Uncle Robert, who read his sister’s eyes, insisted that she should remain.
“You will stay till he is well,” announced Uncle Robert. “No one on earth is so good a nurse as you, and Mrs. Henderson will look after Hawk’s Nest. It will do her good to have something to see to, so you need not worry in the least. The boys will keep me occupied.”
Mrs. Ransom, far from being affronted by the proposal Mr. Burns made, was much relieved by it.
“The Colonel was ‘a bit of a handful’ when he was well, and goodness knows what he would be like ill,” she said.
But Colonel Lane was not even “a bit of a handful,” as it turned out. He was very ill indeed, and was as patient as very ill persons usually are.
Dr. Nansel insisted on a professional nurse, but said that Mrs. Barrimore might share the work with her. Dr. Nansel described the case as complicated. The heart was very weak. There had been at one time abscess of the liver, contracted in India. But nervous breakdown of a very serious character was the cause of the present mischief. The condition of the heart was such that death might ensue. Evidently the Colonel had held up till he literally dropped. Careful nursing and the enforced rest might bring him round, but Anglo-Indians slipped through the fingers in a most amazing way. They had nearly always some undeclared mischief, which asserted itself with direful results when illness from another cause overtook them. Anglo-Indians were “a bag of tricks.” Still, of course there was hope.
What Annie Barrimore suffered in the days that followed only God knew.
Philip, for whom she had sacrificed this man’s happiness and her own, was now quite in the background. The mother-love which had been so intensely strong in her gave place now to the passionate love she felt for the man who was apparently dying before her eyes.
Had she married him this would not have happened. She felt that she had murdered him she loved best. She knew now what she had not known before, that her love for this man was greater than her love for her son. Yet, this was not really the case; the love was different, that was all.
Most days, when the trained nurse was in charge, Uncle Robert fetched his sister to take a few hours’ rest in her home. He was not without fear that she would break down; but he felt he had chosen the lesser evil, for she would never have borne to be kept away from the beloved patient.