"We have every hope of saving him," said Geraldine.
"And what a place I find him in! He has had some kind of doctor attending him, I suppose?"
"He has had a surgeon from the neighbourhood, who seems both kind and clever, and Dr. Ormond."
Mr. Granger seated himself at the foot of the bed, a very little way from
Clarissa, taking possession of his child, as it were.
"Do you know, Mrs. Granger, that I have scarcely rested night or day since you left Paris, hunting for my son?" he said. And this was the first time he acknowledged his wife's presence by word or look.
Clarissa was silent. She had been betrayed, she thought—betrayed by her own familiar friend; and Daniel Granger had come to rob her of her child. Come what might, she would not part with him without a struggle.
After this, there came a weary time of anxious care and watching. The little life trembled in the balance; there were harassing fluctuations, a fortnight of unremitting care, before a favourable issue could be safely calculated upon. And during all that time Daniel Granger watched his boy with only the briefest intervals for rest or refreshment. Clarissa watched too; nor did her husband dispute her right to a place in the sick-room, though he rarely spoke to her, and then only with the coldest courtesy.
Throughout this period of uncertainty, Geraldine Challoner was faithful to the duty she had undertaken; spending the greatest part of her life at Clarissa's lodgings, and never wearying of the labours of the sick-room. The boy grew daily fonder of her; but, with a womanly instinct, she contrived that it should be Clarissa who carried him up and down the room when he was restless—Clarissa's neck round which the wasted little arm twined itself.
Daniel Granger watched the mother and child sometimes with haggard eyes, speculating on the future. If the boy lived, who was to have him? The mother, whose guilt or innocence was an open question—who had owned to being at heart false to her husband—or the father, who had done nothing to forfeit the right to his keeping? And yet to part them was like plucking asunder blossom and bud, that had grown side by side upon one common stem. In many a gloomy reverie the master of Arden Court debated this point.
He could never receive his wife again—upon that question there seemed to him no room for doubt. To take back to his home and his heart the woman who had confessed her affection for another man, was hardly in Daniel Granger's nature. Had he not loved her too much already—degraded himself almost by so entire a devotion to a woman who had given him nothing, who had kept her heart shut against him?