“He looked as if he knew what it was.”
“Oh, hush, here he is coming back! don’t let him hear you,” cried the housekeeper, and then the colloquy came to an end.
But the case was not so simple as Miss Hofland thought. No power of making an effort remained in poor little Hetty. Her previous terrors, which had been chiefly of the imagination, had undermined her strength. She had no longer any force to resist this overwhelming horror when it came. Whether it was her intelligence which had been killed by the blow, whether she were only stunned temporarily, or if it was a moral paralysis of the whole being which had laid her low, could not be divined. She came round a little from that first trance. After a time her eyes could close, her breathing began to be faintly audible, the rigidity of her limbs relaxed. After a longer interval she came to herself so much as to say “Thank you” faintly to the nurses, and to swallow, though with difficulty, the nourishment they administered. During this period there had been the greatest difficulty in satisfying Hetty’s correspondents at home. She had already fallen out of her early punctuality in respect to letter-writing, which smoothed matters a little; but when day by day went by without producing any amelioration in her state, and when letters began to rain upon the house at Horton full of demands for explanation, and to know what was the matter, Mr. Darrell one day announced to the housekeeper with some haste, and an unnecessary sharpness of tone, “I’ll tell you what it is. I’m going to send for her mother, and that without delay.”
Mrs. Mills looked up in consternation. “Her mother!” she cried. “The last woman in the world to come here!”
“She may be the last woman or anything else you please, but she is the only person that has anything to do here, and I am going to send for her. Look there! do you think that can be allowed to go on?” the young man cried, turning half round to where Hetty sat like a waxen image, supported by cushions in a chair. She lay back as white as the pillow upon which her head rested, her eyelids flickering now and then, her thin hands crossed in her lap. She made no complaint, said scarcely anything except that feeble “Thank you,” when anything was brought her, or when some of her anxious attendants paused to smooth her cushions, or ask if she wanted anything. It was a sight to melt the hardest heart.
“And it is more than a week since it happened,” said young Darrell, “and that is all we have been able to do. You are an excellent nurse, Mrs. Mills; you have neglected nothing: and Miss Hofland does everything that kindness can suggest: but you see yourself that we make no progress. I can do nothing more; her mother may.”
“Time will make it all right,” the housekeeper said. “Of course I am very sorry—I would give anything that it had not happened. Of course the poor little thing has got a dreadful shock. But she is very young, and in time she will get all right.”
“If you like to trust to time with such a delicate thing as a girl’s life,” said the young doctor, “I don’t. We must do something. Either that and try the effect of nature, or else I must have the best authority from town to see her; and you know what questions a physician would ask, and perhaps you know how we could answer him. I don’t.”
“Mr. Darrell,” said the housekeeper, “you’re my superior. I have to take my orders from you. All the same, I consider that our first business is to look after what we were put here for. I cannot acknowledge that a child frightened, even though she is frightened into fits, is any reason for giving up.”
“There are a hundred reasons for giving up,” cried the young man passionately. “I would give up this moment if I could, if there was any one to give up my charge to. It’s neither right nor necessary, what we’re doing. I have never stopped regretting I undertook it, never since——”