Two trained nurses from the county hospital alternated the daily and nightly watch by the sick-bed, and Lady Emily shared the day's, and sometimes the night's, duty, humbly assisting the skilled attendants, grateful for being permitted to aid in the smallest service for the son who lay helpless, inert, and unobserving on that bed which even yet might be his bed of death.
No one but those three women and the doctors was allowed to enter Allan's room. Mrs. Wornock was very kind and sympathetic, in spite of torturing anxieties about her son's unexplained absence; but she expressed no desire to see Allan, and she seldom saw Lady Emily for more than a few minutes in the course of the day. The whole house was ordered with reference to the sick-room. Organ and piano were closed and dumb, and a funereal silence reigned everywhere.
And so the wintry days went by, and rain and rough weather made a sufficient excuse for Suzette's staying quietly at home, and seeing very little of the outer world. Mrs. Mornington took the social aspect of the crisis entirely on her own hands, and informed her friends that the wedding had been deferred, partly on account of Allan's illness, and for other reasons which she was not at liberty to explain.
"My niece is very capricious," she said.
"I hope she has not sent Mr. Wornock off to Africa again!" exclaimed Mrs. Roebuck. "Such a brilliant young man, with a house so peculiarly adapted for entertaining, should not be allowed to become an absentee. It is too great a loss for such a place as this, where so few people entertain."
Mrs. Roebuck's estimate of her acquaintance was always based upon their capacity for entertaining, though she herself, on this scale, would have been marked zero.
"No, I don't think he will go back to Africa. But my niece and he have agreed to part—for a short time, at any rate. She is sending back all her wedding-presents this week."
"Oh, pray don't let her send me that absurd Japanese paper-knife! I only chose it because it is so deliciously ugly and queer. And I knew that, marrying a man of Mr. Wornock's means, she wouldn't want anything costly or useful—no fish-knives or salt-cellars."
"Well, if it really is off, or likely to be off," Mr. Roebuck said, with a solemnly confidential air, "I don't mind saying in confidence that I think your niece has acted wisely. The young man is a genius, no doubt; but he's a little bit overstrung—fanatico per la musica, don't you know. And one never knows whether that sort of thing won't go further," tapping his forehead suggestively.
"Oh, das macht nichts; the poor dear young man is toqué, only toqué, not fêlé," protested Mrs. Roebuck, who affected a polyglot style.