Dr. Mallison came to Wimperfield at the same hour as on the occasion of his first visit. He was with the patient for nearly half-an-hour, and he confabulated with Mr. Fosbroke for at least another half hour, so it could not be said that he performed the physician’s duty in a careless or perfunctory manner. But his opinion was not hopeful; and there was a gravity in his manner when he talked to Ida and her stepmother which was evidently intended to prepare them for the worst. He gave a peremptory order for a second nurse, an able-bodied experienced woman, who could relieve Towler in his now most onerous duties — duties growing hourly more painful, since the last development of the patient’s delirium was a violent hatred of his attendant, who, as he believed, was always lying in wait to do him some injury. Dr. Mallison also advised that Mrs. Wendover should no longer occupy the bedroom adjoining her husband’s. Upon this point he was very firm, when Ida urged her anxiety to forego no duty which she owed to her husband.
‘I am so sorry for him,’ she said. ‘I would do anything in the world to help or to comfort him.’
‘Unhappily, dear madam, you can do neither. ‘When these paroxysms are upon him he will mistake his best friend for his worst enemy — he was quite violent to Towler just now. You can do absolutely nothing, and your presence is even likely to irritate him. He must be given over entirely to his nurses. Towler will obey my directions implicitly, and the female attendant — Mr. Fosbroke tells me he can find a thoroughly competent person — will assist him in carrying them out. If we can stimulate the patient’s vital power, which is just now at the lowest ebb, and if we can induce natural sleep, why, there may still be a favourable result. But I do not conceal from you that Mr. Wendover’s condition is critical — very critical. Lady Palliser, you will insist, I hope, that your daughter removes to an apartment at some distance from her husband’s for the present. A few days hence, when the delirium is subjugated, as I trust it may be, by — ahem — the removal of the exciting cause, Mrs. Wendover may resume her attendance upon her husband. Just at present the less she sees of him the better for both.’
Ida could not disobey this injunction, especially as Lady Palliser and Mrs. Jardine took the matter into their own hands. Jane Dyson was ordered to convey all Mrs. Wendover’s belongings to a room on the second and topmost floor of the mansion, exactly over that she now occupied — a fine airy apartment, with a magnificent view, but less lofty, and less ponderously furnished than the apartments of the first floor. Bessie vowed that this upper chamber, with its French bedstead, and light chintz draperies, and maple furniture, was a much prettier room than the one below. She ran up and down stairs carrying flowers, Japanese fans, tea-tables, and other frivolities, until she made the new room a perfect bower, and then carried Ida off triumphantly to inspect her new quarters.
‘Isn’t it lovely,’ she said, ‘such a nice change? Do let us have our tea up here, if that good Dyson won’t mind bringing it. Nearly six o’clock, and we haven’t had a cup of tea! I do so enjoy thoroughly new surroundings. We’ll have the table just in front of this window. What a sweet architect to give this room windows down to the ground, and a lovely balcony! You must have some large Japanese vases in the balcony, Ida. That lovely deep red, or orange tawny. Oh, you poor pet, how wretched you look!’
‘I have just been talking to the new nurse, Bessie. She seems a good, honest creature. She has nursed other people in the same complaint, and — and — she thinks Brian is desperately ill.’
‘Oh, but he may get over it dear! The London doctor did not give him up; and there is no good in your making yourself ill with worry and fear. If you do, you won’t be able to wait upon Brian when he begins to get better; and convalescents want so much attention, don’t you know.’
The tea came, and Bessie persuaded her friend to take some, prattling on all the time in the hope of diverting Ida from the silent contemplation of her trouble. But the horror of the case had taken too stern a hold upon Ida’s brain. It was the dominant idea; as with the somnambulist whose perceptions are dead to every other subject save the one absorbing thought, and all subsidiary ideas linked with it by the subtle chain of association. Ida smiled a wan smile, and pretended to be interested in Bessie’s parochial anecdotes — the idiosyncrasies of the new curate, the fatuity of every young woman in the parish in running after him.
‘He is such a perfect stick; but then certainly there is no other single man in the parish under forty. He is like Robinson Crusoe. It is an awfully deceptive position for a young man to occupy. I know he is beginning to think himself quite handsome, while as for pimples — well, his face is like a Wiltshire meadow before it has been bush-harrowed.’
Ida did not go down to dinner that evening. She felt utterly unequal to the effort of pretended cheerfulness, and she did not want to inflict a countenance of stony gloom upon Mr. and Mrs. Jardine, or on Vernie, who was going to dine late for the first time since his illness. So she sat by the open window overlooking the woods, gray in the universal twilight grayness, and she read Victor Cousin’s ‘History of Philosophy,’ which was a great deal more comforting than fiction or poetry wou’d have been, as it carried her into regions of abstract thought where human troubles entered not.
For the next three days things went on qu............