Had he made a dreadful fool of himself? he asked, when he was thus left alone; then held up his hand, which she had kissed, and looked at it in his strange new thrill of emotion with a half-imbecile smile. He felt himself wondering that the place did not show in the moonlight, and at last put it up to his face, half-ashamed, though nobody saw him. What had happened to Everard? He himself could not tell.
CHAPTER XX.
I DO not know that English doctors have the gift of recommending those pleasant simple fictions of treatment which bring their patient face to face with nature, and give that greatest nurse full opportunity to try her powers, as Continental doctors do, in cases where medicine has already tried its powers and failed—the grape cure, the whey cure, the fir-tree cure—turning their patient as it were into the fresh air, among the trees, on the hillsides, and leaving the rest to the mother of us all. François was already strong in the opinion that his master’s improvement arose from the sapins that perfumed the air in the Kanderthal, and made a solemn music in the wind; and the cure de petit lait in the primitive valleys of Appenzell commended itself to the young fanciful party, and to Herbert himself, whose mind was extremely taken up by the idea. He had no sooner heard of it than he began to find the Kanderthal close and airless, as Everard suggested to him, and in his progressing convalescence the idea of a little change and novelty was delightful to the lad thus creeping back across the threshold of life. Already he felt himself no invalid, but a young man, with all a young man’s hopes before him. When he returned from his daily expedition in his chair he would get out and saunter about for ten minutes, assuming an easy and, as far as he could, a robust air, in front of the hotel, and would answer to the inquiries of the visitors that he was getting strong fast, and hoped soon to be all right. That interruption, however, to his first half-miraculous recovery had affected Herbert something in the same way as it affected Reine. He too had fallen out of the profound sense of an actual interposition of Providence in his favor, out of the saintliness of that resolution to be henceforward “good” beyond measure, by way of proving their gratitude, which had affected them both in so childlike a way. The whole matter had slid back to the lower level of ordinary agencies, nature, accident, what the doctor did and the careful nurses, what the patient swallowed, the equality of the temperature kept up in his room, and so forth.
This shed a strange blank over it all to Herbert as well as to his sister. He did not seem to have the same tender and awestruck longing to be good. His recovery was not the same thing as it had been. He got better in a common way, as other men get better. He had come down from the soft eminence on which he had felt himself, and the change had a vulgarizing effect, lowering the level somehow of all his thoughts. But Herbert’s mind was not sufficiently visionary to feel this as a definite pain, as Reine did. He accepted it, sufficiently content, and perhaps easier on the lower level, and then to feel the springs of health stirring and bubbling after the long languor of deadly sickness is delight enough to dismiss all secondary emotions from the heart. Herbert was anxious to make another move, to appear before a new population, who would not be so sympathetic, so conscious that he had just escaped the jaws of death.
“They are all a little disappointed that I did not die,” he said. “The village people don’t like it—they have been cheated out of their sensation. I should like to come back in a year or so, when I am quite strong, and show myself; but in the meantime let’s move on. If Everard stays, we shall be quite jolly enough by ourselves, we three. We shan’t want any other society. I am ready whenever you please.”
As for Madame de Mirfleur, however, she was quite indisposed for this move. She protested on Herbert’s behalf, but was silenced by the physician; she protested on her own account that it was quite impossible she could go further off into those wilds further and further from her home, but was stopped by Reine, who begged her mamma not to think of that, since François and she had so often had the charge of Herbert.
“I am sure you will be glad to get back to M. de Mirfleur and the children,” Reine said with an ironical cordiality which she might have spared, as her mother never divined what she meant.
“Yes,” Madame de Mirfleur answered quite seriously, “that is true, chérie. Of course I shall be glad to get home where they all want me so much; though M. de Mirfleur, to whom I am sorry to see you never do justice, has been very good and has not complained. Still the children are very young, and it is natural I should be anxious to get home. But see what happened last time when I went away,” said the mother, not displeased perhaps, much as she lamented its consequences, to have this proof of her own importance handy. “I should never forgive myself if it occurred again.”
Reine grew pale and then red, moved beyond bearing, but she dared not say anything, and could only clench her little hands and go out to the balcony to keep herself from replying. Was it her fault that the thunder-storm came down so suddenly out of a clear sky? She was not the only one who had been deceived. Were there not ever so many parties on the mountains who came home drenched and frightened, though they had experienced guides with them who ought to have known the changes of the sky better than little Reine? Still she could not say that this might not have been averted had the mother been there, and thus she was driven frantic and escaped into the balcony and shut her lips close that she might not reply.
“But I shall go with them and see them safe, for the journey, at least; you may confide in my discretion,” said Everard.