CHAPTER XLII.
A GREAT MENTAL SHOCK.
“Have you any notion what was the cause?”
“None,” said Reginald. “Oh, no, none at all,” said Ursula. They were all three standing at the door of the sick-room, in which already a great transformation had taken place. The doctor had sent a nurse to attend upon the patient. He had told them that their father was attacked by some mysterious affection of the brain, and that none of them were equal to the responsibility of nursing him. His children thus banished had set the door ajar, and were congregated round it watching what went on within. They did not know what to do. It was Northcote who was asking these questions; it was he who was most active among them. The others stood half-stunned, wholly ignorant, not knowing what to do.
“I don't think papa is ill at all,” said Janey. “Look how he glares about him, just as I've seen him do when he was writing a sermon, ready to pounce upon any one that made a noise. He is watching that woman. Why should he lie in bed like that, and be taken care of when he is just as well as I am? You have made a mistake all the rest of you. I would go and speak to him, and tell him to get up and not make all this fuss, if it was me.”
“Oh, Janey! hold your tongue,” said Ursula; but she, too, looked half-scared at the bed, and then turned wistful inquiring eyes to Northcote. As for Reginald, he stood uncertain, bewildered, all the colour gone out of his face, and all the energy out of his heart. He knew nothing of his father's affairs, or of anything that might disturb his mind. His mind; all that his son knew of this was, that whatsoever things disturbed other minds his father had always contemptuously scouted all such nonsense. “Take some medicine,” Mr. May had been in the habit of saying. “Mind! you mean digestion,” was it nothing more than some complicated indigestion that affected him now?
“Is it anything about—money?” said Northcote.
They all turned and looked at him. The idea entered their minds for the first time. Yes, very likely it was money.
“We have always been poor,” said Ursula, wistfully. Northcote took her hand into his; none of them except Ursula herself paid any attention to this involuntary, almost unconscious caress, and even to her it seemed a thing of course, and quite natural that he should be one of them, taking his share in all that was going on.
“I—am not poor,” he said, faltering. “You must not think me presumptuous, May. But the first thing to be done is to get him out of his difficulties, if he is in difficulties—and you must let me help to do it. I think you and I should go out and see about it at once.”
“Go—where?” Reginald, like most young people, had taken little notice of his father's proceedings. So long as things went smoothly, what had he to do with them? When there was a pressure for money, he knew he should hear of it, at least in the shape of reproaches and sneers from his father at his useless life, and the expenses of the family. But even these reproaches had died away of late, since Reginald had possessed an income of his own, and since the revenues of the Parsonage had been increased by Clarence Copperhead. Reginald was more helpless than a stranger. He did not know where to turn. “Do you think we could ask him? I am almost of Janey's opinion. I don't think he is so ill as he seems.”
And then they all paused and looked again into the room. The nurse was moving softly about, putting everything in order, and Mr. May watched her from the bed with the keenest attention. His face was still livid and ghastly in colour; but his eyes had never been so full of eager fire in all the experience of his children. He watched the woman with a close attention which was appalling; sometimes he would put his covering half aside as if with the intention of making a spring. He was like some imprisoned animal seeing a possibility of escape. They looked at him, and then at each other, with a miserable helplessness. What could they do? He was their father, but they knew nothing about him, and just because he was their father they were more slow to understand, more dull in divining his secrets than if he had been a stranger. When there came at last a suggestion out of the silence, it was Northcote who spoke.
“I don't see how you can leave him, May. It is plain he wants watching. I will go if you will let me—if Ursula will say I may,” said the young man with a little break in his voice. This roused them all to another question, quite different from the first one. Her brother and sister looked at Ursula, one with a keen pang of involuntary envy, the other with a sharp thrill of pleasurable excitement. Oddly enough they could all of them pass by their father and leave him out of the question, more easily, with less strain of mind, than strangers could. Ursula for her part did not say anything; but she looked at her lover with eyes in which two big tears were standing. She could scarcely see him through those oceans of moisture, bitter and salt, yet softened by the sense of trust in him, and rest upon him. When he stooped and kissed her on the forehead before them all, the girl did not blush. It was a solemn betrothal, sealed by pain, not by kisses.
“Yes, go,” she said to him in words which were half sobs, and which he understood, but no one else.
“You perceive,” he said, “it is not a stranger interfering in your affairs, May, but Ursula doing her natural work for her father through me—her representative. God bless her! I am Ursula now,” he said with a broken laugh of joy; then grew suddenly grave again. “You trust me, May?”
Poor Reginald's heart swelled; this little scene so calmly transacted under his eyes, would it ever happen for him, or anything like it? No, his reason told him—and yet; still he was thinking but little of his father. He had his duty too, and this happened to be his duty; but no warmer impulse was in the poor young fellow's heart.
And thus the day went on. It was afternoon already, and soon the sky began to darken. When his children went into the room, Mr. May took no notice of them—not that he did not know them; but because his whole faculties were fixed upon that woman who was his nurse, and who had all her wits about her, and meant to keep him there, and to carry out the doctor's instructions should heaven and earth melt away around her. She too perceived well enough how he was watching her, and being familiar with all the ways, as she thought, of the “mentally afflicted,” concluded in her mind that her new patient was further gone than the doctor thought.
“I hope as you'll stay within call, sir,” she said significantly to Reginald; “when they're like that, as soon as they breaks out they're as strong as giants; but I hope he won't break out, not to-day.”
Reginald withdrew, shivering, from the idea thus presented to him. He stole down to his father's study, notwithstanding the warning she had given him, and there with a sick heart set to work to endeavour to understand his father—nay, more than that, to try to find him out. The young man felt a thrill of nervous trembling come over him when he sat down in his father's chair and timidly opened some of the drawers. Mr. May was in many respects as young a man as his son, and Reginald and he had never been on those confidential terms which bring some fathers and sons so very close together. He felt that he had no business there spying upon his father's privacy. He could not look at the papers which lay before him. It seemed a wrong of the first magnitude, wrought treacherously, because of the helplessness of the creature most concerned. He could not do it. He thrust the papers back again into the drawer. In point of fact there were no secrets in the papers, nor much to be found out in Mr. May's private life. All its dark side might be inferred from, without being revealed in, the little book which lay innocently on the desk, and which Reginald looked over, thinking no harm. In it there were two or three entries which at length roused his curiosity. Cotsdean, October 10th. Cotsdean, January 12th. C. & T. April 18th. What did this mean? Reginald remembered to have seen Cotsdean paying furtive visits in the study. He recollected him as one of the few poor people for whom his father had a liking. But what could there be between them? He was puzzled, and as Betsy was passing the open door at the time, called her in. The evening was falling quickly, the day had changed from a beautiful bright morning to a rainy gusty afternoon, tearing the leaves and blossoms from the trees, and whirling now and then a shower of snowy petals, beautiful but ill-omened snow, across the dark window. Beyond that the firmament was dull; the clouds hung low, and the day was gone before it ought. When Betsy came in she closed the door, not fastening it, but still, Reginald felt, shutting him out too much from the sick-bed, to which he might be called at any moment. But he was not alarmed by this, though he remarked it. He questioned Betsy closely as to his father's possible connection with this man. In such a moment, confidential, half-whispered interviews are the rule of a house. Every one has so much to ask; so much to say in reply; so many particulars to comment upon which the rest may have forgotten. She would have liked to enter upon the whole story, to tell how the master was took, and how she herself had thought him looking bad when he came in; but even to talk about Cotsdean was pleasant.
“I told Miss Beecham,” said Betsy, “and I told the other gentleman, Mr. Northcote, as was asking me all about it. It's months and months since that Cotsdean got coming here—years I may say; and whenever he came master looked bad. If you'll believe me, Mr. Reginald, it's money as is at the bottom of it all.”
“Money? hush, what was that? I thought I heard something upstairs.”
“Only the nurse, sir, as is having her tea. I'm ready to take my oath as it's money. I've been in service since I was nine years old,” said Betsy, “I've had a deal of experience of gentlefolks, and it's always money as is the thing as sets them off their head. That's what it is. If that Cotsdean didn't come here something about money, never you believe me no more.”
“Cotsdean! a poor shopkeeper! what could he have to do with my father's affairs?” Reginald was not speaking to the woman, but drearily to himself. If this was the only clue to the mystery, what a poor clue it was!
“I dunno, sir,” said Betsy, “it ain't for me to tell; but one thing I'm sure of—Lord bless us, what's that?”
Reginald rushed to the door, nearly knocking her down as he pushed her aside with his hand. When they got outside, it was only the hat-stand in the hall that had fallen, something having been torn off from it apparently in mad haste, and the door had opened and shut. Reginald rushed upstairs, where the nurse was sitting quietly at her tea, the bed-curtains being drawn.
“All right, sir; he's in a nice sleep,” said that functionary; “I didn't light no candles, not to disturb him, poor gentleman.”
Reginald tore the curtains aside, then turned and dashed downstairs, and out into the windy twilight. In that moment of stillness and darkness the patient had escaped. He could see a strange figure walking rapidly, already half way up Grange Lane, and rushed on in pursuit without taking thought of anything. The sick man had seized upon a long coat which had been hanging in the hall, and which reached to his heels. Reginald flew on, going as softly as he could, not to alarm him. Where could he be going, utterly unclothed except in this big coat? Was it simply madness that had seized him, nothing more or less? He followed, with his heart beating loudly. There seemed nobody about, no one to whom he could make an appeal to help him, even if he could overtake the rapidly progressing fugitive. But even while this thought crossed his mind, Reginald saw another figure, broad and tall, developing in the distance, coming towards them, which stopped short, and put out an arm to stop the flight. Even that moment gave him the advantage, and brought him near enough to make out that it was Mr. Copperhead.
“The very man I want,” he heard him say with his loud voice, putting his arm within that of Mr. May, who resisted, but not enough to attract the attention of the new-comer, as Reginald came up breathless and placed himself on his father's other side. The darkness prevented any revelation of the strange appearance of the fugitive, and Mr. Copperhead was not lively of perception in respect to people unconnected with himself.
“You, too,” he cried, nodding at Reginald, “come along. I've come to save that boy of mine from a little artful—Come, both of you. The sight of a young fellow like himself will shame him more than anything; and you, May, you're the very man I want—”
“Not there, not there, for God's sake!” said Mr. May, with a hoarse cry, “not there, my God! Reginald! it used to be hanging. Do you mean to give me up?”
“Hold him fast,” Reginald whispered in desperation, “hold him fast! It is madness.”
“Lord bless us!” said Mr. Copperhead, but he was a man who was proud of his strength, and not given to timidity. He held his captive fast by the arm, while Reginald secured him on the other side. “Why, what's this, May? rouse yourself up; don't give in, man. No, you ain't mad, not a bit of you. Come along, wait here at Tozer's for me, while I do my business; and then I'll look after you. Come on.”
There was a violent but momentary struggle; then all at once the struggling man yielded and allowed himself to be dragged within the garden-door. Was it because an ordinary policeman, one of the most respectful servants of the law, who would have saluted Mr. May with the utmost reverence, was just then coming up? He yielded; but he looked at his son with a wild despair which made Reginald almost as desperate as himself in maddening ignorance and terror.
“Ruin! ruin!” he murmured hoarsely, “worse than death.”