CHAPTER XI
The house had become very quiet.
Under Barnaby's windows and right down the avenue the crunching granite was spread with tan. The servants moved silently about their work, even in the far kitchens whence not a sound could be heard.
For a long time he was unconscious; for a long time he lay breathing heavily, and they could not tell if he was in pain. Other doctors came down from London, and Lady Henrietta had to be told what it was that the girl was fighting with that pale and steady face.
"It's love, sheer love, that keeps her going," said one witness to another, watching her courage in the deeps of agony and uncertainty, and, at last, in the breakers of hope.
She was safe in giving herself without stint, because for a long while he did not know her, and it did not matter to him who it was that was soothing him with a passionate gentleness of which his jarred brain would have no knowledge when it recovered its normal tone. She could sit at his bedside hushing him, whispering that she loved him, she loved him, and he must sleep.
Sometimes he talked to her in unintelligible mutterings, sometimes his rambling speeches, without beginning or end, were bitter to understand.
"You mustn't mind what he says," the doctor warned her kindly. "It's certain to be rubbish. Generally they go over and over some silly thing they remember.—I had a patient once who got into fearful trouble through winding off something about a murder he had read in a book."
—That was after he had stood awhile listening gravely to Barnaby's restless talk.
—"I'll find a way out. Wait a bit, my darling.... We'll not have our lives ruined by that mad marriage. I'll find a way out for us."