"I pray you watch her! Did you not notice that slight incoherency?" he remarked, in a whisper, leaning over toward the doctor.
The doctor had noticed nothing but the playful badinage of a happy girl.
"I am afraid her loveliness blinds my judgment. I must see what there is in all this," he answered to himself, deprecatingly.
They sat long at table. Not that any one ate to excess, though the pompous English steward served up one delicious dish after another, including the time-honored Christmas feast requisite,—the plum-pudding,—which was tasted and approved, not to wound the Briton's national and professional vanity, but sent off, but slightly shorn of its proportions, to grace the servants' table.
The guest noticed that St. Victor partook very sparingly of food, although he fully enjoyed the occasion. Save tasting of the wild game and its condiment of real Calcutta currie, he ate nothing of the leading dishes or entrées. Neither did he drink much wine, whose quality was of the rarest, being of his own stock drawn from his father's rich store in his Madeira cellar. Of the luscious grapes and oranges which formed a leading feature of the dessert, he partook more freely, as if they cooled his tongue. That there was fever, and nervous excitement, in the young man's frame, was evident. Indeed, to the doctor's observant eye, the brother appeared more delicate, and of a temperament more highly nervous than his sister.
The frankness, the almost childish confidence and open-heartedness of the young people formed one of their greatest attractions to the usually reticent, thoughtful physician. He felt his own impulses expanding under the warmth of their sunny natures until the very romance of his boyhood stirred again, and sprouted through the mould in which it lay dormant. There was nothing in their past history or present prospects which, seemingly, they cared to conceal, so that he had become possessed of a pretty fair history of their lives before the last course came upon the board. Both were born in the island of Madeira. St. Victor was twenty-four, Edith nineteen, years of age. Their mother was the daughter of an American merchant, long resident on the island; their father was a French gentleman of fortune, who had retired to the island for his health, had loved and won the fair American girl, and lived with her a life of almost visionary beauty and happiness. Their father had joined their grandfather in some of his mercantile ventures; hence those voyages to the Indies, to South America, to the Mediterranean in which the children were participants. They also had spent a couple of years in France, cultivating the acquaintance of their relatives there, and adding some finishing touches to St. Victor's education, which, having been conducted under his father's eye by accomplished tutors, was unusually thorough and varied for one so young. This fact the doctor surmised during the progress of the banquet, though he did not ascertain the full extent of the young man's accomplishments until a future day. Nor was Edith's education overlooked. She was in a remarkable degree fitted to be the companion and confidante of her brother,—sympathizing in his tastes, reading his books, enjoying his pastimes, and sharing his ambitions to their utmost. It was a beautiful blending of natures,—such as the world too rarely beholds,—such as our received "systems" of education and association cannot produce.
Their grandfather had been dead for several years; their father for three, their mother for two. "She faded rapidly after father's death,—drooped like a frost-blighted flower," said St. Victor. "They had been too happy in this world to remain long apart in the next."
"You now see, doctor," the narrator of these family reminiscences at length said, "why Edith and myself are so unlike. My sister is her mother over again, fair and bright, like your New York ladies,—among the most beautiful women, in many respects, I have ever seen. I am dark and thin,—a very Frenchman in tastes, temperament, and habits."
He toyed a few moments with an orange; then, again leaning toward the physician, he said, in that sharp whisper which once before during the evening he had made use of,—
"I will tell you all, doctor. My father died insane. We afterwards learned that it was one of the inheritances of his haughty and wealthy family. The peace and delight which he had with his wife and children long delayed the terrible legacy; but it fell due at last. He died a maniac,—a raving maniac. She does not know it. It killed her mother. Imagine, doctor, imagine, if you can, how I watch over her! how I pity! how I dread! O God! to think that I must detect those symptoms, as I have done during the last six months. I have seen the virus in her eyes to-night. I have not breathed a word to her of my knowledge and convictions; but I am as certain of it as that she sits there. Look at her now, doctor,—now!"—with a stealthy side-glance at the beautiful girl who, at the moment, was smiling absently over a flower which she had taken from its vase,—smiling only as girls can,—as if it interpreted something deeper than a passing thought.