Vixen. Volume III

Vain were Vixen's efforts to console and cheer. A blight had fallen upon her mother's mind and spirits – a blight that had crept slowly on, unheeded by the husband, till one morning the local practitioner – a gentleman who had lived all his life among his patients, and knew them so well externally that he might fairly be supposed to have a minute acquaintance with their internal organism – informed Captain Winstanley that he feared there was something wrong with his wife's heart, and that he thought that it would be well to get the highest opinion.

The Captain, startled out of his habitual self-command, looked up from his desk with an ashy countenance.

"Do you mean that Mrs. Winstanley has heart disease – something organically wrong?"

"Unhappily I fear it is so. I have been for some time aware that she had a weak heart. Her complexion, her feeble circulation, several indications have pointed to that conclusion. This morning I have made a thorough examination, and I find mischief, decided mischief."

"That means she may die at any moment, suddenly, without an instant's warning."

"There would always be that fear. Or she might sink gradually from want of vital power. There is a sad deficiency of power. I hardly ever knew anyone remain so long in so low a state."

"You have been attending her, off and on, ever since our marriage. You must have seen her sinking. Why have you not warned me before?"

"It seemed hardly necessary. You must have perceived the change yourself. You must have noticed her want of appetite, her distaste for exertion of any kind, her increasing feebleness."

"I am not a doctor."

"No; but these are things that speak plainly to every eye – to the eye of affection most of all."

"We are slow to perceive the alteration in anyone we see daily and hourly. You should have drawn my attention to my wife's health. It is unfair, it is horrible to let this blow come upon me unawares."

If the Captain had appeared indifferent hitherto, there was no doubt of the intensity of his feeling now. He had started up from his chair, and walked backwards and forwards, strongly agitated.

"Shall we have another opinion?" asked Dr. Martin.

"Certainly. The highest in the land."

"Dr. Lorrimer, of Harley Street, is the most famous man for heart disease."

"I'll telegraph to him immediately," said the Captain.

He ordered his horse, rode into Lyndhurst and dispatched his telegram without the loss of a minute. Never had Dr. Martin seen anyone more in earnest, or more deeply stricken by an announcement of evil.

"Poor fellow, he must be very fond of her," mused the surgeon, as he rode off to his next call. "And yet I should have thought she must be rather a tiresome kind of woman to live with. Her income dies with her I suppose. That makes a difference."

The specialist from Harley Street arrived at the Abbey House on the following afternoon. He made his examination and gave his opinion, which was very much the same as Dr. Martin's, but clothed in more scientific language.

"This poor lady's heart has been wearing out for the last twenty years," he told the local surgeon; "but she seems, from your account, to have been using it rather worse for the last year or so. Do you know if she has had any particular occasion for worry?"

"Her only daughter has not got on very well with the second husband, I believe," said Dr. Martin. "That may have worried her."

"Naturally. Small domestic anxieties of that kind are among the most potent causes of heart disease." And then Dr. Lorrimer gave his instructions about treatment. He had not the faintest hope of saving the patient, but he gave her the full benefit of his science. A man could scarcely come so far and do less. When he went out into the hall and met the Captain, who was waiting anxiously for his verdict, he began in the usual oracular strain; but Captain Winstanley cut him short without ceremony.

"I don't want to hear details," he said. "Martin will do everything you tell him. I want the best or the worst you can tell me in straightest language. Can you save my wife, or am I to lose her?"

"My dear sir, while there is life there is hope," answered the physician, with the compassionate air that had grown habitual, like his black frock-coat and general sobriety of attire. "I have seen wonderful recoveries – or rather a wonderful prolongation of life, for cure is, of course, impossible – in cases as bad as this. But – "

"Ah!" cried the Captain, bitterly, "there is a 'but.'"

"In this case there is a sad want of rallying power. Frankly, I have very little hope. Do all you can to cheer and comfort your wife's mind, and to make her last days happy. All medicine apart, that is about the best advice I can give you."

After this the doctor took his fee, gave the Captain's hand a cordial grip, expressive of sympathy and kindliness, and went his way, feeling assured that a good deal hung upon that little life which he had left slowly ebbing away, like a narrow rivulet dwindling into dryness under a July sun.

"What does the London doctor say of me, Conrad?" asked Mrs. Winstanley, when her husband went to her presently, with his countenance composed and cheerful. "He tired me dreadfully with his stethoscope. Does he think me very ill? Is there anything wrong with my lungs?"

"No, love. It is a case of weakness and languor. You must make up your mind to get strong; and you will do more for yourself than all the physicians in London can do."

"But what does he say of my heart? How does he explain that dreadful fluttering – the suffocating sensation – the – ?'

"He explains nothing. It is a nervous affection, which you must combat by getting strong. Dear love!" exclaimed the Captain, with a very real burst of feeling, "what can I do to make your life happy? what can I do to assure you of my love?"

"Send for Violet," faltered his wife, raising herself upon her elbow, and looking at him with timorous eagerness. "I have never been happy since she left us. It seems as if I had turned her out of doors – out of her own house – my kind husband's only daughter. It has preyed upon my mind continually, that – and other things."

"Dearest, I will telegraph to her in an hour. She shall be with you as soon as the steamer can bring her."

"A thousand thanks, Conrad. You are always good. I know I have been weak and foolish to think – "

Here she hesitated, and tears began to roll down her hollow cheeks.

"To think what, love?" asked her husband tenderly.

If love, if tenderness, if flattery, if all sweetest things that ever man said to a woman could lure this feeble spirit back to life, she should be so won, vowed the Captain. He had never been unkind to her, or thought unkindly of her. If he had never loved her, he had, at least, been tolerant. But now, clinging to her as the representative of fortune, happiness, social status, he felt that she was assuredly his best and dearest upon earth.

"To think that you never really cared for me!" she whimpered; "that you married me for the sake of this house, and my income!"

"Pamela, do you remember what Tom Jones said to his mistress when she pretended to doubt his love?"

"My dear Conrad, I never read 'Tom Jones,' I have heard dear Edward talk of it as if it was something too dreadful."

"Ah, I forgot. Of course, it is not a lady's book. Tom told his Sophia to look in the glass, if she were inclined to question his love for her, and one look at her own sweet face would convince her of his truth. Let it be so with yourself, dear. Ask yourself why I should not love the sweetest and most lovable of women."

If sugarplums of speech, if loverlike attentions could have cured Pamela Winstanley's mortal sickness, she might yet have recovered. But the hour had gone by when such medicaments might have prevailed. While the Captain had shot, and hunted, and caught mighty salmon, and invested his odd hundreds, and taken his own pleasure in various ways, with almost all the freedom of bachelor life, his wife had, unawares, been slowly dying. The light had burned low in the socket; and who shall reillumine that brief candle when its day is over? It needed now but a breath to quench the feeble flame.

"Great Heaven!" cried Captain Winstanley, pacing up and down his study, distraught with the pangs of wounded self-interest; "I have been taking care of her money, when I ought to have taken care of her. It is her life that all hangs upon: and I have let that slip through my fingers while I have planned and contrived to save a few beggarly hundreds. Short-sighted idiot that I have been! Poor Pamela! And she has been so yielding, so compliant to my every wish! A month – a week, perhaps – and she will be gone: and that handsome spitfire will have the right to thrust me from this house. No, my lady, I will not afford you that triumph. My wife's coffin and I will go out together."

CHAPTER X.

"All the Rivers run into the Sea."

For some days Violet's return seemed to have a happy effect upon the invalid. Never had daughter been more devoted, more loving, fuller of sweet cares and consolations for a dying mother, than this daughter. Seeing the mother and child together in this supreme hour, no onlooker could have divined that these two had been ever less fondly united than mother and child should be. The feeble and fading woman seemed to lean on the strong bright girl, to gain a reflected strength from her fulness of life and vigour. It was as if Vixen, with her shining hair and fair young face, brought healthful breezes into the sickly perfumed atmosphere of the invalid's rooms.

Roderick Vawdrey had a hard time of it during these days of sadness and suspense. He could not deny the right of his betrothed to devote all her time and thought to a dying mother; and yet, having but newly won her for his very own, after dreary years of constraint and severance, he longed for her society as lover never longed before; or at least he thought so. He hung about the Abbey House all day, heedless of the gloomy looks he got from Captain Winstanley, and of the heavy air of sadness that pervaded the house, and was infinitely content and happy when he was admitted to Mrs. Winstanley's boudoir to take an afternoon cup of tea, and talk for half-an-hour or so, in subdued tones, with mother and daughter.

"I am very glad that things have happened as they have, Roderick," Mrs. Winstanley said languidly; "though I'm afraid it would make your poor mamma very unhappy if she could know about it. She had so set her heart on your marrying Lady Mabel."

"Forgetting that it was really my heart which was concerned in the business," said Rorie. "Dear Mabel was wise enough to show us all the easiest way out of our difficulties. I sent her my mother's emerald cross and earrings, the day before yesterday, with as pretty a letter as I could write. I think it was almost poetical."

"And those emeralds of Lady Jane Vawdrey's are very fine," remarked Mrs. Winstanley. "I don't think there is a feather in one of the stones."