TREMBLING IN THE BALANCE.
Another and a yet sharper trial was further to humble and sober the once
gay and thoughtless Vibert. If ever a gush of warm gratitude had arisen
in his heart, it was drawn forth by the generous effort made in his
behalf by his elder brother. Bruce, when in a state of exhaustion and
suffering which rendered him fit only for the silence and repose of a
sick-chamber, had taken a long journey in winter, and had then
encountered the fatigue and excitement of giving evidence in a
police-court, acting as one who felt that he had no leisure to be ill,
that it was a time for action and not for repose. Bruce had been as a
rider forcing his horse to a leap almost beyond its strength; the brave
steed just clearing the stone wall, and falling on the opposite side,
crushing its rider beneath its weight. An effort had been made,
successfully made; but reaction was certain to follow, and in the case
of Bruce Trevor terrible was that reaction. Ere nightfall straw was laid
down before one of the houses in Grosvenor Square to deaden the sound of
passing wheels, and the most skilful physician in London was counting
the quick throbs in the pulse of a patient in a high delirious fever.
Emmie had never before watched by a sick-bed; she had been far too young
at the time of her mother's last illness to have had anything to do with
nursing. All those who best knew Emmie, with her delicate nerves and
timid character, declared that she was utterly unfit to nurse in a case
that required both strength and courage; for Bruce's ravings were often
those of a maniac. He had sometimes to be held down in his bed by main
force. But the painful lessons of the last few days had not been taught
to Emmie in vain. The timid nervous girl had learned to go to the Fount
of Strength, and the firmness and faith which she thence received
astonished her father and Vibert. When her younger brother would quit
the sick-room, unable to endure the harrowing sight of Bruce struggling
like a demoniac, Emmie remained at her painful post. The sound of his
sister's voice, the gentle touch of her hand, would sometimes soothe the
poor sufferer when nothing else had the slightest effect.
"How can you bear to see him thus?" exclaimed Vibert once to his pale
but tearless sister, after one of Bruce's most distressing paroxysms of
brain-fever.
"I try to trust and not be afraid," the poor girl faintly replied. "I
try to trust him to God, to my--his Heavenly Father. I repeat to myself,
_God is love_. He can--oh! He _will_ make all things, even this most
fearful anguish, work together for good to those who trust Him!"
But for the ravings of fever, when the mind of Bruce had lost all power
of self-control, never would mortal but himself have known the extent of
the sufferings which he had endured whilst in the power of the forgers,
and during the hours of torture when he had remained pinioned and
gagged. In the police-court Bruce had described with calm brevity the
events of that trying night and morning. But when reason had fled from
the sufferer, what images of horror those events had branded on his mind
was apparent to all who approached him. The dreadful scenes through
which Bruce had passed were, in the delirium of fever, acted over and
over again: now he was struggling with fearful violence to unloose a
murderer's grasp on his throat, calling for help in tones so piercing
that they thrilled to the hearts of those watching beside him, and even
reached the ears of passengers in the street. Then the sufferer seemed
to be listening, gasping and trembling as he listened, to sounds which
none but himself could hear. Bruce would mutter words about the
pool--the deep, black, icy-cold pool--and clutch the bed-clothes, as if
to save himself from being dragged down to a watery grave. At another
time the fever-stricken youth would imagine himself as being again bound
in the house of Jael, would writhe and struggle to free himself from
imaginary cords that cut into his flesh as he struggled; and anon would
convulsively start, as if again he heard the thunderbolt strike the
dwelling close to his head.
Day after day passed, night after night, in dreadful transitions from
frenzy to stupor, deathlike stupor, only exchanged for more fearful
frenzy, till even Emmie could scarcely wish for a prolongation of the
terrible struggle. Humbly and submissively she prayed that if her loved
brother were indeed now passing through the river of death, one ray of
reason might gleam through the awful darkness around him, and that the
waves and billows might indeed not go over his head.
But Bruce had youth in his favour, and all that man's skill or woman's
tenderness could throw into the opposite scale to that in which his life
appeared to be gradually sinking. With alternations of hope and fear,
the watchers by the sick-bed marked the trembling of the balance,
scarcely able to believe that from so fearful an attack of fever the
sufferer ever again could rise. But the crisis came at last, and the
worst was over; the maddening fever quitted the suffering Bruce, but
left him helpless as an infant, and more nervous than the most weak and
timid of women.
For weeks Bruce could hardly endure the noise of a step crossing his
room; a shadow alarmed him, a voice would make every nerve in his frame
quiver. The doctor said that for long his patient would be incapable of
any mental exertion; he who had been so steady and regular in his work,
was condemned to the idleness and inaction which, to a character like
that of Bruce, was in itself a most humiliating trial and
disappointment.
As soon as the invalid could be with safety removed from London, he was
sent to a watering-place in the south of England. Emmie, whose health
had suffered from her devoted nursing, accompanied her sick brother.
After a while she exchanged places with Vibert, and rejoined at Myst
Court her father, who was actively fulfilling his duties as a landlord
and benefactor to the poor. In the latter character Mr. Trevor needed
the help of his daughter, whose health was now sufficiently restored to
enable her to become his able assistant.
Vibert had not seen his brother for more than a month when he joined him
at Torquay, and with the sanguine expectations natural to youth he hoped
that the change of air and scene, and the effect of so many weeks passed
in perfect repose, might have brought back health and strength to the
shattered frame of Bruce Trevor. The youth was disappointed to find how
slow had been the progress made by the invalid towards recovery. It was
not merely the hollow eye, the transparent skin, the faint voice and
feeble step that told how far removed convalescence was from vigorous
health, for it seemed to Vibert as if his brother's firmness of mind,
and even his moral courage, were gone. Bruce so shrank from any
allusions to the sufferings of the past, that Vibert, who had come full
of news which he was eager to impart, found that he must avoid even
mentioning the names of the Harpers. For some time Bruce did not hear
the result of the trial of the forgers, who had all been convicted and
condemned to various terms of imprisonment.
But if Bruce's shattered state was distressing both to himself and to
others, it was evident that the character of the young man was ripening
under the trial. Bruce had been proud in his self-dependence, impatient
of the weakness of others; he had trusted in the power of his own strong
will to overcome all difficulties before him. He was now, in conscious
infirmity, learning to cast himself simply, humbly, unreservedly upon
the strength of his God. The proud soul had had to learn that the
kingdom of heaven can only be entered by those who come in the spirit of
a little child, and that the haughtiness of man must be brought down,
that the Lord alone may be exalted.
"There are many things in life that one can't understand," observed
Vibert one day, when he had just placed a footstool before the brother
who had formerly taunted him with an effeminate love of luxurious ease.
"It seems natural enough that I should have had some rough discipline,
seeing what a thoughtless, selfish life I had been leading, till I was
pulled up sharp by that horrid affair. But you--the steadiest fellow in
Christendom--you, who never broke bounds, or turned to the right or the
left--I can't see why the heaviest strokes should be laid upon you, or
what good such a long trying illness can possibly do you."
"Vibert, do you remember what our uncle wrote on those fragments of
paper when we were together at Summer Villa?"
Vibert nodded an affirmative reply.
"I have often thought over his words," continued the invalid; "they
conveyed a salutary warning, all the more needed because it raised my
anger against him who had laid his finger upon the tender spot. Vibert,
I, as well as yourself, had my haunted chamber within the heart, and it
has needed the thunderbolt which has smitten me so low to burst open a
way for the light to enter."
A few months before nothing could have extorted from the lips of Bruce
Trevor such a confession.