Chapter XVI: Good Samaritans

For many weary days and nights the patient fluctuates between improvement and retrogression. The business is a long one, as Mr. Skalpel prophesied. Alexis approaches that mysterious border-land which lies between life and death. Mind and memory are dark. He sees shadowy forms at his bedside,--sees the unreal more often than the real, knows not where he is or what he is, and slowly awakening at last, as from one long troubled dream--a dream of almost infinite duration and of wondrous variety--he feels like a child new born to life, seeking dimly to decipher the unknown characters of a strange alphabet.

Who is this with the gentle face, the mild and thoughtful eyes, shadowy hair, and soft white hands, who ministers to him so patiently, whose voice has such a soothing influence?

Is it his wife? A flash of sudden hope quickens the throbbing of his heart; he tries to raise himself up in his bed, when a strong hand restrains him, and a familiar voice says,--

‘Alexis, dear old fellow, be careful. Mr. Skalpel says you mustn’t exert yourself.’

It is no longer winter. The lattices are open, and through the tender green of the willows smiles the blue April sky. Birds are singing--there is a perfume of violets in the room--blessed heralds of spring. Yes, there they are, violets and primroses on the dressing-table--violets and primroses on the little table by his bed. Oh, welcome spring--welcome sense of new-created life in his own frame!

‘It was good of you to come to me,’ he murmurs, with half-closed eyes, ‘good of you to nurse me. All forgotten, all forgiven. We shall be very happy now, Sibyl.’

He thinks his wife is at his side,--a melancholy delusion, which makes Richard Plowden very uncomfortable.

‘My dear Alexis,’ he says soothingly, ‘it is not Sibyl; we didn’t know where to send for her. The lady who has nursed you was a stranger to you until the day of your accident, but if she had been your sister she could not have done more.’

Alexis closes his eyes with a heavy sigh.

‘She is very good,’ he murmurs resignedly, ‘and I have reason to be grateful. I took her for my wife--a foolish mistake. I ought to have known better. But I am afraid my mind has been wandering a little.’

He turns restlessly on his pillow, opens his eyes again, and looks wonderingly round.

‘Violets!’ he exclaims. ‘How good of you to get me violets at this time of year! What a blue sky for February!’

‘February!’ cries Richard. ‘My dear fellow, it is the nineteenth of April.’

‘April? And I have been lying here----’

‘A little over two months.’

Alexis feels inexpressibly shocked at this revelation. What! the days and nights have been passing, sunrise and sunset, moons waning, and he has been lying there like a log, or like a madman, full of strange fancies, and unconscious of the flight of time. This loss of two months seems to him in some wise terrible. It is as if he had been lying dead.

‘I suppose I have been very ill,’ he says at last.

‘Very ill, dear boy; so near death’s door that we have often feared the door would open and you would pass the threshold. Thank Heaven, we were able to keep you fast on this side. You have to thank Miss Challice for your life,--there never was such a nurse.’

‘You forget that you have done more than half the nursing, Mr. Plowden,’ remonstrates Linda, who sits with her face somewhat shrouded by the dimity bed-curtain.

‘I----, nothing of the kind. I’ve tried to obey your instructions, but at best I’m a clumsy assistant.’

‘You are the best of fellows,’ says Alexis, stretching out his feeble hand to clasp his friend’s. ‘As for Miss Challice,’ he continues, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea who she is, or how she comes to be interested in me; but I’m intensely grateful.’

He falls asleep after this, and slumbers peacefully for some hours. When he awakes it is tea-time, the lattices are closed, and a young moon shines in through the diamond panes. A fire burns cheerfully in the old-fashioned fireplace opposite the foot of the bed. Firelight and moonbeams shine into the room, flashes of silver and gleams of ruddy gold light up the old furniture, the cups and saucers and the old silver teapot on the round table by the fire. They shine, too, on a quiet figure by the hearth, the graceful form of a girl dressed in gray, who has fallen asleep in an old bamboo arm-chair by the hearth.

‘That’s Miss----Whatshername, I suppose,’ Alexis says to himself. ‘Curious business, very. Where am I, I wonder? This hardly looks like the Grange.’

He tries to raise himself into a sitting position, in order the better to inspect the premises. The process is painful enough to wring a groan from him, and the groan awakens his nurse.

‘You mustn’t do that,’ says the gentle voice which has argued and pleaded with him so often in his delirium, but which seems quite unknown to him to-night. ‘You mustn’t try to sit up yet awhile.’

‘Not yet awhile,’ repeats Alexis. ‘I’ve been ill over two months, and I’m getting better--I believe you will. I am getting better.’

‘You are much better--you are getting well very fast.’

‘Oh, this is getting well very fast, is it? And after two months I am not to try to raise myself in my bed. Do you know, it strikes me that’s getting well rather slowly.’

‘You mustn’t be impatient. The injury to your ribs brought on inflammation of the lungs. You have been in great danger.’

‘And you--a stranger--have nursed me?’

‘Not a stranger. Providence brought you to our door; you are our neighbour.’

‘“Which of these, think you?”’ murmurs Alexis. ‘Yes, you have been verily my neighbour, in the Gospel sense of the word. How shall I ever thank you enough, Miss----.’

‘Challice,’ says Linda, as he pauses at a loss for the name. ‘Believe me, Mr. Secretan, I need no thanks. My grandfather and I are very happy to have been of use to you.’

‘Dick Plowden says you have saved my life. Where is Dick, by the way?’

‘He has gone to lie down for a short time. He has had very little rest of late, poor fellow. And now shall I give you some tea?’

‘Yes, if you will be so good. I should like some tea.’

She pours out a cup and brings it to him, and raises his head upon the heaped-up pillows which sustain his weary frame, and puts the cup to his lips. It is a curious sensation for him, this awakening to life; curious to look into this strange face in the uncertain firelight, to hear this gentle voice, to feel the soft touch of these white womanly hands.

‘If this were but my wife, it would indeed be awakening to new life and new happiness,’ he thinks, and the thought that another can so minister to him while his wife treads her selfish way, ignorant of his pain, is very bitter.

‘I think I could hold the teacup myself,’ he says, and he makes the attempt feebly, with a tremulous hand.

‘Capital!’ exclaims Linda. ‘How strong you are getting!’

‘Oh, this is getting strong, is it?’ enquires Alexis. ‘I should like to have seen myself when I was weak. I must have been a pleasing spectacle.’

He falls asleep by-and-bye in the firelight, and sleeps long, for he has at this stage of his illness a wonderful capacity for sleep. When he awakes the fire is burning low, and the dim glimmer of a night lamp suggests some sepulchral hour betwixt night and morning. Richard Plowden occupies the easy chair by the fire.

‘Where is Miss--Miss--Challice?’ asks the invalid.

‘In bed, and sound asleep, I hope. She has sat up night after night to watch you, Alex.’

‘She is very good.’

‘She is an angel, or as near an approach to the angelic as one can hope to meet with upon earth,’ replies Richard, with enthusiasm.

‘Who is she, Dick? and by what concatenation of events do I find myself in a strange house, watched over by a strange young lady?’

Richard explains.

‘Indeed. This is Dorley Mill, and my fair nurse is the miller’s granddaughter. If I were a bachelor now, this might be the opening scene of a charming romance. But I should have taken that young lady for something superior to a miller’s granddaughter; she has an air of refinement.’

‘She belongs by inheritance to the world of art. Her father was a painter.’

‘Challice--yes, I remember, I have seen pictures of his. He died young, I think.’

‘He did, and left this young lady an orphan.’

Mr. Secretan, finding himself able to sit up in bed, and hold a glass or a cup, during the next two or three days shows great anxiety to be taken back to the Grange. He is anxious to resume the business of life--to see his horses, his gardens, to be within reach of his library. He is quite horrified when Mr. Skalpel informs him that he is likely to be obliged to remain at Dorley Mill for three weeks or a month before he will be strong enough to bear the shaking involved in the easiest journey.

‘You need not be in a hurry to leave,’ says the surgeon, ‘you have been well taken care of, I am sure.’

‘I should be an ungrateful hound if I were to forget that for a moment,’ replies Alexis, ‘but I should really like to relieve this house of my presence; I have given so much trouble.’

‘That is all past,’ says Linda. ‘Our only trouble was the fear that you would not recover.’

‘Mr. Benfield must consider me an intolerable nuisance.’

‘He does nothing of the kind,’ says Dick; ‘he is looking forward to your going downstairs as if it were some grand holiday.’

Alexis sighs. The comforts and indulgences of a sick room pall upon his active temperament. But he resigns himself to the inevitable, and Linda and Richard do their utmost to make his life happy.

Now that bodily strength begins slowly to return he suffers from extreme mental depression. He feels as if this coming back to life were something of a mistake, that it might have been better to have slipped quietly through the dark portal. He feels that he has nothing to live for, neither wife nor child. No kith nor kin, only the beaten round of a prosperous man’s existence.

‘I who have tasted the bitter cup of poverty ought to find contentment in prosperity,’ he tells himself; but as the days lengthen slowly to their lingering close he is not content.

‘He’s dreadfully low-spirited,’ says Dick to his assistant nurse. ‘What are we to do to cheer him up a little?’

Linda sighs and looks doubtful; but in the course of the afternoon she brings up some of her favourite books, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Dickens, and offers to read to the invalid.

He is delighted. Any relief is welcome that will take him away from his own thoughts. He chooses the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ and Linda reads at his bidding.

‘We’ll have one of the tragedies when I’m stronger,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t stand “Hamlet” or “Lear” yet awhile.’

From this time forward the reading becomes an institution. Linda is a good reader, her voice round and full, her emphasis always intelligent. Alexis makes a closer acquaintance with Tennyson than he has ever made before now, and renews his boyish delight in Dickens.

In about a week after that first reading he is well enough to go downstairs to the cheerful parlour, but not without support from Richard’s sustaining arms. There is no longer any talk of his going back to the Grange yet awhile. He knows his own weakness now, and is resigned to the tedium of a slow recovery.

‘You are all so good to me,’ he says, with tears in his eyes, ‘I should be a fool to wish myself away from you.’

It is a sunny afternoon in early May when he goes downstairs for the first time. Linda has done her uttermost to make the room bright and cheerful. There are flowers, sweet spring flowers on the chimney-piece, table, and chiffonier; violets, primroses, hyacinths, narcissus, pale monthly roses from the southern wall. A fire burns gaily in the old-fashioned grate; for the invalid is chilly, and May sunshine uncertain. The invalid’s couch has been arranged in the cosiest corner by the fire; snow-white pillows, Berlin wool coverlet, knitted by Linda’s own hands as a Christmas present for her grandfather. The brown wainscot walls are brightened with water-colour landscapes in a higher style of art than Alexis would have expected to find at Dorley Mill; but he learns by-and-bye that they are all the work of Linda’s pencil.

‘What a pretty room!’ cries Alexis, when he is established on his sofa, ‘and what a pretty picture that water-mill makes against the blue sky! I feel ever so much better for the change.’

He enjoys the novelty of the apartment as much as if he had come into a new country, and his spirits begin to rise immediately.

‘Now I feel that I am really getting well,’ he says.

It is three o’clock in the afternoon. Mr. Benfield is to come in at five to tea, and there is to be quite a grand tea-drinking in honour of Mr. Secretan’s convalescence. The simple-hearted old man is almost as delighted at his guest’s recovery as if the Squire of Cheswold were his son.

Linda seats herself in her favourite chair by the open window. Dick places himself by the foot of the couch. The invalid lies in a lazy silence, looking out at the willows and the mill-stream, and the green hills beyond. How lovely nature seems to him after his nights of pain and darkness!

Presently he hears a small voice calling ‘mammie,’ and a small hand making ineffectual attempts to turn the handle of the door. Linda runs to open the door, and the prettiest child Alexis ever remembers to have seen runs into the room.

He has soft golden curls all over his small head, rosy cheeks, bold brown eyes, and the open, confiding look of a child that has been reared in love’s tender keeping. He clings to Linda’s dress.

‘Mammie, mammie dear,’ he cries, ‘Trot wants oo, Trot nenner sees oo now. Oo viz de genlamum?’

‘The gentleman has been very ill, darling, and he wanted me more than Trot does.’

‘Oo tell tory. Trot want oo allvis.’

‘You had Elizabeth to take care of you, pet. Elizabeth is very kind.’

‘See isn’t. Me hate Lithabess.’

‘Oh, you naughty boy. Look, Trot, this is the sick gentleman. Go and shake hands.’

‘Me won’t. Me hate the genlamum.’

‘Oh, Trot!’

‘Cause he keeps oo away from Trot.’

‘But he won’t do that any more, Trot,’ says Alexis, delighted with this infantile grumbler. ‘Come to me, my little man, and let’s make friends. See what I’ve got here!’

And Alexis produces his watch, that unfailing resource of a man who wants to amuse a child.

At sight of the watch and jingling bunch of lockets and seals the little one’s eyes open their widest, and he creeps a little nearer the enemy.

‘I don’t like oo,’ he says, ‘but I’ll look at oor watch.’

With this protest he goes close up to Alexis, and allows himself to be entertained.

‘What a darling little fellow!’ says Alexis. ‘A nephew of yours, I suppose, Miss Challice?’

‘No, he is no relation. He is a little boy my grandfather adopted.’

‘How good of him! The son of an old friend, I conclude.’

‘No. We adopted him to save him from the workhouse.’

‘Ah, that is like you--just as you took me in to save me from death.’

Alexis does not like to ask any further questions, yet he would be glad to know more about this fascinating little fellow, who soon grows friendly and familiar, and nestles his golden head in the invalid’s waistcoat, and plays with the seals and lockets.

Presently the miller comes in to tea, and the table is spread with a simple feast, new-laid eggs, cream, cakes of Linda’s manufacture, and strawberry jam, which Elizabeth, the maid of all work, secretly believes to be the best strawberry jam in Hampshire.

Trot sits up in his high chair at the table, and behaves very prettily, though he disposes of more bread and jam, and follows it up with more cake than Alexis can suppose beneficial to his internal economy; but then Mr. Secretan has seen very little of children and their ways.

Henceforward Trot is a wonderful favourite with him. He allows the little fellow to come into his room at all times and seasons, he sends Dick to Winchester for a cargo of picture-books, and Trot sits upon the invalid’s bed for hours together looking at the pictures, and demanding explanations thereof. When the pictures have been explained to Trot by Alexis, Trot insists on explaining them over again to the explainer, and lays down the law about them and philosophises upon them in a delightful way.

Never before has Alexis had any dealings with a child. It is a new experience to him. The little fellow amuses him for hours together. The thought that his own son might have grown into just such a boy as this seems a bond of union between him and Trot. The boy grows wondrous fond of him, and places him second only to mammie in his measure of love.

‘Have you had Trot long?’ Alexis asks one day of Linda.

‘Ever since he was a fortnight old.’

‘What a charge for you! His parents are dead, of course?’

‘I know nothing about his parents.’

‘Indeed! Poor little waif and stray. If you were not so very fond of him I should beg him of you, and make him my son and heir.’

‘I couldn’t bear to part with him. You are not in earnest, of course, but even if you were, and offered him the greatest advantages, I don’t think I could bring myself to part with him. I have suffered so much for his sake. Perhaps that is why I love him so dearly.’

‘Suffered? But how?’

‘Pray do not ask me. I cannot possibly tell you. It is all past and gone now, and I try to forget it. But it was very bitter.’

This sets Alexis thinking, and the thoughts that come of it trouble him. He sees but one solution of the enigma, and that is one which casts the shadow of disgrace on Linda Challice. Can she, this gentle, lovable girl, with her fair innocent face, be something less pure and perfect than he has believed her? The suspicion pains him as keenly as if she were his sister or his plighted wife. He lies awake for many a weary hour pondering over this painful question. For a little while even his heart turns from poor Trot, who is distressed at finding his new friend less kind, but Trot soon makes himself beloved again. Whatever misery this little brown-eyed boy may have unconsciously occasioned, Alexis cannot help loving him.