The others listened silent to this plea. Nobody spoke. If Mary remembered what had happened, or if she consciously and willingly put it out of her mind, nobody could tell. She nodded her head several times in silent assent. Then she spoke, her companions all listening as if to the voice of fate.
“I understand that,” she said, “and then at the very last—it was the overstrain at the last.”
What did she mean? Even Agnes asked herself this question, wondering over again whether it was all a dream, or whether it was true. John Parke stood amid the group of women, with his heart as heavy as lead, his ears keen to hear any word that could throw light on the mystery. But none came. Was there any mystery at all? Was it a mere encounter between the mother who was happy, and the mother who was (God forgive her!) disappointed—but no more? He stood for some minutes, waiting, terrified, yet eager to hear—and then unsatisfied, yet painfully relieved, as if he had escaped a sentence of death, walked away.
The doctor came afterwards, and pronounced the highest panegyric upon Mar. He had done exactly what it was best and wisest for him to do. He had slept, he had swallowed obediently all that was given him, and gone to sleep again. There now remained nothing for him but to be promoted to the disused practices of eating, and to go on. Dr. Barker, like an elated and successful practitioner, who is aware that great honor and glory would result to himself from the happy issue of this difficult case, freely applauded everybody, even the melancholy culprit, who was a woman of the keenest conscience, and could scarcely be kept from denouncing herself. The nurses, he said, were half the battle, and he had been most ably seconded. And he was ready even to agree without the faintest idea of her meaning or any curiosity on the subject, in Mary’s happy assertion that she had arrived “just in time.” “Precisely,” the doctor said, “just when your appearance was the most invaluable stimulant—just when he was able to profit by it. I agree with you entirely, Lady Frogmore, you came in the nick of time.”
It was considered very strange in the house, accustomed to appeal to the doctor in these constant visits of his if a finger ached, that he did not see Mrs. Parke that day. John expected that she was asleep, and that it was possible she might be quite well when she woke, and Dr. Barker left the house thinking that there were too many women about, and that they were an excitable lot, as women usually were, making as much fuss about that boy as if his getting well were a miracle; whereas he (Dr. Barker) had always been certain with proper care that the boy would get well. He was not a pessimist, but always ready to think the best. And, indeed, Dr. Barker, though he did not fail to dwell upon Mar’s recovery as a wonderful proof of what science could do [“for we had no constitution to work upon, no constitution, and everything against us”] dismissed the boy otherwise from his mind and fixed his thoughts wonderingly upon Mary, who seemed to have come out of her hallucination or mania, or whatever it was, at a moment’s notice in the most astonishing way. It was as if she had always been there, always anxious about him, caring for him. And Dr. Barker smiled at her idea that she was just in time. He had observed it though he had not said anything, and put it down in a mental note book as a curious evidence of the delusions which still linger in a mind that once has been off its balance. Mary had made an immense advance by recognizing her boy, and this mild little extravagance of thinking she had come “just in time”—poor thing—showed how the wind was blowing; how her mind had been affected by the supposed imminence of a crisis. He put it down in his mind as a thing to note, when other patients were similarly affected. The reader knows that the doctor was wrong; but so are a great many, both doctors and other wise people, who take the reverberation of an accidental fact for the foundation of an all-embracing theory—from which many strange things sometimes arrive.
Agnes Hill enacted what she herself came to think afterwards a somewhat ridiculous part for the rest of this day. She had everything that could be wanted for the sick-room brought upstairs in what may be called a rude form; pieces of beef and kettles of water destined to make Mar’s beef tea, and everything else that could be thought of, so that the ante-room resembled an amateur kitchen, filled with a score of things that could be made no use of, and which the indignant cook sent up in quantities, lest the ladies should want anything. A fire sufficient to cook by in the height of summer is not a comfortable thing. And still less was the condition of mind comfortable in which Miss Hill sat watching, afraid to rest or to admit any alleviation, tolerating with difficulty the presence of the nurse who, deeply interested and curious, addressed all her faculties to the task of finding out what was meant by these precautions. The food that had been sent up from the kitchen had been very dainty; it could not be because of any imperfection in that; and the nurse smiled at the thought that she could be supposed to have been careless in the warming or preparation of anything. What then was the meaning of it? When her colleague in her agony of compunction confided the story of her dreadful failure, of the sleep that had lasted all night, and the cordial that had presumably caused it, a strange gleam of light came into the mystery. Mrs. Parke had been in the sick-room when the night nurse had fallen asleep, and when she woke in the morning Lady Frogmore was there, and Lady Frogmore had asserted again and again that she had arrived “just in time.” It seemed a wonderful gleam of light, yet on the whole it did not reveal much. What had happened, what Mrs. Parke had done, what Lady Frogmore had found, what had taken place while the legitimate guardian slept, could only be guessed and dimly guessed. The nurse formed a theory in her own mind not further from the truth than a theory unattended by actual foundations of fact usually is—much more the truth than Dr. Barker’s conclusion as to the rags of delusion which remain in the mind when its greater trouble is gone. But it was a theory which Nurse Congreve of the Ridding Hospital kept closely to herself. A nurse, like a doctor, sees many strange chapters of family history—and among them this was the most strange; but that was all that could be said.
The most curious thing was that before the day was half over, Lady Frogmore, coming into the ante-room and finding it impossible to rest there as she had intended, on account of the dreadful heat, suddenly fell into a fit of suppressed laughter at her sister’s batterie de cuisine, and laughed till the tears ran down her cheeks.
“What is all that for?” she said. “And do you think, Agnes, that you can make things for him better than the cook?”
Miss Hill gave her sister a look full of reproach, but Lady Frogmore still laughed.
“The cook is a cordon bleu, and you will be melted away before that fire.”