She was called back to the common passage of affairs by a faint knock at the door of the ante-room, and going to it found Ford, conducted by a sleepy maid who had been roused to prepare Lady Frogmore’s room. “Where is my lady, Miss Hill?” said the anxious Ford. “I can’t find my lady. It’s late and she’s tired, and I must get her to bed.”
“No, Ford; she will not leave her son to-night.”
“Oh, Miss Hill, her son! She will die of it, or she will go wrong again, and what will everybody say to me for allowing this? She must come to bed. She must come to bed!”
“No one can make her do so, Ford—the nurse has gone to sleep, someone is wanted here. I will stay by her, and if I can get her to go to bed I will.”
“You will both kill yourselves,” cried Ford aggrieved, “and what will be the advantage in that? You may, if you please, Miss Hill, I have no authority; but my lady, my lady! It is as much as her life is worth.”
Agnes bade the maid bring her some shawls, and lie down herself. She went softly into the sick room and put a wrap round Mary’s shoulders, who raised her pale face, just visible through the dark in its whiteness, to kiss her in token of thanks. Agnes permitted her hungry heart an anxious look at the patient and satisfied herself, to the relief of various awful doubts that had been growing on her that he breathed softly and regularly, though almost inaudibly. She endeavored in vain to rouse the sleeping woman behind, and then she herself retired into the ante-room. Was it true? Could it be possible? As she sat there, realizing the extraordinary way in which Mary and she had been allowed to come in and take possession, when she perceived that no one came near them, that Letitia did not return, did not even send a servant, but gave up the patient and the charge of him without a word, without the slightest notice of their possible wants, or care for them, a sense of the strangeness of it all grew upon her. Could Mary’s tale be true? Oh, God, could it be true? The woman sleeping so deeply, not to be roused—the house fallen into complete silence as if everyone had gone to bed. Mary and she, as it seemed, the only two waking in all the place. Could it be true? Could it be true?
An hour or two later the scene had changed, the sick room was faintly illuminated through the closed curtains with the light of the morning. And Agnes, looking in, through the half open doorway, met Mary’s look, her face like the clear, pale morning, a sort of ecstasy in her wakeful eyes. She did not seem to have moved since Agnes threw the shawl round her, nor had she closed those widely-opened eyes. When she had given her sister that look they returned to the bed where Mar’s young wasted countenance was now dimly visible. There was almost a chill in that blue dawning of the new day; a something clear and keen above illusion, the light of reality, yet the light of a vision. As Agnes looked, everything returned to its immovable stillness again. The pale boy sleeping, the pale mother watching, the nurse behind come into sight with her head thrown back, a potent witness in her insensibility. Was it true? Could it be true?
CHAPTER XLVIII.
John Parke woke next morning to see his wife in her dressing gown, moving vaguely about the room, a shadow against the full summer light that came in at all the windows. He could not make out at first what she was doing, prowling about in a curious monotonous round from window to window, pausing to look out, as it seemed, at the edge of the blind, first of one, then of another. He watched her for a little while in vague alarm. During all this time a vague but painful suspicion was in John’s mind. He knew better than anyone how she had looked forward to a new state of affairs. Had she not drawn even him to that vile anticipation to plan and calculate upon the boy’s death? The pain of the thought that he had done so made more intense his sense of the terrible revulsion in her mind when all these horrible hopes came to an end. He was not a man who naturally divined what was going on in the minds of others, but the movement in his own, on this occasion, and the instinctive knowledge which long years of companionship had vaguely, magnetically conveyed to him about his wife—not a matter of reflection or reason, but simply of impression—kept a dull light about Letitia which surrounded no other person upon earth. Something like sympathy mingled with and increased his power of comprehending during this dreadful crisis. How would she make up her mind to it, he asked himself, notwithstanding the horror and shame with which he thought of the calculations he himself had been seduced into sharing. He knew very well how little she liked to be foiled, how she struggled against disappointment, and got her will in defiance of every combination of circumstances. During all the previous day he had been very uneasy, certain that in her long absence she was planning something, wondering what she could plan that would have any effect upon the present state of affairs—fearing—he knew not what. John could not allow himself to think that his wife would contemplate harming the boy. Oh, no, no! such a thought was not in his mind. Letitia had her faults. She had never been kind to Mar. She had thought of him as an interloper, as an intruder, as supplanting Duke—and she had not concealed her feeling. But harm him—by so much as a touch. Oh, no! no! Nevertheless, John had been very uneasy all day, and even in his sleep this gnawing discomfort had not left him. He had dreamed of deathbeds and dying persons, and of strange scenes of chaos in which she was always present, though he knew not for what purpose. And when he woke suddenly and saw her wandering about the room in the high clear morning light like a ghost, all the uneasiness of the previous day, all the troubled dreams of the night came back upon his heart. He watched her for a minute without making any sign, and then he called “Letitia!” His voice made her start violently—but she came towards him at once, wrapping her dressing-gown round her as though she felt cold.
“Isn’t it very early? Why are you prowling about at this hour?”