‘Very well,’ she responded cheerily. ‘Stand by the mantel-piece and give us plenty of room. Now, then, my baby boy; one, two, and off we go.’
My life has shown me instances of self-devotion in plenty; I have seen proofs of ready wit, and more of indomitable pluck; but I have never seen them so marvellously combined as on that terrible June night. Instinct taught me what she meant to do. She had persuaded her husband to stand at the end of the room farthest from the curtain that hid her one means of escape, and now she intended to hazard her only chance, dash through it, lock the door on the other side, and then go for help. Backwards and forwards, round and round, she circled, a weird enough figure in her white draperies. The little white feet were bare, and it taxed her utmost strength to hold the heavy boy in her arms; but with a sublime heroism of which I should never have believed her capable, she never once paused for breath. A miracle alone kept the child asleep; but when I saw the poor mother’s lips move dumbly between the snatches of the gay valse she was humming, I felt that she was praying God he might not waken. Nearer and nearer the curtain she came; but, to my horror, I perceived that Crawford was growing uneasy and advancing slowly in the rear.
‘Mrs Crawford! Quick!’
There was not a minute to be lost. I tore the curtain aside, and she rushed towards me; but ere I could fasten the heavy door, her husband was upon us. With a yell of baffled rage, he was tearing after her through the open doorway, and in another moment would have reached her with uplifted knife, when I tripped him up, and he fell headlong to the floor. He was stunned by his fall; and while I fastened his hands and feet by means of the cut window-cord, his wife went back to the inner room and rang loudly for assistance.
Ere he came to himself, Arthur Crawford was safely secured in my own room. Leaving him there under charge of the men-servants, I went back to seek Mrs Crawford. She was lying on the bedroom floor with her nervous fingers still tightly interlaced, and by her side sat her little son, warm and rosy from his broken sleep. He was kissing the paling lips as I came hastily into the room, and now held up a warning finger as I knelt beside them.
‘Poor mamma is fast asleep,’ he whispered. ‘And she is so cold!’
She was not dead. The long and frightful mental strain through which she had passed brought on brain-fever, and for some days we despaired of her life; but she came through it bravely; and ere the summer waned, I had the satisfaction of installing both mother and son in a seaside cottage, far enough away from her Berkshire home.
Crawford, poor fellow, only lived a few months, for a dangerous fall in the asylum grounds put a merciful termination to his confinement. During those few months, I visited him occasionally, and he always spoke most tenderly of his wife, whom he imagined to be dead.
When he died, I went to break the news to his young widow; and while staying in her pretty Devonshire cottage, I solved much that had puzzled me. Her terror at my first introduction to her had been occasioned by the fact that she had at once recognised me as Lennox the mad doctor. I had been pointed out to her in the park the season before. She dreaded Arthur’s incipient madness being known to any one; for she had a blind terror of a lunatic asylum in connection with her idolised husband, and hoped that a quiet country life, free from trouble and contradiction, might in time restore him. But had he never broken out before? I asked, for it seemed to me incomprehensible that so slight a frame should be capable of such courage. Once, she said, only once, and then he had been bent on killing himself. In struggling with him for the possession of the knife, he had accidentally cut her wrist, and so occasioned the ugly scar that disfigured it. As for Bertie’s presence on that fatal night, she told me he had always been accustomed to sleep in their room; and as I had refused to second her theory that the child wanted change of air, and so aid in sending him out of the house, she could devise no other means of getting rid of him.
And then I took my leave; and I have never seen Mrs Crawford from that day to this; but still, in spite of a certain pair of sweet brown eyes which make the sunshine of my home, I am forced to admit that there is no woman on earth for whom I have such a boundless admiration as for that unfortunate lady of whom I at one time thought as my First Patient.