nor was it likely to arise again, for the life of principle and
self-control he had lately led had delivered Henry from the folly and
childishness of old passion. The mirror of his mind was now smooth and
clear, and it needed only to brush the mists away that had gathered
upon it, and light entered, and with the light peace.
He one day described to Mrs. Elliott the singular torture he had long
endured. Nora, as he saw her to be, as he knew her to be, had long won
his heart. In their first meeting she had caught his fancy. To this had
been afterwards added gratitude and reverence; and growing from these a
devotion which, owing to their peculiar relations, was touched with a
light of romance.
But in opposition to these feelings there had been another image
perpetually rising before him--never, after his first acquaintance,
taking any hateful form, but one tending to distance, to freeze, to
chill him. He saw her as his benefactress and his judge. He saw her calm
and kind, extending to him her clemency, inviting him to mercy, judging
of him pitifully; seeing his errors, but forgiving them. And, strange to
say, the more the first feelings strove for mastery, and sometimes
gained it, the more did this image, with a cold Medusa gaze, haunt and
repel him. The combat between the two feelings had made his life
torture, his visits to her a torment.
“And no wonder,” was Mrs. Elliott’s observation. “But did it never
strike, never cross your poor brain, that she could perhaps feel more
like a young girl than an old judge?”
“Never but once,” he said. “After I left Riddlemere I was haunted by the
thought, the hope that I had made a favourable impression; but Mr.
Powderham’s letter telling me of her friendly interference in my favour
put that to flight for ever. Nor was it likely, after her kindness to
my family, that I should even imagine such a feeling on my return. I
think,” and he coloured and smiled, “if what I now gather from her is
true, her conduct to me and to them--judging by the common feelings of
people in that position--was truly heroic. The devotion of my life will
be a poor reward for all she has borne, and done.”
* * * * *
A conclusion is hardly needed to a tale that has been already too long.
And there needs no pointing of a moral, when a moral has been so
glaringly exhibited.
It is not perhaps a common thing for an individual hate to be nourished
and cherished in a family; yet unless the annals of the world greatly
lie, the very same state of mind is nourished and cherished by single
persons, and in families, towards inanimate things; towards subjects,
bodies, names, and words. There are reasonless antipathies and
prejudices so nursed and fed in certain minds, that the very minds
become perturbed by the violence of the hate; a single word, a simple
name, sufficing to raise such a host of fiery thoughts, that the mental
powers lose their balance, and become incapable of fair and righteous
judgment.
It was the thought of some such truth that suggested the idea of the
story which has been told; which prompted the attempt to display the
effects of a reasonless hate on a young, unthinking character.
“Fierce passions discompose the mind,
As tempests lash the sea.”
There is the truth to be remembered. The remainder of the verse has its
truth also:
“But calm content and peace we find
When, Lord, we turn to Thee.”
Yet it would be unfair to deny that these reasonless hates and
antipathies are often cherished by minds whose desires are set in a
right direction. Good men, religious men, indulge in prejudices, until
their minds are unstrung by them. Yet good men, above all others, should
beware of such things; for fierce passions and prejudices, if cherished,
will discompose their brains, let them be as good as they may.
THE END.
LONDON: PRINTED BY MACDONALD AND TUGWELL, BLENHEIM HOUSE.
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
the two cbildren=> the two children {pg 73}
for it acknowleged=> for it acknowledged {pg 75}
disappoinment with it=> disappointment with it {pg 127}
and very scrupulons=> and very scrupulous {pg 146}
and Sophy profitted=> and Sophy profited {pg 150}
evening in the begining=> evening in the beginning {pg 152}
what I imgaine=> what I imagine {pg 230}