Janet thought with relief that whatever suspicions may have gleamed across him, whatever half recollections might have formed in his mind, they had passed away like clouds, when she saw him submitting to all Gussy’s half-nurse, half-lover attentions, leaning back upon his pillows, suffering himself to be silenced and soothed, smiling upon his anxious ministrant, and professing to do everything she told him.
“Was there ever so docile a slave?” he said; “I have no will but my lady’s.”
“You mean patient,” said Gussy, with the soft flush that lit up her face, “and it is your nurse whom you obey.”
“Fortunately the two things are the same in my case,” he said.
To think that he could indulge in this badinage while his mind was still following out the thread upon which another man’s life hung, was incredible to Janet. She thought it had all passed from his mind, and that she and her secret, and, still more, Dolff and his, must now be safe. And presently she was asked to go again and play for the soothing of the invalid, a request which she obeyed with suppressed indignation. Why should she be made to minister to him too—she whose eyes had been opened, who had just escaped, or hoped that she had escaped from him, almost at the risk of her life? Janet was impatient of him, and half disappointed after the excitement into which his tentative questions and looks had thrown her, that he had let it drop again and float off in nothingness. She was quieted in her fears, but she almost resented it, and despised the man who had so little nerve and force left.
Janet was wrong, it need scarcely be said. Meredith retired a little earlier than usual on the pretence of being tired. He lay very still in the quiet of his room, which nobody but the nurse was now permitted to enter, till his headache was quite gone, and then he returned to the search of his own mind and recollections, and to the finding out of the something which he remembered, yet for the moment had forgot.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
It all came back like lightning when the policeman came once more. The family party were almost as before, when the man was announced again, bringing back the former excitement.
No one noticed when Dolff stole out of the room. The lamps had not been brought in, though the afternoon had become dark. The fire glowed, but gave no flame. But it is wrong to say that no one noticed. Janet did not lose a movement of the unhappy young man, nor did Meredith, though he took no notice. Meredith said little: he was struggling with the force of this new discovery that had flashed upon his mind, and which not only cleared up the knotty point, but put meaning and reason into a business hitherto incomprehensible to him.
When the aspect of Dolff suddenly struck upon his dormant memory and roused it into keen life, he no longer found any difficulty in understanding the whole matter. Dolff had seen him with Janet, with whom the lout imagined himself in love. He had heard, perhaps, certain words of the conversation: he had seen the clinging of Janet to Meredith’s arm, the hands held in his. Meredith thought he remembered now a figure with hat drawn down and collar up at the window of Mimpriss’s shop. It was all explicable now; he understood it. Dolff! It flashed upon him without doubt or uncertainty. There was something whimsical, bizarre about it which made him laugh. Dolff, whom he had always despised, a rowdy undergraduate, a music-hall man. Dolff, a troublesome boy, wanting even in the matured strength of a man, not his own match in any way. And to think that he had been carried into the house, and nursed with the profoundest devotion under the same roof with the cub who had tried to take his life.