To-day the sky was dull, and the velvet couch stood beside the hearth. Halcott sat at work in the adjoining bed-chamber, and came in every now and then to replenish the fire: a footman was always on duty in the corridor. A spring bell stood among the elegant trifles upon her ladyship's table; and the lightest touch of her left hand upon the bell brought her attendants to her side. She resolutely refused to have any one sitting with her all day long. Solitude was a necessity of her being, she told Mr. Horton, when he recommended that she should have some one always in attendance upon her.
As the weeks wore on her features had been restored to their proud, calm beauty, her articulation was almost as clear as of old: yet, now and then, there would be a sudden faltering, the tongue and lips would refuse their office, or she would forget a word, or use a wrong word unconsciously. But there was no recovery of power or movement on that side of the body which had been stricken. The paralysed limbs were still motionless, lifeless as marble; and it was clear that Mr. Horton had begun to lose heart about his patient. There was nothing obscure in the case, but the patient's importance made the treatment a serious matter, and the surgeon begged to be allowed to summon Sir William Jenner.
This, however, Lady Maulevrier refused.
'I don't want any fuss made about me,' she said. 'I am content to trust myself to your skill, and I beg that no other doctor may be summoned.'
Mr. Horton understood his patient's feelings on this point. She had a sense of humiliation in her helplessness, and, like some wounded animal that crawls to its covert to die, she would fain have hidden her misery from the eye of strangers. She had allowed no one, not even Maulevrier, to be informed of the nature of her illness.
'It will be time enough for him to know all about me when he comes here,' she said. 'I shall be obliged to see him whenever he does come.'
Maulevrier had spent Christmas and New Year in Paris, Mr. Hammond still his companion. Her ladyship commented upon this with a touch of scorn.
'Mr. Hammond is like the Umbra you were reading about the other day in Lord Lytton's "Last Days of Pompeii,"' she said to Mary. 'It must be very nice for him to go about the world with a friend who franks him everywhere.'
'But we don't know that Maulevrier franks him,' protested Mary, blushing. 'We have no right to suppose that Mr. Hammond does not pay his own expenses.'
'My dear child, is it possible for a young man who has no private means to go gadding about the world on equal terms with a spendthrift like Maulevrier—to pay for Moors in Scotland and apartments at the Bristol?'