A MORNING'S WORK.
“Go and lie down for an hour,” whispered Phœbe. “I am not sleepy at all. I have sat up before, and never felt it, you never did, I can see it in your poor little white face; and besides, I am steadier, because I am not so anxious. Now go, Ursula, if you are really fond of me, as you say—”
“Oh, Phœbe! if you think he is a little better. Oh, how horrible it is to be sleepy, as if you were all body, and had no heart at all!”
“You have plenty of heart, but you have never been used to this nursing. Leave your door open, so that I may call you in a moment. I have sat up often. Now go, to please me,” said Phœbe. She had another object than mere rest to her friend, who at last, very much ashamed and crying softly, yet so weary that nothing on this earth seemed so desirable to her as sleep, crept to her room, and lay down there as the pale morning began to dawn. Betsy slept heavily in an easy-chair outside the door of the sick-room. She was there at hand in case anything was wanted, but she was happily unconscious where she was, sleeping the sleep of hard work and a mind undisturbed. Phœbe had seen that the patient was stirring out of the dull doze in which his faculties had been entirely stilled and stupefied. He was rousing to uneasiness, if not to full consciousness. Two or three times he made a convulsive movement, as if to raise himself; once his eyes, which were half open, seemed to turn upon her with a vague glimmer of meaning. How strangely she felt towards him, as she sat there in the grey of the morning, sole guardian, sole confidant of this erring and miserable man! The thought ran through her with a strange thrill. He was nothing to her, and yet he was absolutely in her power, and in all heaven and earth there seemed no one who was capable of protecting him, or cared to do so, except herself only. She sat looking at him with a great pity in her mind, determined to be his true protector, to deliver him from what he himself had done. She had not realized at first what it was he had done, and indeed it was only now that its full enormity, or rather its full consequences (which were the things that affected her most urgently), made themselves apparent to her. Generalizations are unsafe things; and whether it was because she was a woman that Phœbe, passing over the crime, fixed her thoughts upon the punishment, I do not venture to say; but she did so. After all a few lines of writing on a bit of paper is not a crime which affects the imagination of the inexperienced. Had it been a malicious slander Phœbe would have realized the sin of it much more clearly; but the copy of her grandfather's signature did not wound her moral sense in the same way, though it was a much more serious offence. That Mr. May could have intended to rob him of the money appeared impossible to her; and no doubt the borrowing of the signature was wrong—very wrong. Yes, of course it was horribly, fatally wrong; but still it did not set her imagination aglow with indignant horror, as smaller affairs might have done. But the consequences—disgrace, ruin, the loss of his position, the shame of his profession, moral death indeed, almost as frightful as if he had been hanged for murder. She shivered as she sat by him, veiled by the curtain, and thought of her grandfather's vindictive fierceness; only she stood between him and destruction, and Phœbe felt that it was by no legitimate means that she was doing so, not by her influence over her grandfather as she had hoped, but only by an unjustifiable expedient which in itself was a kind of crime. This, however, brought a slight smile on her face. She took out her little purse from her pocket, and looked at the bit of paper carefully folded in it. The faint perfume of the Russia leather had already communicated itself to the document, which had not been so pleasant in Tozer's hands. As she looked at it lying peacefully on her lap, her attention was suddenly called by the patient, who sat upright and looked furtively about him, with his hand upon the coverings ready to throw them off. His ghastly white face peered at her from behind the curtain with wild eagerness—then relaxed, when he met her eye, into a kind of idiot smile, a painful attempt to divert suspicion, and he fell back again with a groan. The trance that had stupefied him was over; he had recovered some kind of consciousness, how much or how little she could not tell. His mind now seemed to be set upon hiding himself, drawing his coverings over him, and concealing himself with the curtain, at which he grasped with an excess of force which neutralized itself.
“Mr. May,” said Phœbe, softly. “Mr. May! do you know me?”
She could not tell what answer he made, or if he made any answer. He crouched down under the bed-clothes, pulling them over his face, trying to hide himself from her; from which she divined that he did recognize her, confused though his faculties were. Then a hoarse murmuring sound seemed to come out of the pillow. It was some time before she could make out what it was.
“Where am I?” he said.
With the lightning speed of sympathy and pity, Phœbe divined what his terror was. She said, almost whispering,
“At home, in your own bed—at home! and safe. Oh, don't you know me—I am Phœbe.” Then after a pause, “Tozer's granddaughter; do you know me now?”
The strange, scared, white-faced spectre shrank under his covering, till she could see no more of him except two wild eyes full of terror which was almost madness.