The Lovels of Arden Part 70

Lady Geraldine proved herself an accomplished nurse. The sick child seemed more tranquil in her arms than even in his mother's. The poor mother felt a little pang of jealousy as she saw that it was so; but bore the trial meekly, and waited upon Geraldine with humble submission.

"How good you are!" she murmured once, as she watched the slim white hands that had played chess with George Fairfax adjusting poultices--"how good you are!"

"Don't say that, my dear Mrs. Granger. I would do as much for any cottager's child within twenty miles of Hale; it would be hard if I couldn't do it for my sister's friend."

"Have you always been fond of the poor?" Clarissa asked wonderingly.

"Yes," Geraldine answered, with a faint blush; "I was always fond of them.

I can get on with poor people better than with my equals sometimes, I think; but I have visited more amongst them lately, since I have gone less into society--since papa's death, in fact. And I am particularly fond of children; the little things always take to me."

"My baby does, at any rate."

"Have you written or telegraphed to Mr. Granger?" Lady Geraldine asked gravely.

"No, no, no; there can be no necessity now. Dr. Ormond says there is hope."

"Hope, yes; but these little lives are so fragile. I implore you to send to him. It is only right."

"I will think about it, by and by, perhaps, if he should grow any worse; but I know he is getting better. O, Lady Geraldine, have some pity upon me!

If my husband finds out where I am, he will rob me of my child."

The words were hardly spoken, when there was a loud double-knock at the door below, a delay of some two minutes, and then a rapid step on the stair--a step that set Clarissa's heart beating tumultuously. She sat down by the bed, clinging to it like an animal at bay, guarding her cub from the hunter.

The door was opened quickly, and Daniel Granger came into the room. He went straight to the bed, and bent down to look at his child.

The boy had been light-headed in the night, but his brain was clear enough now. He recognised his father, and smiled--a little wan smile, that went to the strong man's heart.

"My G.o.d, how changed he is!" exclaimed Mr. Granger. "How long has he been ill?"

"Very little more than a week, sir," Jane Target faltered from the background.

"More than a week! and I am only told of his illness to-day, by a telegram from Lady Laura Armstrong! I beg your pardon, Lady Geraldine; I did not see you till this moment. I owe it to your sister's consideration that I am here in time to see my boy before he dies."

"We have every hope of saving him," said Geraldine.

"And what a place I find him in! He has had some kind of doctor attending him, I suppose?"

"He has had a surgeon from the neighbourhood, who seems both kind and clever, and Dr. Ormond."

Mr. Granger seated himself at the foot of the bed, a very little way from Clarissa, taking possession of his child, as it were.

"Do you know, Mrs. Granger, that I have scarcely rested night or day since you left Paris, hunting for my son?" he said. And this was the first time he acknowledged his wife's presence by word or look.

Clarissa was silent. She had been betrayed, she thought--betrayed by her own familiar friend; and Daniel Granger had come to rob her of her child.

Come what might, she would not part with him without a struggle.

After this, there came a weary time of anxious care and watching. The little life trembled in the balance; there were hara.s.sing fluctuations, a fortnight of unremitting care, before a favourable issue could be safely calculated upon. And during all that time Daniel Granger watched his boy with only the briefest intervals for rest or refreshment. Clarissa watched too; nor did her husband dispute her right to a place in the sick-room, though he rarely spoke to her, and then only with the coldest courtesy.

Throughout this period of uncertainty, Geraldine Challoner was faithful to the duty she had undertaken; spending the greatest part of her life at Clarissa's lodgings, and never wearying of the labours of the sick-room.

The boy grew daily fonder of her; but, with a womanly instinct, she contrived that it should be Clarissa who carried him up and down the room when he was restless--Clarissa's neck round which the wasted little arm twined itself.

Daniel Granger watched the mother and child sometimes with haggard eyes, speculating on the future. If the boy lived, who was to have him? The mother, whose guilt or innocence was an open question--who had owned to being at heart false to her husband--or the father, who had done nothing to forfeit the right to his keeping? And yet to part them was like plucking asunder blossom and bud, that had grown side by side upon one common stem.

In many a gloomy reverie the master of Arden Court debated this point.

He could never receive his wife again--upon that question there seemed to him no room for doubt. To take back to his home and his heart the woman who had confessed her affection for another man, was hardly in Daniel Granger's nature. Had he not loved her too much already--degraded himself almost by so entire a devotion to a woman who had given him nothing, who had kept her heart shut against him?

"She married Arden Court, not me," he said to himself; "and then she tried to have Arden Court and her old lover into the bargain. Would she have run away with him, I wonder, if he had had time to persuade her that day? _Can_ any woman be pure, when a man dares ask her to leave her husband?"

And then the locket that man wore--"From Clarissa"--was not that d.a.m.ning evidence?

He thought of these things again and again, with a weary iteration--thought of them as he watched the mother walking slowly to and fro with her baby in her arms. _That_ picture would surely live in his mind for ever, he thought. Never again, never any more, in all the days to come, could he take his wife back to his heart; but, O G.o.d, how dearly he had loved her, and how desolate his home would be without her! Those two years of their married life seemed to be all his existence; looking back beyond that time, his history seemed, like Viola's, "A blank, my lord." And he was to live the rest of his life without her. But for that ever-present anxiety about the child, which was in some wise a distraction, the thought of these things might have driven him mad.

At last, after those two weeks of uncertainty, there came a day when Dr.

Ormond p.r.o.nounced the boy out of danger--on the very high-road to recovery, in fact.

"I would say nothing decided till I could speak with perfect certainty," he said. "You may make yourselves quite happy now."

Clarissa knelt down and kissed the good old doctor's hand, raining tears upon it in a pa.s.sion of grat.i.tude. He seemed to her in that moment something divine, a supernal creature who, by the exercise of his power, had saved her child.

Dr. Ormond lifted her up, smiling at her emotion.

"Come, come, my dear soul, this is hysterical," he said, in his soothing paternal way, patting her shoulder gently as he spoke; "I always meant to save the little fellow; though it has been a very severe bout, I admit, and we have had a tussle for it. And now I expect to see your roses come back again. It has been a hard time for you as well as for baby."

When Mr. Granger went out of the room with the physician presently, Dr.

Ormond said gravely,--

"The little fellow is quite safe, Mr. Granger; but you must look to your wife now."

"What do you mean?"

"She has a nasty little hacking cough--a chest cough--which I don't like; and there's a good deal of incipient fever about her."

"If there is anything wrong, for G.o.d's sake see to her at once!" cried Daniel Granger. "Why didn't you speak of this before?"

"There was no appearance of fever until to-day. I didn't wish to worry her with medicines while she was anxious about the child; indeed, I thought the best cure for her would be the knowledge of his safety. But the cough is worse to-day; and I should certainly like to prescribe for her, if you will ask her to come in here and speak to me for a few minutes."

So Clarissa went into the dingy lodging-house sitting-room to see the doctor, wondering much that any one could be interested in such an insignificant matter as _her_ health, now that her treasure was safe. She went reluctantly, murmuring that she was well enough--quite well now; and had hardly tottered into the room, when she sank down upon the sofa in a dead faint.

Daniel Granger looked on aghast while they revived her.

"What can have caused this?" he asked.

"My dear sir, you are surely not surprised," said Dr. Ormond. "Your wife has been sitting up with her child every night for nearly a month--the strain upon her, bodily and mental, has been enormous, and the reaction is of course trying. She will want a good deal of care, that is all. Come now," he went on cheerfully, as Clarissa opened her eyes, to find her head lying on Jane Target's shoulder, and her husband standing aloof regarding her with affrighted looks--"come now, my dear Mrs. Granger, cheer up; your little darling is safely over his troubles."

She burst into a flood of tears.

"They will take him away from me!" she sobbed.