CHAPTER VI.
The Doctor's reflections on his return.
HOW much safer am I now?” thought the doctor, as he pursued his way home in the dark, and reflected on all that had just transpired, and on the probable consequences of it. “To-morrow there will be a jury,—it cannot be avoided; and I shall be called to give evidence, and Fanny, who saw it all, will be called also. She suspects something, and may tell all until she raises suspicions in the minds of others. Would that she too were out of the way, and then—then I should be finally secure!”
But as he thus thought on another death, the dread of the last came strongly upon him; and his skin seemed to creep upon his bones. He fancied there was a body lying in the road, and several times he checked his horse to avoid trampling upon it, or turned him suddenly aside in order to pass it by.
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He could see the shadowy lineaments of the man he had murdered flickering about in the doubtful air, with the very folds of the bed-clothes which his own hand had gathered round it, pictured in misty but accurate lines, like an artist's first sketch emerging from a ground of dark and indistinct space. He grew anxious to get home. He wondered how it was that never in his life before had any sight so haunted him, and yet he had seen many worse agonies than that,—many. Yes; he had seen old sinners die,—stubborn and unrepentant to the last; he had seen them die, and make no sign of hope of Heaven's grace. And he had seen young maids die of very terror at the thought and name of death. Yet these were nothing. They were happiness itself to what he had witnessed that night. When he arrived at home, his wife remarked that he looked pale and ill.
“No, my dear,” he replied, “I am very well indeed,—wonderfully well. I never felt better in my life. I can assure you, you are mistaken.” He sat down to his supper; but as he tried to carve, his knife slipped, and he did not try it again. The face of the lawyer seemed to be over the table, dancing about in the broad beams of the candlelight.
“You tremble, Frank!” cried his wife; “your hand shakes. How did you leave Skinwell?”
“He is dead.”
“Dead!”
“Yes,—he is gone. A concussion of the brain has taken him off. It was a terrible fall, indeed.”
“But how sudden!” exclaimed she.
“People will die suddenly sometimes,” replied the doctor; “and especially when pitched headlong out of a gig on a stony road. Now I think of it, let me tell you, my dear, that to-morrow perhaps, or on some early day, I shall want you to show a young woman down in the village here, all over the house. I wish her to see the patients. Do not ask any questions now; I have particular reasons for it. I only have to request of you very particularly, when she does come, to make no inquiries of her of any kind, nor to answer any questions she may put to you. It is of great importance to yourself as well as to me; and more so indeed than you can be aware of just now; so that it is unnecessary to insist further upon it.”
The wife promised strict compliance with his injunctions, as it was no very unusual thing for her thus to be requested to take a blind part in the performance of some mystery or other in the establishment, of which no one knew the purpose save Dr. Rowel himself. By this combination of secrecy with his wife, and of apparent openness and candour towards Fanny, he trusted to convince the latter that the communication which the dying man had made respecting her father was false and utterly without foundation. In adopting this bold course, it is evident that the doctor laid himself open to the possibility at least of a discovery; yet it was clearly the safest plan which, under the circumstances, he could adopt. The opinions which his wife entertained respecting the sanity of the unfortunate James Woodruff rendered it highly necessary, not only that the name and relationship of the visiter to whom he had promised an inspection of his house should be unknown to her, but also that no suspicion should be excited by any attempt on his part to prevent James Woodruff's being seen by Fanny along with all the other patients; since the very fact of one of them being purposely withheld would of itself give room for doubt; while, from an interview between them he had nothing to fear, since in his opinion it was a moral impossibility that either father or daughter should recognise the other.