Dr. Wainwright's Patient: A Novel

by Edmund Yates

"I mean to say nothing of the sort," said Paul, turning very red. "Daisy is the best girl in the world; but I don't know, somehow I don't think her letters have been quite as jolly lately--the last two, I mean; there is something in them which I can't exactly make out, and there is not something in them which I have generally found there; so that after all, as I said before, I shall be glad when I get back."

"Has Mrs. Derinzy said anything more to you on the subject which you wrote to me about?" asked George, with a very bad attempt at indifference.

"No," said Paul; "she has begun it once or twice, but something has always intervened."

"Have you any idea that she has given up her intention of getting you to marry Miss Annette?"

"I fear not; I fear that her intention remains just the same, and that I shall have an immense deal of trouble in combating it. You see, events have changed since your arrival here, my dear George. But speaking dispassionately together, I don't see what line I can take with my mother in declining to propose for Annette, except the straightforward one that I won't do it. It seems highly ridiculous for a man in a government office, and with only the reversion of a sufficiently snug, but certainly not overwhelming, income in prospect, to refuse the chance of an enormous fortune, and the hand of a very pretty girl, who, as Mr. Swiveller says, has been expressly growing up for me."

"Yes," said George, reflectively, "I quite see what you mean; it will be a difficult task. But you intend to carry it through?"

"Most decidedly. Nothing would induce me to break with--with that young person in London; and if she were to break with me, God knows it would half kill me. I don't think I could solace myself by taking a wife with a lot of money, even if I could be such a ruffian as to attempt it."

So from this and fifty other conversations of a similar nature--for the theme was one which always engrossed his mind, and was constantly rising to his tongue--George Wainwright knew that there would be no obstacle to his love for Annette so far as Paul Derinzy was concerned. That young man had no care for his cousin even without the knowledge of the dreadful secret, which must be known to him some day, and the revelation of which would inevitably settle his resolution to decline a compliance with his mother's prayer.

That dreadful secret, always up-rearing its ghastly form in the path which otherwise was so smooth and so straight for George Wainwright's happiness! All his cogitations came to one invariable result--there could be no other explanation of it all. The illness which she herself could not explain, which came upon her from time to time, and during which she sank away from ordinary into mere blank existence, emerging therefrom with no knowledge of what she had gone through; the mysterious woman, half nurse, half keeper, who watched so constantly and so grimly over her? the manner in which all questions touching upon the girl's illness were shirked by every member of the household; the delusion so assiduously kept up, under which Mrs. Derinzy and not her niece was made to appear as the sufferer; above all, the constant visits of his father--all these proved to George that the disorder under which Annette Derinzy laboured was insanity, and nothing else.

And the more he thought of it, the more terrified was he at the idea. Familiarity with mental disease, intercourse with those labouring under it, had by no means softened its terrors to George Wainwright. True, he had no physical fear in connection with the mere vulgar fright which is usually felt with "mad people." He had no experience of that; but he had seen so much of the gradual growth of the disorder; had so often marked the helpless, hopeless state into which those suffering under it fell--silently indeed, but surely--that he had come to regard it with greater terror than the fiercest fever or the deadliest plague.