The glad and happy father was only too eager now to snatch a smile from his wife’s face, and anxious was he to bury any little obstacle that may have existed in the past, and expel it for ever from its lurking corner of tempting repose. He saw that Lady Dunfern’s life was hanging by a flimsy hair, and who could, for an instant, depict the great despair of her husband when told that all hope must be abandoned!
The frantic father wrung his hands in a frenzy of momentary madness, and in spite of authoritative advice he timidly moved in the direction of the bed on which his beloved lay, and knelt beside it to fervently offer up a prayer “for the speedy recovery of her who was the chief object of his existence.” Raising himself up and clasping his darling in his arms, he whispered in her ear a word of encouragement, and gently laying her highly-heated head on the silken pillow he again prayed, in deepest and gravest earnestness, “that she might be spared only a little longer.”
No doubt his prayer was no sooner offered than answered, as she at this stage slightly rallied, and appeared somewhat strengthened. Day by day the still fond and loving husband sat by the bedside of the invalid until strong enough to battle fully against the weakening hand of her malady; and at the very time Sir John sat beside the bed of sickness, inwardly “showering blame upon himself for hindering his wife’s social enjoyment, and for which he believed he acted wrongly;” she, on the contrary, was outwardly pouring rebuke on her own head “for ever entering into a league of life-long punishment by marrying a man she simply abhorred, and leaving her noble and well-learned tutor, Oscar Otwell, whom she yet loved, to wander in a world of blighted bliss!”
Ah! to be sure! It was during these days of unremitting attention that he was afforded an opportunity of storing up a multitude of touchy remarks uttered by his wife when the relapse of raging fever reached its defiant height! She never ceased to talk in a most gentle manner of “Oscar Otwell,” “her darling and much-loved tutor.” She even expressed sorrow, in the course of her broken remarks, “at the false step she had taken to satisfy, not herself by any means, but Lady Dilworth!” She strongly protested her “hatred for him” who sat listening, with grave intensity, to every word that escaped her lips! She even spoke of “a cavity in her jewel-case in which was safely deposited a ring, given her by Oscar during her happy period of instruction under his guidance,” adding, in her painful discourse, that “she loved it as well as himself,” etc., etc.
These rambling statements when ended, in an instant caused Sir John’s resolutions, made by him so recently, to become worthless remarks; and if partly charged with jealousy before, he was doubly so now.
No onlooker could fail in the least to pity the sneered husband, whose livid countenance during the course of her remarks, rambling though they were, was a sight never to be forgotten. How he gazed with astonished indifference at the invalid so charged with deceit! She who acted the emblem of innocence at all times, and attempted to attach entire blame to her husband! She who partly promised peace in future to him who never again could enjoy it!
How his manner became so abrupt and his speech so scanty within such a short period was verily a proof of the belief he fostered relative to his wife’s statements, which were yet to her unknown.
The doctors in attendance endeavoured strongly to imprint upon Sir John the fact that “such remarks as those uttered by his wife should be treated with silence and downright indifference,” adding that “patients smitten with fever, of what kind soever, were no more responsible for their sayings than the most outrageous victim to insanity.”