Maid of the Mist Part 2

Mrs Carew turned as he left the room, and followed him out, and the sick man sank back with a groan and a curse.

"Will he die?" she asked quickly, as she closed the door behind them.

"Not necessarily. But if he lives he'll be crippled for life."

"He would sooner die than live like that."

"We can't help that. It's my business to keep him alive. I'll run down and mix him a draught which may give him some rest. You'll need a.s.sistance. He may go off his head. He's a bad patient. I'll send you someone up----"

"Not Jane Pinniger then. I won't have her."

He knitted his brows at her. "It was Jane I was thinking of. She's an excellent nurse, both brains and brawn, and he may get violent in the night."

"I won't have her here," said Elinor obstinately, and he remembered that gossip had, not so very long ago, been busy with the names of Pasley and Jane, as she had at other times occupied herself with Pasley and many another. Undoubtedly Elinor had had much to bear.

"All right! If I can find anyone else----" he began.

"I won't have Jane Pinniger here,"--and he went off at speed to get the draught and find a subst.i.tute for Jane if that were possible.

His doubts on that head were justified. He sent his boy up with the draught, and started on the search for a nurse who should combine a modic.u.m of intelligence with the necessary strength of mind and body.

But his choice was very limited. Old crones there were, satisfactory enough in their own special line and in a labourer's cottage, but useless for a job such as this. There was nothing for it at last but to go back to the Hall and tell Mrs Carew that it was Jane or n.o.body.

"n.o.body then," said she decisively. "I will manage with one of the girls from downstairs, and young Job to help."

"Young Job is all very well with the dogs----"

"He will do very well for this too. We may not require him, but he can be at hand in case of need," and he had to leave it at that.

V

Carew suffered much, more in mind even than in body. The thought of lying there like a d.a.m.ned log, as he put it, for the rest of his days filled him with most pa.s.sionate resentment, and drove him into paroxysms of raging fury. He cursed everything under the sun and everyone who came near him, with a completeness and finality of invective which, if it had taken effect or come home to roost, would have blighted himself and all his surroundings off the face of the earth.

Even his wife, and the maid who took turns with her to sit within call, accustomed as they were to his outbreaks, quailed before the storm.

Young Job alone suffered it without turning a hair, and paid no more heed to it all, even when directed against himself, than he would to the yelping of his dogs.

Wulfrey Dale came in for his share, chiefly by reason of his quiet inattention to the sufferer's impossible demands for extinction.

But he found his visits to the sick-room trying even to his seasoned nerves. What it must all mean to the tortured wife he hardly dared to imagine.

Once when he was there, Carew hurled a tumbler at her which missed her head by a hair's-breadth. Dale got her out of the room, and turned and gave his patient a sound verbal drubbing, and Carew cursed him high and low till his breath gave out.

"Has he done that before?" the Doctor asked the white-faced wife, when he had followed her downstairs.

"Oh, yes. But I'm generally on the look-out. I was off my guard because you were there. Oh, I wish he would die and leave us in peace."

"He'll kill himself if he goes on like this."

"He'll kill some of us first. He's wanting to die. It would be the best thing for him--and for us. Can't you let him die?" and a tiny spark shot through the shadowy suffering of her eyes as she glanced up at him.

"You know I can't. Don't talk like that!" he said brusquely, and then, to atone for the brusqueness, "I am sorely distressed for you, but there is nothing to be done but bear it as bravely as you can. What about your mother? Couldn't you----"

"It would only make him worse still, if that is possible. Pasley detests her. Oh, I wish I were dead myself. I cannot bear it," and she broke into hysterical weeping, and swayed blindly, and would have fallen if he had not caught her.

A woman's grief and tears always drew the whole of Wulf's sympathy.

And he and she had been almost as brother and sister all their lives--till she married Carew.

"Don't, Elinor! Don't!" he said soothingly, as with her shaking head against his breast she sobbed as though her heart were broken.

Mollie, the maid, came hastily in, without so much as a knock, her red face mottled with white fear.

"He's going on that awful, Ma'am, I vow I daresn't stop in there alone with him. It's as much as one's life's worth when he's in his tantrums."

"Get your mistress a gla.s.s of wine, Mollie, and then find young Job and send him up. I'll go up and wait with Mr Carew till he comes."

He led Mrs Carew to the couch and made her lie down there, and explained matters to the girl by asking her,

"Does he throw things at you too?"

"La, yes, Doctor, at all of us, if we don't keep 'em out of his reach.

He do boil up so at nothing at all," and she went off in search of young Job, who was pa.s.sing a peaceful holiday hour in the company of thirty couple of yelping hounds.

VI

Dale was confronted with the problem with which every medical man comes face to face during his career.

Here was a man who, both for his own sake and still more for the sake of those about him, would be very much better dead than living; who wanted to die, and, as he believed, make an end; who begged constantly for the relief of death;--and yet, against his own equally strong feeling of what would be best for all concerned, his doctor must do his very utmost to keep his patient alive and all about him in torment.

Wulfrey wished, as devoutly as the more immediate sufferers, that he would die. He wished it more ardently each time he saw Mrs Carew, and wholly and entirely on her account.

Her white face, which grew more deathly white each day, and her woful eyes, which grew ever more despairing in their shadowy rings, were sure indexes of what she was pa.s.sing through. Dale wondered how much longer she would be able to stand it.

He gave her tonics, and his most helpful sympathy and encouragement.

And at the same time, by the irony of circ.u.mstance and the claims of his profession, he must do everything in his power to perpetuate the burden under which she was breaking.

But the whole matter came to a sudden and unlooked for end, on the seventh day after the accident.

Wulfrey was hastening up to the Hall to clear this, the unpleasantest item, out of his day's work, when he met young Job coming down the drive with a straw in his mouth and three couples of young hounds at his heels.

"Wur comen fur you, Doctor," said young Job. "He's dead."

"Dead?" jerked the Doctor in very great surprise, for his patient had been more venomously alive than ever the night before.