"Certainly, monsieur,--to Geneva; did not I myself recommend him to the Hôtel de l'Ecu,--me?"
"Do you know his name?"
"I can show monsieur the name in the strangers' book. It is a name of English, which nobody but English can pronounce."
The book was brought; and five minutes after a telegram was despatched to Dr. Hudson, at the Hôtel de l'Ecu, Geneva, imploring him to come and see an English lady then lying dangerously ill at Martigny.
That night never faded out of Robert Streightley's memory. To his last hour he recollected the dead solemn calm, broken only by an occasional moan from the half-insensible figure on the bed, the position of the furniture, the subjects of the prints on the walls. As he kept his watch grim and solitary (for the doctor, after the failure of the tisane to produce immediate cure, gave up the case and refused to attend again); as he looked at Katharine, with her face whiter than her night-dress, with blanched lips, and hair flung in wild disorder over her pillow, his heart sunk within him and he shook with fear. Was this to be the end of it? Was that lovely prize, which he had accomplished with so much difficulty and at such a sacrifice of principle, to be taken from him now? Was he to lose her,--to lose her without ever having had the chance of winning her love; of letting her see that he was something more than the mere rich City man, who had triumphed by the influence of his money; that he worshipped her with all his soul---- Ah! she must be spared until she had learned that! And Robert Streightley fell on his knees by the bedside, and prayed to God to hear his petition.
The next day at noon Dr. Hudson arrived. Katharine was at her lowest ebb about this time, and Robert was nearly mad with anxiety; but he derived infinite comfort from the sight of the English doctor's honest cheery face and from the sound of his voice. A wondrous voice; so clear and yet so soft, ringing with comfort and encouragement and hope; a voice at the first sound of which Katharine opened her long-closed eyes and looked with interest at the speaker--would have spoken herself, but that Dr. Hudson raised his finger with a cautioning gesture, and then laid it on his lip. He did not permit her to speak until he had felt her pulse and heard the account of her seizure from her husband; and then he only asked her a few questions which needed very short replies. And then Dr. Hudson took Robert Streightley into the next room, and said:
"She may recover--I think she will; but the next four-and-twenty hours will decide."
"You--you will not leave her, doctor! Any sum which----"
"My dear sir," interrupted Dr. Hudson, laying his hand on Streightley's arm, "I will not leave her bedside until the crisis is over."
And he did not. Independently of the attraction of the case itself (and Dr. Hudson loved his profession, and pursued it with an ever-increasing fondness for its study), he found himself very much interested in the beauty of his patient, and profoundly touched by the adoration of her so quietly, so unceasingly shown by her husband. It was a little new to him this worship of a woman by the man who was legally bound to her; for Dr. Hudson lived habitually in Paris, and had a high repute amongst the French aristocracy, amongst whom there was indeed a great deal of the tender passion, though it generally flowed in the wrong channels. He was pleased too with Streightley's sound sense and straightforward honesty; and after the crisis had passed, and Katharine was in the earliest stage of convalescence, she would hear the doctor and her husband discussing politics, and commerce, statistics, and science, far into the night. The doctor was a widower, had no domestic ties, all his patients were away from Paris; and he was so pleased with his new friends that he extended the period of his holiday, and remained with them as their guest.