"She wouldn't look at anybody that wasn't remarkably nice," Helen mused.
"Well--I don't want to abuse your friends--but nobody was remarkably
nice. Believe me, she hasn't looked at anybody, and nothing whatever has
occurred. She's ill, and it's a mere morbid fancy."
"It's a mere morbid fancy----!" Mrs. Chantry gobbled down this formula.
I felt that I was giving her another still more acceptable, and which
she as promptly adopted, when I added that Louisa would soon get over
it.
I may as well say at once that Louisa never got over it. There followed
an extraordinary week, which I look back upon as one of the most
uncomfortable of my life. The doctor had something to say about the
action of his patient's heart--it was weak and slightly irregular, and
he was anxious to learn whether she had lately been exposed to any
violent shock or emotion--but he could give no name to the disorder
under the influence of which she had begun unmistakably to sink. She lay
on the sofa in her room--she refused to go to bed, and in the absence of
complications it was not insisted on--utterly white, weak and
abstracted, shaking her head at all suggestion, waving away all
nourishment save the infinitesimally little that enabled her to stretch
out her hand from time to time (at intervals of very unequal length) and
begin "Mother, mother!" as if she were mustering courage for a supreme
confession. The courage never came; she was haunted by a strange impulse
to speak, which in turn was checked on her lips by some deeper horror or
some stranger fear. She seemed to seek relief spasmodically from some
unforgettable consciousness and then to find the greatest relief of all
in impenetrable silence. I knew these things only from her mother, for
before me (I went gently in and out of her room two or three times a
day) she gave no sign whatever. The little local doctor, after the first
day, acknowledged himself at sea and expressed a desire to consult with
a colleague at Exeter. The colleague journeyed down to us and shuffled
and stammered: he recommended an appeal to a high authority in London.
The high authority was summoned by telegraph and paid us a flying visit.
He enunciated the valuable opinion that it was a very curious case and
dropped the striking remark that in so charming a home a young lady
ought to bloom like a flower. The young lady's late hostess came over,
but she could throw no light on anything: all that she had ever noticed
was that Louisa had seemed "rather blue" for a day or two before she
brought her visit to a close. Our days were dismal enough and our nights
were dreadful, for I took turns with Helen in sitting up with the girl.
Chantry Court itself seemed conscious of the riddle that made its
chambers ache; it bowed its grey old head over the fate of its daughter.
The people who had been coming were put off; dinner became a ceremony
enacted mainly by the servants. I sat alone with Christopher Chantry,
whose honest hair, in his mystification, stuck out as if he had been
overhauling accounts. My hours with Louisa were even more intensely
silent, for she almost never looked at me. In the watches of the night
however I at last saw more clearly into what she was thinking of. Once
when I caught her wan eyes resting upon me I took advantage of it to
kneel down by her bed and speak to her with the utmost tenderness.
"If you can't say it to your mother, can you say it perhaps to _me_?"