And Captain Arthur Bohun, in spite of the cruel fate that had parted them, pressed the letter to his heart, and the sweet name, Ellen Adair--sweeter than any he would ever hear again--to his lips, and shed tears of anguish over it in the feebleness induced by illness.
They might take Mary Dallory to his room as much as they pleased; and Matilda might exert her little wiles in praising her, and madam hers to leave them "accidentally" together; but his heart was too full of another, and of its own bitter pain, to have room for as much as a responsive thought to Mary Dallory.
"Arthur is frightfully languid and apathetical!" spoke Miss North one day in a burst of resentment. "I'm sure he is quite rude to me and Mary: he lets us sit by him for an hour at a time, and never speaks."
"Consider how ill he has been--and is," remonstrated Sir Nash.
Mrs. Cumberland's span of life was drawing into a very narrow space: and it might be that she was beginning to suspect this. For some months she had been growing inwardly weaker; but the weakness had for a week or two been visibly and rapidly increasing. Captain Bohun's unaccountable behaviour had tried her--for Ellen's sake. She was responsible to Mr. Adair for the welfare of his daughter, and the matter was a source of daily and hourly annoyance to her. When this second tardy note arrived, she considered it, in one sense, a satisfactory explanation; in another, not so: since, if Captain Bohun had been too ill to write himself, why did he not get some one else to write to her and say so? However, she was willing to persuade herself that all would be right: and she told Ellen, without showing her the note, that Captain Bohun had been dangerously ill, unable to come or write. Hence Ellen's return letter.
But, apart from the progress of the illness in itself, nothing had done Mrs. Cumberland so much harm as the news of her daughter-in-law's death. It had been allowed to reach her abruptly, without the smallest warning. I suppose there is something in our common nature that urges us to impart sad tidings to others. Dinah, Jelly's friend and underling, was no exception to this rule. On the day after the death, she sat down and indited a letter to her fellow-servant, Ann, at Eastsea, in which she detailed the short progress of Mrs. Rane's illness, and her strangely sudden death. Ann, before she had well mastered the cramped lines, ran with white face to her mistress; and Miss Adair afterwards told her that she ought to have known better. That it was too great a shock for Mrs. Cumberland in her critical state, the girl in her repentance very soon saw. Mrs. Cumberland asked for the letter, and scarcely had it out of her hand for many hours. Dead! apparently from no sufficient cause; for the fever had lasted only a day, Dinah said, and had gone again. Mrs. Cumberland, in her bewilderment, began actually to think the whole thing was a fable.
Not for two or three days did she receive confirmation from Dr. Rane. Of course the doctor did not know or suppose that any one else would be writing to Eastsea; and he was perhaps willing to spare his mother the news as long as he could do so. He shortly described the illness--saying that he, himself, had entertained very little hope from the first, from the severity of the fever. But all this did not help to soothe Mrs. Cumberland; and in the two or three weeks that afterwards went on, she faded palpably. Little wonder the impression, that she was growing worse, made its way to Dallory.
[CHAPTER XVIII.]
JELLY'S TROUBLES
With the same rapidity that the sickness had appeared, so did it subside in Dallory. Mrs. Rane's was the last serious case: the last death; the very few cases afterwards were of the mildest description; and within a fortnight of the time that ill-fated lady was laid in the ground, people were restoring their houses and throwing their rooms open to the renewed air.