THE SICK-CHAMBER.
She had reached the little iron gate, which hung on one hinge only,
and was lifting it from the ground to push it open, when sudden
through the stillness came a frightful cry. Had they found him
already? Was it a life-and-death struggle going on within? For one
moment she stood rooted; the next she flew to the door. When she
entered the hall, however, the place was silent as a crypt. Could it
have been her imagination? Again, curdling her blood with horror,
came the tearing cry, a sort of shout of agony. All in the dark, she
flew up the stair, calling him by name, fell twice, rose as if on
wings, and flew again until she reached the room. There all was
silence and darkness. With trembling hands she found her match-box
and struck a light, uttering all the time every soothing word she
could think of, while her heart quavered in momentary terror of
another shriek. It came just as the match flamed up in her fingers,
and an answering shriek from her bosom tore its way through her
clenched teeth, and she shuddered like one in an ague. There sat her
brother on the edge of the bedstead staring before him with fixed
eyes and terror-stricken countenance. He had not heard her enter,
and saw neither the light nor her who held it. She made haste to
light the candle, with mighty effort talking to him still, in gasps
and chokings, but in vain; the ghastly face continued unchanged, and
the wide-open eyes remained fixed. She seated herself beside him,
and threw her arms around him. It was like embracing a marble
statue, so moveless, so irresponsive was he. But presently he gave a
kind of shudder, the tension of his frame relaxed, and the soul
which had been absorbed in its own visions, came forward to its
windows, cast from them a fleeting glance, then dropped the
curtains.
"Is it you, Helen?" he said, shuddering, as he closed his eyes and
laid his head on her shoulder. His breath was like that of a
furnace. His skin seemed on fire. She felt his pulse: it was
galloping. He was in a fever--brain-fever, probably, and what was
she to do? A thought came to her. Yes, it was the only possible
thing. She would take him home. There, with the help of the
household, she might have a chance of concealing him--a poor one,
certainly! but here, how was she even to keep him to the house in
his raving fits?
"Poldie, dear!" she said, "you must come with me. I am going to take
you to my own room, where I can nurse you properly, and need not
leave you. Do you think you could walk as far?"
"Walk! Yes--quite well: why not?"
"I am afraid you are going to be ill, Poldie; but, however ill you
may feel, you must promise me to try and make as little noise as you
can, and never cry out if you can help it. When I do like this," she
went on, laying her finger on his lips, "you must be silent
altogether."
"I will do whatever you tell me, Helen, if you will only promise not
to leave me, and, when they come for me, to give me poison."
She promised, and made haste to obliterate every sign that the room
had been occupied. She then took his arm and led him out. He was
very quiet--too quiet and submissive, she thought--seemed sleepy,
revived a little when they reached the open air, presently grew
terrified, and kept starting and looking about him as they crossed
the park, but never spoke a word. By the door in the sunk fence they
reached the garden, and were soon in Helen's chamber, where she left
him to get into bed while she went to acquaint her aunt of his
presence in the house. Hard and unreasonable, like most human
beings, where her prejudices were concerned, she had, like all other
women, sympathy with those kinds of suffering which by experience
she understood. Mental distress was beyond her, but for the solace
of another's pain she would even have endured a portion herself.
When therefore, she heard Helen's story, how her brother had come to
her window, that he was ill with brain-fever, as she thought, and
talked wildly, she quite approved of her having put him to bed in
her own room, and would have got up to help in nursing him. But
Helen persuaded her to have her night's rest, and begged her to join
with her in warning the servants not to mention his presence in the
house, on the ground that it might get abroad that he was out of his
mind. They were all old and tolerably faithful, and Leopold had been
from childhood such a favourite, that she hoped thus to secure their
silence.
"But, child, he must have the doctor," said her aunt.
"Yes, but I will manage him. What a good thing old Mr. Bird is gone!
He was such a gossip! We must call in the new doctor, Mr. Faber. I
shall see that he understands. He has his practice to make, and will
mind what I say."
"Why, child, you are as cunning as an old witch!" said her aunt. "It
is very awkward," she went on. "What miserable creatures men
are--from first to last! Out of one scrape into another from babies
to old men! Would you believe it, my dear?--your uncle, one of the
best of men, and most exemplary of clergymen--why, I had to put on
his stockings for him every day he got up! Not that my services
stopped there either, I can tell you! Latterly I wrote more than
half his sermons for him. He never would preach the same sermon
twice, you see. He made that a point of honour; and the consequence
was that at last he had to come to me. His sermons were nothing the
losers, I trust, or our congregation either. I used the same
commentaries he did, and you would hardly believe how much I enjoyed
the work.--Poor dear boy! we must do what we can for him."
"I will call you if I find it necessary, aunt. I must go to him now,
for he cannot bear me out of his sight. Don't please send for the
doctor till I see you again."
When she got back to her room, to her great relief she found Leopold
asleep. The comfort of the bed after his terrible exhaustion and the
hardships he had undergone, had combined with the drug under whose
influences he had more or less been ever since first he appeared at
Helen's window, and he slept soundly.
But when he woke, he was in a high fever, and Mr. Faber was
summoned. He found the state of his patient such that no amount of
wild utterance could have surprised him. His brain was burning and
his mind all abroad: he tossed from side to side and talked
vehemently--but even to Helen unintelligibly.
Mr. Faber had not attended medical classes and walked the hospitals
without undergoing the influences of the unbelief prevailing in
those regions, where, on the strength of a little knowledge of the
human frame, cartloads of puerile ignorance and anile vulgarity, not
to mention obscenity, are uttered in the name of truth by men who
know nothing whatever of the things that belong to the deeper nature
believed in by the devout and simple, and professed also by many who
are perhaps yet farther from a knowledge of its affairs than those
who thus treat them with contempt. When therefore he came to
practise in Glaston, he brought his quota of yeast into the old
bottle of that ancient and slumberous town. But as he had to gain
for himself a practice, he was prudent enough to make no display of
the cherished emptiness of his swept and garnished rooms. I do not
mean to blame him. He did not fancy himself the holder of any
Mephistophelean commission for the general annihilation of belief
like George Bascombe, only one from nature's bureau of ways and
means for the cure of the ailing body--which, indeed, to him,
comprised all there was of humanity. He had a cold, hard,
business-like manner, which, however admirable on some grounds,
destroyed any hope Helen had cherished of finding in him one to whom
she might disclose her situation.
He proved himself both wise and skilful, yet it was weeks before
Leopold began to mend. By the time the fever left him, he was in
such a prostrate condition, that it was very doubtful whether yet he
could live, and Helen had had to draw largely even upon her fine
stock of health.
Her ministration continued most exhausting. Yet now she thought of
her life as she had never thought of it before, namely as a thing of
worth. It had grown precious to her since it had become the stay of
Leopold's. Notwithstanding the terrible state of suspense and horror
in which she now lived, seeming to herself at times an actual sharer
in her brother's guilt, she would yet occasionally find herself
exulting in the thought of being the guardian angel he called her.
Now that by his bedside hour plodded after hour in something of
sameness and much of weariness, she yet looked back on her past as
on the history of a slug.
During all the time she scarcely saw her cousin George, and indeed,
she could hardly tell why, shrunk from him. In the cold, bright,
shadowless, north-windy day of his presence, there was little
consolation to be gathered, and for strength--to face him made a
fresh demand upon the little she had. Her physical being had
certainly lost. But the countenance which, after a long interval of
absence, the curate at length one morning descried in the midst of
the congregation, had, along with its pallor and look of hidden and
suppressed trouble, gathered the expression of a higher order of
existence. Not that she had drawn a single consoling draught from
any one of the wells of religion, or now sought the church for the
sake of any reminder of something found precious: the great quiet
place drew her merely with the offer of its two hours' restful
stillness. The thing which had elevated her was simply the fact
that, without any thought, not to say knowledge of him, she had yet
been doing the will of the Heart of the world. True she had been but
following her instinct, and ministering--not to humanity from an
enlarged affection, but only to the one being she best loved in the
world--a small merit surely!--yet was it the beginning of the way of
God, the lovely way, and therefore the face of the maiden had begun
to shine with a light which no splendour of physical health, no
consciousness of beauty, however just, could have kindled there.