THE RAVELLED SLEAVE : II

C—— demurred, hummed and hawed, and acquiesced.

“Your friend must keep in the background,” he said. “He’s not a backstair reporter, I suppose?”

“He’s an independent gentleman, and either a poet or an ass—I don’t know which.”

“Same thing,” said this airy Philistine; “but no matter, so long as he don’t talk.”

“He won’t talk.”

“Very well, bring him up. Fact is, we’re trying an experiment this afternoon. Aunt’s brought the baby—sort of natural magnetism to restore the current, cancel the hiatus—see? I’ve not much belief in it myself.”

I fetched Valentine, and we followed C—— up to the ward. There were only present there—one, a list-footed nurse; two, a little shabby-genteel woman, with a false tow-like front over vicious eyes, who carried a flannelled bundle; and three, the patient herself.

She had not so much as stirred, to all appearance, since I last saw her. We, Valentine and I, took up our position apart. Some accidental contact with him made me turn my head. He was quivering like a high-strung racer for the start. This physical excitability was news to me. “H’mph!” I thought. “Is there really that in you which you must keep such a tight rein on?”

The nurse took the infant, and placed it on the sleeping girl’s breast. It mewed and sprawled, but evoked no response whatever.

“She’d never a drop of the milk of kindness in her,” muttered the little verjuicy woman.

“Hold your tongue!” said the doctor sharply.

He and the nurse essayed some coaxing. In the midst, I was petrified by the sight of Valentine going softly up to the bed-head.

“May I whisper a word?” he said. “It may fail or not. But I don’t think you can object to my trying.”

And actually, before his astonished company could move or collect its wits, he had bent and spoken something, inaudible, into the patient’s ear.

Now, I ask you to remember that this girl had been in a cataleptic sleep for not less than three months, under observation, and with no chance, so far as I knew, to cozen her attendants; and believe me then as you can when I tell you that, answering, instantly and normally, to Valentine’s whisper, she sighed, stretched her arms, though at first with an air of some lassitude and weakness, and, opening her eyes, fixed them with a sort of suspended stare upon the face of her exorcist. Gradually, then, a little pucker deepened between her brows, and instantly, some shadow of fright or uneasiness flickering in her dark pupils, she turned her head aside. Obviously she was distressed by the vision of this strange face coming between the light and her normal, as it seemed to her, awaking.

Valentine immediately stood away, and backed to where she could not see him.

C——, obviously putting great command on himself, since circumstances made it appear that some damned “natural magic” had got the better of his natural science, took the situation in hand professionally, and frowned to the aunt, to whom the baby had been restored, to show herself. The woman, rallying from the common stupefaction, gave an acrid sniff and obeyed.

“Well, Nancy!” she said, in a tone between wonder and remonstrance.

The girl looked round again and up, with a little shock. Immediately her dilated pupils accepted with frank astonishment this more familiar apparition.

“Gracious goodness, Aunt Mim!” she whispered; “what have you got there?”

Then she turned her face on the pillow, with a smile of drowsy rapture.

“Anyhow, you’ve found your way to Skene at last,” she murmured, and instantly fell into a natural sleep, from which, it was evident, there must be no awaking her.

C—— wheeled upon my friend.

“I suppose you won’t part with your secret?” he asked drily.

It was a habit with Valentine, not his least aggravating, composedly to put by any unwelcome or difficult question addressed to him as if he did not hear it.

“Skene’s in Kent, isn’t it?” he asked, ostensibly of the aunt, though he looked at me. I could have snapped at him in pure vindictiveness. He wasn’t inscrutable, any more than another. What was his confounded right to pose as a sphinx?

“She fancies she’s there,” he said. “Why?”

I turned dumbly with the question to the little woman creature. I don’t know if she supposed I was in some sort of official authority to cross-examine her. She had powder on her face, and a weak glow mantled through it.

“It was there she met her trouble, sir,” she said, hesitating. “She’d gone down to the hop-picking last September, and I was to follow. But circumstances” (she wriggled her shoulders with an indescribable simper) “was against my joining her.”

“Well,” broke in C——, suddenly and rather sharply, “you must take the consequences, and, for the present anyhow, the burden of them off her shoulders.”

“Begging your pardon, sir?” she questioned shrewdly.

“The child,” said the doctor, “the child. Everything, it appears, relating to it is for the moment obliterated from her mind. She takes up existence, I think you’ll find, last autumn, at this Skene, with expecting you. Well, you have come, and returned to London together. You understand? The time of year is the same. None of all this has for the moment happened.”

There was an acrid incredulity in his hearer’s face as she listened to him.

“Do I understand, or don’t I, sir,” she said, “that her shame is to be my care and consideration? And till when, if you’ll be so good?”

“That I can’t say,” he answered. “Probably the interval, the abyss in her mind, will bridge itself by slow degrees. Her reason likely depends upon your not rudely hastening the process. I warn you, that’s all.”

“And pray,” she said, with ineffable sarcasm, “how is I, as a respectable woman, to account to her for this that I hold?”

“Put it out to nurse.”

“No, sir, if you’ll allow me. The hussy have done her best to bring me to ruin already.”

“Say you’ve adopted it.”

She gave a shrill titter.

“Nanny will have lost her wits, hindeed, to believe that.”

“Well, she has in a measure.”

“And the police?” she said. “Aren’t you a little forgetting them, sir?”

“The police,” said C——, “I will answer for. The case isn’t worth their pursuing, and they will drop it.”

The baby began to wail; and Aunt Mim, with her lips pursed, to play the vicious rocking-horse to it.