Out he went again, and talked with Archdale, who was in plain clothes, and a round hat, with a great coat buttoned up to his smooth blue chin, and a gig-whip in his hand. Archdale, as usual, was severely placid and brief, and as Harry talked with him outside, Mildred Tarnley thought she heard a step in the loft over her head, and another sound that excited her curiosity. She listened, but all was quiet again.
Harry returned in comparatively high spirits.
“Well, Mrs. Tarnley,” said he, “the ’bus is a bit late, I’m thinkin’, but anyhow, he can’t wait,” and he pointed over his shoulder at Mr. Archdale who stood at the door; “he’ll drive you back again, and he knows the road as far as Cressley Common, and you can show him the rest,—and you’ll want to be back again with poor Alice,—and the doctor will look in here, often in the week—almost every day—and tell you how the little chap’s going on. And see, here’s a very respectable woman—what’s her name?—she was here this minute, and she won’t be leaving till after the ’bus comes in, and you leave her the baby, and I’ll wait here till I see it in charge of the nurse that’s coming from Wykeford. Come in, will ye?—not you—the woman, I mean. Now, Mildred, give her the baby.”
The woman had a gentle, cheerful, and honest face; and looked down with the angelic light of a woman’s tenderness on the sleeping face of the little baby.
“Lord love it,” she murmured, smiling. “What a darling little face!”
Mildred Tarnley looked down on it, too. She said nothing. She bit her lips hard, and her old eyes filled up with tears that welled over as she surrendered the baby, without a word, and then hastily she went out, mounted to her seat in the tax-cart, and was driven swiftly away by a companion as silent as he who had conveyed her there.
CHAPTER LV.
HOW FARES THE CHILD?
Dr. Willett called regularly at the Grange, and kind Lady Wyndale was daily there, taking the doctor’s directions about jellies, wines, and such other good things as the depressed state of the patient called for, notwithstanding her fever.
In a few days more he changed this treatment. The patient, in fact, could not be got to swallow these things. Dr. Willett became more perplexed. It was not exactly gastric fever, but he thought it more resembled that flickering treacherous fire than any other fever with which he was acquainted.
There are sicknesses that will not be cured through the body. The mind diseased, which is the parent of these impracticable maladies, of which, when people die, they are said to have died of a broken heart—disdains the apothecary’s boxes and bottles—knows nothing of them. The heart-ache, of which it is no more than an unusually protracted fit, has its seat in that which no apothecary can hear, see, feel, or understand. When the immortal, and in this life, inscrutable, spirit, which is the unseen lodger, the master, of the body, sickens, all sickens. In its pain all below it writhe and wither, and the body, its ultimate expression, reflects but cannot mitigate its torment.