He was hopeful that he had made an advance, and yet this sudden recall to Trevlyn disconcerted him. Apart from the question of the earl’s death, there was another trouble, he believed, hanging over Monica’s future. Tom Pendrill had been profiting by her absence to “experiment,” as she would have called it, upon Arthur, with results that had surprised even him, though he had always believed the case curable if properly treated. Randolph had had nothing to do directly with the matter, but Tom had written lately, asking him to find out the best authorities on spinal injuries, and get some one or two specialists to come and have a look at the boy. This Randolph had done at his own expense, and with the result, as he had heard a few days back, that Arthur was to be sent abroad for a year, to be under a German doctor, whose cures of similar cases had been bringing him into marked repute.
Monica had been, by Arthur’s special wish, kept in ignorance of everything. He was eagerly anxious, even at the cost of considerable suffering, to submit to the prescribed treatment, feeling how much good he had already received from Tom’s more severe remedies; but he knew how Monica shrank from the idea of anything that could give him pain, how terrible she would consider the idea of parting, how vehemently she would struggle to thwart the proposed plan. So he had begged that she might be kept in ignorance till all was finally settled. Indeed, he had some idea, not entirely discouraged by Tom, of getting himself quietly removed to Germany in her absence, so that she might be spared all the anxiety, misery, and suspense.
Randolph could hardly have been acquitted of participation in the scheme, the whole cost of which was to fall upon him, and he wondered what Monica might think of his share in it. It had been no doing of his that she had not been told from the first. He had urged upon the others the unfairness of keeping her in the dark; but Arthur’s vehement wish for secrecy had won the day, and he had held his peace until he should be permitted to speak.
And now, what would happen? What was likely to be the result upon Monica of the inevitable disclosure? Would it not seem to her as if the first act of her husband, on succeeding to the family estate, was to banish from it the one being for whom she had so often bespoken his protection and brotherly care? Might she not fancy that he was in some way the originator of the scheme? Might she not be acute enough to see that but for him it never could have been carried out, owing to lack of necessary funds? Her father might have approved it, but he could not have forwarded it as Randolph was able to do. Might it not seem to her that he was trying to rid himself of an unwelcome burden, and to isolate his wife from all whom she loved best? He could not forget some of the words she had spoken not very long after their marriage. Practically those words had been rescinded by what had followed, but that could hardly be so in this case. Monica’s heart clung round Arthur with a passionate, yearning tenderness, that was one of the main-springs of her existence. What would she say to those who had banded together to take the boy from her?
Randolph’s pre-occupation and gravity were not lost upon Monica, but she had no clue to their real cause. She felt that there was something in it of which she was ignorant, and there was a sort of sadness and constraint even in the suspicion of such a thing. She was unnerved and miserable, and, although, she well knew she had not merited her husband’s full confidence, it hurt her keenly to feel that it was withheld from her.
Evening came on, a wild, melancholy stormy evening—is there anything more sad and dreary than a midsummer storm? It does not come with the wild, resistless might of a winter tempest, sweeping triumphantly along, carrying all before it in the exuberance of its power. It is a sad, subdued, moaning creature, full of eerie sounds of wailing and regret, not wrapped in darkness, but cloaked in misty twilight, grey and ghostlike—a pale, sorrowful, mysterious thing, that seems to know itself altogether out of place, and is haunted by its own melancholy and dreariness.
It was in the fast waning light of such a summer’s evening that the portals of Trevlyn opened to welcome Monica again.
She was in the old familiar hall that once had been so dear to her—the place whose stern, grim desolation had held such charms for her. Why did she now gaze round her with dilated eyes, a sort of horror growing upon her? Why did she cling to her husband’s arm so closely, as the frowning suits of mail and black carved faces stared at her out of the dusky darkness? Why was her first exclamation one of terror and dismay?
“Randolph! Randolph! This is not Trevlyn! It cannot be Trevlyn! Take me home! ah, take me home!”