"I'll rest nowhere till I've been to Marchmont Towers," answered the young soldier passionately. "If I must walk there,––if I'm to drop down dead on the road,––I'll go. If the cornfields between this and the Towers were a blazing prairie or a raging sea, I'd go. Get me a fly, man; and don't talk to me of my mother or the doctors. I'm going to look for my wife. Get me a fly."
This demand for a commonplace hackney vehicle sounded rather like an anti–climax, after the young man's talk of blazing prairies and raging seas; but passionate reality has no ridiculous side, and Edward Arundel's most foolish words were sublime by reason of their earnestness.
"Get me a fly, Morrison," he said, grinding his heel upon the platform in the intensity of his impatience. "Or, stay; we should gain more in the end if you were to go to the George––it's not ten minutes' walk from here; one of the porters will take you––the people there know me, and they'll let you have some vehicle, with a pair of horses and a clever driver. Tell them it's for an errand of life and death, and that Captain Arundel will pay them three times their usual price, or six times, if they wish. Tell them anything, so long as you get what we want."
The valet, an old servant of Edward Arundel's father, was carried away by the young man's mad impetuosity. The vitality of this broken–down invalid, whose physical weakness contrasted strangely with his mental energy, bore down upon the grave man–servant like an avalanche, and carried him whither it would. He was fain to abandon all hope of being true to the promises which he had given to Mrs. Arundel and the medical men, and to yield himself to the will of the fiery young soldier.
He left Edward Arundel sitting upon a chair in the solitary waiting–room, and hurried after the porter who had volunteered to show him the way to the George Inn, the most prosperous hotel in Swampington.
The valet had good reason to be astonished by his young master's energy and determination; for Mary Marchmont's husband was as one rescued from the very jaws of death. For eleven weeks after that terrible concussion upon the South–Western Railway, Edward Arundel had lain in a state of coma,––helpless, mindless; all the story of his life blotted away, and his brain transformed into as blank a page as if he had been an infant lying on his mother's knees. A fractured skull had been the young Captain's chief share in those injuries which were dealt out pretty freely to the travellers in the Exeter mail on the 15th of August; and the young man had been conveyed to Dangerfield Park, whilst his father's corpse lay in stately solemnity in one of the chief rooms, almost as much a corpse as that dead father.
Mrs. Arundel's troubles had come, as the troubles of rich and prosperous people often do come, in a sudden avalanche, that threatened to overwhelm the tender–hearted matron. She had been summoned from Germany to attend her husband's deathbed; and she was called away from her faithful watch beside that deathbed, to hear tidings of the accident that had befallen her younger son.
Neither the Dorsetshire doctor who attended the stricken traveller upon his homeward journey, and brought the strong man, helpless as a child, to claim the same tender devotion that had watched over his infancy, nor the Devonshire doctors who were summoned to Dangerfield, gave any hope of their patient's recovery. The sufferer might linger for years, they said; but his existence would be only a living death, a horrible blank, which it was a cruelty to wish prolonged. But when a great London surgeon appeared upon the scene, a new light, a wonderful gleam of hope, shone in upon the blackness of the mother's despair.
This great London surgeon, who was a very unassuming and matter–of–fact little man, and who seemed in a great hurry to earn his fee and run back to Saville Row by the next express, made a brief examination of the patient, asked a very few sharp and trenchant questions of the reverential provincial medical practitioners, and then declared that the chief cause of Edward Arundel's state lay in the fact that a portion of the skull was depressed,––a splinter pressed upon the brain.
The provincial practitioners opened their eyes very wide; and one of them ventured to mutter something to the effect that he had thought as much for a long time. The London surgeon further stated, that until the pressure was removed from the patient's brain, Captain Edward Arundel would remain in precisely the same state as that into which he had fallen immediately upon the accident. The splinter could only be removed by a very critical operation, and this operation must be deferred until the patient's bodily strength was in some measure restored.