"I am not feeling much better," said Mabel in one of her letters; "but I daresay--indeed I have no doubt--the weather is against me; Whittaker thinks so too. I enclose his report. There is nothing new here, or of importance."
Chudleigh Wilmot accepted his wife's account of the state of things at home, and replied to her letters in his usual strain. He had failed to notice that she never alluded to Miss Kilsyth; or he would hardly have dealt with so much emphasis, or at such length, on the details of a case to which the recipient of his letters manifested such complete indifference.
Dr. Whittaker continued to report upon the cases to which he had been called in; and no more telegrams interrupted the concentration of Chudleigh Wilmot's attention upon the illness and convalescence of Madeleine Kilsyth..
[CHAPTER VI.]
At Kilsyth.
The routine of illness and anxiety, the dull monotony of an absorbing care, had rapidly settled down upon Kilsyth, immensely alleviated, of course, by the confidence imposed by Wilmot's presence. The influence of his skill, the insensible support of his calmness and self-reliance, were felt all through the household by those members of it to whom the life or death of Madeleine was a matter of infinite importance, and by those who felt a decent amount of interest, but could have commanded their feelings readily enough. As for Wilmot himself, he would have found it difficult to account for the absorption of feeling and interest with which he watched the case, had he been called upon to render any account of it to others. In his own mind he shirked the question, and simply devoted himself day and night to his patient, leaving the house only once a day for a brief time, during which he would stride up and down the terrace in front of the house, gulping in all the fresh air he could inhale; and then his place in the sick-chamber was taken by an old woman, who had years before been Madeleine's nurse, and who was now married and settled on the estate. Not since the old days of his house-surgeonship at St. Vitus's had Chudleigh Wilmot had such a spell of duty as this: the fact of his giving up his time in this manner to a girl with whom he had not exchanged twenty words, with whose friends he had no previous acquaintance, in whom he could have no possible interest, came upon him frequently in his enforced exercise on the terrace, in his long weary vigils in the sick-room; and each time that he thought it over, he felt or pronounced it to himself to be more and more inexplicable. In London he made it an inexorable rule never to leave his bed at night, unless the person sending for him were a regular patient, no matter what might be their position in life, or the exigency of their case; and even among his own connection he kept strictly to consultation and prescription; he undertook no practical work, there were apothecaries and nurses for that sort of thing. He had a list of both, whom he could recommend, but he himself never paid any attention to such matters. And here he was acting as a combination of physician, apothecary, and nurse, dispensing the necessary medicines from the family medicine-chest, sitting up all night, concocting soothing drinks, and smoothing hot and uneasy pillows.
Why? Chudleigh Wilmot had asked himself that question a thousand times, and had not yet found the answer to it. Beauty in distress--and this girl, for all her mass of golden hair and her bright complexion and her blue eyes, could only be called pretty--beauty in distress was no more strange to Chudleigh Wilmot than to the hero of nautical melodrama at a transpontine theatre. He was constantly being called in to cases where he saw girls as young and as pretty as Madeleine Kilsyth "hove down in the bay of sickness," as the said nautical dramatic hero forcibly expresses it. Scarcely a day passed that he was not for some few minutes by the couch of some woman of far superior attractions to this young girl, and yet of whom he had never thought in any but the most thoroughly professional manner, listening to her complaints, marking her symptoms, prescribing his remedies, and entering up the visit in his note-book, as he whirled away in his carriage, as methodically as a City accountant. But he had never felt in his life as he felt one bright afternoon when the wild delirium had spent its rage and died away, and the doctor sat by the girl's bedside, and held her hand, no longer dry and parched with fever, and bent over her to catch the low faint accents of her voice.
"You don't know me, Miss Kilsyth," said he gently, as he saw her dazed by looking up into his face.
"O yes," said Madeleine, in ever so low a voice,--"O yes; you are Doctor--Doctor--I cannot recollect your name; but I know you were sent for, and I saw you before--before I was--"
"Before you were so ill; quite right, my dear young lady. I am Dr. Wilmot, and you have been very ill; but you are better now, and--please God--will soon be well."