CHAPTER XIII.
MADNESS OR CRIME?
Days grew into weeks, and the slow, anxious hours brought very little change in Allan's condition, and certainly no change which the doctors could call a substantial improvement. Physician and surgeon from London, famous specialists both, came at weekly intervals and testified to the good fight which the patient was making, and the latent power of a frame which had been strained and wasted by the hardships of African travel, and which was now called upon to recover from severe injuries. Consciousness had returned, but not reason. The young man had not once recognized the mother who rarely left his bedside, but whose bland and pleasant countenance was so sorely altered by grief and anxiety that even in the full possession of his senses he might hardly have known her. The power of speech had returned, but only in delirious utterances, or in a strange gibberish, which poor Lady Emily mistook for an African language, but which was really the nonsense-tongue of a disordered brain.
The doctors pronounced the case not utterly without hope; but they would commit themselves to nothing further than this. It was a wonder to have kept him alive so long. His recovery would be almost a miracle.
Two trained nurses from the county hospital alternated the daily and nightly watch by the sick-bed, and Lady Emily shared the day's, and sometimes the night's, duty, humbly assisting the skilled attendants, grateful for being permitted to aid in the smallest service for the son who lay helpless, inert, and unobserving on that bed which even yet might be his bed of death.
No one but those three women and the doctors was allowed to enter Allan's room. Mrs. Wornock was very kind and sympathetic, in spite of torturing anxieties about her son's unexplained absence; but she expressed no desire to see Allan, and she seldom saw Lady Emily for more than a few minutes in the course of the day. The whole house was ordered with reference to the sick-room. Organ and piano were closed and dumb, and a funereal silence reigned everywhere.
And so the wintry days went by, and rain and rough weather made a sufficient excuse for Suzette's staying quietly at home, and seeing very little of the outer world. Mrs. Mornington took the social aspect of the crisis entirely on her own hands, and informed her friends that the wedding had been deferred, partly on account of Allan's illness, and for other reasons which she was not at liberty to explain.
"My niece is very capricious," she said.
"I hope she has not sent Mr. Wornock off to Africa again!" exclaimed Mrs. Roebuck. "Such a brilliant young man, with a house so peculiarly adapted for entertaining, should not be allowed to become an absentee. It is too great a loss for such a place as this, where so few people entertain."
Mrs. Roebuck's estimate of her acquaintance was always based upon their capacity for entertaining, though she herself, on this scale, would have been marked zero.
"No, I don't think he will go back to Africa. But my niece and he have agreed to part—for a short time, at any rate. She is sending back all her wedding-presents this week."
"Oh, pray don't let her send me that absurd Japanese paper-knife! I only chose it because it is so deliciously ugly and queer. And I knew that, marrying a man of Mr. Wornock's means, she wouldn't want anything costly or useful—no fish-knives or salt-cellars."
"Well, if it really is off, or likely to be off," Mr. Roebuck said, with a solemnly confidential air, "I don't mind saying in confidence that I think your niece has acted wisely. The young man is a genius, no doubt; but he's a little bit overstrung—fanatico per la musica, don't you know. And one never knows whether that sort of thing won't go further," tapping his forehead suggestively.
"Oh,das macht nichts; the poor dear young man istoqué, onlytoqué, notfêlé," protested Mrs. Roebuck, who affected a polyglot style.
"Ah, but the mother, don't you know! That's where the danger comes in. The mother has never been quite right," argued her husband.
"I am not going to accept congratulations," said Mrs. Mornington. "I'm very sorry the marriage has been postponed. Mr. Wornock and Suzette are admirably adapted for each other, and he is no more cracked than I am. And remember the marriage is put off—not broken off."
"All the more reason why she should not send me back that Japanese absurdity," said Mrs. Roebuck, as if the paper-knife were of as much consequence as the marriage.
Suzette saw Mrs. Wornock nearly every day during that time of trouble—sometimes at Discombe, where they sat together in the music-room, or paced the wintry garden, saying very little to each other, but the elder woman taking comfort from the presence of the younger.
"I am miserable about him," she told Suzette; and that was all she would ever say of her son.
She had no suggestions to offer as to the cause of his disappearance. She uttered no complaint of his unkindness.
Suzette inquired if the police had made any discovery about Allan's assailant.
No, nothing; or, at least, Mrs. Wornock had heard of nothing.
"Lady Emily may know more than she cares to tell me," she said.
"Oh, I think not! Living in your house, indebted so deeply to your kindness, she could not be so churlish as to keep anything back."
"She thinks of nothing but her son. She would have no mercy upon any one who had injured him."
Her tone startled Suzette, with the recurrence of a terror which she had tried to dismiss from her mind as groundless and irrational.
"No, no; of course not. Who could expect her to have mercy? However hard the law might be, she would never think the sentence hard enough. Her only son, her idolized son, brought to the brink of the grave, perhaps doomed to die, in spite of all that can be done for him."
Suzette tried to shut out that horrible idea—the hideous fancy that the ruffian who had attacked Allan Carew was no casual offender, extemporizing a crime on the suggestion of the moment, for the chance contents of a gentleman's purse, and an obvious watch and chain. Murder so brutal is not often the result of a chance encounter. Yet such things have been; and the alternative of a private vengeance—a vindictive jealousy culminating in attempted murder—was too horrible. Yet that dreadful suspicion haunted Suzette's pillow in the long winter nights—nights of wakefulness and sorrow.
Where was he, that miserable man, who had won her heart in spite of her better reason, and in loving whom she had seldom been without the sense of trouble and fear? His want of mental balance had been painfully obvious to her even in their happiest hours; and she had felt that there was peril in a nature so capricious and so intense. She had discovered that for him religion was no strong rock. He had laughed away every serious question, and had made her feel that, in all the most solemn thoughts of life and after-life, they were divided by an impassable gulf: on his side, all that is boldest and saddest in modern thought: on her side, the simple, unquestioning faith which she had accepted in the dawn of her reason, and which satisfied an intellect not given to speculate upon the Unknowable. She had found that, not only upon religious questions, but even on the moral code of this life, there were wide differences in their ideas. Dimly, and with growing apprehension, she had divined the element of lawlessness in Geoffrey's character, revealed in his admiration of men for whom neither religion nor law had been a restraining influence—men for whom passion had been ever the guiding star. Lives that to her seemed only criminal were extolled by him as sublime. Such, or such a man, whose unbridled will had wrought ruin for himself and others, was lauded as one who had known the glory of life in its fullest meaning, who had verily lived, not crawled between earth and heaven.
In her own simple, unpretentious way, Suzette had tried to combat opinions which had shocked her; and then Geoffrey had laughed off her fears, and had promised that for her sake he would think as she thought, he would school himself to accept a spiritual guide of her choosing.
"Who shall my master be, Suzette? Shall I be broad and liberal with Stanley, severe with Manning, intense with Liddon, mystical with Newman? 'Thou for my sake at Allah's shrine, and I——' You know the rest. I will do anything to make my dearest happy."
"Anything except pretend, Geoffrey. You must never do that."
"Mustn't I? Then we had better leave religion out of the question; until, perhaps, it may grow up in my mind, suddenly, like Jonah's gourd, out of my love for you."
In all the weary time while Allan was lying at the gate of death, and Geoffrey had so strangely vanished, Suzette had never doubted the love of her betrothed. The possibility of change or fickleness on his part never entered into her mind. Of the truth and intensity of his affection she, who had been his betrothed for nearly half a year, could not doubt. Her fears and anxieties took a darker form than any fear of alienated feelings, or inconstancy. Suicide, crime, madness, were the things she feared, though she never expressed her fears. Her father heard no lamentations from those pale lips; but he could read the marks of distress in her countenance, and he was grieved and anxious for her sake.
He too invoked the powers of the detective police, but quietly, and without anybody's knowledge. He went up to London, and put the case of Geoffrey's disappearance before one of the sagest philosophers who had ever adorned the detective force at Scotland Yard, now retired and practising delicate investigations on his own account.
"Do you suppose there has been a fatal accident, or that he has been keeping out of the way on purpose?" asked the General, after all particulars had been stated.
"An accident would have been heard of before now. No doubt he is keeping out of the way. Have you any reason to suppose him mentally afflicted?"
"Afflicted, no. Eccentric, perhaps, though I should hardly call him that—capricious, somewhat whimsical. Mentally afflicted? No, decidedly not."
"Ah! That trick of keeping out of the way is a very common thing in madness. If he is not mad, there must be some strong reason for his disappearance. He must have done something to put himself in jeopardy."
"Impossible! No, no, no. I can't entertain the idea for a moment," cried the General, thinking of that murderous attack in the wood.
"Do you wish us to make inquiries?"
"No, no, better not—the young man's mother is having everything done. I am not a relation—I only wanted the benefit of a professional opinion. I thought you might be able to throw some light——"
"No two cases are quite alike, sir; but I think you will find I am right here, and that in this case there is lunacy, or there has been a crime."
"Madness or crime," mused the General, as he left the office. "I can't go back to Suzette and tell her that. I must take her away again."
He announced his intention of starting for the Riviera next morning at the breakfast-table; but his daughter implored him piteously to let her stay at Matcham.
"It would be so heartless to go away while Allan is hovering between life and death, and while——"
She left the sentence unfinished. She could not trust herself to speak of Geoffrey.