“Yes, my good woman. You are too excitable, I can see, to look after him. There’s something the matter with him. I can’t tell what it is till I see him again. Who is he? but how should you know? He had better go to the hospital, where he can be well looked to——”
“Sir,” she said, eagerly, “I’m myself now. I am not one to get excited. I thought he was dead; and you brought him back; God bless you! He has been as good as an angel to my boy. I’ll nurse him night and day and never give way. Let him stay here.”
“You are not strong enough; you’ll get ill yourself,” said the doctor. “Then you know who he is? Be sure you write to his friends at once. But he’d much better go to the hospital; you’ll get ill too——”
“No, no,” she said; “no, no. I never was ill. It was I who got him out of the water. I’m strong; look, doctor, what an arm I have. I can lift him if it’s wanted. Let him stay; oh, let him stay!”
“Your arm is all very well, but your pulse is a different thing,” said the doctor. “If you go and fret and excite yourself, I’ll have him off in an hour. Well, then, you can try. Come and let us see how he is getting on now.”
“They are as like as two peas,” he said to himself, as he went away. “He’s somebody’s illegitimate son, and this is his aunt, or his sister, or something, and he don’t know. God bless us, what a world it is! but I’d like to know which he’s going to have, that I may settle what to do.”
CHAPTER XXXII.
I am afraid I cannot tell any one “which” it was that poor Val had, not having any medical knowledge. He was very ill, and lay there for the week during which Dick was absent on his master’s affairs, knowing nobody, often delirious, never himself, unable to send any message, or even to think of those he had left behind, who knew nothing of him. He talked of them, raved about them when his mind wandered, sometimes saying things which conveyed some intelligence to the mind of the anxious woman who watched over him, and often uttering phrases which she listened to eagerly, but which were all blank and dark to her. Poor soul! how she watched, how she strained her ear for every word he said. Her own, thus, once more; thus at last in her hands, with none to come between them; dependent on her—receiving from her the tendance of weary days and sleepless nights. Receiving from her, not she from him—eating her bread even, so to speak, though he could eat nothing—living under her roof—dependent on her, as a son should be on a mother. I cannot describe the forlorn sweetness there was to her in this snatch of nature, this sudden, unexpected, impossible crisis which, for the time, gave her her son. I do not know if it ever occurred to her mind that the others who had a right to him might be wondering what had become of their boy. Even now her mind was not sufficiently developed to dwell upon this. She thought only that she had him—she, and no other. She closed her doors, and answered all questions sparingly, and admitted nobody she could help; for what had anybody to do with him but she? When the doctor asked if she had written to his friends, she nodded her head or said “Yes, yes,” impatiently. His friends! who were they in comparison to his mother? They had had him all his life—she had him for so short a time, so very, very short a time!—why should any one come and interfere? She could get him everything he wanted, could give up all her time to watch him and nurse him. Once she said, when the doctor pressed her, “I have let his mother know;” and he was satisfied with the reply. “If his mother knows, of course it is all right,” he said. “Oh yes, yes,” she cried, “his mother knows;” and what more was necessary? She had not the faintest intention of revealing herself to him afterwards, of taking the advantage of all she was doing for him. No! it seemed to her that she could die easier than say to Val, “I am your mother;” a subtle instinct in her—delicacy of perception communicated by love alone—made her feel that Val would receive the news with no delight—that to be made aware that she was his mother would be no joy to him; and she would have died rather than betray herself. But to have him there, unconscious as he was, “wandering in his mind,” not knowing her, or any one—but yet with her as if he had been a baby again, dependent on her, receiving everything from her! No words can say what this was. She passed the time in a strange trance of exquisite mingled pleasure and pain; suffering now and then to see him ill, to feel that he did not know her, and if he knew her, would not care for her; suffering, too, from the sleepless nights to which she was totally unaccustomed, and the close confinement to one room, though scarcely realising what it was that made her head so giddy and her sensations so unusual; but all the time and through all the suffering rapt in a haze of deep enjoyment—a happiness sacred and unintelligible, with which no one could intermeddle; which no one even knew or could understand but herself. She had no fear for Valentine’s life; though the doctor looked very grave, it did not affect her; and though her brain was keen and clear to understand the instructions he gave, and to follow them with pertinacious, unvarying, almost unreasoning exactitude, she did not study his looks, or ask with brooding anxiety his opinion, as most other women in her circumstances would have done. She never asked his opinion, indeed, at all. She was merely anxious, not at all afraid; or if she was afraid, it was rather of her patient getting well than dying. The doctor, who was the only one who beheld this strange sickbed, was more puzzled than tongue could tell. What did the woman mean? she was utterly devoted to the sick man—devoted to him as only love can be; but she was not anxious, which love always is. It was a puzzle which he could not understand.
In a week Dick came back. He had been away on his master’s business, being now a trusted and confidential servant, with the management of everything in his hands. It was Easter week, too, and his business had been combined with a short holiday for himself. His mother was not in the habit of writing to him, though she did, in some small degree at least, possess the accomplishment of writing—so that he came home, utterly ignorant of what had happened, on one of those chilly March evenings when the light lengthens and the cold strengthens, according to the proverb. Dick was tired, and the landscape, though it was home, looked somewhat dreary to him as he arrived; the river was swollen, and muddy, and rapid; the east wind blanching colour and beauty out of everything; a pale sunset just over, and a sullen twilight settling down, tinting with deep shadows and ghastly white gleams of light the cold water. He shivered in spite of himself. The door was not standing open as usual, nor was there any light in the little parlour. He had to stand and knock, and then, when no one answered, went round to the back door (which was his usual entrance, though he had chosen the other way to-night) to get in. The kitchen was vacant, the maid having gone to the doctor’s for poor Val’s medicine. Dick went into the parlour, and found it dreary and deserted, looking as if no one had been there for months. Finally, he went up-stairs, and found his mother at the door of a bedroom coming to meet him. “I thought it must be you,” she said, “but I could not leave him.” “Leave him? Leave whom, mother? what do you mean?” he said, bewildered. “Hush, hush,” she cried, looking back anxiously into the room she had just left; then she came out closing the door softly after her. “Come in here,” she said, opening the next door, which was that of his own room. “I can speak to you here; and if he stirs I’ll hear him.” Dick followed her with the utmost astonishment, not knowing what his mother meant, or if she had gone out of her wits. But when he heard that it was Mr Ross who lay there ill, and that his mother had saved his young patron’s life, and was now nursing him, with an absorbing devotion that made her forget everything else, Dick’s mind was filled with a strange tumult of feeling. He showed his mother nothing but his satisfaction to be able to do something for Mr Ross, and anxiety that he should have everything he required; but in his heart there was a mixture of other sentiments. He had not lost in the least his own devotion to the young man to whom (he always felt) he owed all his good fortune; but there was something in his mother’s tremulous impassioned devotion to Valentine that had disturbed his mind often, and her looks now, engrossed altogether in her patient, thinking of nothing else, not even of Dick’s comfort, though she knew he was to return to-day, affected him, he could scarcely tell how. When he had heard all the story, he laid his hand kindly on her shoulder, looking at her. “You are wearing yourself out,” he said; “you are making yourself ill. But it’s all right; to be sure, when he was taken ill like this, he could go nowhere but here.”
“Nowhere,” she said with fervour. “Here it’s natural; but never mind me, boy, I’m happy. I want nothing different. It’s what I like best.”