THERE had been a pause after Lily called to Marg’ret to bring the baby on the night when Ronald left her. Marg’ret, though very kind, was a person who liked her own way. If the child’s toilet was not complete, according to her own elaborate rule, she did not obey in a moment even the eager call of the young mother. There were allowances made for her, as there always are for those who insist upon having their own way.
Accordingly there was a pause. Lily lay and listened to the wheels of the geeg which carried Ronald away. They did not bring the same chill to her heart as usual, and yet a chill began to steal into the room. The night was warm and soft—the early August, which in the North is the height of summer—and there was no chill at all in the atmosphere. It seemed to Lily’s keen ears as she lay listening that the geeg paused as if something had been forgotten, but then went on at double speed, galloping up the brae, till the sound of the wheels was extinguished in the night and distance. Then she called again sharply: “Marg’ret, Marg’ret! bring in my baby!” But still there was no reply.
“She’s just a most fastidious woman, with all her dressings and her undressings. She’ll no have finished him just to the last string tying,” said Robina.
“Bid her come at once, at once!” cried Lily. “I want my little man.”
And Beenie dived into the next room, which was muffled in curtains, great precautions having been taken lest the cry of the child should be heard down stairs. There was another room still within that, into which the nurse occasionally retired; but there was no one in either place, nor were there any traces of the little garments lying about which betray a baby’s presence—every thing appeared to have been swept away. Beenie, who had come for the child with her rosy countenance beaming, stood still in consternation, her mouth open, her terrified eyes taking in every thing with speechless dismay; for Marg’ret had never ventured down stairs as yet, nor had, they flattered themselves, a sound of the infant been heard, to awaken any question there. Beenie stood silent and terrified for a moment, and then, instead of returning to her mistress, she flew down stairs. Katrin was alone, doing some of her delicate cooking carefully over the fire; all was still, as if nothing but the most commonplace and tranquil events had ever happened there. Beenie, who had burst into the place like a whirlwind, again paused, confounded by this every-day tranquillity. “Katrin, Katrin, where is Marg’ret?” she cried, adding in a lower tone, “and the bairn?”
“What a question to ask me!” said Katrin. “She’s with your mistress without a doubt. Have you ta’en leave of your senses,” she murmured in a hurried undertone, “to roar out like that about a bairn? What bairn?”
Here Beenie found herself at the end of all her resources. She burst out into loud weeping. “She’s no up the stair and she’s no down the stair,” cried Beenie, “and my bonnie leddy is crying out for her, and will not be satisfied! And she’s no place that I can find her—neither her nor yet the bairn.”
Katrin thrust her saucepan from her as if it had been the offending thing; she wiped her hands with her apron. She looked at Beenie, both of them pale with horror. “Oh, the ill man!” she cried. “Oh, the monster! Oh, sic a man for our bonnie dear! I have been misdoubting about the bairn—but wha could have expectit that a young man no hardened in iniquity would have thought of a contrivance like that?”
Beenie had no thought or time to spare even on such an enormity. “How am I to face her—and tell her?” she said.
And at this moment they heard Lily’s voice calling from above, at first softly, then shouting, screaming all their names. “Marg’ret! Beenie! Katrin! Marg’ret! Marg’ret! Beenie! Katrin! Where is my bairn? where is my bairn?”
The two women flew up the stairs, at the head of which they found Lily in her white night-dress, with her feet bare, her hair waving wildly about her head, her face convulsed and drawn. “My bairn!” she cried, “my bairn! my little bairn! Where is Marg’ret? Where is my baby? Marg’ret! Marg’ret! Beenie! Katrin! bring me my baby—my baby!” She seized Beenie wildly with her trembling hands.
“Oh, my daurlin’!” Beenie cried. “Oh, my bairn—oh, my bonnie Miss Lily!”
Lily flung the large weeping woman from her with a passion of impatience. “Katrin!” she said breathlessly, “you have sense; where is my baby? bring me my baby! My little bairn! Did ye ever hear that an infant like that should be kept from his mother? Marg’ret! Marg’ret! Where has she taken my baby—my baby—my——”
Lily’s voice rose to a kind of scream. She ceased to have command of her words, and went on calling, calling, for Marg’ret and for her child in an endless cry, not knowing what she said.
“You will come back to your bed first and then I will tell you,” said Katrin. There was no one in the house but themselves, and they were isolated in this sudden tragedy from all the world by the distance and the silence of night and the moor. The door stood open at the foot of the stairs, and a cold air blew up through the long, many-cornered passage, chill and searching notwithstanding the warmth of the night. Lily was glad to lean shivering upon the warm support of the kind woman who encircled her with her arm. “You will tell me—you will tell me,” she murmured, permitting herself to be drawn back to her room. The blind had been raised from one of the windows, and the moonlight streamed in, crossing the dimly lighted chamber with one white line of light. The bed, with the little table by it, and the candle burning calmly, seemed too peaceful for Lily’s mood of suspense and alarm. She stood still in the moonlight, which seemed to make her figure luminous with her white bare feet and pale face. “Tell me!” she cried, “tell me! Marg’ret! Marg’ret! Where has she taken my baby? I want my baby—nothing more—nothing more.”
“For the Lord’s sake, mem!” said Katrin, “ye are shivering and trembling. Go back to your bed.”
“Oh, my daurlin’!” cried the weeping Beenie. “Oh, my bonnie lamb, he’s just away with his father in the geeg. Ye needna cry upon Marg’ret; she’ll no hear you, for it’s just her that’s taken him away!”
“Oh, you born fool!” Katrin cried, supporting her young mistress with her arm.
But Lily twisted out of her hold. She turned upon Beenie, bringing her hands together wildly with a loud clap that startled all the silences about like the sudden report of a pistol, and then fell suddenly with a cry at their feet.
Since that moment she had not recovered consciousness. Both of them knew by the force of experience how dangerous a symptom in Lily’s condition is the strong convulsive shivering which had seized her, and for the greater part of that dreadful night before Sir Robert’s arrival they were both by her bedside striving with every kind of hot application to restore a natural temperature. But when they had partially succeeded in this, she still lay unconscious, sometimes agitated and disturbed, flinging herself about with her arms over her head, and once or twice repeating, what filled them with horror, the extraordinary clap together of her hands—sometimes quite still, and murmuring under her breath a continuous flow of inarticulate words, but never conscious of them or their ministrations, saying no word that had meaning in it. Sir Robert’s arrival made a certain change, and left the weight of the nursing upon Beenie, Katrin, with her many additional labors, being unable to bear her share. They had already, however, had time for several consultations on the subject, which Sir Robert naturally disposed of with so much ease, but which to the two women was a much more serious matter—a doctor. Would not a doctor divine at once with his keen, educated eyes what had happened so recently? Would not he read as clearly as in a book what had been the beginning of Lily’s illness? She lay helpless now, able to give them no assistance in disposing of her—she, so wilful by nature, who had always got her own way, so far, at least, as they were concerned. It filled them with awe to look at her lying unconscious, and to feel that her fate was in their hands. What were they to do? They were responsible for her life or death.
The doctor, when he came, listened with very small attention to Beenie’s long and confused story, chiefly made up from things she had read and heard of the causes of Lily’s illness. Whatever the causes were, the result was clear enough. She was in a high fever, her faculties all lost in that confusion of violent illness which takes away at once all consciousness of the present and all personal control. “Fever” was an impressive word in those days, more alarming in some senses, less so in others, than now. It was not mapped out and distinct, with its charts and its well-known rules. There was not, so far as I am aware, such a thing as a clinical thermometer known, at least not in ordinary practice; and the word “fever” meant something dangerously “catching,” something before which nurses fled and friends retired in dismay—which is not to say that those who suffered from it were less sedulously guarded and taken care of by their own people then than now. The first idea of both Beenie and Katrin, however, was that it must be “catching,” being fever, and Sir Robert, when he was informed, was not much wiser. “Fever—where could she have got it?” he said with a sudden imagination of some wretched beggar-woman with a sick child who might have given it to the young lady. “It is not a thing of that kind. You are thinking of scarlatina or maybe typhus. Nothing of that sort. It does not spring from infection. It is brain-fever,” the medical man said. “Brain-fever!” said Sir Robert, indignant. “There was never any thing of that kind in my family.” He took it as a reproach, as if the Ramsays had ever been a race subject to disturbance in the brain!
But whatever they said, it mattered little to Lily. She lay on her bed for hours together moving her restless head to and fro, muttering inarticulate words, then pouring forth a stream of vague discourse, through which there gleamed occasionally a ray of meaning, a wild sudden demand, a flash of protest and expostulation. “Not that! not him!” she would sometimes say, “any thing but him!” and the doctor, making out as much as that one day, believed that the poor girl had been refused her lover, and that it was the sudden arrival of the uncle, who was hostile to them, which had brought on or precipitated the trouble in her brain. Sometimes she would call for “Marg’ret, Marg’ret, Marg’ret!” in accents now of impatience, now of despair. And then he asked who Marg’ret was and why she did not come, or rather: “Which of you is Marg’ret?” to the confusion of the two women. “Oh, sir, neither her nor me,” cried Beenie, “neither her nor me! but a woman that had something to do with her—in an ill moment.” “Let her be sent for, then,” he said peremptorily. Beenie and Katrin had a great deal to bear. Knowing every thing, they had to pretend they knew nothing, to shake their heads and wonder why the patient should utter words which were heartrending to them as betraying the dreadful persistence of that impression of misery in her mind which they knew so well. They gave themselves the comfort of exchanging a glance now and then, which was almost all the mutual consolation they had. For Katrin was very much occupied with the housekeeping and her work, and the necessity for satisfying her master and his guests, who, knowing nothing of Sir Robert’s family, and never having seen his niece, did not propose to go away, as guests in other circumstances would have done. And Sir Robert was very far from desiring that they should go away. He was terrified to find himself here alone, without even Lily’s company, and therefore said very little of her illness. What difference could it make to her, if she never saw them or heard of them, whether Sir Robert had company or not? So Katrin labored morning and night to feed with her best the party in the dining-room, and with very imperfect help at first to look after all the wants of the gentlemen, while Beenie, isolated in her mistress’s room, nursed night and day the helpless, unconscious creature who required so little, yet needed so much care. Those were not the days of carefully regulated nursing, in which the most important matter of all is the preservation of the nurse’s health and her meals and hours of taking exercise. It was an age when the household was sufficient for itself, and the domestic nurse devoted herself night and day to her charge, accepting all the risks and fatigue as a matter of course. Beenie had no help and wanted none. Sometimes for a moment’s refreshment she would go down to the door, and breathe in a long draught of the fresh morning air, while Katrin stood by Lily’s bed trying to elicit from her a look or sign of intelligence. But Beenie could not have remained absent from her young mistress had the wisest of nurses been there to take her place. “Na, na; I’ve ta’en care of her a’ her days, and I’ll take care of her till the end,” Beenie said, when Katrin exhorted her to take a few minutes more of the outdoor freshness. “Hold your tongue, woman, with your ends!” cried Katrin—“a young thing like that with a’ her life in her! She will see us baith out.” “Oh, the Lord grant it!” cried Beenie, shaking her large head. “But how is she to live and face the truth and ken all that’s happened if ever she comes to herself? She will just sit up in her bed, and clap her two hands together as she did yon dreadful night—and give up the ghost.”
“God forgive him—for I canna!” said Katrin, with a deep-drawn breath.
“And Marg’ret! What do ye say to her, the deep designing woman, that had been planning it, nae doubt, all the time?”
“Marg’ret!” cried Katrin with disdain, with the gesture of throwing something too contemptible for consideration from her. But she added: “There is just this to be said: We could not have keepit the bairn. No possible, her so ill, and the doctor about the house, and a wee thing that bid to have had the air and could not be keepit silent, nor yet hid. Oh, mony’s the thought I’ve had on that awful subject. It was the deed of a villain, Beenie! Maybe God will forgive him, but never me. And yet, being done, it’s weel that it was done.”
“Katrin!” cried Beenie in dismay.
But something, perhaps, in their low-toned but vehement conversation had caught some wandering and confused faculty not entirely overwhelmed in Lily’s bosom. She began to call out their names again with a wild appeal, “Marg’ret, Marg’ret!” above all the others, flinging out her arms and rising up in her bed, as Beenie had described in her gloomy anticipations, as if to give up the ghost.
And in this way days and weeks passed away. Lily’s fever seemed to have become a natural part of the life of the house. Robina seemed to herself unable to remember the time when she went to bed at night and got up again in the morning like other people, and had ordinary meals and went and came about the house. And all the incidents that had gone before became dim. If an answer had been demanded of her hurriedly, she could scarcely have ventured to affirm that any one was true: the marriage ceremony in the Manse parlor, the meetings of the young husband and wife, and above all the last tremendous event, which had seemed in its turn to be of more importance than any thing else that ever occurred. They had all faded away into the background, while Lily, sometimes pale as a ghost, sometimes flushed with the agitation of fever, lay struggling between life and death. The doctor, an ordinary village doctor, knew little of such maladies. He was reduced by his practical ignorance to the passive position which is now so often adopted by the highest knowledge. He watched the patient with anxious and sympathetic eyes, naturally sorry for a creature so young, with her girlish beauty fading like a flower. He did not know what to do, and he wisely did nothing. He had made, as was natural, many attempts to find out how an attack so serious had been brought on. Had she received any great shock? Katrin and Beenie, looking at each other, had answered cautiously that maybe it might be so, but they could not tell. Had she suddenly heard any bad news? Oh, yes, poor thing, she had done that! very bad news that had just gone straight to her heart like the shot of a gun. “But, doctor, you’ll say nothing to Sir Robert of that.” The doctor drew his own conclusions and satisfied himself. No doubt the shock was the arrival of the old uncle. He had heard something of the young gentleman who was always coming and going, and that the two would make a bonnie couple if every thing went right, though this good-natured speech was accompanied by shakings of the head and prognostications of dreadful things that might happen if every thing went wrong. The doctor nodded his head and made up his mind that he had penetrated the affair. It would not even have shocked him to hear that it had gone the length of a secret marriage. Private marriages acknowledged late were not looked upon in Scotland with very severe eyes. Both law and custom excused them, though in such a case as Lily’s it was strange that any thing of the kind should occur.
But it becomes of very little importance, when such a malady has dragged along its weary course for weeks, to know what was the cause of it. The rapid cures which a promise of happiness works, in fiction at least, very seldom occur in life, and when the spiritual part of the patient becomes lost, as it were, in the hot running current of fevered blood, and the predominance of the agitated body is complete over all the commotions of the mind, it is vain to think of proposing remedies for the original wrong, even if that were possible. Sir Robert now and then paid a visit to his niece’s room, short and unwilling, dictated solely by a sense of duty. He stood near the door and looked at her, tossing on her pillows, or lying as if dead in the apathy of exhaustion, with an uneasy sense, partly that he was himself badly used by Providence, partly that he might, perhaps, be partially himself to blame. He had left her here very lonely. Perhaps it was a mistake in judgment; but then he had been entirely ignorant of the circumstances, and how could it be said to be his fault? When she began to talk, he could not understand what she said—nor, indeed, could any one in the quickened and hurrying incoherence of the utterance—except the cry of Marg’ret, Marg’ret, Marg’ret! which still sometimes came with a passion that made it intelligible from her lips. “Who is Marg’ret?” he asked angrily. “I remember no person of that name.” “Marg’ret! Marg’ret! Marg’ret!” cried Lily again, her confused mind caught by his repetition of the name. She flung herself toward the side of the bed which was nearest the door, opening her eyes wide, as if to see better, and adding, with a cry of ecstasy: “She has brought him back—she has brought him back!” Sir Robert hurried away with a thrill of alarm. Who was it that was to be brought back? Who was the Marg’ret for whom she cried night and day? Was it the mere delirium of her fever, or was something else—something real and unknown—hidden below?