His rapid restoration was due, in part, to the physicians, who found his symptoms far easier to analyse under the effects of the drug than they had been during the complex reactions of his convalescence; and in part to the curious obstinacy of the old man himself who, with a vivid memory of their last experiment, successfully refused to touch another spoonful of medicine. Under the combined influence of their science and his mother-wit, he was within three days dressed and about the house. Within a week he was walking out daily, and soon manifested that revolt against restraint, which is but the return of an active and working brain to its normal functions.
As Mr Burden could spend more and more of the day downstairs, Cosmo rightly thought it less and less his duty to waste his time at home. Such was his zeal in his new-found opportunities for work, that he would leave the house before his father had been permitted to rise; and the recreation necessary after a long day, not to speak of private calls which had to be made upon other members of the original syndicate, commonly prevented his return until long after his father was asleep.
In these days, therefore, which just preceded Mr Burden’s reappearance in the City, he saw but little of his son.
Of Mr Barnett he saw and heard even less, on account of that deplorable imbroglio with which my reader is already acquainted. The interval was short. It was but a fortnight after the scene in the drawing-room, that the doctor gave Mr Burden leave to resume his business activities; but the continued loneliness and silence had borne upon him very heavily.
I myself saw him in those days, and I myself was deceived by his reaction towards health. I did not comprehend, nor did anyone comprehend, how deep was the wound which even so short an illness and one of so indeterminate a nature could inflict upon such a character as Mr Burden’s, a character already shaken by doubt and continual nameless perplexities.
We could all see that he had been thrust suddenly beyond the boundary of old age, but we could not see the further thing: I mean, that he was very near to the last fall of all; that any sudden blow might be his end.
That blow was delivered, of course, by the blundering hand of the unpardonable Abbott.
It will readily be perceived that, with a man of Mr Abbott’s temper, the great forces of modern England would breed, not only a reactionary hatred, but a mania for suspicion.
The man was for ever putting two and two together. He was perpetually seeing conspiracies where no conspiracy existed, nay where no conspiracy could, in the nature of things, exist. He would smell out the secret influences of what he called “cosmopolitan finance,” in the actions of the dullest and most orderly of civil servants. He had dropped one newspaper after another, proceeding on a scale, as it were, from the fairly sane to the hopelessly fanatical. At last he had come to reading none, with the exception of a weekly sheet which not only floundered into every mare’s nest of politics, but was largely supported by subscriptions from Mr Abbott himself.