These are the words with which the patient’s mother receives Miss Carew, and they are wafted on a sigh of relieved gratitude, and accompanied by the admission that she has herself been ejected from the sick-room, and requested not to reappear there until further orders. The occasion is evidently considered to be one of such magnitude as to have summoned from his certificate-hung study Mr. Prince to join his acknowledgments to those of his wife; but the elaborate expression of his thanks, with its inevitable prefix of “I do not wish to be intrusive,” is cut short by a peremptory inquiry, transmitted by Féodorovna’s maid, as to the cause of the delay in showing up the visitor.
“She will give you the most minute directions,” says Mrs. Prince, hurrying Lavinia off upon this mandate, and speaking in a flurried semi-whisper. “You must consent to everything, and”—lowering her voice still further—“of course you can use your own judgment afterwards.”
“There is not a soul in the house I can trust,” says Féodorovna, clutching Miss Carew’s hand in a clasp whose feverishness her own cool palm verifies. “Do not pay the slightest attention to anything Nurse Blandy says. She is absolutely untrustworthy and incapable.”
Lavinia nods, mindful of Mrs. Prince’s directions.
“In this dreadful contretemps it is something to have a person on whose honesty at least one can rely,” continues Féodorovna, staring tragically at Lavinia out of her yellowed eyes. “You have some sympathy—some comprehension of what it must be to me to be tied down here, now of all times.”
There is no insincerity in Lavinia’s gesture of assent. Despite the absolute lack of foundation for Miss Prince’s belief in her own indispensability, and the ludicrous effect with which a solemn sentimentality gilds her already gilded features, Miss Carew’s compassion is genuine, and even acute. To be within five doors of him, and yet parted as effectually as if oceans rolled between them! A shocked flash of realization of what such a deprivation would be to herself dries up effectually any of that inclination to mirth which the preposterousness of Féodorovna’s pretensions, coupled with that of her appearance, would naturally produce.
“You must come and go between us,” continues the patient, earnestly. “Tell me how he is from hour to hour, prevent his fretting more than he can help, and ensure him against the neglect which hitherto only my own personal and incessant attention has guarded him from.”
A mechanical mandarin-like movement agitates Lavinia’s head.
“Of course you do not know anything of the technicalities of nursing—how should you?—but you can at least follow my directions.”
“Yes.”