Day after day passed, night after night, in dreadful transitions from frenzy to stupor, deathlike stupor, only exchanged for more fearful frenzy, till even Emmie could scarcely wish for a prolongation of the terrible struggle. Humbly and submissively she prayed that if her loved brother were indeed now passing through the river of death, one ray of reason might gleam through the awful darkness around him, and that the waves and billows might indeed not go over his head.
But Bruce had youth in his favour, and all that man’s skill or woman’s tenderness could throw into the opposite scale to that in which his life appeared to be gradually sinking. With alternations of hope and fear, the watchers by the sick-bed marked the trembling of the balance, scarcely able to believe that from so fearful an attack of fever the sufferer ever again could rise. But the crisis came at last, and the worst was over; the maddening fever quitted the suffering Bruce, but left him helpless as an infant, and more nervous than the most weak and timid of women.
For weeks Bruce could hardly endure the noise of a step crossing his room; a shadow alarmed him, a voice would make every nerve in his frame quiver. The doctor said that for long his patient would be incapable of any mental exertion; he who had been so steady and regular in his work, was condemned to the idleness and inaction which, to a character like that of Bruce, was in itself a most humiliating trial and disappointment.
As soon as the invalid could be with safety removed from London, he was sent to a watering-place in the south of England. Emmie, whose health had suffered from her devoted nursing, accompanied her sick brother. After a while she exchanged places with Vibert, and rejoined at Myst Court her father, who was actively fulfilling his duties as a landlord and benefactor to the poor. In the latter character Mr. Trevor needed the help of his daughter, whose health was now sufficiently restored to enable her to become his able assistant.
Vibert had not seen his brother for more than a month when he joined him at Torquay, and with the sanguine expectations natural to youth he hoped that the change of air and scene, and the effect of so many weeks passed in perfect repose, might have brought back health and strength to the shattered frame of Bruce Trevor. The youth was disappointed to find how slow had been the progress made by the invalid towards recovery. It was not merely the hollow eye, the transparent skin, the faint voice and feeble step that told how far removed convalescence was from vigorous health, for it seemed to Vibert as if his brother’s firmness of mind, and even his moral courage, were gone. Bruce so shrank from any allusions to the sufferings of the past, that Vibert, who had come full of news which he was eager to impart, found that he must avoid even mentioning the names of the Harpers. For some time Bruce did not hear the result of the trial of the forgers, who had all been convicted and condemned to various terms of imprisonment.
But if Bruce’s shattered state was distressing both to himself and to others, it was evident that the character of the young man was ripening under the trial. Bruce had been proud in his self-dependence, impatient of the weakness of others; he had trusted in the power of his own strong will to overcome all difficulties before him. He was now, in conscious infirmity, learning to cast himself simply, humbly, unreservedly upon the strength of his God. The proud soul had had to learn that the kingdom of heaven can only be entered by those who come in the spirit of a little child, and that the haughtiness of man must be brought down, that the Lord alone may be exalted.
“There are many things in life that one can’t understand,” observed Vibert one day, when he had just placed a footstool before the brother who had formerly taunted him with an effeminate love of luxurious ease. “It seems natural enough that I should have had some rough discipline, seeing what a thoughtless, selfish life I had been leading, till I was pulled up sharp by that horrid affair. But you—the steadiest fellow in Christendom—you, who never broke bounds, or turned to the right or the left—I can’t see why the heaviest strokes should be laid upon you, or what good such a long trying illness can possibly do you.”
“Vibert, do you remember what our uncle wrote on those fragments of paper when we were together at Summer Villa?”
Vibert nodded an affirmative reply.
“I have often thought over his words,” continued the invalid; “they conveyed a salutary warning, all the more needed because it raised my anger against him who had laid his finger upon the tender spot. Vibert, I, as well as yourself, had my haunted chamber within the heart, and it has needed the thunderbolt which has smitten me so low to burst open a way for the light to enter.”