# Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 11/Lord Oakburn's daughters - Part 23

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LORD OAKBURN’S DAUGHTERS. BY THE AUTHOR OF "EAST LYNNE."
CHAPTER XLV.TAKING THE AIR IN BLISTER LANE.
It was a gloomy time at South Wennock. Usually a remarkably healthy place—indeed, had it not been, the few medical men established there could not have sufficed—it was something new to have an epidemic raging, and people took alarm. The fever was a severe one, and two or three patients had died; but still it was not so bad as it might have been, as it is occasionally in other places. The town was hurriedly adopting all sorts of sanitary precautions, and the doctors were worked off their legs.
Lady Jane Chesney regretted on Lucy’s account that it should have happened just now. Not that she was uneasy on the score of fear for her; Jane was one of those happy few who can put their full and entire trust in God’s good care, and so be calm in the midst of danger: “Whoso dwelleth under the defence of the most High, shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.” But she was sorry this sickness should prevail now, because it made the visit a dull one.
Jane lived in the same quiet style. Since the addition to her income through the money left her by old Lady Oakburn, she had added but one man servant to her modest household. The two maids, of whom Judith was one, and this man, comprised it. Not that Jane saved much. She dressed well, and her housekeeping was liberal; and she gave away a great deal in a quiet way. But the young, full of life, loving gaiety, might have called her house a dull one; she feared Lucy was finding it so; and it certainly did not want the sickness and alarm prevailing abroad to augment it.
Jane was saying this as she sat one night alone with Lucy. They had promised to spend the evening with some friends, but just as they were about to quit home, a note was delivered from the lady to whom they were engaged. One of her servants was taken ill, and she feared it might be the fever: perhaps therefore Lady Jane would prefer to put off her visit.
“I should not have minded for myself,” remarked Jane, as they sat down to a quiet evening at home, “but I will not risk it for you, Lucy. I am so sorry, my dear, that South Wennock should be in this uncertain state just now. You will have cause to remember your dull visit to me.”
Lucy laughed. She did not look very dull as she sat there. Her evening dress was of gay silk, and some sort of enamelled ornaments, a necklace and bracelets glistening with their steel mountings, were on her fair neck and arms. She had taken up some embroidery work, was already busy with its intricacies, and she looked up with a laughing eye at Jane.
“Indeed I am not sorry to be kept at home, Jane. Dull as you call my visit, all my work seems to get on badly: and you know I promised myself to do so much. But, Jane—if I may say one thing,” Lucy added, her gay tone changing to seriousness, “you seem dull. You have been so ever since we came from London.”
Jane paused a moment. “Not dull, Lucy, dear. I have been preoccupied: I acknowledge that.”
“What about?” asked Lucy.
“I would rather not tell you, Lucy. It is only a little matter on my mind: a little doubt: something I am trying to find out. I cannot help thinking of it constantly, and I suppose it has made me silent.”
You need not ask the source of Jane’s preoccupation. That it was connected with her sister Clarice you will have already divined. Since the information gained from Mrs. West, that Clarice had married, Lady Jane had been unable to divest herself of an impression that that little child at Tupper’s cottage was the child of Clarice. The only possible ground for her fancy was the extraordinary likeness (at least, as Jane saw it) in that child’s eyes and general expression of face to Clarice. The features were not like; quite unlike; but the eyes and their look were Clarice’s over again. Added to this—and perhaps the fact somewhat strengthened Jane’s doubts—was the manner of his ostensible mother, Mrs. Smith. From the very first, Jane had thought she looked old to be the mother of so young a child; but she had hard features, and such women, as Jane knew, are apt to look much older than they really are. Several times since her return from London Jane had passed the cottage and talked to the little boy over the gate. Once she had gone in—having been civilly invited by Mrs. Smith to rest herself—and she had indirectly tried to ascertain some particulars of the child’s past life: where he was born, and where he had lived. But Mrs. Smith grew uncommunicative and would not answer much. The boy was her own, she said; she ​had had another son, older than this, but he had died; she had married very late in life. Her husband had occupied a good post in a manufactory at Paisley, in Scotland, and there her little boy had been reared. Upon her husband’s death that summer, she had left the place and come back to her native country, England. So far as that, Mrs. Smith was communicative enough; but beyond these points she would not go; and upon Lady Jane’s rather pressing one or two questions, the widow was quite rude. Her business was her own, she said, and she did not recognise the right of strangers to pry into it. Lady Jane was baffled. Of course it might all be as the woman said; but there was a certain secrecy in her manner that Jane suspected. She had, however, no plea for pressing the matter further; and she preferred to wait and, as it were, feel her way. But she thought of it incessantly, and it had rendered her usually equable manner occupied and absent, so much so as to have been observed by Lucy.
“Is it anything about Laura?” asked Lucy, in answer to Jane’s last observation.
“Oh no. Nothing at all.”
“Do you think, Jane, that Laura is happy? She seems at times so strangely restless, so petulant.”
“Lucy, I hope she is happy: I cannot tell. I have observed what you say, but I know nothing.”
“Mr. Carlton seems very indulgent to her,” returned Lucy.
And in point of fact, Lucy had been quite struck with this indulgence. Jane’s own decision, not to visit at the house of Mr. Carlton, whether springing from repugnance or pride, or what not, she had strictly adhered to, but she had not seen fit to extend the prohibition to Lucy; and Lucy was often at Laura’s, and thus had an opportunity of seeing Mr. Carlton’s behaviour to his wife. She told Jane that she liked Mr. Carlton better than she had liked him as a little girl; she remembered, she said with a laugh, that she then entertained a great prejudice against him; but she liked him now very well, and he was certainly fond of Laura. Jane agreed that Mr. Carlton’s manners were gentlemanlike and agreeable; she had now and then met him in society, and nothing could be more courteous than was Mr. Carlton’s manner to herself; but, into his house Jane still declined to enter.
“I think he has always been most indulgent to her,” observed Jane. “Laura, I fear, is of a difficult temper, but———Are we going to have visitors to-night?”
The break in her sentence was caused by a visitor’s knock. Impromptu evening visitors to Lady Jane Chesney were not common. The servant opened the drawing-room door.
“Mr. Frederick Grey, my lady.”
Lucy threw down her embroidery. Jane smiled; the dull evening had changed for Lucy.
He came in with a radiant face. They questioned him upon his appearance in South Wennock, when they had believed him in London, reading hard for his degree. Frederick protested his uncle John had invited him down.
“I suppose the truth is, you proffered him a visit,” said Jane. “Or perhaps came without any notice to him at all.”
Frederick Grey laughed. The latter was in truth the fact. But Frederick never stood on ceremony at his uncle John’s: he was as much at home there as at his father’s.
And as the days went on and the sickness in South Wennock increased, Mr. John Grey declared that his nephew’s visit was the most fortunate circumstance that could have happened. For the medical men were scarcely equal to the additional calls upon them, and Frederick took his full share of the duty. So, after all, the visit, which had been intended by him to be nothing but a short and delightful holiday with Lucy Chesney, was changed into one of labour, and—in one sense—disappointment. For he could only venture to see her once in a way, every other day or so; neither had he time for more; and then, with all the precaution of changing his clothes.
Lady Laura Carlton’s feet seemed instinctively to take her to Blister Lane, past the front of Tapper’s cottage. Jealousy has carried women to more inconvenient places. The unhappy suspicion—how miserably unhappy it was to be in its ultimate effects, neither Laura nor any one else could dream of!—connecting her husband with that little child had grown to a height that was scarcely repressible; and Laura was in the dangerous frame of mind that has been metaphorically designated as touchwood—wanting but a spark to kindle it into a flame.
Not a day passed but she was walking down Blister Lane. She would take her way up the Rise, turn down the lane, pass the cottage, which was situated at this end of it, walk on a little way, and then come back again. All as if she were taking a walk to get a mouthful of fresh air. If she saw the little boy in the garden she would stop and speak to him; her jaundiced eyes devouring the likeness which she thought she detected to Mr. Carlton; it seemed that she could never tire of looking at it.
It was not altogether the jealousy itself that ​took Lady Laura there, but a determination that had sprung out of it. A resolve had seated itself firmly in her mind to sift the matter to its very foundation, to bring to light the past. She cared not what means she used: the truth she would know, come what would. Of a sufficiently honourable nature on the whole, Lady Laura forgot honour now; Mr. Carlton had reproached her with “dodging” his steps; she was prepared to do that and worse in her route of discovery.
It might have been described as a disease, this mania that was distracting her. What did she promise herself would be gained by these hauntings of Blister Lane? She did not know; all that she could have told was, that she was unable to rest away from the place. For one thing, she wanted to ascertain how frequently Mr. Carlton went to the cottage.
But fortune had not favoured her. Not once had she chanced to light upon the time that Mr. Carlton paid his professional visit. Had she met him—of which there was of course a risk—an excuse was ready. As if fate wished to afford her a facility of operation, Lady Laura had become acquainted with the fact that a young woman, expert in fine needlework, lived in Blister Lane; she immediately supplied her with some, and could have been going there to see about it had she been inconveniently met.
One gloomy day in the beginning of November, Laura bent her steps in the usual direction. It did not rain, but the skies were lowering, and anybody might have supposed that Lady Laura was better indoors than out. She, however, did not think so. In her mind’s fever, outward discomfort was as nothing.
As she passed the gate of Tupper’s cottage, Mrs. Smith, in her widow’s cap, was leaning over it, gazing in the direction of South Wennock, as if expecting some one. She looked at Laura as she came up; but she did not know her for the wife of Mr. Carlton. And Lady Laura, with averted eyes and a crimson blush on her haughty cheeks, went right into the road amidst the mud, rather than pass close to the gate. It was the only time she had seen Mrs. Smith since that first day, for the widow kept much to the house.
On went Laura in her fury, and never turned until she came to the cottage of the seamstress. It seemed that she required an excuse to her own mind for being in the lane that day. The conclusion she had arrived at in her insensate folly was, that the woman was looking impatiently for the advent of Mr. Carlton. What passion that this earth contains can ever befool us like that of jealousy!
She went in, gave some directions about the work, so confused and contradictory as nearly to drive the young woman wild, and then retraced her fierce steps back again. Very excessively astonished was she, to see, just on this side of Tupper’s cottage, a sort of hand-carriage standing in the middle of the road path, and the little boy seated in it. He looked weak and wan and pale, but his beautiful eyes smiled a recognition of Lady Laura.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“She took off her pattens and forgot them, and she has got a hole in her boot,” lucidly replied the child.
“Who’s she?” resumed Laura.
“The girl that Mr. Carlton sent. He says I must go out as long as I can, and she comes to draw me. The drum’s broke,” continued the boy, his countenance changing to intense trouble; “Mr. Carlton broke it. He kissed me because I didn’t cry, and he says he’ll bring me another.”
“Is Mr. Carlton there now?” hastily asked Laura, indicating the cottage.
“Yes. It was the drum broke, not the soldier. He hit it too hard.”
The clanking of pattens was heard in the garden path, and a stout-looking country girl came forth. She knew Lady Laura by sight, and curtsied to her. Laura recognised her as a respectable peasant’s daughter who was glad to go out by day, but who could not take a permanent situation on account of a bed-ridden mother.
“The little boy looks ill,” remarked Lady Laura, rather taken to, and saying any words that came uppermost.
“Yes, my lady; and they say he is weaker to-day than he has been at all.”
“Mr. Carlton says so?”
“His mother says so. Mr. Carlton hasn’t seen him. He has not been to-day.”
Laura strode away, vouchsafing no further notice of the speaker, not so much as a word of adieu to the little child. In her heart of hearts she believed the girl was telling her a lie; was purposely deceiving her; and that Mr. Carlton was even then inside the cottage. The child’s words, “the girl that Mr. Carlton sent,” were beating their refrain on her brain. Why should Mr. Carlton send a girl to draw out any child, unless he held some peculiar interest in him? she was asking herself. Ah, if she could but have seen the thing as it actually had been!—how innocent it was! When the boy got past running about, Mr. Carlton said he must still go into the open air. The mother hired this little carriage, and was regretting to Mr. Carlton that she could not hear of a fit person to draw it; he thought at once of this young woman; he was attending the mother ​at the time; and said he would send her. That was the whole history. Laura Carlton, in her blind jealousy, knew not the bed that she was preparing for herself.
She went straight home, walking fast, and entered the house by the surgery entrance, as she would do now and then in impatient moods, when she could not bear to wait while the street door was opened. Mr. Carlton’s assistant, Mr. Jefferson, was standing there, and raised his hat to her.
“When do you expect Mr. Carlton in?” she asked, as she swept past.
“Mr. Carlton is not out, Lady Laura.”
“Mr. Carlton is out,” she rejoined, turning her angry face upon the surgeon.
He looked surprised. “Indeed no, Lady Laura. Mr. Carlton came in about half an hour ago. He is down in the drug-room.”
Lady Laura did not believe a word of it. Were they all in league to deceive her? She turned to the lower stairs, determined to see with her own eyes and confute the falsehood. This drug-room, sometimes styled shortly the cellar, was a small boarded apartment, to which access could be had only through the cellar. Mr. Carlton kept drugs and other articles there pertaining to his profession; the servants had strict orders never to enter it, lest, as Mr. Carlton once told them, they might set their feet on chemical materials of a combustible nature, and get blown up. They took care to keep clear of it after that warning.
Lady Laura passed through the cellar and peered in. Standing before an iron safe, its door thrown wide open, was Mr. Carlton. Laura saw what looked like bundles of papers and letters within it; but so entirely astonished was she to see her husband, that a sudden exclamation escaped her.
You have heard of this room and this safe before. Mr. Carlton once locked up a letter in it which he had received from his father, the long-ago evening when he first heard of the illness of Mrs. Crane. Laura knew of the safe’s existence, but had not felt any curiosity in regard to it. She had penetrated to this room once in her early married days, when Mr. Carlton was showing her over the house, but never since.
A sudden exclamation escaped her. It appeared to startle Mr. Carlton. He shut the safe door in evident haste, and turned round.
“Laura! Is it you? What ever do you want down here?”
Iaura was unable to say at the moment what she wanted, and in her perplexity spoke something very near the truth. Mr. Jefferson had said he was there, but she thought he was out, and came to see.
She turned away while she spoke, and Mr. Carlton looked after her in surprise, as she made her way quickly up the stairs.
So in this instance, at least, there had been no treachery, and Lady Laura, so far, might have sat down with a mind at rest. The little child had evidently not comprehended her question, when she asked whether Mr. Carlton was indoors then.
CHAPTER XLVI.LADY JANE BROUGHT TO HER SENSES AT LAST.
On the morning subsequent to this, Lady Jane and Lucy were sitting together after breakfast. Lucy had complained of a headache; she was leaning her head upon her hand, when Judith came in with a note. It proved to be from Lady Laura. She had twisted her ankle, she said; was consequently a prisoner, and wished Lucy to go and help her to pass a dull day.
“I should like to go, Jane. A walk in the air may take my headache off.”
“You are sure you have no sore throat?” asked Jane, somewhat anxiously. She had put the question once before.
Lucy smiled. Of course people were suspicious of headaches at this time! “I don’t think I have any sore throat, Jane; I ate my breakfast very well. I did not sleep well last night, and that has made my head feel heavy.”
Lucy found Laura on a sofa in her dressing-room, a pretty apartment on the first ﬂoor.
“Are you quite an invalid?” asked Lucy.
“Not quite; I can manage to limp across the room. But the ankle is swollen and rather painful. Did Jane object to your coming?”
“Not at all. How did you contrive to hurt it, Laura?”
“I was in mischief,” returned Lady Laura, with a half laugh. “And you know, when people do get up to mischief on the sly, punishment is sure to follow. Don’t our first lessons in the spelling-book tell us so?”
“What was the mischief,” returned Lucy.
“I and Mr. Carlton are not upon the best of terms; there is a grievance between us,” was Laura’s answer. “You need not look so serious, Lucy; I do not mean to imply that we are quite cst-and-dog, but we are not precisely turtle-doves. He has secrets which he keeps from me; I know he has; and get at them I will. There’s deceit abroad just now, and I vow and declare I’ll come to the bottom of it.”
Lucy listened in wondering surprise. Laura would say no more. “No,” she observed, “it is nothing particularly suitable to your ears: let it pass, so far. He has got a strong iron safe in the cellar, and in this safe he keeps ​papers and letters and things; I know, because I went down yesterday, when he had the lid open, and he started like a coward when he saw me, and shut it to. Well, I thought 1 would see what there is in that safe, and I stole down to the cellar last night with my bunch of keys, to try whether any one of them would unlock it.”
“Oh, Laura!” broke forth Lucy, shocked and pained beyond expression. “How could you think of such a thing?”
“Wait until you have a husband like Mr. Carlton, who puts your temper up with his underhand ways, and then see what you would ‘think’ and do,” retorted Lady Laura.
And Lucy ventured no further remonstrance, for she had once been a child under Laura’s control, and was somewhat in awe of her still.
“I went in the dark, lest the servants should see me,” proceeded Lady Laura, “taking some wax matches with me, to light when I got down. All went well; I tried the keys (none of which fitted, so I was baffled there), and blew out my lights to come back again. We have to go down three steps in coming out of the drug-room, where the safe is, and mount two to get into the cellar—wretched incapables the builders must have been, to make you go down steps only to come up again! Well, Lucy, I slipped on something at the top of these three steps, something sticky, it seemed, and down I went to the bottom. I could hardly get up at first, for pain in my foot, and a regular fright I was in, fearing I must call the servants; however, I did succeed in crawling back. There’s the history.”
And a very creditable one! Lucy sat in wonder.
“I have told it you out of bravado,” continued Laura, who seemed to be in a reckless mood, “and you may repeat it to Jane, if you like. When he came home he wanted to know how I had done it. ‘Slipped,’ I answered; and he got no more out of me.”
A silence ensued, which Lucy broke. “We heard a rumour, Laura, that Mr. Carlton was likely to give up his practice here. Frederick Grey mentioned it.”
“He says he shall. I don’t know. Of course London’s the best field for a medical man. Talking of Frederick Grey, what’s the reason that Mr. Carlton dislikes him so much?”
“I know nothing about it,” replied Lucy.
“I heard him going on to Mr. Jefferson about Frederick Grey’s being down here interfering with the practice. There never was any love between them. Young Grey used to say Mr. Carlton drove his father from the town.”
“As he did,” returned Lucy, quietly. “At least it was so reported in the old days, I remember. But that is all past and done with. Frederick Grey is not interfering with Mr. Carlton’s practice.”
“No; Mr. Carlton would see him far enough away, rather than allow that. Lucy! are you ill? Your eyes look heavy, and your cheeks are flushed.”
Lucy had been bending her head upon her hand for the last few moments, as she had done earlier in the morning at her sister Jane’s.
“I got up with a headache,” she replied, lifting her eyes wearily. “I thought the air, as I came along, might have done it good, but it has not, and my throat is getting sore.”
“Throat getting sore!” echoed Laura. An instant’s pause, and she started from the sofa in consternation, forgetting her lameness, seized her sister, and drew her to the light of the window.
“Lucy! it cannot be! You are never going to have the fever!”
But Lucy was going to have the fever. In fact, Lucy had got the fever. And Lady Jane did not know of it until night, when she was expecting Lucy home; for Laura, from carelessness or from some other motive, never sent to tell her. At nine o’clock the footman was dispatched with the news, but it was Mr. Carlton who sent him.
Lady Jane could not believe it. It was simple Jonathan, and she did think the man must have made some mistake. Lady Lucy was in bed, he said. She had been taken ill soon after reaching their house. Mr. Carlton was out then, but on his return he pronounced it to be the fever, and ordered her instantly to bed. He had charged Jonathan to give his respects to Lady Jane, and to assure her that every care and attention should be paid to the invalid.
Now nothing in the world could have been much less welcome than this news to Lady Jane Chesney. To her mind there was something underhanded in their thus taking possession of Lucy, and she complained privately to Judith. Apart from Lady Jane’s anxiety for Lucy, she had an unconquerable aversion to her lying ill at Mr. Carlton’s, to her being attended by that gentleman, or to herself becoming an inmate, however temporarily, in his house, which she must do, were Lucy to remain. She took a moment’s counsel with herself, for Lady Jane was one who rarely did things upon impulse, then attired herself for walking, and proceeded to Mr. Carlton’s, taking Judith with her, and ordering her own footman to go as quickly as he could to Mr. Grey’s and bring back that gentleman to Mr. Carlton’s.
​The best room, a large and handsome spare chamber adjoining Lady Laura’s dressing-room, had been hastily prepared for Lucy. She was lying in it, looking flushed and anxious, and complaining of her head and throat.
“Jane,” she whispered, as her sister bent over her, “Mr. Carlton says it is the fever. I wish I could have been at home with you!”
“You should have returned the instant you found yourself getting worse, Lucy,” was Jane’s answer. “I thought you were possessed of common sense, child. Laura, you ought to have sent her; where was your carriage, that she could not have the use of it?”
“It was not her fault—or mine,” replied Laura. “Mr. Carlton administered some remedies this morning, and wished to see the effect; to-night he says she is too ill to go. But, if you will allow me to express my private opinion, Jane, I should say that it has all happened for the best, for where can she be so well attended to as in the house of a medical man? And you may be sure she shall have good nursing.”
“Laura, I would rather have her with me; she is under my charge, you know. I wonder if she can be moved now?”
“You must be stupid to think it,” returned Laura.
“I told Mr. Carlton I felt well enough to be taken home,” spoke Lucy, “but he said I did not understand the risk. I think I might be taken, Jane.”
Jane inquired after Mr. Carlton. Ho was in the dining-room, taking some refreshment after a hard day’s work, and she went to him. He rose in astonishment. Lady Jane Chesney in his house!
“Mr. Carlton,” she said, speaking quietly in spite of her anger, and she did feel very angry, “I have come to convey Lady Lucy home. I fancy it may be done without risk.”
“Impossible, Lady Jane. It might cost her her life.”
“I cannot but think, sir, before you had assumed to yourself the responsibility of keeping her, that you might have sent to inquire my pleasure upon the subject,” returned Lady Jane, with dignity. “The fever must be quite at its earliest stage, and there was no reason why she could not have been sent home. She was well enough to walk here this morning, and she was, I make no doubt, not sufficiently ill to debar her returning this evening.”
“It has come on very rapidly indeed,” replied Mr. Carlton; “and I think she will have it badly.”
“I still wish to take her, if possible,” persisted Jane, somewhat agitated at the last words, “and I have dispatched a messenger for Mr. Grey, that he may come here and give me his opinion upon the point. In doing this, I wish to cast no slight upon your judgment and skill, Mr. Carlton, but Mr. Grey is my own attendant, and I have unusual confidence in him; moreover, he will not be prejudiced, for her removal or against it. You and I, sir, perhaps are so; though on opposite sides.”
“I do not understand you,” spoke the surgeon.
“I am prejudiced in favour of taking her; you, in favour of keeping her; Mr. Grey, on the contrary, will give his honest opinion, for he can have no motive to be biassed either way.”
“Yes, ho can,” rejoined Mr. Carlton. “A profitable patient will fall into his hands, if he gets her away.”
True, so far; but the words vexed Jane. “She will be his patient in either case, Mr. Carlton. I mean, I say, no reflection on your skill; but my own doctor must attend on Lady Lucy, wherever she may be.”
The cold, haughty tone of the words and manner, the "Lady Lucy,” stung Mr. Carlton. Jane’s treatment of him, her utter rejection of any intimacy, had been boiling up within him for years. He so far forgot his usual equanimity, he so far forgot himself, as to demand with a flash of passion and a word that had been better left unsaid, whether he was not as efficient as John Grey. Jane put him down with calm self-possession.
“Sir, it is true that my sister is your wife; but I beg you not to forget that I am Lady Jane Chesney, and that a certain amount of respect is due to me, even in your house. I do believe you to be as efficient as Mr. Grey; that your skill is equal to his; but that is not the question. He is my medical attendant, and I would prefer that he took the case.”
“It’s well known, sir, that when people are ill, there’s no place seems to them like home,” interposed Judith, who had quite adopted her lady’s prejudices in the affair. “We’d a great deal better have her at home.”
Before any rejoinder could be made, a noise was heard in the hall, and Mr. Carlton turned to it, Jane following him. Frederick Grey had entered: and Mr. Frederick was in a state of agitation scarcely suppressible. He caught hold of Lady Jane.
“My uncle was out, and I came in his stead,” he cried, his words rendered half unintelligible by emotion. “Where is she? Is she very ill?”
An altercation ensued. Mr. Carlton, whose temper was up (a most unusual thing with him) stepped before his visitor to impede his way to the stairs.
​“Mr. Frederick Grey, I cannot permit you to be in my house. Had your uncle come, I would have received him with all courtesy; but I wish to know by what right you intrude.”
“I don’t intrude willingly,” was the answer. “I have come to see Lady Lucy Chesney.”
“You cannot see her. You shall not pass up my stairs.”
“Not see her!” echoed Frederick, staring at Mr. Carlton as though he thought he must be out of his mind. “Not see her! You don’t know what you are saying, Mr. Carlton. She is my promised wife.”
He would have borne on to the stairs; Mr. Carlton strove to impede him, and by some means the gas became extinguished; possibly the screw was touched. The servants were in the hall; hearing the altercation, they had stolen into it; Lady Laura, with her damaged foot, was limping down the stairs. The women servants shrieked at finding themselves in sudden darkness; they were perhaps predisposed to agitation from the dispute; and Lady Laura shrieked in concert, not having the faintest notion what there could possibly be to shriek at.
Altogether it was a scene of confusion. The women ran close to their master for protection, they knew not from what, and Frederick Grey, pushing everybody aside with scant courtesy, made his way to the staircase. Mr. Carlton would have prevented him, but was impeded by the servants, and at the same moment some words were whispered in a strange voice in his ear.
“Would you keep her here to poison her on her sick bed, as you did another?”
Simultaneously with this, there was some movement at the hall door: a slight bustle or sound as if somebody had either come in or gone out. It had been ajar the whole of the time, not having been closed after Frederick Grey’s entrance, for Lady Jane’s footman stood outside, waiting for orders.
Mr. Carlton—all his energy, all his opposition gone out of him—stood against the wall, wiping his ashy face. But that he had heard Frederick Grey’s footsteps echoing up the stairs beforehand, he would have concluded that the words came from him. Somebody struck a match, and Mr Carlton became conscious, in the dim light, that there was a stranger present,—a shabby-looking man who stood just within the hall. What impulse impelled the surgeon, he best knew, but he darted forward, seized, and shook him.
“Who are you, you villain?”
But Mr. Carlton’s voice was changed, and he would not have recognised it for his own. The interloper contrived to release himself, remonstrating dolefully.
“I’m blest if this is not a odd sort of reception when a man comes for his doctor! What offence have I been guilty on, sir, to be shook like this?”
It was inoffensive little Wilkes, the barber, from the neighbouring shop. Mr. Carlton gazed at him with very astonishment in the full blaze of the relighted gas. “I’m sure I beg your pardon, Wilkes! I thought it was—Who came in or went out?” demanded Mr. Carlton, looking about him in all directions.
The servants had seen no one. It was dark.
“I came along to fetch you, sir,” explained the barber, who sometimes had the honour of operating on Mr. Carlton’s chin. “My second boy’s a bit ill, and we think it may be the fever. I wasn’t for coming for you till morning, sir, but the wife made a fuss and said there were nothing like taking disorders in time; so when I shut up my shop, I come. I suppose you took me for a wild bear, a marching in without leave.”
“Did you meet anybody, or see anybody go out?” asked Mr. Carlton, leaving the suggestion of the wild bear unanswered.
“I didn’t, sir. I was going round to the surgery, when I see the hall light disappear, and heard some women scream. Naterally I come straight in at the big door; I wondered whether anybody was being murdered.”
At the foot of the stairs, standing side by side, contemplating all these proceedings with astonishment, and not understanding them, were the ladies, Jane and Laura. They asked an explanation of Mr. Carlton.
“I—I—thought I heard a stranger; I thought some one had come in. I feel sure some one did come in,” he continued, peering about him still in a curious kind of way.
“Will you step down, please sir, to the boy?”
“Yes, yes, Wilkes, I’ll be with him before bedtime,” replied Mr. Carlton. And the forgiving little barber turned away meekly, and met Mr. John Grey coming in. Frederick Grey, unimpeded, had made his way up-stairs. An open door, and a light inside, guided him to Lucy’s chamber. Ill as she was, she uttered an exclamation of remonstrance when she saw him, and covered her face with her hot hands.
“Oh, Lucy, my darling! To think that it should have attacked you!”
“Frederick! what do you do here? Where is Jane? It is not right.”
He drew away her hands to regard her face, ​he passed his own cool hand across her brow; he took out his watch to count the beatings of the pulse.
“I am here in my professional capacity, Lucy; don’t you understand? Could I entrust my future wife to any other?” he asked, in a voice that literally trembled with tenderness. “I have been at the bedside of patients to day, love, young and delicate as you.”
“I do feel very ill,” she murmured.
The fear that was over him increased as he gazed upon her, stopping the life-blood at his heart. What if he should lose her?—if this scourge should take her away from him and from life? And of course there was only too much reason to fear that it might have been communicated to her through his visits. A scalding tear dropped on to her face, and Lucy, looking up, saw that his eyes were wet.
“Am I then so very ill?” she murmured.
“No, no, Lucy; it is not that. But this has come of my imprudence: I ought to have kept away from you; and I cannot bear that you should suffer pain! Oh my darling———”
They were coming in, Mr. Grey and Lady Jane. The experienced surgeon moved his nephew from the bed, as if the latter were but a tyro. And indeed he was such, in comparison with the man of long practice.
Mr. Grey could not recommend Lucy’s removal; quite the contrary. He saw no reason why she should not have been taken home at first, he said, but it had better not be attempted now. Jane was deeply annoyed, but she could only acquiesce.
“It cannot be helped,” she said, with a sigh. “But I am grievously vexed that she should be ill, away from my house. Remember, she is in your charge, Mr. Grey.”
“In mine? What will Mr. Carlton say to that?”
“It is of no consequence to me what he says,” was the reply. “I cast no slight upon Mr. Carlton’s skill; I have told him so; and if he chooses to attend her, conjointly with you, I have no objection whatever. But Lucy’s life is precious, and I have confidence in you, Mr. Grey, from old associations.”
Frederick Grey found that ho was to be excluded from the sick-room. His attendance as a medical man was not necessary. And both Mr. Grey and Lady Jane thought his visits might tend to excite Lucy. In vain he remonstrated: it was of no use.
“She is to be my wife,” he urged.
“But she is not your wife yet,” said Mr. Grey, “and you may trust her safely to me. Be assured that, if dangerous symptoms appear, you shall be the first to hear of them.”
“And to see her,” added Lady Jane.
With this he was obliged to be content. But he was terribly vexed over it. He stooped to kiss her hot lips in the impulse of the moment’s tenderness.
“Don’t—don’t,” she murmured. “You may take the fever.”
“Not I, child. We medical men are fever-proof. Oh Lucy, my best and dearest, may God bring you through this!”
Mr. Carlton was pleased to accept the alternative, and agreed, with some appearance of suavity, to attend Lucy in conjunction with Mr. Grey. Putting aside the implied reflection on his skill—and this, Jane reiterated to him again, was not intended—he had no objection to the visits of Mr. Grey. The fact was, Mr. Carlton would have liked to bring Lucy triumphantly through the illness himself, as he felt confident he could do; she would have had his best care, looking for no reward, as his wife’s sister; and he felt mortified that the case should have been partially taken out of his hands. It was a slight, let Lady Jane say what she would; he felt it, and no doubt the town would be free enough in its comments.
“And now, Laura,” said Jane, seeking her sister, “as you and Mr. Carlton have saddled yourselves with Lucy, you must also be troubled with me and Judith, who is invaluable in a sick-room. I shall not move out of this house until I can take Lucy with me.”
Lady Laura clapped her hands in triumph, “Well done, Jane! You, who would not condescend to put your foot over our doorstep, to be brought to your senses at last! It serves you right, Jane, for your abominable pride.”
“It has not been pride,” returned Jane. “Pride has not kept me away.”
“What then? Prejudice?”
“No matter now, Laura; we have an anxious time before us. Mr. Grey thinks that Lucy will be very ill.”
“Just what Mr. Carlton said; and he kept her here to take care of her. I am sure he will be glad to extend a welcome to you, Jane, for as long as you choose to stay with us. He has always been willing to be friendly with you, but you would not respond. He takes prejudices; I acknowledge that; but he never took one against you. He has taken one against Judith.”
“Against Judith! What has she done to Mr. Carlton?” asked Jane, in surprise.
“Nothing. But he does not like her face. He says it always strikes him as being disagreeable. I like Judith, and I’m sure she’s a faithful servant.”
Mr. Carlton, inquire as he would, was unable to discover how that whisper could have ​come to him. That some one had entered the hall and gone out again, he did not entertain a doubt. He made inquiries of Lady Jane's footman, whether he had seen any one enter; but the man acknowledged that he had not been looking. After the entrance of Mr. Frederick Grey, he had waited a minute or two, and then had gone round to the servants' entrance by the surgery.
So Mr. Carlton was as wise as before. And meanwhile no one could think why he should fancy that any stranger had been in the hall, in addition to little Wilkes the barber.
(To be continued.)