'A case of shattered nerves, and all your own doing,' said Dr. Mallison.

'You must leave off brandy.'

'Brandy has left me off,' retorted Brian. 'My wife and her step-mother have gone in for strict economy. I am not allowed a spoonful of cognac, although I tell them it is the only thing that staves off racking neuralgic pains.

'You must endure neuralgia rather than go on poisoning yourself with brandy. For you alcohol is rank poison--you are suffering now from the c.u.mulative effect of all you have taken within the last twelve months.

There are men who can drink with impunity--go on drinking hard through a long life; but you are not one of those. Drink for you means death.'

'A man can die but once,' grumbled Brian; 'and an early death is better than an aimless life.'

'For shame!' said the physician. 'If I had such a wife as you have, the aim of my life would be to make myself worthy of her, and to win distinction for her sake.'

'Ah, there was a time when I thought the same,' answered Brian; 'but that's over and done with.'

Ida left the doctor and his patient together, and walked up and down the corridor outside her husband's room, waiting to hear Dr. Mallison's final directions. He remained closeted with Brian for about a quarter of an hour.

'I have said all I could, and I have written a prescription which may do some good,' he told Ida. 'This is a case for moral suasion rather than medical treatment. If you can exercise a good influence over your husband, and keep all stimulants away from him, he will recover. But his const.i.tution has been undermined by bad habits--an indolent unhealthy life--a life spent in hot rooms, by artificial light. Get him out of doors as much as you can, without exposing him to bad weather or undue fatigue. He is very weak, and altogether out of gear; and you mustn't expect much improvement until he recovers tone and appet.i.te; but if you can ward off any return of the delirium, that will be something gained.'

'Indeed it will. The delirium was too terrible.'

'Well, keep all drink away from him.'

'Even if he seems to suffer for want of it?'

'Yes. The old-fashioned idea was that stopping a man's drink suddenly would bring on an attack of delirium tremens; but we know better than that now. We know that the delirium is only a consequence of alcoholic poisoning, and inevitable where that goes on.'

Ida went back to the drawing-room with the doctor. The tea-table was ready, and there were decanters and sandwiches on another table. Dr.

Mallison took a cup of tea and a sandwich, while he gave Ida minute directions as to the treatment of the patient. And then he accepted the handsome cheque which had been written for him, with Mr. Fosbroke's advice as to amount, and took his departure, promising to send a skilled attendant within the next twelve hours.

Ida felt happier after she had seen Dr. Mallison. There was very little that could be done for her husband. He had sown his wild oats, and that light scattering of the seeds of folly had been pleasant enough, no doubt, in the time of sowing; and this was the unantic.i.p.ated result--a bitter harvest of care and pain which had to be endured somehow.

And now came for that household at Wimperfield a period of agonising trouble and fear. The boy's illness developed into an acute attack of rheumatic fever, and for three dreadful days and nights his life trembled in the balance. Not once did Ida enter her husband's room during that awful period of fear. She could not steel herself to look upon the man whose sin, or whose folly, had brought this evil on her beloved one. 'My murdered boy,' she kept repeating to herself. Even on her knees, when she tried to pray, humbly and meekly appealing to the Fountain of mercy and grace--even then, while she knelt with bowed head and folded hands, those awful words flashed into her mind. Her murdered boy.

If he were to die, who could doubt that his death would lie at Brian's door? who could put away the dark suspicion that Brian had wantonly, and with murderous intent, exposed the delicate child to bad weather and long hours of fasting and fatigue?

CHAPTER XXVI.

'AND, IF I DIE, NO SOUL WILL PITY ME.'

At last their long watchings, their tender care, directed by one of the most famous men in London--who was summoned to Wimperfield at Mr.

Fosbroke's suggestion within a week of Dr. Mallison's visit--and attended twice or thrice a day by the clever apothecary, were rewarded by the a.s.surance that the time of immediate danger was over, and that now a slow and gradual recovery might fairly be antic.i.p.ated. It was only then that Ida could bring herself to face Brian again, and even then she met him with an icy look, as if the life within her were frozen by grief and care, and those rigid lips of hers could never again melt into smiles.

Brian had been leading a fitful and wandering life during the boy's illness, watched and waited upon by Towler, the man from London, with whom he quarrelled twenty times a day, and who needed his long experience of the "ways" of alcoholic victims to enable him to endure the fitfulness and freakishness of his present charge.

Warned by Dr. Mallison that he must spend as much of his life in the open air as possible, Brian had taken to going in and out of the house fifty times a day, now wandering for five or ten minutes in the garden, anon rambling as far as the edge of the park, then running into the stable yard, and ordering a horse to be saddled instantly, but never mounting the horse. After seeing the animal led up and down the yard once or twice, he would always find some excuse for not riding; the fact being that he had no longer courage enough to get into the saddle. His riding days were over. Even the stable mastiff, an old favourite with Brian, gave him a painful shock when the great tawny brute leapt out of his kennel, straining at his chain, and baying deep-mouthed thunder by way of friendly greeting.

Towler had a hard time of it, following his charge here and there, waiting upon him, bearing his abuse; but Towler had a peculiar gift, a faculty for getting on with patients of this kind. He knew how to dodge, and follow, and circ.u.mvent them; how to take liberties with them, and scold them, without too deeply wounding their _amour-propre;_ how to humour and manage them; and although Mr. Wendover quarrelled with his attendant fifty times a day, he yet liked the man, and tolerated his presence; and had already come to lean upon him, and to be angry when Towler absented himself.

'Well,' said Brian, looking up as Ida entered his room on that happy morning on which she had been told that her brother was out of danger--'the boy is better, I hear?'

These things are quickly known in a household, when there has been general anxiety about the issue of an illness.

'Yes, he is better. By G.o.d's grace, he will live; but his life has trembled in the balance. Brian, it would have been your fault if he had died.'

'Would it? Yes, I suppose indirectly I should have been the cause. I was a fool to take him out that morning; but,' shrugging his shoulders, 'I wanted a ramble, and I wanted company. Who could tell there would be such a diabolical storm, or that we should lose our way? Thank G.o.d he is out of danger. Poor little beggar! Did you think I wanted to put him out of the way?' he asked, suddenly, looking at her with a keen flash of interrogation.

'To think that would be to think you a murderer,' she answered, coldly.

'I have thought that you had little affection for him or for me when you exposed him to that danger; and then I schooled myself to think better of you--to remember that, perhaps, on that day you were hardly responsible for your actions.'

'In fact, that I was a lunatic,' said Brian.

'I would rather think you mad than wicked.'

'Perhaps I am neither. Why have you put that man as a spy upon me?'

The discreet Towler had retired into the adjacent bedroom during this conversation.

'He is not a spy. Dr. Mallison said you ought to have a servant specially to wait upon you, that in your sleepless nights you might not be left alone.'

'No, they are a trial, those long nights. Towler is not a bad fellow, but he irritates me sometimes. Last night he let a black-muzzled gipsy brute hide behind my curtains, and then told me it was my "delusions."

Delusions! when I saw the fellow as plain as I see you now.'

Ida was silent. She had hoped that the patient had pa.s.sed this stage, and was on the road to recovery of health and reason. She interrogated Towler by-and-by, and he a.s.sured her that Mr. Wendover had taken no stimulants since he had been attending upon him.

'Are you sure he cannot get any without your knowledge?' Ida asked. 'Dr.

Mallison told me that in this malady a patient is terribly artful--that he will contrive to evade the closest watchfulness, if it is any way possible to get drink.'

'Ah, that's true enough, ma'am,' sighed the man; 'there's no getting to the bottom of their artfulness: but I'm an old hand, and I know all the ins and outs of the complaint. It isn't possible for Mr. Wendover to get any drink in this house, and he never goes out of it without me. Every drop of wine and spirits is under lock and key, and all the servants are warned against giving him anything.'

Ida sighed, full of shame at the thought that her husband, the man whom it was her duty to honour and obey, should be degraded by such humiliating precautions; and yet there was no help for it. He had brought himself to this pa.s.s. This is the end of ambrosial nights, the feast of reason, the flow of soul, wit drowned in whisky, satire stimulated by brandy and soda.

Ida went back to her brother's room. It was there her love, her fears, her cares were all concentrated. Duty might make her careful and thoughtful for her husband, but here love was paramount. To sit by his pillow, to talk to him, or read to him, or pray for him, to minister to him, jealous of the skilled nurse who had been hired to perform these offices,--these things were her delight. Lady Palliser, worn out with watching and anxiety, had now broken down altogether, and had consented to take a long day's rest; but Ida's more energetic nature could do with much less rest--half an hour's delicious sleep now and then, with her head on her darling's pillow, was all-sufficient to restore her.

And so the blessed days of hope went on, and every morning and every afternoon Mr. Fosbroke's report was more favourable. It was a tedious recovery from a cruel disease, happily shortened by at least two-thirds of its old-fashioned length by modern treatment; but all was going well, and the hearts of the watchers were at ease. The boy lay swathed in cotton wool, very helpless, very languid, fed and petted from morning till night, like a young bird brought up by hand: and Ida and her stepmother had to be patient and thankful.

Ida had often thought during the boy's illness of the man who had found him, and brought him safely home to them on that anxious day; and she wished much to testify her grat.i.tude to the misanthropic dweller in the gamekeeper's cottage; but she hesitated as to her manner of approaching him. To go herself would be futile, when he had so obdurately shut his door against her. Then she had Vernon's a.s.surance that this Bohemian hated women. She might have sent a servant with a message; but she had reason to know, from Vernon's description of the man, that he was altogether above the servant cla.s.s, and would be likely to resent such a form of approach. She might have written to him; but her pride recoiled from that course, remembering his cavalier treatment of her. And so she let the days slip by, until Vernon began to recover strength and good spirits, and to inquire about his friend.

'I want Jack to come and see me, and sit with me,' said the boy; 'he could come to tea couldn't he, mother? You wouldn't mind, would you?'

'My dear, he is not a proper person for you to a.s.sociate with,' replied Lady Palliser. 'You oughtn't to bemean yourself by a.s.sociating with your inferiors.'

'Bemean fiddlesticks!' cried Vernie; 'I don't believe there is such a word. Jack is the cleverest man I know--cleverer than Mr. Jardine, and that's saying a great deal.'

Vainly did the widow endeavour to awaken her son's mind to the great gulf which divides a baronet from a hawker--a gulf not to be bridged over by the genius of a Dalton or a Whewell--and to those nice distinctions which obtain between a casual out-of-door intercourse with a man of this cla.s.s, and a deliberate invitation to tea.

'When I'm well enough to go out I can go to him,' answered Vernon, doggedly; 'but now I'm ill he must come to me; and it's very unkind of you not to let him come. Blow his station in life! If he was a duke I shouldn't want him.'