"I hope I didn't say anything unbecoming to you; if I did, I didn't mean it. I am so worried and confused I don't know what I'm saying." By this time she had forgotten the cause of her tears. What Grey said made her believe she herself had uttered something offensive to the banker. "I wonder can it be that I have caught the fever from Sir Alexander, and am not in my right mind?"
"No, no, no," laughed Grey reassuringly. "You need not be afraid of that." He had no desire to recall to her memory the words which had drawn from him the abrupt and disconcerting exclamation. "And so," he said, in a bland voice, "poor Sir Alexander's head is wandering."
"Oh, yes. He began to be queer last night, and got worse all the night. This morning we sent for the doctors, and they came again in the afternoon. At the latter visit they said I had better send for you, as you were so much in Sir Alexander's mind, both when he was raving and when he wasn't."
"Then he has lucid intervals?"
"Oh, yes—or, at least, not quite lucid. There are times when he is less wild than others; but I think his mind is not quite free at any time. I have been keeping you here instead of taking you direct to him, as I should have done. You will excuse me; my poor head is quite gone too. Will you come with me to him now?"
"Yes," he answered, with a profound bow.
As he followed her through the dull stately passages that, although it was still full daylight, were dim and funereal, he tried to pierce the veil of the future. How would this sudden development of the old man's disease affect him? Was the old man in his comparatively lucid moments capable of altering his will? What was the cause of the old man's desire to see him? And, above all, how had this idea of theft come upon him?
So far as he could now form an opinion of the case, he did not feel reassured.
Suppose Mrs. Grant's account of the baronet's condition of mind in the less excited moments was overdrawn, and that while in his periods of delirium he was haunted by goblin fears of robbers, in his more collected phases he might be troubled with reasonable dread of theft or misappropriation or fraud. Did the old man desire to destroy or alter his will? That was the vital question. If he did, then surely the lead would overtake the gold.
The gold! That gold could never be won back, not in as many years as it took the baronet to save it up. Not in twice as many years, and he might have no more than one year. The gold could never overtake the lead now—that is, the gold, the Consols.