The doctor was quite right. A hundred little things bore out his opinion. Bess would sit for hours staring into vacancy and talking to herself. She did not cry. She sat with tearless, lacklustre eyes, repeating to herself the sad story of her later life. There was no emotion, no passionate outbreak, only the monotonous misery. Marks made up his mind to obey the doctor’s instructions at once.
Bess offered no opposition. She seemed to have lost all power of will, all care or thought for herself. She expressed no surprise when her father told her they were going on a journey. She was still feeble and weak, but she could get about, and she obeyed him as the tired child obeys its nurse—mechanically.
Somehow or other, his daughter’s illness seemed to have obliterated all other thoughts from the old man’s mind. In that great trouble he lost sight of the disgrace of the young squire and the sufferings of the old one. He seldom thought of either.
It seemed to him that something very dreadful had happened a long time ago, but that was all over now, and he had nothing to do with it.
He had but one thing left to him now—his daughter. He knew that the prison-gates had closed upon her husband for years—that he was walled up in a living tomb, and might as well be dead. He knew that the old master he had served so faithfully, and whose service he had quitted stealthily and like a thief in the night, was lying paralyzed in his lonely mansion, body and mind alike wrecked by the blow which, as he thought, his own son had dealt him.
He had read in the papers the whole terrible history, for they had not been loth to comment on it, and his own name had been seized upon by the sensation-mongers and artfully interwoven With a narrative more fiction than fact.
To shun publicity and avoid inquiry, he had hidden his real name when he took the little London lodgings. All his desire was to forget the horrible past and devote himself to the poor girl cast back to his loving arms once more by the cruel waves of misfortune.
He accepted the doctor’s warning, and acted upon it at once. He had still enough money left to last them some months with care, and when Bess’s health was re-established he supposed they must set to and work, and, if Bess was too weak, why, he must work for the two.
He went down to the seaside with his invalid daughter and nursed her day and night. He painted the future to her brightly, talked of setting the lawyers to work to prove George’s innocence yet, and so bouyed her with hope that at last he saw a faint color coaxed into the white cheeks again and the dull eyes grow bright with tears.
As tenderly as he had watched and cherished her when she was a babe did the old father watch and cherish her now.