“For the Lord’s sake, mem!” said Katrin, “ye are shivering and trembling. Go back to your bed.”
“Oh, my daurlin’!” cried the weeping Beenie. “Oh, my bonnie lamb, he’s just away with his father in the geeg. Ye needna cry upon Marg’ret; she’ll no hear you, for it’s just her that’s taken him away!”
“Oh, you born fool!” Katrin cried, supporting her young mistress with her arm.
But Lily twisted out of her hold. She turned upon Beenie, bringing her hands together wildly with a loud clap that startled all the silences about like the sudden report of a pistol, and then fell suddenly with a cry at their feet.
Since that moment she had not recovered consciousness. Both of them knew by the force of experience how dangerous a symptom in Lily’s condition is the strong convulsive shivering which had seized her, and for the greater part of that dreadful night before Sir Robert’s arrival they were both by her bedside striving with every kind of hot application to restore a natural temperature. But when they had partially succeeded in this, she still lay unconscious, sometimes agitated and disturbed, flinging herself about with her arms over her head, and once or twice repeating, what filled them with horror, the extraordinary clap together of her hands—sometimes quite still, and murmuring under her breath a continuous flow of inarticulate words, but never conscious of them or their ministrations, saying no word that had meaning in it. Sir Robert’s arrival made a certain change, and left the weight of the nursing upon Beenie, Katrin, with her many additional labors, being unable to bear her share. They had already, however, had time for several consultations on the subject, which Sir Robert naturally disposed of with so much ease, but which to the two women was a much more serious matter—a doctor. Would not a doctor divine at once with his keen, educated eyes what had happened so recently? Would not he read as clearly as in a book what had been the beginning of Lily’s illness? She lay helpless now, able to give them no assistance in disposing of her—she, so wilful by nature, who had always got her own way, so far, at least, as they were concerned. It filled them with awe to look at her lying unconscious, and to feel that her fate was in their hands. What were they to do? They were responsible for her life or death.
The doctor, when he came, listened with very small attention to Beenie’s long and confused story, chiefly made up from things she had read and heard of the causes of Lily’s illness. Whatever the causes were, the result was clear enough. She was in a high fever, her faculties all lost in that confusion of violent illness which takes away at once all consciousness of the present and all personal control. “Fever” was an impressive word in those days, more alarming in some senses, less so in others, than now. It was not mapped out and distinct, with its charts and its well-known rules. There was not, so far as I am aware, such a thing as a clinical thermometer known, at least not in ordinary practice; and the word “fever” meant something dangerously “catching,” something before which nurses fled and friends retired in dismay—which is not to say that those who suffered from it were less sedulously guarded and taken care of by their own people then than now. The first idea of both Beenie and Katrin, however, was that it must be “catching,” being fever, and Sir Robert, when he was informed, was not much wiser. “Fever—where could she have got it?” he said with a sudden imagination of some wretched beggar-woman with a sick child who might have given it to the young lady. “It is not a thing of that kind. You are thinking of scarlatina or maybe typhus. Nothing of that sort. It does not spring from infection. It is brain-fever,” the medical man said. “Brain-fever!” said Sir Robert, indignant. “There was never any thing of that kind in my family.” He took it as a reproach, as if the Ramsays had ever been a race subject to disturbance in the brain!
But whatever they said, it mattered little to Lily. She lay on her bed for hours together moving her restless head to and fro, muttering inarticulate words, then pouring forth a stream of vague discourse, through which there gleamed occasionally a ray of meaning, a wild sudden demand, a flash of protest and expostulation. “Not that! not him!” she would sometimes say, “any thing but him!” and the doctor, making out as much as that one day, believed that the poor girl had been refused her lover, and that it was the sudden arrival of the uncle, who was hostile to them, which had brought on or precipitated the trouble in her brain. Sometimes she would call for “Marg’ret, Marg’ret, Marg’ret!” in accents now of impatience, now of despair. And then he asked who Marg’ret was and why she did not come, or rather: “Which of you is Marg’ret?” to the confusion of the two women. “Oh, sir, neither her nor me,” cried Beenie, “neither her nor me! but a woman that had something to do with her—in an ill moment.” “Let her be sent for, then,” he said peremptorily. Beenie and Katrin had a great deal to bear. Knowing every thing, they had to pretend they knew nothing, to shake their heads and wonder why the patient should utter words which were heartrending to them as betraying the dreadful persistence of that impression of misery in her mind which they knew so well. They gave themselves the comfort of exchanging a glance now and then, which was almost all the mutual consolation they had. For Katrin was very much occupied with the housekeeping and her work, and the necessity for satisfying her master and his guests, who, knowing nothing of Sir Robert’s family, and never having seen his niece, did not propose to go away, as guests in other circumstances would have done. And Sir Robert was very far from desiring that they should go away. He was terrified to find himself here alone, without even Lily’s company, and therefore said very little of her illness. What difference could it make to her, if she never saw them or heard of them, whether Sir Robert had company or not? So Katrin labored morning and night to feed with her best the party in the dining-room, and with very imperfect help at first to look after all the wants of the gentlemen, while Beenie, isolated in her mistress’s room, nursed night and day the helpless, unconscious creature who required so little, yet needed so much care. Those were not the days of carefully regulated nursing, in which the most important matter of all is the preservation of the nurse’s health and her meals and hours of taking exercise. It was an age when the household was sufficient for itself, and the domestic nurse devoted herself night and day to her charge, accepting all the risks and fatigue as a matter of course. Beenie had no help and wanted none. Sometimes for a moment’s refreshment she would go down to the door, and breathe in a long draught of the fresh morning air, while Katrin stood by Lily’s bed trying to elicit from her a look or sign of intelligence. But Beenie could not have remained absent from her young mistress had the wisest of nurses been there to take her place. “Na, na; I’ve ta’en care of her a’ her days, and I’ll take care of her till the end,” Beenie said, when Katrin exhorted her to take a few minutes more of the outdoor freshness. “Hold your tongue, woman, with your ends!” cried Katrin—“a young thing like that with a’ her life in her! She will see us baith out.” “Oh, the Lord grant it!” cried Beenie, shaking her large head. “But how is she to live and face the truth and ken all that’s happened if ever she comes to herself? She will just sit up in her bed, and clap her two hands together as she did yon dreadful night—and give up the ghost.”
“God forgive him—for I canna!” said Katrin, with a deep-drawn breath.
“And Marg’ret! What do ye say to her, the deep designing woman, that had been planning it, nae doubt, all the time?”
“Marg’ret!” cried Katrin with disdain, with the gesture of throwing something too contemptible for consideration from her. But she added: “There is just this to be said: We could not have keepit the bairn. No possible, her so ill, and the doctor about the house, and a wee thing that bid to have had the air and could not be keepit silent, nor yet hid. Oh, mony’s the thought I’ve had on that awful subject. It was the deed of a villain, Beenie! Maybe God will forgive him, but never me. And yet, being done, it’s weel that it was done.”