Amethyst dropped her hands and started up.
“Oh, I am sick of lovers,” she said angrily. “None of them are any good.”
The sun broke out through the mist of the autumn morning, the bells from the church in the village rang a merry chime through the open window. Amethyst turned her back on the smiling prospect. The morning bells had no message of hope for her.
Chapter Thirty Three.
Twisting the Threads of Fate.
The weeks that followed Lucian’s accident had been a time of severe trial to Sylvester Riddell. All the responsibility rested on his shoulders of deciding whether they should go ashore at Kirkwall, or get on to Edinburgh in the yacht, on which latter course Sylvester, finding that the Kirkwall doctor authorised it, and could accompany them, had finally fixed. He had to telegraph to Mrs Leigh, who was still in Switzerland, to come to Edinburgh, and when he did so he had scarcely any hope that she would find her son alive. He knew nothing of illness, was not a person of ready practical resource, and was far too sensitive not to feel the sight of such suffering to be a terrible strain upon him. Imaginative and sympathetic, he felt all the horror of the sudden striking down of the strong young life, and to be calm and cheerful was almost beyond his power. Lucian was far too ill to fret about himself or his future; when he was conscious, relief from pain was all he could desire, and the first time he showed much sense of the situation was when he knew Mrs Leigh was coming.
“Oh, Syl!—the mother!” he said, looking up with wistful eyes, “try to help her.”
There was very little help or comfort to be given. Sylvester knew that the worth of life would be as much crushed out for Mrs Leigh by Lucian’s death, or hopeless illness, as for the poor young fellow himself. She was a good woman, and a brave one, but heavy trial was new to her, and her misery took the line of trying every expedient, getting every opinion, wondering constantly whether anything else could have been done at first, and perhaps, spite of herself, her state of mind became apparent to Lucian, for he tried to say something of “Syl being so clever, and always knowing what to do,”—an opinion perhaps hardly shared by the trained nurses, but which went to Syl’s heart. Mrs Leigh, however, to say nothing of Lucian, would have been so much more forlorn without him, that he could not possibly leave them alone; he remained with them in Edinburgh, and, when his old playfellow’s vigorous youth enabled him to rally up to a certain point, he arranged for the difficult journey south, and escorted them back to London. Here he was obliged to leave them, to return to his duties at Oxford, taking a few days’ much-needed rest at home by the way.