“Very ill! Why, when I last saw him, at four o’clock, he was in fairly good form.”
“There has been a change for the worse, very sudden and rapid, and when the doctor got here he found diphtheritic symptoms. He ought to have been called, as I knew, in the morning, and the child ought n’t to have been brought into the garden.”
“My dear lady, he was very happy there,” I answered, much appalled.
“He would be happy anywhere. I have no doubt he is happy now, with his poor little throat in a state—” she dropped her voice as her brother came in, and Mark let us know that, as a matter of course, Mrs. Ambient would not appear. It was true that Dolcino had developed diphtheritic symptoms, but he was quiet for the present, and his mother was earnestly watching him. She was a perfect nurse, Mark said, and the doctor was coming back at ten o’clock. Our dinner was not very gay; Ambient was anxious and alarmed, and his sister irritated me by her constant tacit assumption, conveyed in the very way she nibbled her bread and sipped her wine, of having “told me so.” I had had no disposition to deny anything she told me, and I could not see that her satisfaction in being justified by the event made poor Dolcino’s throat any better. The truth is that, as the sequel proved, Miss Ambient had some of the qualities of the sibyl, and had therefore, perhaps, a right to the sibylline contortions. Her brother was so preoccupied that I felt my presence to be an indiscretion, and was sorry I had promised to remain over the morrow. I said to Mark that, evidently, I had better leave them in the morning; to which he replied that, on the contrary, if he was to pass the next days in the fidgets, my company would be an extreme relief to him. The fidgets had already begun for him, poor fellow; and as we sat in his study with our cigars after dinner, he wandered to the door whenever he heard the sound of the doctor’s wheels. Miss Ambient, who shared this apartment with us, gave me at such moments significant glances; she had gone upstairs before rejoining us to ask after the child His mother and his nurse gave a tolerable account of him; but Miss Ambient found his fever high and his symptoms very grave. The doctor came at ten o’clock, and I went to bed after hearing from Mark that he saw no present cause for alarm. He had made every provision for the night, and was to return early in the morning.
I quitted my room at eight o’clock the next day, and, as I came downstairs, saw, through the open door of the house, Mrs. Ambient standing at the front gate of the grounds, in colloquy with the physician. She wore a white dressing-gown, but her shining hair was carefully tucked away in its net, and in the freshness of the morning, after a night of watching, she looked as much “the type of the lady” as her sister-in-law had described her. Her appearance, I suppose, ought to have reassured me; but I was still nervous and uneasy, so that I shrank from meeting her with the necessary question about Dolcino. None the less, however, was I impatient to learn how the morning found him; and, as Mrs. Ambient had not seen me, I passed into the grounds by a roundabout way, and, stopping at a further gate, hailed the doctor just as he was driving away. Mrs. Ambient had returned to the house before he got into his gig.
“Excuse me, but as a friend of the family, I should like very much to hear about the little boy.”
The doctor, who was a stout, sharp man, looked at me from head to foot, and then he said, “I’m sorry to say I have n’t seen him.”
“Have n’t seen him?”
“Mrs. Ambient came down to meet me as I alighted, and told me that he was sleeping so soundly, after a restless night, that she did n’t wish him disturbed. I assured her I would n’t disturb him, but she said he was quite safe now and she could look after him herself.”
“Thank you very much. Are you coming back?”