MAR’S illness continued week after week, never violent, but never ending. He was not very ill, but his life was being slowly drained away. The fire of the fever was low, not a great flame, blazing and devouring, but it went on and on. The third week passed, and the fourth, with renewed and disappointed expectations of a change, but none came. “It will run out the six weeks,” said the doctor. “And then—?” Ah, who could say. The good doctor, who had taken care of Mar all his life, turned away from the question. “It all depends upon his strength,” he said. His strength! but he had no strength. He was as weak as a child. The nurse lifted him in her arms like an infant—a skeleton, with long, long limbs. It seemed a farce to speak of his strength, as if there was any hope in that.
Duke had gone away before this time—his leave had come to an end, and he had been allowed to come in and say good-bye to his cousin. “I thought you would have been up and about before I went,” said Duke, blustering a little to keep himself from crying. “You are a lazy beggar, to be lying there with nothing the matter. I don’t think there’s anything the matter with you. You just like to lie there and keep us all slaving attendance. You know you were always a lazy beggar.”
Mar did nothing but smile, as he had always done at Duke’s jokes which were not great jokes. He said, “Is your leave over?” with his faint voice. “But you could have a day or two again if I sent for you, Duke?”
“Oh, yes,” said Duke, “you must send for me the first time you are allowed to get out, to help you downstairs. I’ll come, never fear.” But after a little more of this tearful smiling talk, the young man beckoned softly to the nursing sister to come with him to the door. “What do you think he means about sending for me?” he said, with a face almost as pale as Mar’s.
The nurse looked at him and shook her head. She too had grown to like the patient boy. She put up her hand to her eyes to dash away the rising tears. “He must not see that I have been crying,” she said.
“Is that what he means? Do you think that’s what he means? And do you think so too?” cried Duke. “Oh, don’t say so, nurse, don’t say so; it would break my heart.”
“I won’t say so,” she replied. “I think with such a young thing as that there is always hope.”
“And you know a lot,” said Duke, “as much as the doctor. God bless you for saying so! But you think that is what he means? And he lies there—and smiles—and thinks—of that,” said the young man, with his face full of awe. He set out in all the vigor of his young life in the brightness of the summer day to his light work and boundless amusement with all the world before him—and Mar lying there, smiling, thinking of that. Duke felt as if his own lightly beating heart stood still in the poignancy of the contrast. Oh, why could not he give some of his life to help out that flickering existence? He went away feeling that there was a pall over the sunshine, and that nothing would ever be truly bright again. But to be sure that was a mood that could not last.
Mrs. Parke had given orders at first that the girls were not to go near the sick room, but she had not thought then how long it would go on, an endless dreadful ordeal. And when they stole in, now Letty, now Tiny, their mother either did not find it out or made no remark. Letitia during all this time of suspense was of a very strange aspect—her husband and her children did not know what to make of her. She talked very little to them; did not interfere with their pursuits as she usually did. She seemed to care for nothing. Naturally there were no guests or entertainments of any kind, and her interest in her household affairs, which was usually so minute and unending, seemed to have faded altogether. She wrote no letters, made no calls, her social life seemed to come to an end. She did not even go to church, which was a habit she had always kept up rigorously. Three or four times a day she went to the sick room for news of the patient, and it was there alone that she seemed to wake up completely. She put the nurses through a catechism of questions. She attended upon the doctor when he came, and listened to everything he said and that was said to him with a hungry curiosity. Her countenance did not vary or betray it. It was known that she was “over-anxious,” that she had always taken a despairing view. When he was pronounced to be a little better there was a little quiver of her head, like an unspoken contradiction; and when he was a little worse a sort of assenting gleam came into her eyes. The nurses did not like her, and answered her questions as briefly as possible. Her determination that everything must go badly irritated the women, who had a natural confidence in themselves and in what their nursing could do, and they both believed that she was more satisfied when the news was bad than when it was good. “She’s not like his mother,” they said between themselves, “and she’s fixed in her mind from the first that this is how it’s to be—as some people would rather see their mother die than be proved wrong in their opinion.” They thought no worse of her than this. As a matter of fact Letitia was very unhappy during this long suspense. She had never anticipated anything of the kind. What she had expected was an illness which would last perhaps a week, and this long lingering malady confounded and exasperated her. She was angry with poor Mar for being so long about deciding what to do, and with the doctor who would not say anything definite, and the nurses whose opinions wavered from hour to hour. “How is a person to tell when you are never in the same mind from one hour to another?” she said with the resentment of highly excited nerves. She was strung to the very highest pitch, thinking of nothing else, longing for a crisis, that she might know what she had to look for. She was never at rest for a moment whatever she was doing, but kept always listening, always intent. Every step that approached she thought was some one come to call her, to tell her there was a change. She dropped her work upon her knee, or let her pen fall, to listen for every sound that arose. On the critical day of each week when a crisis might be expected she was so restless that she could not keep still. “My wife is so anxious,” John said, trying to persuade himself that her anxiety was the natural anxiety, the desire that the patient should get well. That anxiety is terrible enough as most know; but the other anxiety, the horrible watch which is for the patient getting worse, the longing for “a change” in the worst sense—a change that meant death, how horrible is that, beyond all description! When she talked at all she talked of his symptoms and of what the night nurse said, and what the other said. The nurses took different sides as was natural. One of them was pessimist, the other took the doctor’s view. It was the night nurse that was the gloomy one—and with her Mrs. Parke was in the habit of having a long consultation very early when she was relieved in the morning—a consultation from which she derived a little satisfaction, and which calmed her nervous excitement. But the day nurse with the cheerful look, who always insisted that the patient was a little better, or looked a little brighter, or had a little more strength, or at all events was “no worse,” brought back the nervous excitement which was like a fire in her veins.
The fifth week had begun, and the fight of life and death on the boy’s wasted frame was becoming every hour more intense. Would his strength hold out? “He has no strength,” said the night nurse. “I feel every hour as if from minute to minute the collapse must come.” “I don’t say he isn’t very weak,” said the more cheerful sister, “but you never can tell with a delicate boy like that how strong the constitution may be. Sometimes it’s like iron and steel, and yet no appearance.” The doctor stood and looked at the worn young countenance upon the pillow. Mar had scarcely strength to open his eyes, to respond to the doctor’s inquiries and acknowledge the stir of his morning visit. There was a faint smile upon his face, and sometimes a wistful look round upon the group about his bed, moving slowly from one to another. His mind had never been affected. Sometimes he lay as if in a dream, but when recalled was “always himself” the nurse said, “and that is surely a good sign.” Dr. Barker did not deny that it was a good sign, but he looked graver than ever. Letitia devoured him with eager eyes when they stood face to face outside the sick room.
“What do you think, doctor?” she said.
“I have told you a hundred times what I think,” he replied, with the petulance of distress. “I cannot form a new opinion every hour. If his strength holds out he will do well. All depends upon that. I suppose,” he added hastily, “his mother has been kept informed.”
“His mother—what does she care?” said Letitia in her excitement. “It is a great thing to us, but it is nothing to her.”
“Yes, I can see it is a great thing to you,” he answered, with a clouded countenance. “But she has been told I suppose?”
“Oh, what does it matter? What does it matter?” Letitia said within herself in the misery of her suspense. But she wrung her hands till they hurt her, and controlled herself. “I believe news has been sent,” she said.
“But that is not enough,” said the doctor, glad on his side to have some reason to find fault, to relieve his own brain and heart with an outburst. “She must be told that his state is very serious. She must be made to know——”
“Then you think his state is very serious?” said Letitia, with a kind of wildness of concealed exultation in her eyes.
“Have I ever said otherwise?” said the doctor. “Can anyone look at him and not see that?—very grave but not hopeless, Mrs. Parke. You will never get me to say more.”
“It is only because I want to know the truth,” she said, abashed.
“I will never tell you anything but the truth. The mother ought to know. However indifferent she may be there must be some human feeling left. I remember her as a very sweet woman. And then there was the aunt who was devoted to the boy.”
“You speak as if there was but one,” said Letitia, with a forced smile.
“Oh, I do not overlook your anxiety, Mrs. Parke! No doubt it is very great—but the other ladies must be told. Tell them——” The doctor paused when he saw her hungry look. It flashed into her face that now she would hear the exact truth how much there was to fear and how much to hope. She looked at him as he paused, clasping her hands tight.
“Yes?” she said, breathless. The doctor, it was evident, had thought better of what he was going to say.
“Tell them,” he said, “that the circumstances are serious: that there is an absence of certain of the worse symptoms—but again that the matter is grave. It all depends on how his strength keeps up. And that in the present position of affairs I think they should be here.”
“You think they should be here,” Letitia repeated breathlessly. It seemed to her the most satisfactory utterance she had yet heard.
“Yes, it would be an ease to your own mind to have his nearest relatives on the spot. They would share your anxiety at least—and it is not as if there was any want of room. They should have been here at once—to prevent reflections—in case anything should happen.”
A lightning gleam seemed to come out of Letitia’s eyes—like that electrical flash which the doctor had thought scorched him when Mar’s illness began.
“Then you think——” she said with a heaving of her breast.
“I think no more than what I have said: but to have Lady Frogmore here and Miss Hill would in any case be best.”
Letitia repeated “Lady Frogmore” unconsciously under her breath. It was not of Mary she was thinking. It was of the next bearer of that title, the woman towards whom the coronet was floating ghost-like in a sort of trail of cloud.
“I can’t believe,” said the doctor sharply, “that Lady Frogmore will be so indifferent as is said to the condition of her son.”
Letitia went to her writing table when he was gone with a strange buoyancy. She had not written any letters for some time, but there was a sort of exultation in her now as if the end of her suspense was near. John came in when she had seated herself and begun her letter. He had missed the doctor and was anxious to hear what he had said. There was something in his wife’s aspect which startled him. “The boy is better?” he exclaimed. He gave her in the impulse of the moment a credit which she did not deserve.
“Is he?” cried Letitia, turning round upon her chair with all the color going out of her face. She added tremblingly, shrinking from her husband’s eye, “Do you mean that there is a change?”
“I thought so,” he said gravely, “from the relieved look in your face.”
They contemplated each other for a moment in silence, John with pain and distress, she shrinking a little from his eye. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said; “though I might be relieved to think that the poor child will not suffer much longer. I am to write to his mother, the doctor says.”
“To write to his mother! Then he has given up all hope?”
Letitia did not trust herself to speak, but she nodded her head in assent.
“Poor boy, poor boy!” cried John; “and poor Mary,” he added after a moment, with a broken voice.
“It will be nothing to her,” said Mrs. Parke briefly.
“God knows! it may rouse her to understand what she’s losing: the finest, promising boy, the most generous and patient——”
“Oh, John, I cannot put up with you!” cried Letitia, wild with agitation and excitement. “The one creature that stood between your son and his birthright—between you and everything you have looked for all your life.”
John Parke walked about the room in an agitation which was not simple as his emotions generally were. His heart was wrung for the patient boy who had grown up under his eye—but perhaps to forget all that this boy’s death would bring him was impossible. He stamped his foot on the ground as if to crush those horrible thoughts that would arise. “If I could buy little Mar’s life with the sacrifice of everything!” he said, with an almost hysterical break in his voice——
“It is easy saying so,” she said; “but for my part Duke is more to me than Mar!”