The routine of illness and anxiety, the dull monotony of an absorbing care, had rapidly settled down upon Kilsyth, immensely alleviated, of course, by the confidence imposed by Wilmot's presence. The influence of his skill, the insensible support of his calmness and self-reliance, were felt all through the household by those members of it to whom the life or death of Madeleine was a matter of infinite importance, and by those who felt a decent amount of interest, but could have commanded their feelings readily enough. As for Wilmot himself, he would have found it difficult to account for the absorption of feeling and interest with which he watched the case, had he been called upon to render any account of it to others. In his own mind he shirked the question, and simply devoted himself day and night to his patient, leaving the house only once a day for a brief time, during which he would stride up and down the terrace in front of the house, gulping in all the fresh air he could inhale; and then his place in the sick-chamber was taken by an old woman, who had years before been Madeleine's nurse, and who was now married and settled on the estate. Not since the old days of his house-surgeonship at St. Vitus's had Chudleigh Wilmot had such a spell of duty as this: the fact of his giving up his time in this manner to a girl with whom he had not exchanged twenty words, with whose friends he had no previous acquaintance, in whom he could have no possible interest, came upon him frequently in his enforced exercise on the terrace, in his long weary vigils in the sick-room; and each time that he thought it over, he felt or pronounced it to himself to be more and more inexplicable. In London he made it an inexorable rule never to leave his bed at night, unless the person sending for him were a regular patient, no matter what might be their position in life, or the exigency of their case; and even among his own connection he kept strictly to consultation and prescription; he undertook no practical work, there were apothecaries and nurses for that sort of thing. He had a list of both, whom he could recommend, but he himself never paid any attention to such matters. And here he was acting as a combination of physician, apothecary, and nurse, dispensing the necessary medicines from the family medicine-chest, sitting up all night, concocting soothing drinks, and smoothing hot and uneasy pillows.
Why? Chudleigh Wilmot had asked himself that question a thousand times, and had not yet found the answer to it. Beauty in distress--and this girl, for all her mass of golden hair and her bright complexion and her blue eyes, could only be called pretty--beauty in distress was no more strange to Chudleigh Wilmot than to the hero of nautical melodrama at a transpontine theatre. He was constantly being called in to cases where he saw girls as young and as pretty as Madeleine Kilsyth "hove down in the bay of sickness," as the said nautical dramatic hero forcibly expresses it. Scarcely a day passed that he was not for some few minutes by the couch of some woman of far superior attractions to this young girl, and yet of whom he had never thought in any but the most thoroughly professional manner, listening to her complaints, marking her symptoms, prescribing his remedies, and entering up the visit in his note-book, as he whirled away in his carriage, as methodically as a City accountant. But he had never felt in his life as he felt one bright afternoon when the wild delirium had spent its rage and died away, and the doctor sat by the girl's bedside, and held her hand, no longer dry and parched with fever, and bent over her to catch the low faint accents of her voice.
"You don't know me, Miss Kilsyth," said he gently, as he saw her dazed by looking up into his face.
"O yes," said Madeleine, in ever so low a voice,--"O yes; you are Doctor--Doctor--I cannot recollect your name; but I know you were sent for, and I saw you before--before I was--"
"Before you were so ill; quite right, my dear young lady. I am Dr. Wilmot, and you have been very ill; but you are better now, and--please God--will soon be well."
"Dr. Wilmot! O yes, I recollect. But, please, don't think because I could not recall your name that I did not know you. I have known you all through this--this attack. I have had an indefinable sense of your presence about me; always kind and thoughtful and attentive, always soothing, and--"
"Hush, my dear child, hush! you must not talk and excite yourself just yet. You have had, as you probably know, a very sharp attack of illness; and you must keep thoroughly quiet, to enable us to perfect your recovery."
"Then I'll only ask one question and say one thing. The question first--How is papa?"
"Horribly nervous about you, but very well. Constant in his tappings at this door, unremitting in his desire to be admitted; to which requests I have been obdurate. However, when he hears the turn things have taken, he will be reassured."
"That's delightful! Now, then, all I have to say is to thank you, and pray God to bless you for your kindness to me. I've known it, though you mayn't think so, and--and I'm very weak now; but--"
He had his strong arm round her, and managed to lay her back quietly on her pillow, or she would have fainted. As it was, when the bright blue eyes withdrew from his, the light died out of them, and the lids dropped over them, and Madeleine lay thoroughly exhausted after her excitement.
What was the reminiscence thus aroused? What ghost with folded hands came stealing out of the dim regions of the past at the sound of this girl's voice, at the glance of this girl's eyes? What bygone memories, so apart from everything else, rose before him as he listened and as he looked? He had not hit the trail yet, but he was close upon it.
The news that the extremity of danger was past was received with great delight by the guests at Kilsyth. With most of them Madeleine was a personal favourite, and all of them felt that a death in the house would have been a serious personal inconvenience. The Northallertons, Lady Fairfax, and Lord Towcester, were the only seceders; the others either had arranged for later visits elsewhere, or found their present quarters far too comfortable to be given up on the mere chance of catching an infectious disorder. Some of them had had it, and laughed securely; others feared that from the mere fact of their having been in the house when the attack took place, they were so "compromised" as to prevent their being received elsewhere; and one or two actually had the charity to think of their host and hostess, and stayed to keep them company, and to be of any service in case they might be required. Charley Jefferson belonged to this last class. Emily Fairfax little knew that by her selfish flight from Kilsyth she had entirely thrown away all her hold over the great honest heart that had so long held her image enshrined as its divinity. She never gave a thought to the fact that when the big Guardsman used to hum in a deep baritone voice the refrain of a little song of hers--
"Loyal je serai
Durant ma vie"--
he was expressing one of the guiding sentiments of his life. Colonel Jefferson was essentially loyal; to shrink from a friend who was in a difficulty, to shuffle out of supporting in purse, person, or any way in which it might be requisite, a comrade who had a claim of old acquaintance or strong intimacy, was in his eyes worse than the majority of crimes for which people stand at the dock of the Old Bailey. In this matter he never swerved for an instant. He never gave the question of infection a thought; he had had scarlet-fever at Eton, and jungle-fever out in India, and he was as case-hardened, he said, as a rhinoceros. He took no credit to himself for being fearless of infection, or indeed for anything else, this brave simple-minded good fellow; but if anyone had been able to see the working of his heart, they would have known what credit he deserved for holding to his grand old creed of loyalty to his friend, and for ignoring the whispers of the siren, even when she was as fascinating and potential as Emily Fairfax. When some one asked if he were going, he laughed a great sardonic guffaw, and affected to treat the question as a joke. When the disease was pronounced to be unmistakably infectious, he at once constituted himself as a means of communication between Dr. Wilmot and the outer world; and his honour and loyalty enabled him to face the fact that probably little Lord Towcester had followed Lady Fairfax to her next visiting place, and was there administering consolation to her with great equanimity. When Dr. Wilmot came out for his half-hour's stride up and down the terrace, he generally found the Colonel and Duncan Forbes waiting for him; and these three would pace away together, the two militaires chatting gaily on light subjects calculated to relieve the tedium of the doctor, and to turn his thoughts into pleasanter channels, until it was time for him to go back to his duty. And when the worst was over, and Chudleigh Wilmot could have longer and more frequent intervals of absence from the sick-room, it was Charley Jefferson who proposed that they should establish a kind of mess in the smoking-room, where the Doctor, who necessarily debarred himself from communion with the others at the dinner-table, might yet enjoy the social converse of such as were not afraid of infection. So a dinner-table was organised in the smoking-room, and Jefferson and Duncan Forbes invited themselves to dine with the Doctor. They were the next day joined by Mrs. Severn, who had all along wished to devote herself to the invalid, and had with the greatest difficulty been restrained from establishing herself en permanence as nurse in Madeleine's chamber; and Mr. Pitcairn asked for and obtained permission to join the party, and proved to have such a talent for imitation and such a stock of quaint Scotch stories as made him a very valuable addition to it. So the "Condemned Cell," as its denizens called it, prospered immensely; and by no means the least enjoyment in the house emanated from it.
Lady Muriel, seeing more and more of Wilmot, as the closeness of his attendance on his patient became relaxed by her advance towards convalescence, and studying him with increased attention, learned to regard him with feelings such as no man of her numerous and varied acquaintance had ever before inspired her with. The impression he had made upon her in the first interview was not removed or weakened, and he presented himself to her mind--which was naturally inquiring, and possessed considerably more intelligence than she had occasion to use, in a general way, in her easy-going, prosperous, and conventional life--in the light of an interesting and remunerative study.
Lady Muriel's faultlessly good manners precluded the indulgence of any perceptible absence of mind; and she possessed the enviable faculty which some women of the world exhibit in such perfection, of carrying, or rather helping, on a conversation to which she was not in reality giving attention, and in which she did not feel the smallest particle of interest. The gallant militaires, the dashing sportsmen, the grands seigneurs, and the ladies of distinction who were among her associates, and the gentlemen, at least of the number of her admirers, were accustomed to regard Lady Muriel's powers of conversation as something quite out of the common way; and so indeed they were--only these simple-minded and ingenuous individuals did not quite understand the direction taken by their uncommonness. It never occurred to them to calculate how much of her talking Lady Muriel did by means of intelligent acquiescent looks, graceful little bows, sprightly exclamations, a judicious expression of intense interest in the subject under discussion when it chanced to be personal to the other party to the discourse, and sundry other skilful and effective feminine devices. It never dawned upon them that one half the time she did not hear, and during the whole time she did not care, what was said; that her graceful manner was merely manner, and her real state of mind one of complete indifference to themselves and almost everyone besides. Not that Lady Muriel was an unhappy woman. Far from it. She was too sensible to be unhappy without just cause; and she certainly had not that. She perfectly appreciated her remarkably comfortable lot in life; she estimated wealth, station, domestic tranquillity and respect, and the unbounded power which she exercised in her household domain, quite as highly as they deserved to be estimated; and though as free from vulgarity of mind as from vulgarity of manner, she was not in the least likely to affect any sentimental humility or mistake about her own social advantages. She could as easily have bragged about them as forgotten them; but just because she held them for what they were worth, and did not exaggerate or depreciate them, Lady Muriel was given to absence of mind; and though neither unhappy, nor imagining herself so, she was occasionally bored, and acknowledged it. Only to herself though. Lady Muriel Kilsyth had no confidantes, no intimacies. Hers was the equable kind of prosperous life which did not require any; and she was the last woman in the world to acknowledge a weakness which her truly admirable manners gave her power most successfully to conceal.
The touch of sorrow or anxiety is a sovereign remedy for ennui. It will succeed when all the resources to which the victims of that fell disease are accustomed to have recourse fail ignominiously. If Lady Muriel had loved Madeleine Kilsyth, the girl's illness would have put boredom to flight, with the first flush or shiver of fever, the first dimness of the eyes, the first tone of complaint in the clear young voice. But Lady Muriel did not love Madeleine, and did not pretend to herself that she loved her. Indeed Lady Muriel never pretended to herself. She had seen and understood that to deceive oneself is at once much easier and more dangerous than to deceive other people, and she avoided doing so on principle--on the worldly-wise principle, that is, by which she so admirably regulated her life--and reaped a rich harvest of popularity. She did not dislike the girl at all, and she would have been very sorry if she had died, partly for the sake of Kilsyth, whom she really liked and admired, and who would have broken his stout simple heart for his daughter--"much sooner and more surely than for me," Lady Muriel thought; "but that is quite natural, and as it should be. She is the child of his first love, and I am his second wife, and he is quite as fond of me as I want him to be;"--for she was a thoroughly sensible woman, and would much rather not have had more love than she could reciprocate. But she was perfectly equable and composed. Throughout Madeleine's illness it did not cause her sorrow, though her manner conveyed precisely the proper degree of stepmotherly concern which was called for under the circumstances; and she did not suffer from anxiety, being rationally satisfied that all the skill, care, and indulgence demanded by the exigencies of the case were liberally bestowed on Madeleine. Anxiety was quite uncalled for, and therefore did not chase away the brooding spirit of ennui from Lady Muriel.
The first thing that struck her particularly with regard to Chudleigh Wilmot was that she did not experience any sense of boredom in his presence. In fact it dissipated that ordinarily prevailing malady; she was really interested in everything he talked about, really charmed by the manner in which he talked, and had no need whatever to draw on the ever-ready resources of her manner and savoir faire.
When Wilmot began to make his appearance freely among the small party at Kilsyth, and, after the usual inquiries--in which the serious and impressive tone at first observed was gradually discarded--to enter into general conversation, and to exercise all the very considerable powers which he possessed of making himself agreeable, Lady Muriel found out and admitted that this was the pleasantest time of the day. The interval between this discovery and her finding herself longing for the arrival of that time--dwelling upon all its incidents when she was alone, making it a central point in her life, in fact--was very brief.
With this new feeling came all the keen perception, the close observation, and the nascent suspicion which could not fail to accompany it, in such a "thorough" organisation as that of Lady Muriel. She began to take notice of everything concerning Wilmot, to observe all his ways, and to watch with jealous scrutiny the degree of interest he displayed in all his surroundings at Kilsyth.
As Madeleine progressed in her recovery, Lady Muriel looked for some decline in the physician's absorption in the interest of her case. He would be less punctual, less constant in his attendance upon her; he would be more susceptible to influences from the outside world: he would be anxious to get away perhaps--at least he would no longer be indifferent to professional duties elsewhere; he would begin to weigh their respective claims, and would recognise the preponderance of those at a distance over that which he had already satisfied more than fully, more than conscientiously, with a fulness and expansion of sympathy and devotion rare indeed.
Wilmot was extremely popular among the little company at Kilsyth. Wonderfully popular, considering how much he was the intellectual superior of every man there; but then he was one of those clever men who never make their talents obnoxious, and are not bent on forcing a perpetual recognition of their superiority from their associates. He allowed the people he was with to enjoy all the originality, wit, knowledge, and good fellowship that was in him, and did not administer the least alloy of mortification to their pride with it. When Lady Muriel forcibly acknowledged to herself, and would as frankly have acknowledged to any one else, if any one else would have asked her a question on the subject, that she held Dr. Wilmot to be the cleverest and most agreeable man she had ever met, she did but echo a sentiment which had found general expression among the party assembled at Kilsyth.
As the days went by, Lady Muriel began to feel certain misgivings relative to Wilmot. She did not quite like his look, his manner, when he spoke of Madeleine. She did not consider it altogether natural that he should never weary of Kilsyth's garrulity on the subject of his darling daughter. The physician, taking rest from his long and anxious watch, might well be excused if he had tired a little of questions and replies about every symptom, every variation, and of endless stories of the girl's childhood, and laudation of her beauty, her virtues, and her filial love and duty. But Dr. Wilmot never tired of these things; he would, on the contrary, bring back the discourse to them, if it strayed away, as it would do under Lady Muriel's direction; and moreover she noticed, that no circumstances, no social temptation had power to detain him a moment from his patient, when the time he had set for his return to her side had arrived.
Taking all these things into consideration, and combining them with certain indications which she had noticed about Madeleine herself, Lady Muriel began to think the return of Dr. Wilmot to London advisable, and to perceive in its being deferred very serious risk to her scheme for the endowment of her young kinsman with the hand and fortune of her stepdaughter. She was not altogether comfortable about its success, to begin with. Ramsay Caird had not as yet made satisfactory progress in Madeleine's favour. It was not because the girl had no power of loving in her that she had listened without the smallest shadow of emotion to Mr. Ramsay Caird, but simply because Mr. Ramsay Caird had not had the tact, or the talent, or the requisite qualifications, or the good fortune to arouse the power of loving him in her. Lady Muriel was far too quick an observer, far too learned a student of human nature, not to read at a glance all that her stepdaughter's looks revealed; and her knowledge of life at once informed her of the danger to her scheme. What was to be done? Wilmot must be got rid of, must be sent away without loss of time. His business was over, and he must go. That must be treated as a matter of course. He was called in as a professional man to exercise his profession; and the necessity of any further exercise of it having terminated, his visit was necessarily at an end. No possible suspicion of her real reason for wishing to get rid of him could arise. A married man, of excellent reputation, accustomed to being brought into the closest contact with women of all ages in the exercise of his profession--why, people would shout with laughter at the idea of her bringing forward any idea of his flirtation with a girl like Madeleine! And Kilsyth himself--nothing, not even the influence which she possessed over him, would induce him for an instant to believe any such story. It was very ridiculous; it must be her own imagination; and yet--No; there was no mistaking it, that girl's look; she could see it even then. Even if Ramsay Caird were not in question, it was a matter which, for Madeleine's own sake, must be quietly but firmly put an end to. Immensely gratified by this last idea--for there is nothing which so pleases us as the notion that we can gratify our own inclinations and simultaneously do our duty, possibly because the opportunities so rarely arise--Lady Muriel sought her husband, and found him busily inspecting a new rifle which had just arrived from London. After praising his purchase, and talking over a few ordinary matters, Lady Muriel said shortly:
"By the way, Alick, how much longer are we to be honoured by the company of Dr. Wilmot?"
The inquiry seemed to take Kilsyth aback, more from the tone in which it was uttered than its purport, and he said hesitatingly,
"Dr. Wilmot! Why, my dear? He must stay as long as Madeleine--I mean--but have you any objection to his being here?"
"Il Not the least in the world; only he seems to me to be in an anomalous position. Very likely his social talents are very great, but we get no advantage of them; and as for his professional skill--for which, I suppose, he was called here--there is no longer any need of that. Madeleine is out of all danger, and is on the fair way to health."
"You think so?"
"I'm sure of it. But, at all events, any doubt on that point could be dissipated by asking the Doctor himself."
"My dearest Muriel, wouldn't that be a little brusque, eh?"
"My dear Alick, you don't seem to see that very probably this gentleman is wishing himself far away, but does not exactly know how to make his adieux. A man in a practice like Dr. Wilmot's, however we may remunerate him for his visit here, and however agreeable it may be to him" (Lady Muriel could not resist giving way in this little bit), "must lose largely while attending on us. He is a gentleman, and consequently too delicate to touch on such a point; but it is one, I think, which should be taken into consideration."
Lady Muriel had had too long experience of her husband not to know the points of his armour. The last thrust was a sure one, and went home.
"I should be very sorry," said Kilsyth, with a little additional colour in his bronzed cheeks, "to think that I was the cause of preventing Dr. Wilmot's earning more money, or advancing himself in his profession. We owe him a deep debt of gratitude for what he has done; but perhaps now, as you say, Madeleine is out of danger; and may be safely left to the care of Dr. Joyce. I'll speak to Dr. Wilmot, my dear Muriel, and make it all right on that point.".