Chapter XV

The fears of fever proved to be true. A brain-fever came on, and for a week Henry was very ill. Although serious, however, the attack was not considered dangerous, and as every day the physician spoke confidently of the result, cheerfulness returned to the members of the house.

Except the children, there were none who were bound to Henry by those near ties which make anxiety last while illness lasts. All were satisfied to know that he was no worse, or a shade better, and thankfully rolled anxiety away. All but Nora; and she had to behave like the rest. She did not dare to ask from hour to hour whether there was a change; did not dare to meet the physicians, and ask if they were convinced the danger was passed. No one appeared to consider her specially interested, or, indeed, except from the unfortunate circumstance of her fall, interested in any way.

No one except Mrs. Elliott. She saw the anxiety that devoured Nora; she saw the efforts by which she maintained her constant composure, and she did all which a kind person can do to relieve a state of mind which, although visible, shrinks from notice.

“But she will make herself ill,” she thought, “and the sooner she sees Henry the better. Possibly under these new circumstances the estrangement will give way.”

At the end of about ten days Henry was pronounced to be convalescent; and no sooner did the children hear that he was really better than they became clamorous to see him. Hitherto Mrs. Elliott only, and she under great restraint, had been allowed to go near his room.

“Now will be the time for Nora,” she thought; but before she had taken any measures for such a step, Nora herself spoke.

“I do not know if it could be allowed,” she said to Mrs. Elliott, “but I should be very glad if I might see my cousin. I am haunted by his face as he lay on the ground. It is dreadful! Nothing, I think, but seeing him can drive the impression away.”

She spoke quietly but earnestly. She did indeed feel as if she could scarcely bear for a longer time the torture of her mind.

“I understand that,” Mrs. Elliott said; and promised to see what could be done.

Henry was attended by two physicians; a great one, who came at stated times from a distance, and a little one, who devoted almost his whole time to him.

Mrs. Elliott waited until the following day, when the great physician came, and then made her request. “As he was satisfied with Henry’s state, might his little sister and his cousin now be allowed to see him?”

“To a visit from his little sister,” the physician replied, “there can be no possible objection. I am afraid the other is a more doubtful matter. Indeed,” he added, shaking his head, “I cannot take on myself at present to let him run the risk of agitation.”

Mrs. Elliott looked at him curiously.

“Would his cousin’s presence agitate him? Does he remember what happened on the ice?” she asked, discreetly.

“Are you not aware,” said the physician, “that during his delirium Mr. Devereux has constantly spoken of Miss Smith--so constantly, indeed, that I have every reason to fear he would not see her with calmness.”

“No, I was not aware,” she said, with extreme surprise and curiosity.

The physician looked at her with a smile.

“I see what you imagine; but that is not at all the impression I intend to convey. My impression would be of a contrary nature. Mr. Devereux very constantly spoke of and addressed Miss Smith, often calling her Miss Smythe. Sometimes he addressed her as having injured him, but more often reproached himself as if he had injured her. It was impossible to put any meaning to his ravings; but, under the circumstances, I think you will feel with me that the visit must be delayed.”

Mrs. Elliott was not very clear on this point, but it was not one on which she could venture to have an opinion.

She told Nora that Annabella was to be allowed to see Henry, as her visit would be no effort to him; but that any further step was forbidden for a few days longer. She spoke cheerfully, and Nora could only be satisfied to wait.

Henry was convalescent, but he did not recover. The joys of convalescence, such as poets have painted them, were not his. He was allowed to get up, he was laid on a sofa, he was wheeled to the window; but all the day long he lay languid, joyless, and indifferent.

When the great physician, who had ceased his constant attendance, came at the end of five or six days, he found but little improvement. “I cannot understand it,” he said. “There must be some hidden injury.”

“He would be well if he chose to be well,” said the lesser practitioner impatiently; “everything depends on the patient. If the patient will make no exertions, medicine is useless. If Mr. Devereux was in a hospital, they would turn him out; and the best thing for him, too.”

The little doctor who spoke thus had become much attached to Henry, but he was provoked with him for not getting well. He had been looking forward to a display of the progress made under his care, and he was disappointed.

The great physician asked for Mrs. Elliot.

“I think we will try your remedy,” he said. “The excitement I feared may prove a help instead of a hindrance. Mr. Devereux must be roused. Let us try an experiment. If Miss Smith is disposed to visit him, let her do so this afternoon. I need not recommend care and watchfulness. You will be on your guard. I leave the matter in your hands.”

Mrs. Elliott undertook it cheerfully. While he was dining, she paid Henry a visit; and as she left him, observed, quietly, that a few people were now to be admitted. “I shall bring Nora to see you this afternoon.”

She did not wait for any reply, nor paused to observe the manner in which the statement was received.

An hour afterwards she fetched Nora and accompanied her to his room. As they walked along, Nora begged her to remain with her during the visit.

“You see I have got my knitting,” Mrs. Elliott said, smiling. She could not refuse a request made with great earnestness, but she determined to use her discretion.

As they appeared at the door, a deep flush for an instant dyed Henry’s cheek, and then passed away with the rapidity of weakness, and left him deadly pale. He looked so wan, so weak, so emaciated with illness, that Nora paused breathless to recover herself from the shock he gave her. The sight of him was worse than the vision that had haunted her. “And I the cause!” she now said in her heart.

Accustomed, however, to self-control, the pause of horror was hardly perceived before she came quietly forward, and then shook hands in sedate and tranquil fashion. Mrs. Elliott then placed a chair for her opposite to him at the foot of the sofa, and sat down herself nearer to the door.

“I hoped I should have found you better,” Nora said, and her voice trembled a little as she spoke.

“I am better, thank you,” he replied. “Indeed, in a few days I suppose I shall be quite well.”

His words were cheerful and re-assuring, but the tone of his voice was most painful. So languid, weak, and weary.

“Do you not wish to get well?” Nora asked, addressing the tone of his voice, not the words he had said.

“I don’t know. Oh! yes, I suppose I wish to get well. All men do. But life is a great trouble--a great struggle. Sometimes I feel as if it was hardly worth while.”

And while he said these sentences, disconnectedly, his eyes rested on her, looking so large and mournful in his sunken cheeks, so like the eyes of Sophy in her dying days, that Nora felt struck as with a pang of death.

“I think you should wish to live,” she said, bending forward towards him, and speaking earnestly.

“I know I should,” he replied. “I know well that I am not fit to die; nor is weariness of life a good preparation for death.”

“I did not mean that. I meant--” and here her voice took a tone of passion in its earnestness--“I meant that you should wish to live for my sake.” A glow tinged his cheek for a second, but Nora scarcely perceived it. “If you were to die, what would become of me? Do you not know that I should have killed you?”

“You have killed me many times,” he answered; and in his voice, also, there was now a sound touched and altered from its languid tone. “This time only the stroke would have been welcome.”

“How have I killed you? What have I ever done that you should hate me?”

“Hate! Is it possible you think I hate?”

Up to this time, notwithstanding her great discomfort, Mrs. Elliott, in obedience to Nora’s wishes, had sat still. But here she felt unable to maintain her position longer, and softly left the room. Her departure was unperceived. She had been forgotten.

“It seems like hate,” Nora replied; “and what have I done, and how have I deserved it? If it has been my unhappy fate to offend you often, and now to have done you harm; you should pity, and not hate me. You should pity me; for you cannot tell how I wished to do you good--how I have longed, in my lonely life, to have you for my friend, and not my enemy.”

Her words were poured out, as she thus pleaded her cause before him, with a force and quickness uncommon to her. Henry listened with wide-opened eyes, and made no effort to arrest her.

It is related in Guarini’s “Pastor Fido,” that a hard-hearted young hunter, who had trampled on love, scorning a young maiden who loved him, was in a moment of time transformed by the discovery that he had wounded, and he thought to death, the maiden he was disdaining. In one instant the hard heart became soft.

It was with some such feeling, and with like suddenness, that Henry was now transformed. As he listened to Nora’s voice pleading before him, as he looked into her earnest eyes, the stubborn rebellious feeling which had made his life miserable, born of passion first, then of pride, gave way--melted within him.

“Hate!” he cried, and in an altered tone, “is it possible you think I _hate_?”

And then a new and sudden struggle began within. It was no longer the struggle of opposing feelings always felt in her presence, but the struggle against one feeling, which seemed bursting for utterance. The physician would have been alarmed if he had seen his agitation. His cheeks were flushed with crimson, and every vein in the now transparent skin seemed to be quivering beneath its slender covering.

Nora was terrified. She had hitherto been so absorbed by her intense desire to set all bitterness at rest between them, that she had not thought of the possibility of agitation. She now looked round, and saw that Mrs. Elliott was gone.

“You are ill,” she cried, in a fright. “I have done you harm again!” and she rose quickly from her seat.

“Wait,” he cried, and he stretched out his hand to her.

Pausing irresolute, hardly knowing what she did, she took it; and then meeting a gaze that seemed designed to read her very soul, she began to feel and to think;--and she blushed.

The blush loosed the fetters that withheld him.

“You said hate,” he cried, still gazing at her. “It is not hate. Shall I say what it is--unworthy though I am to feel it?”

A swift bright glow, radiant in its beauty and gladness, flitted over her unconscious face. It made her look so lovely that Henry could have risen from his couch and worshipped her. He did spring up and attempted to rise, but her imploring hand and weakness combined subdued him.

“Is it possible!” he cried, gazing at her. “Do _you not_ hate?”

She smiled and blushed, and slowly shook her head; and so it came to pass that the barrier between them was broken down.

Nor was it likely to arise again, for the life of principle and self-control he had lately led had delivered Henry from the folly and childishness of old passion. The mirror of his mind was now smooth and clear, and it needed only to brush the mists away that had gathered upon it, and light entered, and with the light peace.

He one day described to Mrs. Elliott the singular torture he had long endured. Nora, as he saw her to be, as he knew her to be, had long won his heart. In their first meeting she had caught his fancy. To this had been afterwards added gratitude and reverence; and growing from these a devotion which, owing to their peculiar relations, was touched with a light of romance.

But in opposition to these feelings there had been another image perpetually rising before him--never, after his first acquaintance, taking any hateful form, but one tending to distance, to freeze, to chill him. He saw her as his benefactress and his judge. He saw her calm and kind, extending to him her clemency, inviting him to mercy, judging of him pitifully; seeing his errors, but forgiving them. And, strange to say, the more the first feelings strove for mastery, and sometimes gained it, the more did this image, with a cold Medusa gaze, haunt and repel him. The combat between the two feelings had made his life torture, his visits to her a torment.

“And no wonder,” was Mrs. Elliott’s observation. “But did it never strike, never cross your poor brain, that she could perhaps feel more like a young girl than an old judge?”

“Never but once,” he said. “After I left Riddlemere I was haunted by the thought, the hope that I had made a favourable impression; but Mr. Powderham’s letter telling me of her friendly interference in my favour put that to flight for ever. Nor was it likely, after her kindness to my family, that I should even imagine such a feeling on my return. I think,” and he coloured and smiled, “if what I now gather from her is true, her conduct to me and to them--judging by the common feelings of people in that position--was truly heroic. The devotion of my life will be a poor reward for all she has borne, and done.”

* * * * *

A conclusion is hardly needed to a tale that has been already too long. And there needs no pointing of a moral, when a moral has been so glaringly exhibited.

It is not perhaps a common thing for an individual hate to be nourished and cherished in a family; yet unless the annals of the world greatly lie, the very same state of mind is nourished and cherished by single persons, and in families, towards inanimate things; towards subjects, bodies, names, and words. There are reasonless antipathies and prejudices so nursed and fed in certain minds, that the very minds become perturbed by the violence of the hate; a single word, a simple name, sufficing to raise such a host of fiery thoughts, that the mental powers lose their balance, and become incapable of fair and righteous judgment.

It was the thought of some such truth that suggested the idea of the story which has been told; which prompted the attempt to display the effects of a reasonless hate on a young, unthinking character.

“Fierce passions discompose the mind,
As tempests lash the sea.”

There is the truth to be remembered. The remainder of the verse has its truth also:

“But calm content and peace we find
When, Lord, we turn to Thee.”

Yet it would be unfair to deny that these reasonless hates and antipathies are often cherished by minds whose desires are set in a right direction. Good men, religious men, indulge in prejudices, until their minds are unstrung by them. Yet good men, above all others, should beware of such things; for fierce passions and prejudices, if cherished, will discompose their brains, let them be as good as they may.

THE END.

LONDON: PRINTED BY MACDONALD AND TUGWELL, BLENHEIM HOUSE.

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

the two cbildren=> the two children {pg 73}

for it acknowleged=> for it acknowledged {pg 75}

disappoinment with it=> disappointment with it {pg 127}

and very scrupulons=> and very scrupulous {pg 146}

and Sophy profitted=> and Sophy profited {pg 150}

evening in the begining=> evening in the beginning {pg 152}

what I imgaine=> what I imagine {pg 230}