‘I don’t say you meant it so, but at the least it was a piece of great officiousness on your part. How dared you think, or let others think,’ she went on, suddenly flaring up, ‘that my husband—is mad? Is that brotherly solicitude? For shame! For shame! Had I known who your friend was, I would have turned him from my door.’
‘Then there is no chance, I suppose,’ said Arthur, sorrowfully, ‘of persuading you to join your forces to ours, and inducing Henry to go away with us for a change?’
‘Not the slightest. He does not need change. If he does, we will go away quietly together. Don’t think me unkind, Arthur, but I have already told you what Henry’s illness arises from. I know he sometimes takes a little dose of morphia, or smokes a pipe of opium; he does it to allay the pain of neuralgia, which often unfits him for business; many other neuralgic patients do the same. The pain he endures unfits him for society also; it upsets his nerves and makes him irritable. But to call him mad—to bring a mad doctor to see him, without asking his consent, or mine— Oh! it was cruel—cruel!’
She turned her back upon her brother-in-law, and went on with her work, whilst he sat there, hardly knowing what to do or say.
‘How am I to persuade you, Hannah,’ he resumed at last, ‘that I acted in all love and kindness towards my brother and you? I believed that, living always by his side, you could not have noticed what is so very palpable to me—the extraordinary change in poor Henry—’
‘Not seen it?’ she interrupted him with. ‘Not wept over it, and prayed over it for months past! Why not say at once that I do not love my husband, Arthur? I know far more of him than you do, and could have saved you the trouble of bringing a mad doctor to gloat upon his infirmities. Henry is unhappy, poor darling! He has been unhappy ever since his partner’s death, and his nerves have become unstrung. He is foolish, perhaps, to take so much morphia, but it soothes and relieves him, and anything is better than that he should suffer. But you will not cure him—neither you nor your doctors! Only time and affection will do that, with perfect quiet. I will not, therefore, have him disturbed, nor worried in any way, either by relations or strangers. I will not let him go to public amusements again, which only tire him, but he shall stay at home with me till God, in His own good time, sees fit to cure him of his complaint.’
‘Forgive me, Hannah,’ said Captain Hindes, after a pause, ‘I daresay I have been very officious, but I did it for the best. Won’t you believe that?’
‘Yes, I believe that.’
‘And I will leave Henry for the future to you. But, oh! do try to wean him from that dreadful habit. And look here, my dear, under these circumstances, what is the use of my remaining in London? I cannot afford the expense of an hotel, and came here, as you must know, only to be near you and Henry. But it can be no pleasure to me to continue to see him in this condition, especially if I can do him no good. It unnerves me, Hannah. He is a wreck of his former self. We shall only quarrel if we continue to meet, so the sooner I take my wife and little ones into the fresh country, the better. Don’t be surprised, then, if we start almost immediately, but I shall, of course, run up and say good-bye to you and Henry before we go.’
He held out his hand to her as he spoke, but, to his surprise, instead of taking it, Hannah covered her face with her own, and burst into a flood of tears.