By these means he hoped that none of the servants would go and buy more of these same papers elsewhere.
Notwithstanding these precautions, he took the nurse apart, and said, “Now, you are an experienced woman, and to be trusted about an excitable patient. Mind, I object to any female servant entering Mrs. Staines's room with gossip. Keep them outside the door for the present, please. Oh, and nurse, if anything should happen, likely to grieve or to worry her, it must be kept from her entirely: can I trust you?”
“You may, sir.”
“I shall add ten guineas to your fee, if she gets through the month without a shock or disturbance of any kind.”
She stared at him, inquiringly. Then she said,—
“You may rely on me, doctor.”
“I feel I may. Still, she alarms me. She looks quiet enough, but she is very excitable.”
Not all these precautions gave Dr. Philip any real sense of security; still less did they to Mr. Lusignan. He was not a tender father, in small things, but the idea of actual danger to his only child was terrible to him and he now passed his life in a continual tremble.
This is the less to be wondered at, when I tell you that even the stout Philip began to lose his nerve, his appetite, his sleep, under this hourly terror and this hourly torture.
Well did the great imagination of antiquity feign a torment, too great for the mind long to endure, in the sword of Damocles suspended by a single hair over his head. Here the sword hung over an innocent creature, who smiled beneath it, fearless; but these two old men must sit and watch the sword, and ask themselves how long before that subtle salvation shall snap.