Heart and Science - Wilkie Collins (ebooks that read to you TXT) 📗
- Author: Wilkie Collins
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While Mr. Le Frank was warily laying his plans for the next day, he had himself become an object of suspicion to the very woman whose secrets he was plotting to surprise.
This was the longest and saddest night which the faithful old nurse had passed at her darling’s bedside.
For the first time, Carmina was fretful, and hard to please: patient persuasion was needed to induce her to take her medicine. Even when she was thirsty, she had an irritable objection to being disturbed, if the lemonade was offered to her which she had relished at other times. Once or twice, when she drowsily stirred in her bed, she showed symptoms of delusion. The poor girl supposed it was the eve or her wedding-day, and eagerly asked what Teresa had done with her new dress. A little later, when she had perhaps been dreaming, she fancied that her mother was still alive, and repeated the long-forgotten talk of her childhood. “What have I said to distress you?” she asked wonderingly, when she found Teresa crying.
Soon after sunrise, there came a long interval of repose.
At the later time when Benjulia arrived, she was quiet and uncomplaining. The change for the worse which had induced Teresa to insist on sending for him, was perversely absent. Mr. Null expected to be roughly rebuked for having disturbed the great man by a false alarm. He attempted to explain: and Teresa attempted to explain. Benjulia paid not the slightest attention to either of them. He made no angry remarks—and he showed, in his own impenetrable way, as gratifying an interest in the case as ever.
“Draw up the blind,” he said; “I want to have a good look at her.”
Mr. Null waited respectfully, and imposed strict silence on Teresa, while the investigation was going on. It lasted so long that he ventured to say, “Do you see anything particular, sir?”
Benjulia saw his doubts cleared up: time (as he had anticipated) had brought development with it, and had enabled him to arrive at a conclusion. The shock that had struck Carmina had produced complicated hysterical disturbance, which was now beginning to simulate paralysis. Benjulia’s profound and practised observation detected a trifling inequality in the size of the pupils of the eyes, and a slightly unequal action on either side of the face—delicately presented in the eyelids, the nostrils, and the lips. Here was no common affection of the brain, which even Mr. Null could understand! Here, at last, was Benjulia’s reward for sacrificing the precious hours which might otherwise have been employed in the laboratory! From that day, Carmina was destined to receive unknown honour: she was to take her place, along with the other animals, in his note-book of experiments.
He turned quietly to Mr. Null, and finished the consultation in two words.
“All right!”
“Have you nothing to suggest, sir?” Mr. Null inquired.
“Go on with the treatment—and draw down the blind, if she complains of the light. Good-day!”
“Are you sure he’s a great doctor?” said Teresa, when the door had closed on him.
“The greatest we have!” cried Mr. Null with enthusiasm.
“Is he a good man?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I want to know if we can trust him to tell us the truth?”
“Not a doubt of it!” (Who could doubt it, indeed, after he had approved of Mr. Null’s medical treatment?)
“There’s one thing you have forgotten,” Teresa persisted. “You haven’t asked him when Carmina can be moved.”
“My good woman, if I had put such a question, he would have set me down as a fool! Nobody can say when she will be well enough to be moved.”
He took his hat. The nurse followed him out.
“Are you going to Mrs. Gallilee, sir?”
“Not to-day.”
“Is she better?”
“She is almost well again.”
CHAPTER LIII.
Left alone, Teresa went into the sitting-room: she was afraid to show herself at the bedside.
Mr. Null had destroyed the one hope which had supported her thus far—the hope of escaping from England with Carmina, before Mrs. Gallilee could interfere. Looking steadfastly at that inspiriting prospect, she had forced herself to sign the humble apology and submission which the lawyers had dictated. What was the prospect now? Heavily had the merciless hand of calamity fallen on that brave old soul—and, at last, it had beaten her down! While she stood at the window, mechanically looking out, the dreary view of the back street trembled and disappeared. Teresa was crying. Happily for herself, she was unable to control her own weakness; the tears lightened her heavy heart. She waited a little, in the fear that her eyes might betray her, before she returned to Carmina. In that interval, she heard the sound of a closing door, on the floor above.
“The music-master!” she said to herself.
In an instant, she was at the sitting-room door, looking through the keyhole. It was the one safe way of watching him—and that was enough for Teresa.
His figure appeared suddenly within her narrow range of view—on the mat outside the door. If her distrust of him was without foundation, he would go on downstairs. No! He stopped on the mat to listen—he stooped—his eye would have been at the keyhole in another moment.
She seized a chair, and moved it. The sound instantly drove him away. He went on, down the stairs.
Teresa considered with herself what safest means of protection—and, if possible, of punishment as well—lay within her reach. How, and where, could the trap be set that might catch him?
She was still puzzled by that question, when the landlady made her appearance—politely anxious to hear what the doctors thought of their patient. Satisfied so far, the wearisome woman had her apologies to make next, for not having yet cautioned Mr. Le Frank.
“Thinking over it, since last night,” she said confidentially, “I cannot imagine how you heard him walking overhead. He has such a soft step that he positively takes me by surprise when he comes into my room. He has gone out for an hour; and I have done him a little favour which I am not in the habit of conferring on ordinary lodgers—I have lent him my umbrella, as it threatens rain. In his absence, I will ask you to listen while I walk about in his room. One can’t be too particular, when rest is of such importance to your young lady—and it has struck me as just possible, that the floor of his room may be in fault. My dear, the boards may creak! I’m a sad fidget, I know; but, if the carpenter can set things right—without any horrid hammering, of course!—the sooner he is sent for, the more relieved I shall feel.”
Through this harangue, the nurse had waited, with a patience far from characteristic of her, for an opportunity of saying a timely word. By some tortuous mental process, that she was quite unable to trace, the landlady’s allusion to Mr. Le Frank had suggested the very idea of which, in her undisturbed solitude, she had been vainly in search. Never before, had the mistress of the house appeared to Teresa in such a favourable light.
“You needn’t trouble yourself, ma’am,” she said, as soon as she could make herself heard; “it was the creaking of the boards that told me somebody was moving overhead.”
“Then I’m not a fidget after all? Oh, how you relieve me! Whatever the servants may have to do, one of them shall be sent instantly to the carpenter. So glad to be of any service to that sweet young creature!”
Teresa consulted her watch before she returned to the bedroom.
The improvement in Carmina still continued: she was able to take some of the light nourishment that was waiting for her. As Benjulia had anticipated, she asked to have the blind lowered a little. Teresa drew it completely over the window: she had her own reasons for tempting Carmina to repose. In half an hour more, the weary girl was sleeping, and the nurse was at liberty to set her trap for Mr. Le Frank.
Her first proceeding was to dip the end of a quill pen into her bottle of salad oil, and to lubricate the lock and key of the door that gave access to the bedroom from the stairs. Having satisfied herself that the key could now be used without making the slightest sound, she turned to the door of communication with the sitting-room next.
This door was covered with green baize. It had handles but no lock; and it swung inwards, so as to allow the door of the cupboard (situated in the angle of the sitting-room wall) to open towards the bedroom freely. Teresa oiled the hinges, and the brass bolt and staple which protected the baize door on the side of the bedroom. That done, she looked again at her watch.
Mr. Le Frank’s absence was expected to last for an hour. In five minutes more, the hour would expire.
After bolting the door of communication, she paused in the bedroom, and wafted a kiss to Carmina, still at rest. She left the room by the door which opened on the stairs, and locked it, taking away the key with her.
Having gone down the first flight of stairs, she stopped and went back. The one unsecured door, was the door which led into the sitting-room from the staircase. She opened it and left it invitingly ajar. “Now,” she said to herself, “the trap will catch him!”
The hall clock struck the hour when she entered the landlady’s room.
The woman of many words was at once charmed and annoyed. Charmed to hear that the dear invalid was resting, and to receive a visit from the nurse: annoyed by the absence of the carpenter, at work somewhere else for the whole of the day. “If my dear husband had been alive, we should have been independent of carpenters; he could turn his hand to anything. Now do sit down—I want you to taste some cherry brandy of my own making.”
As Teresa took a chair, Mr. Le Frank returned. The two secret adversaries met, face to face.
“Surely I remember this lady?” he said.
Teresa encountered him, on his own ground. She made her best curtsey, and reminded him of the circumstances under which they had formerly met. The hospitable landlady produced her cherry brandy. “We are going to have a nice little chat; do sit down, sir, and join us.” Mr. Le Frank made his apologies. The umbrella which had been so kindly lent to him, had not protected his shoes; his feet were wet; and he was so sadly liable to take cold that he must beg permission to put on his dry things immediately.
Having bowed himself out, he stopped in the passage, and, standing on tiptoe, peeped through a window in the wall, by which light was conveyed to the landlady’s little room. The two women were comfortably seated together, with the cherry brandy and a plate of biscuits on a table between them. “In for a good long gossip,” thought Mr. Le Frank. “Now is my time!”
Not five minutes more had passed, before Teresa made an excuse for running upstairs again. She had forgotten to leave the bell rope, in case Carmina woke, within the reach of her hand. The excellent heart of the hostess made allowance for natural anxiety. “Do it, you good soul,” she said; “and come back directly!” Left by herself, she filled her glass again, and smiled. Sweetness of temper (encouraged by cherry brandy) can even smile at a glass—unless it happens to be empty.
Approaching her own rooms, Teresa waited, and listened, before she showed herself. No sound reached her through the half open sitting-room door. She noiselessly entered the bedroom, and then locked the door again. Once more
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