“Well, perhaps that is just,” she said, regretfully; “but yet here is me and Gilchrist hungering for something to do, and all the good pounds a week that might be so useful handed over to them.”
Dora listened to all this, half indignant, half uncomprehending. She had a boundless scorn of the “good pounds” of which Miss Bethune in her Scotch phraseology spoke so tenderly. And she did not clearly understand why this particular point in her father’s illness should be so much more important than any other. She heard her own affairs discussed as through a haze, resenting that these other people should think they had so much to do with them, and but dimly understanding what they meant by it. Her father, indeed, did not seem to her any better at all, when she was allowed for a moment to see him as he lay asleep. But Dora, fortunately, thought nothing of the expenses, nor how the little money that came in at quarter day would melt away like snow, nor how the needs, now miraculously supplied as by the ravens, would look when the invalid awoke to a consciousness of them, and of how they were to be provided in a more natural way.
It was not very long, however, before something of that consciousness awoke in the eyes of the patient, as he slowly came back into the atmosphere of common life from which he had been abstracted so long. He was surprised to find Dr. Roland at his pillow, which that eager student would scarcely have left by day or night if he could have helped it, and the first glimmering of anxiety about his ways and means came into his face when Roland explained hastily that Vereker came faithfully so long as there was any danger. “But now he thinks a poor little practitioner like myself, being on the spot, will do,” he said, with a laugh. “Saves fees, don’t you know?”
“Fees?” poor Mannering said, with a bewildered consciousness; and next morning began to ask when he could go back to the Museum. Fortunately, all ideas were dim in that floating weakness amid the sensations of a man coming back to life. Convalescence is sweet in youth; but it is not sweet when a man whose life is already waning comes back out of the utter prostration of disease into the lesser but more conscious ills of common existence. Presently he began to look at the luxuries with which he was surrounded, and the attendants who watched over him, with alarm. “Look here, Roland, I can’t afford all this. You must put a stop to all this,” he said.
“We can’t be economical about getting well, my dear fellow,” said the doctor. “That’s the last thing to save money on.”
“But I haven’t got it! One can’t spend what one hasn’t got,” cried the sick man. It is needless to say that his progress was retarded, and the indispensable economies postponed, by this new invasion of those cares which are to the mind what the drainage which Dr. Vereker alone believed in is to the body.
“Never mind, father,” Dora said in her ignorance; “it will all come right.”
“Right? How is it to come right? Take that stuff away. Send these nurses away. I can’t afford it. Do you hear me? I cannot afford it!” he began to cry night and day.
CHAPTER VIII.
Mr. Mannering’s convalescence was worse than his illness had been to the house in Bloomsbury. Mrs. Simcox’s weekly bill fell by chance into the patient’s hands, and its items filled him with horror. When a man is himself painfully supported on cups of soup and wings of chicken, the details of roast lamb for the day-nurse’s dinner, and bacon and eggs for the night-nurse’s breakfast, take an exaggerated magnitude. And Mrs. Simcox was very conscientious, putting down even the parsley and the mint which were necessary for these meals. This bill put back the patient’s recovery for a week, and prolonged the expenses, and brought the whole house, as Mrs. Simcox declared tearfully, on her comparatively innocent head.