Sufficient time, however, had elapsed to Ralph to have received an answer to his second letter, but none arrived.
He came at last to a new determination. At all risks, he resolved, after seeing his mother and her party safely established at Vevey, to go to England, and with the help of the Cheltenham address in his possession, seek to discover his lost Marion, and learn the reason of her strange silence.
Mrs. Archer’s not having replied to his enquiries did not surprise him. He began to feel sure that she must have set out on her long journey eastward before his letter had arrived at her mother-in-law’s house. The fear that Marion might have accompanied her to India, he resolutely determined for the present to set aside. Time enough to think of it when he discovered it to be actually the case.
As ill-luck would have it, some considerable time elapsed before he found himself free to turn northwards. Half way on their journey to Switzerland Sybil fell ill—grievously ill, poor little dove–and he could not find it in his heart to leave her, even had he thought it right to do so. It was a very miserable state of things. Their resting-place was a small provincial town near the French frontier, where, as may be imagined, the accommodation was far from luxurious. They succeeded in securing the best rooms in the best hotel, which sounds gorgeous enough, but practically speaking was the very reverse.
The little inn was built round a small courtyard, on to which opened the windows of all the rooms. Considering that in this courtyard were performed all the unsightly, though doubtless unavoidable household duties, such as scouring of pans, washing of cabbages, and killing of chickens; that herein also took place all the gossiping, bargaining, and scolding of the neighbourhood; and that, to crown all, the weather was stiflingly hot, and cleanliness, but a pleasing recollection of the past, it may easily be imagined that it was hardly the spot one would choose to be ill in. The poor child suffered terribly. Her constant cry was for “Uncle Ralph,” in whose arms, at all hours of the day and night, she seemed alone to find ease or repose. And for a whole fortnight they knew not what to think or hope.
Lady Severn was wretched. She, too, in her suffering and anxiety clung closely to her son. It drew them very near together—this time of dread and watching—and did not a little to reveal to the poor lady the true character of her quondam favourite, Florence Vyse. The beauty, as might have been expected, behaved with utter heartlessness and selfish disregard of every one’s comfort but her own; grumbling fretfully whenever she thought Lady Severn could not hear her, at the hardship of being detained in this “odious hole,” and all but saying openly that if only they could get away from this “horrible place,” she cared little whether the child lived or died.
But sweet Sybil’s life-battle was not yet to end. She recovered, and, as is the way with children once they “get the turn,” as it is called, amazed them all by the speediness of her convalescence.
Spite of all the disadvantages of her surroundings, by the latter half of May she was able to be moved, and the end of the month saw them all comfortably established in the pretty Swiss “maison de campagne.” Then at last Ralph began to think of executing his project. But before he had had time to enter into any of its details, the whole scheme was unexpectedly knocked on the head.
The first morning after their arrival in Vevey, he was passing along the principal street on his way to look up the doctor in whose care they had been advised to place Sybil, when, some way in front, he saw a familiar figure advancing towards him.
An Englishwoman evidently, as he could have told by her walk, even had he not known her. Middle-sized and broadset, ruddy-complexioned and reddish haired, coming along with that peculiar swing of mingled hauteur and nonchalance, affected by one type of that curious genus, the fast young lady; there was no mistaking our old acquaintance Sophy Berwick.