CHAPTER XLVIII.
Dolff hurried out of the room so bewildered and dazed that he neither understood what this new revelation was, nor what he was sent out to do. He felt himself hustled out of the room by his anxious sisters, while Meredith was left to be the defender of the party against the madman. The madman! What was it his mother had said. To fetch Vicars—but that was not all—to get something out of his father’s coat. His father! Dolff stopped a few steps from the door, out of which he had been thrust to run in haste and bring what was wanted out of his father’s coat.
“My father,” Dolff said to himself, “has been dead since ever I can remember. Who is my father?” He was completely bewildered. He remembered his mother very well in her widow’s cap. And she was known everywhere to be a widow. “Your father!”—he could not think what it meant. He believed there must be some mistake, some strange illusion which had fallen upon them, or which, perhaps, they had thought of, invented, to prevent remark. “Your father!” could it have been said only to shut his mouth?
It was due to Providence, not to Dolff, that Vicars came in his way, drifting across the hall in pursuit of his patient. Vicars had the famous pocket-book in his hand, and Dolff wondered vaguely what was the meaning of it, and how it was that this pocket-book, like a property on the stage, should be so mixed up with the poor man’s thoughts, if these distracted fancies could be called thoughts. All that he could do was to point towards the drawing-room, whither Vicars hastened. He had no command of his voice to say anything, or of himself to be able to exercise his own wits. He dropped in his dismay upon one of the hard wooden chairs in the hall, and sat there staring vaguely before him, trying to think.
There was a faint jar of the door, and a little figure came out abruptly, as if escaping. It was Janet, whose smooth hair was a little out of order, and her black dress crushed by the half embrace in which the madman had held her. Janet was deeply humiliated by that embrace, by having thus appeared before Meredith and all of them, the object of the old man’s fondling. Her face was obscured by anger and annoyance, and when Dolff sprang up and put himself in her way, the little governess looked for a moment like a little fury, contemplating him with a desire in her eyes to strike him to dust if she had been able—a fiery little Gorgon, with the will without the power.
“What is it—what is it now?” she cried, clenching her hand as if she would have struck him, yet at the same moment holding herself in with difficulty from a fit of angry tears.
“Janet, don’t forsake me,” cried Dolff; “I am half mad, I don’t know what to think. Who is he? Tell me who he is!”
“Mr. Harwood,” cried Janet, fiercely, “you—you are not a wise child.”
He looked at her with a naive wonder.
“I have never set up for being wise. You are far, far more quick than I am. I suppose you understand it, Janet. I know you don’t care for me, as I do for you; but you might feel for me a little. Oh, don’t turn away like that—I know you’ve thrown me off; but help me—only help me. Who is he? Tell me who he is.”