THE family were all very much startled by the news, which Letitia communicated only when the arrival of a nurse in the costume which is not to be mistaken startled the household. “What does that woman want?” said John, who was prejudiced like so many gentlemen against costume, and did not like the professional air. “She is the nurse whom Dr. Barker has sent for Mar.” “For Mar,” cried all the party with varying tones of expression. Letitia looked round upon her husband and her children, and she felt that there was not one of them who had any sympathy with her—who thought at all of the consequences or of what would happen—if—— She was provoked beyond expression by the look of alarm and imbecile anxiety on all their faces. “What is the matter?” John said. “Is there anything more than usual? I thought he had a cold. What is wrong with the boy?”
“Only an attack of typhoid,” Mrs. Parke said with angry gravity. They never did sympathize with her or enter into any of her thoughts—though the advantage she anticipated was to them chiefly, she said to herself angrily, and not to her.
And that dreadful word was soon abroad in all the house. It was the evening, after dinner, and all who were at home were in the drawing-room. The two schoolboys, Reggie and Jack, had, of course, gone back to school. And the young ones had been talking of their lawn tennis, and So and So’s low service, and somebody’s volleying, and a great deal of other jargon. They had been obliged to dress in a great hurry for dinner, and no one had had the time to run in and ask for Mar. “Typhoid!” they cried, some of them in loud, and some of them in low tones.
“Who says so? you are always fancying something dreadful. Does Barker say so? And how did he get it?” said John. “I am sure we have had trouble enough with the drains.”
“If one is to have it, one will have it, whatever is done about the drains,” said Mrs. Parke.
“But oh, mamma,” said Letty, “why a nurse? I know a great deal about nursing. There were those two ambulance classes. It would be so much nicer for dear Mar to have his own people about him. Sarah would sit up at night, she is very fond of him, and I would take care of him in the day.”
Letitia did not take the trouble to reply, but looked at the girl only, crushing her as effectually as by a torrent of words. “He shall have every care,” she said, “and the best that can be got, but he has no constitution, and I fear it will go badly with him. There is no use in deceiving ourselves.”
“Don’t be a croaker,” cried John, getting up from his chair. It would have been strange, perhaps, if there had not flashed across the mind of John all that was implied in this evil augury. He was not quick, nor was he more selfish than other men, but into the hearts of the most innocent there is projected by times a picture as from a magic-lantern, showing as it seems from without, not from within, in a sudden glare of diabolical light the advantage which a great misfortune to someone else may bring them. John was as much horrified by this sudden perception as if he had been compassing the end of Mar. He cried out, “Good God!” which was in reality an appeal against the devilish light that had flashed upon him without any will of his; and then his voice melted, and he murmured, “Poor little Mar. Poor little Mar!”
“Don’t give in in that way, father,” cried Duke. “Typhoid fever is bad enough, but not so bad as mother makes out. Why, I know half a dozen men who have had it. At Harrow there was one fellow as bad as bad could be, and not strong, just like Mar, and he got round all right. The stronger the fellow the worse it is for him. That’s what all the doctors say.”
These words brought a cold chill to Letitia. In her thoughts, by way of forestalling all the disappointments there might happen, she had already thought of this.
“Oh, mamma, send for some new book from Mudie’s directly,” said Tiny; “when Mar is ill we can never get enough books to satisfy him.”
“Oh hold your tongue, Tiny. He will be too ill to read books,” said Letty with tears, “and one must not let him talk either, but just a very little—nor even talk to him to amuse him till the fever goes off.”
“How dull it will be for Mar!” cried Tiny. “I am sure I shall talk to him and tell him everything. To be dull is as bad as having a fever. Because you have gone to the ambulances you think you know—but I don’t believe in keeping people so quiet. When I had the measles——”
“Be quiet both of you,” said Mrs. Parke, “and understand that neither of you go near Mar. He must be left in the hands of the nurses—it is too serious to play with. I shall go myself every day to see that all is right.”
There was a chorus of outcries at this decision, but Mrs. Parke was not moved. “No one must disturb him,” she repeated. “The people who have the best chance are the people in the hospitals—and Mar must be treated just as if he were in a hospital.—I will not have him disturbed.”
“Is it so grave as that, Letitia?” asked John, very seriously, scarcely looking at her. He began to divine partly from that gleam which had come upon himself what must be in her mind.
“Nothing could be more grave,” she said, vehemently; “anyone except a schoolboy or a silly girl must see that. What Duke says is nonsense. It stands to reason that a weakly boy with no constitution to fall back upon, attacked by a slow disease that eats away the strength——”
John Parke rose as if the thought were intolerable, and went out of the room hurriedly. He was trying to escape from that devilish suggestion. The boy would die; all the hindrances would be removed; the inheritance would be his which he had always looked forward to, which had been supposed to be his all his life. Not in John’s honest brain was that thought bred. It filled him with horror of himself. It made him feel as if he were Mar’s murderer, anticipating the boy’s doom. “God forgive me! God forgive me!” cried John: and he went out covered with a cold dew of trouble to humble himself and struggle with the demon. These horrible suggestions come sometimes to the minds that most loathe them: which proves to many people that there is a devil, a dreadful Satan, trying what harm he can do, even though we grow contemptuous of the horns and hoofs.
The doctor, however, was not so gloomy as Letitia. “It is quite true that he must not be disturbed; but keeping up his spirits is half the battle, and he must not be abandoned either. Mrs. Parke is too anxious. I have always told her she made more than was necessary of young Frogmore’s complaints. He’s delicate, of course. Still there’s no reason for giving up hope.”
“My boy, Duke,” said John, “says that it’s worse for strong fellows than for weak. I don’t know if he’s right.”
“Well, it’s never a good thing to be weak,” said Dr. Barker, “but there’s a kind of truth in it. For the fever sometimes runs higher with a man in the prime of life. Keep up your spirits. If no complications arise we’ll pull him through.”
Those cheerful tones found no response in the countenance of Letitia, which was tragical in the paleness of passionate feeling. Every word that was uttered by the medical optimist was like a knell in Letitia’s heart. If it should be so indeed—but it could not, it would not be so.
“Mrs. Parke has always taken too serious a view,” said the cheerful doctor. “I have told her so for years.”
“I don’t say that I don’t always take a serious view,” said Letitia. “It is my temperament I suppose—but you will bear me witness, doctor, that I never have been so anxious about my own children as I have been about Mar.”
“Yes, that is true,” said the doctor, with a quick glance at her, in which there was something uncertain, doubtful. Perhaps it was the look of suppressed excitement in her which struck Dr. Barker as something strange. She was not an over-anxious mother. Was it love or another sentiment that made her so tragic about Mar? A slight shiver ran over the honest and sensible country practitioner, but he was far too little accustomed to evil passions to follow it further. He could not take into his mind such a dreadful thought; it was like a ghostly figure sweeping by in the dark, such as he sometimes met on lonely roads on winter nights—not able to tell whether it was a belated fugitive or a distorted shadow. Another subject of more practical importance, as he thought, displaced this vague apprehension. “By the by,” he said, “I must not forget one thing. I have been talking to you of the state of those cottages on the other side of the park for years. I’ve got the water to analyze which these poor people are drinking, and I believe it’s the cause of poor young Frogmore’s illness. Let this be a reason at once for seeing after their condition: at least it will be getting some good out of the evil which now you cannot prevent. You know I’ve been talking about it for years.”
“The cottages?” said John. He added, “You know I’m in a peculiar position, I can do nothing without Blotting. It’s not as if it was my own property.”
“Oh what is the use of talking of such things just now,” said Letitia, sharply. There was a sort of half electrical glance between the two which the doctor felt to blaze across him, scorching his face. He gave a horrified look from one to the other, surprising that infernal light in Letitia’s eyes. But John’s were covered with downcast eyelids, and the look of his somewhat heavy face did not coincide with that unearthly, devilish flash. Dr. Barker, however, was struck as a man might be struck by lightning. He seemed to lose his moral equilibrium for the moment. A chill horror ran in his veins. When he thought of the boy-patient upstairs with his cheeks growing hollow and his eyes large under the influence of the fever, and these two, watching its progress, perhaps communicating to each other how things were going, hoping for the worst and not the better conclusion, it was as if the earth had been cut away from under his feet, and he saw himself suddenly on the edge of a horrible precipice. He rode away upon his rounds with a doubt whether it was safe to leave the house, whether he ought not to set up some special guard that no evil should approach the boy. Poor boy, with no one who loved him to look after him, but only dangerous hate and the vigilance of an enemy! The honest country doctor had never in his life been struck as he was that day with a sense of secret horror, danger, and possible crime concealed under the smooth surface of ordinary existence. Twice he turned back before he had got out of the avenue with the idea of warning his nurses, recommending to them special vigilance, and not to allow Mrs. Parke to have anything to do with the patient. But how dared he do such a thing, to rouse any suspicion of the mistress of the house? He had no evidence but a glance, and who could rely upon a look? He might, very probably had, must have, mistaken it; and twice he turned his horse, and at last rode away, but with a mind troubled by many anxious thoughts. He consoled himself by thinking that with two nurses on whom he could depend no harm could happen to the patient. But after all it was not so much the harm that could happen as the dreadful idea that his nearest relations were watching by his sick bed, hoping that he might never rise from it, that upset the doctor. He said to himself that between that and doing anything to expedite the end there was a great difference, and perhaps it was impossible when there was so much at stake not to be conscious what a difference it would make. Dr. Barker had been in the district a long time, and remembered Lord Frogmore’s marriage, and how everybody said it was very hard upon John Parke. So it was, very hard. To expect so long that he was to be his brother’s heir, and then to be suddenly cut out. There had been a great deal of sympathy with him at the time, and perhaps it was impossible now not to think if the boy was removed—— Perhaps it was natural, inevitable, that the disappointed pair should be open to that thought. But to imagine them watching, waiting, while the innocent boy lay ill, hoping for a bad turn, higher fever, hopeless complications—— Good heavens, could anything more dreadful be?
John Parke was innocent of entertaining such thoughts. But he divined them, and his heart was wrung within him. He scarcely spoke to Letitia while the fever strengthened its hold upon Mar, but went solemnly morning and evening to the door to ask of the nurses how their patient was. Sometimes he stood at the open door looking in, saying as well as he could a cheerful good-morning to the boy. “Make haste and get well, my lad,” he would say; and John, though he was not given to anything of the kind, would sometimes bring a rose and sometimes a piece of flowering myrtle from the great tree at the door of the conservatory to lay on the little table at Mar’s bedside. Mar, when he was able to remark them, was much touched by these little attentions, and John would go away again soothed by the sight of the active nurses in their white aprons, and the quiet and order of the sick room. It was a comfort to think that everything was being done. This is a great consolation to every kind looker-on whose anxiety is less urgent than that of love. John never saw Letitia there; he knew that the nurse who was on duty, if moved by no profound sentiment for one patient more than another was yet on the whole desirous that every one should get well, and had her professional reputation more or less involved in the success of her nursing. There was thus at least no hostile sentiment, only well wishers, careful watchers, concerned for his recovery, who were near the boy.
But neither he nor any one any more than the doctor had any fear of Letitia as if she had been capable of plotting against the young life. No, no, no, a hundred times no. They divined the passion that was in her, the sense of a possibility which would change everything in life, and perhaps, perhaps a wish against which in her heart no doubt she struggled, and would not allow that the balance should turn the wrong way. John pushed the thought from him with passion, ashamed of himself for his suspicion of his wife. He felt that she would not be sorry for Mar’s obliteration—such a faint, young, powerless personality—from existence: which would have such tremendous consequences that her mind was carried away by them. And that was bad enough, but it was all. She would not harm him any more than she would harm Duke; and at the utmost, when all was said, the only evidence against Letitia even to this extent was a strange gleam which had got into her eyes.