C—— demurred, hummed and hawed, and acquiesced.
“Your friend must keep in the background,” he said. “He’s not a
backstair reporter, I suppose?”
“He’s an independent gentleman, and either a poet or an ass—I don’t
know which.”
“Same thing,” said this airy Philistine; “but no matter, so long as he
don’t talk.”
“He won’t talk.”
“Very well, bring him up. Fact is, we’re trying an experiment this
afternoon. Aunt’s brought the baby—sort of natural magnetism to
restore the current, cancel the hiatus—see? I’ve not much belief in
it myself.”
I fetched Valentine, and we followed C—— up to the ward. There were
only present there—one, a list-footed nurse; two, a little
shabby-genteel woman, with a false tow-like front over vicious eyes,
who carried a flannelled bundle; and three, the patient herself.
She had not so much as stirred, to all appearance, since I last saw
her. We, Valentine and I, took up our position apart. Some accidental
contact with him made me turn my head. He was quivering like a
high-strung racer for the start. This physical excitability was news
to me. “H’mph!” I thought. “Is there really that in you which you must
keep such a tight rein on?”
The nurse took the infant, and placed it on the sleeping girl’s
breast. It mewed and sprawled, but evoked no response whatever.
“She’d never a drop of the milk of kindness in her,” muttered the
little verjuicy woman.
“Hold your tongue!” said the doctor sharply.
He and the nurse essayed some coaxing. In the midst, I was petrified
by the sight of Valentine going softly up to the bed-head.
“May I whisper a word?” he said. “It may fail or not. But I don’t
think you can object to my trying.”
And actually, before his astonished company could move or collect its
wits, he had bent and spoken something, inaudible, into the patient’s
ear.
Now, I ask you to remember that this girl had been in a cataleptic
sleep for not less than three months, under observation, and with no
chance, so far as I knew, to cozen her attendants; and believe me then
as you can when I tell you that, answering, instantly and normally, to
Valentine’s whisper, she sighed, stretched her arms, though at first
with an air of some lassitude and weakness, and, opening her eyes,
fixed them with a sort of suspended stare upon the face of her
exorcist. Gradually, then, a little pucker deepened between her brows,
and instantly, some shadow of fright or uneasiness flickering in her
dark pupils, she turned her head aside. Obviously she was distressed
by the vision of this strange face coming between the light and her
normal, as it seemed to her, awaking.
Valentine immediately stood away, and backed to where she could not
see him.
C——, obviously putting great command on himself, since circumstances
made it appear that some damned “natural magic” had got the better of
his natural science, took the situation in hand professionally, and
frowned to the aunt, to whom the baby had been restored, to show
herself. The woman, rallying from the common stupefaction, gave an
acrid sniff and obeyed.
“_Well_, Nancy!” she said, in a tone between wonder and remonstrance.
The girl looked round again and up, with a little shock. Immediately
her dilated pupils accepted with frank astonishment this more familiar
apparition.
“Gracious goodness, Aunt Mim!” she whispered; “what have you got
there?”
Then she turned her face on the pillow, with a smile of drowsy
rapture.
“Anyhow, you’ve found your way to Skene at last,” she murmured, and
instantly fell into a natural sleep, from which, it was evident, there
must be no awaking her.
C—— wheeled upon my friend.
“I suppose you won’t part with your secret?” he asked drily.
It was a habit with Valentine, not his least aggravating, composedly
to put by any unwelcome or difficult question addressed to him as if
he did not hear it.
“Skene’s in Kent, isn’t it?” he asked, ostensibly of the aunt, though
he looked at me. I could have snapped at him in pure vindictiveness.
He wasn’t inscrutable, any more than another. What was his confounded
right to pose as a sphinx?
“She fancies she’s there,” he said. “Why?”
I turned dumbly with the question to the little woman creature. I
don’t know if she supposed I was in some sort of official authority to
cross-examine her. She had powder on her face, and a weak glow mantled
through it.
“It was there she met her trouble, sir,” she said, hesitating. “She’d
gone down to the hop-picking last September, and I was to follow. But
circumstances” (she wriggled her shoulders with an indescribable
simper) “was against my joining her.”
“Well,” broke in C——, suddenly and rather sharply, “you must take
the consequences, and, for the present anyhow, the burden of them off
her shoulders.”
“Begging your pardon, sir?” she questioned shrewdly.
“The child,” said the doctor, “the child. Everything, it appears,
relating to it is for the moment obliterated from her mind. She takes
up existence, I think you’ll find, last autumn, at this Skene, with
expecting you. Well, you have come, and returned to London together.
You understand? The time of year is the same. None of all this has for
the moment happened.”
There was an acrid incredulity in his hearer’s face as she listened to
him.
“Do I understand, or don’t I, sir,” she said, “that her shame is to be
my care and consideration? And till when, if you’ll be so good?”
“That I can’t say,” he answered. “Probably the interval, the abyss in
her mind, will bridge itself by slow degrees. Her reason likely
depends upon your not rudely hastening the process. I warn you, that’s
all.”
“And pray,” she said, with ineffable sarcasm, “how is I, as a
respectable woman, to account to her for this that I hold?”
“Put it out to nurse.”
“No, sir, _if_ you’ll allow me. The hussy have done her best to bring
me to ruin already.”
“Say you’ve adopted it.”
She gave a shrill titter.
“Nanny will have lost her wits, hindeed, to believe that.”
“Well, she has in a measure.”
“And the police?” she said. “Aren’t you a little forgetting them,
sir?”
“The police,” said C——, “I will answer for. The case isn’t worth
their pursuing, and they will drop it.”
The baby began to wail; and Aunt Mim, with her lips pursed, to play
the vicious rocking-horse to it.