She maintained an indolent yet questioning silence. Dr. Hemstruther repeated the question.
“Yes, I have fancied it,” she answered; “one can fancy so many things in the dark.”
Dr. Hemstruther gave a jerk of the chin as though to emphasize this as a fact worth noting. He drew his chair nearer, and, taking her hand, looked at it attentively, rubbing the skin with his thumb-nail. Then he asked her a few more questions, keeping his eyes on hers, and watching her with the alertness of a hawk.
My lady and Mrs. Jael saw the girl’s eyelids begin to quiver. When Dr. Hemstruther spoke to her she did not answer him, but sat rigid, like a cataleptic, her face betraying no feeling and no intelligence. She remained in some such posture till the old man rose and pushed back his chair. Then a deep breath seemed to come from her with a great sigh, and the lashes closed over her eyes so that she appeared asleep.
Dr. Hemstruther watched her for a while, and then turned to Anne Purcell with an expression of sympathetic gravity upon his face.
“She is best left alone, madam, at present.”
And he marched out at my lady’s heels, Mrs. Jael following and carrying his hat and cane.
Dr. Hemstruther had satisfied a pliant conscience with regard to the nature of the case. He sat—much at his ease—in one of the leather-seated chairs in the room that had been Lionel Purcell’s library, and declared his conviction that the girl was of unsound mind.
“I can understand, madam,” he said, with a courtly little bob of the wig to my lady, “how much exercised you are in mind over your daughter’s sanity. At present it is the calm after the storm, the cool dew after the fire of noon. The pulse is depressed, the brain almost torpid, and she did not even hear some of the things I said. Then you heard her confess to hearing voices; that is a very common and significant symptom. My experience goes to prove that some of these cases are the most dangerous and distressing.”
He nodded his head, took snuff with emotion, and looked under half-lowered eyelids at my lord.