"You talk as if she did it on purpose, father," says Cecilia, with an indignant laugh—"as if she enjoyed it. I do not think that anyone, even Sybilla"—with a resentful side-glance at the sofa—"could enjoy having her teeth chattering with cold, her head as heavy as lead, and her knees knocking together under her."
"Good heavens!" cries Jim, his bewildered surprise swallowed up in genuine alarm; "you do not mean to say that she is as bad as that?"
Sybilla laughs, and even in the midst of his real anxiety, Burgoyne has time for the reflection that the Wilson family seem this morning to have se donné le mot to show in how many different styles it is possible to be merry without the least tinge of genuine mirth in any.
"My dear Jim, have not you known Cis long enough not to take her au pied de la lettre? Do not you know of old what a magnificent colourist she is?—a perfect Tintoret! Of course Amelia is not quite the thing, poor dear—she has no one but herself to blame for that!—but equally of course, to a colossally healthy person such as she, any little ailment appears a mountain."
This speech is uttered with the accent of such entire conviction that it ought to carry reassurance into the heart of the person to whom it is addressed. Sybilla really and honestly disbelieves in the reality of any claims but her own to sincere sickness. But Jim unreasonably neither is nor feigns to be reassured.
"You have had advice for her? You have sent for Dr. Coldstream?" he asks rapidly of the two sound members of the family, turning his back unceremoniously upon the invalid.
"I was going to send for him at once," answers Cecilia, her own latent anxiety quickened by the evident alarm of her interlocutor, "but Sybilla said it was needless, as in any case he was coming to see her this afternoon."
"I think he wishes to change my medicine," puts in Sybilla in a piano voice, that shows an evident desire to assert her threatened position of prime and only genuine invalid, a sort of "beware of imitations" tone; "he is not quite satisfied with the effect of the last, I think; it has not brought up the pulse and quickened the appetite in the way he hoped. I thought that he might run up and look at Amelia at the end of his visit to me."
"And is it possible," inquires Jim, with some heat, "that you are going to let half a day go by without doing anything for her? I suppose you have not exaggerated, have you?" turning with an earnest appeal in his eyes to Cecilia; "but in any case I am very sure that nothing short of being really and gravely ill would have kept her in bed—she who is always waiting hand and foot upon us all, whom we all allow to spend her life in hewing wood and drawing water for us."
"Send for Dr. Coldstream at once," says Mr. Wilson irritably; "at once, I tell you; he is so very seldom out of the house that I have often thought of suggesting to him to take a room here; and now, on the only occasion on which he is really needed, he is not at hand."