“You will take all necessary steps at once?” said Lord Cheriton, looking from one doctor to the other.
Both were consentient. Dr. Wilmot drove off at once to find the nearest medical man, and brought him back in his carriage. A very brief interview with the patient convinced this gentleman of the necessity for gentle restraint, and the certificate was signed by him and Dr. Wilmot.
It was six o’clock, and the shadows were deepening in the room where Mrs. Porter was sitting, quiescent, silent, in a kind of apathy from which she was scarcely roused by the entrance of the nurse from Cheshunt, a tall comely-looking woman of about thirty, neatly dressed, and with pleasant manners.
Mrs. Porter sat there in her dull lethargy, the food that had been prepared for her untasted at her side. The nurse looked at the patient with a keen professional eye, and from the patient to the tray where an ill-cooked chop stagnated in a pool of grease; and where the unused teacup showed that even the feminine refreshment of tea had failed to tempt her.
“She hasn’t eaten anything,” said the nurse, “and she looks weak and wasted, as if she had been for a long time without food. You’d better send for some beef essence and a little brandy. She ought to be kept up somehow, if she is to be taken to Cheshunt to-night. It will be a long drive.”
Lord Cheriton despatched the policeman’s wife to the nearest chemist’s and the nearest wine merchant’s, while he went himself to a livery stable and ordered a brougham and pair to be at Myrtle Cottage at seven o’clock. The certificate had been signed, and there was nothing to hinder the removal of the patient. He found Mercy with her mother upon his return, but the mother had given no sign of recognition, and the daughter sorrowfully acknowledged the necessity of the case after Dr. Mainwaring had gently explained her mother’s condition to her.
“I am not surprised,” she said, with sad submission, “I saw it coming years ago. I have lain awake many a night when I was a girl listening to her footsteps as she walked up and down her bedroom, and to the heart-broken sigh that she gave every now and then, in the dead of the night, when she thought there was no one to hear her.”
An hour later the woman who for twenty years had been known as Mrs. Porter, and who was to carry that name to her dying day, was on her way to The Grange, Cheshunt, with her daughter and the nurse in the carriage with her. She had made no resistance, had gone where she was asked to go, with an apathetic indifference, had given no trouble; but although her daughter had been with her for an hour, doing all that tender attention could do to awaken her memory, there had been not a word or a look from the mother to betoken consciousness of her existence.
Yet it was clear that the mental powers were only clouded, not extinguished; for, as Lord Cheriton stood a little way outside the porch watching her as she passed out to the carriage, she stopped suddenly and looked at him.
“Will you and I ever meet again, James Dalbrook?” she asked solemnly.