“Oh, no; we have not made any mistake,” cried the children with one voice. “Besides, he was such friends with us. He promised to give us quantities of things; and then he is like papa.”
“I don’t think Sir William is well,” said Fairfax, hurriedly. He rose up with an exclamation of terror, and Lady Markham sprang to her feet and rushed to her husband’s side.
“I am feeling—a little faint,” he said, in a half-whisper, with a tremendous attempt to regain command of himself; but it failed. His head drooped, his eyelids quivered, and then lay half-closed upon the dim langour underneath that had lost all power of seeing; his breath laboured, and came in gasps from his pale lips. All the sudden recovery in which they had been so happy was over. Alice put the children hastily out of the room, like a flock frightened, as she ran to call Jarvis, to get what was necessary, to send for the village doctor. The boys and girls got together into a corner of the hall and cried silently, clinging together in fright and sorrow; or at least the girls cried, wondering—
“Was it anything we said?”
“Oh, I wish—I wish!” cried Bell, but in a whisper, “that I had not said anything about the little gentleman!”
But of all the family she was the only one that thought of this. The others though they were much alarmed were not surprised. There was nothing, alas! more natural than that these fits should come on again. The doctor had expected it. They said to each other that he had been more tired with the journey than they supposed—that indeed it was certain in his state of health that he must be worn out by the journey: the wonder only was that he had revived at all. He was carried to his room after a while, the children looking on drearily from their corner, full of dismay. To them nothing seemed to be too dreadful to be expected.
“Oh, why does papa look so pale?” Marie sobbed, with that blighting terror which seizes a child at the first sight of such signs of mortality. Even the boys had much to do to rub away out of the corners of their eyes the sudden burst of tears.
“I am better—much better,” the sick man said, when he came to himself, “but very weak. You won’t allow me to be disturbed? I cannot see any one—it is impossible for me to see any one, Isabel.”
“Do you think I will let you be disturbed?” said Lady Markham. “And who would disturb you? Do you forget, William, that we are at home?”
But that word, so full of consolation, fell upon him with no healing in it. Yes, he knew very well that he was at home, and that his enemy who had been waiting for him all these years—his enemy who meant him no harm, who meant no one any harm—the deadliest foe of the children and their mother, his own reproach and shame—that innocent yet mortal enemy was close to him, lurking among the trees, behind the peaceful houses in the village, to disturb him as no one else could. His wife put back the curtain so as to shield his feeble eyes from the lamp, and sat down—anxious, yet serene—wondering at his strange fancy. Disturb him! Who could disturb him here?