“Well, I told her she could go if she liked; but I never meant her to take me at my word.”
Bram was thunderstruck. Such a simple solution of the mystery of the disappearance of the dutiful daughter had never entered his mind. In a fit of passion, perhaps of partial intoxication, Theodore had bade his daughter get out of the house. And the long-suffering girl had taken him at his word.
The doctor nodded.
“I thought so,” said he. “I thought there was no end to what the child would put up with at your hands. So you have driven her away? Well, then you’ll have to suffer for it, I’m afraid. I don’t know of anybody else who would come to nurse you.”
“I’ll do what I can,” said Bram in a hollow voice from the background.
It needed an effort on his part to make this offer. He felt that he loathed the little wretch who had himself driven his daughter into the arms of her untrustworthy lover. Only the thought that Claire would wish him to do so enabled him to undertake the distasteful task of ministering to such a patient. Theodore thanked him in a half-hearted sort of way, feeling that there was something not altogether grateful to himself in the spirit in which this offer was made. The doctor was far more cordial.
He told Bram he was doing a fine thing.
“But then,” he added in his rough way, “fine things are what one expects of you, Mr. Elshaw.”
And then he went out, leaving Theodore in much perplexity as to what the fellow could see in Elshaw to make such a fuss about.
Bram spent the night with him, doing his best to soothe and to comfort the unfortunate man, whose sufferings, both of mind and body, grew more acute as the hours wore on. His own worry about himself was the chief cause of this. Long before morning he had lost sight of the shame of his daughter’s flight, and looked upon it solely as a wicked freak which had resulted in his own most cruel misfortune.