NEXT morning Mar, who had slept little all night, was found to be feverish and unwell, which was a state of affairs by no means unusual or alarming, but which gave to Letitia a sort of additional triumph. “What did I say to you?” she cried. “You dragged him out of the quiet that is natural at his age and forced him to make a public appearance. You seem quite pleased with yourselves, all of you, though I told you what would happen. And here he is in bed again, and no telling when he may be allowed to get up.”
“It was the walk yesterday, mamma,” said Letty, “and not sleeping, what with the noise and the music. It was not making that speech——”
“Of course you must know best,” said the mother, “and you have favored me with your opinion to that effect before.”
“Oh, mamma, don’t please be angry. Mar says he is quite well enough to get up. He says it is only because he didn’t sleep.”
“Of course, he knows best,” said Letitia. “You are all so sure of your own wisdom. But I hope it will convince you that for his own interests that sort of thing must not be done.”
She went away, however, without giving any distinct orders, and Mar got up. But when he was up he was giddy and “queer,” so he said, and quite disposed to lie down again. The tide of life was so strong in the house with all these young people about that a delicate boy was not much remarked. Duke would rush up in the middle of his own occupation with his tennis bat still in his hand, or in his cricketing costume fresh from the village green, and say “Hallo, Mar! no better? You must get better, old fellow, and come and have a game.” And Letty came in many times a day to ask how he was getting on. “You really must be better to-morrow, Mar,” she said. “Mamma puts it all down to the tenants’ dinner, and says you should not have been allowed to speak. She puts all the blame on Duke and me.”
“There is no blame,” said Mar; “it is only that I am such a poor creature. I am never good for anything.”
“Well, you must be better to-morrow,” Letty would say, and go off to her ride, or perhaps to her tennis which she too played very well. And then Tiny would come in with her hair flying in her haste, as soon as her lesson was over. “Are you better, Mar?”
“Oh, yes a little, but I shall not go downstairs to-day,” the boy would say, smiling at her.
“Oh, it is too tiresome,” cried Tiny; “I want you to come with me and get some water-lilies out of the pond. Duke’s always so busy; he will never do anything. And I want you to come down the village with me to see the man about those little dachshund puppies. It is too bad of you, Mar, to be ill now. I want you so much.”
“I am very sorry, Tiny, but you see I can’t help myself.”
“Oh, you could if you would try hard; just put on a resolution and make up your mind, and do, do be better to-morrow!” cried Tiny with vehemence. It is to be feared that this earnestness was simply on Tiny’s own account, to whom Mar was a most serviceable follower—but the boy was grateful for this vigorous demand.
“I will if I can,” he said—and then Tiny flew off with her hair waving, and he remained till the next visitor arrived. To tell the truth it was rather pleasant to them all to find him there always ready to hear what they had to say; and when they expressed their impatience with his illness, or ordered him imperiously to get well, they were though unconsciously only half sincere. “It’s nice to have you to run to always, Mar,” Tiny said, who, being the youngest, was the most unabashed in the utterance of fact. And Mar smiled and replied that it was nice to have them all coming to him. “If I am ever dull I know I shall soon hear someone running upstairs.”
“But remember,” cried Tiny, “you have promised to be better to-morrow.”
“Oh yes,” said Mar, “I shall be better to-morrow.”
“If you don’t, I heard mamma say she would send for the doctor, Mar.”
“I shall be better,” cried the boy. And as a matter of fact he did drag himself downstairs and got out to the avenue in a dutiful endeavor to follow Tiny to see after the dachshund puppies; but he grew so pale, and so soon found out that he could not drag one foot after the other, that a great panic arose among the young people. Duke was called from his tennis (for there were visitors that afternoon and a great game was going on) by Tiny in a voice more like that of a signal man in a gale than of a young lady. “Duke!” she said, “Mar’s fainted!” which brought Duke with a rush like a regiment of cavalry across the lawn, followed by Letty, her white dress flashing like a ray of light across the shadows. Mar fainted! They flung themselves upon him where he half sat, half lay upon a great trunk of a tree which had lain there for years overgrown with moss and lichens—the very same upon which Mary his mother had once thrown herself before he was born.
“No—I haven’t fainted—I’m only—very tired. I’ll go in again directly,” said Mar.
“Oh can’t you carry him home, Duke? We’ll help you. Oh it is all my fault,” cried Tiny, “if I had only known!”
“Old fellow,” cried Duke, who had the tears in his eyes, “if you’ll put your arms round my neck I’ll carry you. I can, I can. Oh I wish you were twice the weight.”
“Don’t worry him,” cried Letty. “He would rather walk with your arm and mine. Oh, I did not know you were so ill, Mar!”
Here Letitia came hurrying towards them, which brought a little color back to Mar’s cheeks.
“What’s the matter?” she said. “You have stopped two games rushing off like mad creatures. Oh, I might have known it was Mar.”
“The two games may go to—Bath,” cried Duke, flinging away from him with disdain the racquet which he had still been holding in his hand.
“I’m quite able to walk now,” said Mar. “I’ll go home. Go back to your game, please. I’m not very well, Aunt Letitia. I couldn’t get on any further, and Tiny took fright; that’s all.”
“You can give him your arm indoors, Duke, which he never ought to have quitted. I can’t conceive what he means. He is always doing something to pose as if he was not taken care of. Letty, go back to your friends—go back when I tell you! I hope I know how to manage him. You can tell the doctor to come when he has finished his game. It is a good thing he is here. Now come along, Mar; a little energy. If you could walk so far as this coming out, you may surely get back again.”
“Oh, easily,” said Mar. And though it was not easy at all he accomplished it, and got back to the sofa in the schoolroom, where he had spent so many wistful days, putting the best face upon it that he could, and urging Duke to return to his game, which that light-hearted youth, quite reassured to see that his cousin could walk and could smile, did not hesitate to do, flying downstairs heaven knows how many steps at a time to get back to his play. The anxious group which had gathered around Mar like a whirlwind, dispersed again in the same way, relieved, and thinking no evil. Oh, yes, he was better—no worse than he often was; nothing to be frightened about.
“And now, let’s finish our game,” said Duke.
The robust yet careless family affection, which would have done anything for the weakling among them, left him cheerful and comforted as soon as he was “better,” having no anxious thought.
And Mar was left to Letitia and her terse and unemotional questionings. It was Mrs. Parke’s habit to take all his ailments as a sort of reproach to herself.
“You might have known that it was not fit for you to go out in the blazing sun,” she said; “but you seem to take a pleasure in behaving as if no attention was ever paid to you.”
She went and got him a cushion with her own hands, and thrust it under his head with an irritable movement, and walked up and down the room, drawing down a blind over the window which gave Mar a glimpse of the sky and green trees he loved, and putting things in order which needed no arrangement.
“The doctor is a long time over his game,” she said to the old nurse, who still attended to the wants of the schoolroom. “I think he might have come before now.”
“Don’t let me keep you up here, Aunt Letitia,” said Mar. “There is not much the matter with me; it is a pity to trouble the doctor.”
“You will please not meddle with what I do, Mar,” she replied. “If you would only pay a little attention to what may be expected from yourself——”
The doctor came at last, and asked a great many questions and looked very grave. He ordered Mar to bed, not to lie on the sofa any longer, and gave a great many directions about quiet and fresh air and beef tea. He himself helped the boy to his room, and was so careful and so kind that there came to Mar’s mind a half elation, half melancholy, in the thought that he was going to be ill—that at last, after his years of delicate health, there was going to be something the matter with him which would prove all that Mrs. Parke had said, and of which he would possibly die. A great excitement, silent and suppressed, rose in his mind with this thought. It was alarming and strange, but it was not altogether unpleasing. There is a kind of pre-eminence, of superiority, in being very ill to a boy. It was like going into a battle. He felt solemnized, yet half amused. He was to be the hero of a sort of drama—he was to be in danger of his life. It pleased his imagination, which had so little food. And he tried to catch what the doctor was saying when he followed Mrs. Parke into the next room. But by that time he was getting drowsy, and his faculties dulled, and this he could not do.
In the next room the conference was grave enough. “He has never been ill before,” said the doctor. “I ever told you so from the first, Mrs. Parke, delicate but not ill, and nothing that he might not shake off with time. But he is ill now. If I am not mistaken he is in for an attack of typhoid, and I fear a bad one. I’ll go straight to the hospital at Claremont and send you a nurse—indeed, you had better have two nurses—care is everything. With great care and unremitting attention we may pull him through.”
Letitia was pale, but she was ready for the emergency. “It will not be dangerous for the others?” she said.
“No, no, there’s no danger for the others—unless your drains are bad. But he says he was at that horrid little village on the other side of the Park on Friday last, and got a drink of water there. That’s enough to account for it. I’ve often spoken about the state of these cottages. It would be a kind of strange justice if he were to be the first victim. I suppose you’ll let his mother know?”
“What is the use of letting his mother know? She takes no notice of him. I think I am the only mother he has ever known.”
“There was an aunt,” said the doctor, “who was very much devoted to him. They ought to be told. The fever is high, and he has a delicate constitution. He may have to fight for his life.”
“Will you come again to-night?” she said.
“I will send the nurses in at once if I can get two, otherwise, perhaps, your old woman will take the night? I’ll come back first thing in the morning. But I think you should let the relations know.”
When the doctor was gone Letitia followed him out of the room and went to the schoolroom, which was quite cool and empty. She sat down upon the sofa which had supported Mar’s languid limbs so long, and looked round her as if upon a new world. Her whole being was filled with excitement which threatened to burst all bounds. She felt as if she must have burst forth in laughing or in crying, and if she did not do so it was because the influence of conventional rules and common decorum are too strong to be broken. Every pulse was going like the wheels of a steam engine, and her heart thumping like the great piston that keeps all in motion. Was it anxiety and alarm for Mar that roused that tremendous tumult in her brain? It is to be supposed that she thought so, or tried to make herself think so for the moment. But she knew very well that this was only a gloss forced by a horrified consciousness upon her, and that in the bottom of her heart it was a sudden and dreadful hope which had sprung up in her mind. The child had been so delicate all his life, one whom all the gossips declared she would never rear; and this had left a vague anticipation as of something she could not prevent, which would be good for them all if it came, modified by a fear of what might be said should it happen in her house, which kept Letitia always uneasy, and dictated those precautions which were half regard for other people’s opinion, and half terror of herself. But Mar, though he had been so delicate, had kept, perhaps for that very reason, curiously free of the usual ailments of childhood. When he had them he had them in the lightest form. Never before had this delicate boy, this interloper who stood between Letitia and so many advantages, this child who everybody prophesied could not live—never before had he visibly hung between life and death. Typhoid fever! It was a name to chill the blood in the veins of loving parents, of anxious friends. It made Letitia’s blood boil with a fever of impatience, of desire, of horrible eagerness, at which she was terrified, but which she could not restrain. It was not her fault. She had done nothing to bring it about. He had got the poison out of her house because of his own childish imprudence, exposing himself as she never would have allowed him to expose himself. Letitia’s conscience was quite clear, and nobody could blame her. And he would die—a creature so fragile, with so little life in him, no constitution to fall back upon: there was no fear of a long and terrible illness: a fever that sucked the strength away, and killed the strongest men, would not last long in such a case as this. He would die. She gasped with sensations unspeakable, and felt as if she could not get her breath. He would die. The obstacle would be taken away from her path, from John’s, from Duke’s, and nobody could say that she had done it, or was in any way to blame. What a thought to invade and fill her whole consciousness, all the being of a woman who was a mother, and knew what it was in a way to love those who belonged to her! She could not keep down the wild buoyancy of her hope and exhilaration. This boy, who never ought to have existed, who had been from his birth the obstacle to all her hopes, this supplanter, this undesired, unnecessary child—he would die! and for Letitia and all who belonged to her the future of her brightest hopes would be secured at last.
But with this there sprang up in her mind a dreadful impatience. It did not seem to her that she could go on day after day enduring all the vicissitudes of this illness until the crisis came—if indeed his strength held out till the crisis came. Sometimes the patient, if he were weak, collapsed early, and the disease did not run its full course; sometimes it was rapid, violent, foudroyant. A hundred confused calculations ran through her mind. Mar had not life enough for that. Probably the fever would be slow with his low vitality, not blazing but sapping the life away—and he would have to keep up all through—expressing anxiety, watching day and night for the change, looking on with outward calm while the doctors would go through all that daily pantomime with the thermometer, which she would scarcely be able to endure. Yes, this is how it would be—weeks of it, perhaps; horrible, lingering on when it might just as well be over at once without all this slow torture. Letitia remembered after what seemed a long time that she had an afternoon party on the lawn, and that all her guests would be wondering at her absence. She would have to put on a grave face, and speak of her anxiety and his delicacy, and go through all the fantastic performances which decorum demanded. But he would die—of that certainty at least there could be no doubt now.