TAILS WIN.
Linda was musing, alone and disconsolate, in the big garish drawing-room at Onslow Gardens. They had taken the house furnished while their own was being prepared for them, and Linda hadn’t attempted to rectify any room in it to her private taste, except her special little boudoir on the second floor. So she was sitting there, brooding, with her eyes on the ugly wall, nursing her grief and loneliness as best she might, when a footman of the usual gorgeous ducal pattern (to which she had long grown accustomed) flung open the door hurriedly, with the air of a man who has great news to announce, and blurted out in one breath the alarming tidings:
‘His grace has come back by himself in a cab, without his luggage or anything, and he’s waiting downstairs in the hall now, if your grace will please to step down and see him — very ill with the fever.’
In a second, at those terrible words, Linda had forgotten everything — save that Bertie was her husband and had come home ill to her. She rushed downstairs to him with beating heart and outstretched arms, as if the episode of his disappearance and the cruel watch he had set upon her movements had never existed.
He was sitting, or rather crouching, on one of the high-backed Chippendale chairs that flanked the hall table. Linda flung herself upon him with a dozen kisses, in a wild outbreak of emotion, very rare in her temperament.
‘Oh, Bertie, Bertie!’ she cried in an agony of suspense, ‘then you’ve come back to me at last. What is it? What is it? Oh, how horribly hot your forehead feels! It was kind of you, when you found yourself so ill, to think of coming home to me!’
The Duke, for his part, didn’t exactly repel her. That was not his cue now. He had left the arbitrament of fate to Mrs. Bouverie-Barton; and Mrs. Bouverie-Barton, as Goddess of Heads and Tails, had decided the toss-up in the sense that he was to come back to her. He accepted that decision in a blind, fatalistic way, as marking out his course for him. But he had a definite plan in his mind as well, to which that course was but the blank prelude; and he meant to carry out the plan, as it rose dim in his head a week ago on the Hamar Fjeld, and still more clearly that afternoon on the bench on the Embankment — ay, even to its uttermost jot and tittle. So he merely accepted Linda’s kisses in a passive, mechanical, undemonstrative, high, aristocratic way, and whispered coldly in her ear:
‘Not before the servants, please. No scenes, I beg of you. If there have been differences between us, let us keep them to ourselves. Don’t let us go washing our dirty linen in public before the butler and the lady’s-maid.’
For in all these matters, Adalbert Montgomery flattered himself, his manners still preserved that famous repose which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere.
Linda drew back as if she had been stung; but she never forgot her duty for all that. No, nor her tenderness either, harshly as he had greeted her. She could see in him, in spite of everything, only her husband, returned home to her ill — seriously ill; and her one thought now was for his comfort and safety. In less than half an hour they had moved the Duke upstairs and put him quietly in bed, and Sir Frederick Weston himself, the great specialist on typhoid, hastily summoned by special messenger from his house in Harley Street, was already in attendance.
It was a terrible time. Whatever the Duke’s own plan might have been, this unexpected attack intervened to postpone or delay it. For a week or two he continued dangerously ill; and for a week or two Linda, already wearied out with her constant care for Elizabeth Woodward, nursed him assiduously, with very little intermission. His attitude puzzled her. She couldn’t quite make out what Bertie meant. At times, indeed, it almost seemed as if he relented for awhile; he spoke to her so kindly, not to say affectionately, and Linda half began to hope the breach between them would be bridged over in part by this unexpected illness. But gradually it dawned upon her that these gentler moods were most frequently displayed before the doctor or the nurses. Whenever for a few minutes she was left quite alone with him, her husband relapsed at once into moody and gloomy silence. Not that he spoke harshly to her; she fancied he seemed almost of set purpose to avoid such conduct as that; but he hardened himself like adamant, as one who could neither hear nor see her. Often he lay, with closed mouth and feverish lips hard pressed, for whole hours at a time, revolving in his own mind she knew not what bitter thoughts about her.
To Linda, this silent mood of his was inexpressibly terrible. Womanly above everything, she felt his illness had suddenly endeared him to her once more; and it froze the very marrow in her bones to see him thus chilly and irresponsive to all her wifely attentions. At times she half ventured to hope it might be nothing more than the lethargy of fever; when Bertie began to mend again, perhaps he would smile as of old upon her. But, strange to say, the Duke did not begin to mend. Even when the crisis was fairly over, as Sir Frederick himself declared, curious symptoms set in, which that experienced specialist, in spite of all his vast knowledge, failed entirely to comprehend.
‘Never saw a case in all my practice quite like this one,’ he said, mumbling. True, the long suppression of the fever under the influence of the Norwegian climate might have something to do with its abnormal development; quite possible — quite possible; but the Duke’s strange drowsiness certainly surprised him. ‘It forms a most unexpected symptom of some unusual and dangerous secondary evolution,’ he remarked to Linda. ‘It’s a sequela of typhoid, like the one that followed the late epidemic of influenza, never before, to my knowledge, so clearly indicated. The patient’s condition at times may be described as nothing short of absolutely comatose.’
All this never interfered for a moment with Linda’s care in nursing him. She did everything possible to make him well, and even insisted on washing the parqueted floor all round the edges with Condy’s fluid with her own hands, lest infection should linger in casual corners. That parqueted floor she had had put down herself while Bertie was away, in case of illness; she was so grateful now to her own good genius for ever thinking of it.
One afternoon, as the Duke lay on his bed in a semi-conscious state, with Linda by his side, George the footman came up, bringing a card on a salver, one among dozens of similar cards of inquiry left each day at the door; but this one, George observed, with a malicious smile, the gentleman had particularly requested might be carried upstairs direct to the Duchess. In a moment the dozing patient was wide awake and restless.
‘Whose card is that, Linda?’ he asked, quite briskly, calling her by her Christian name outright for the very first time since his return from Norway.
Linda shrank back. The stars in their courses were fighting against her. With a terrible sinking at her heart she held it up before him. Her husband read it unmoved:
‘Mr. Basil Maclaine;’ and then below, in manuscript, ‘With very kind inquiries for the Duchess of Powysland.’
‘I see,’ the Duke murmured, with a groan, turning his face towards the wall. ‘His kind inquiries are all for you, Linda.’
The unhappy wife could answer nothing. She bent her head low, and burst into a silent flood of tears. Coincidence and occasion were dealing very hardly by her. She cried long and bitterly, but Bertie lay still, with his face turned away, and took no further notice of her. It was a terrible position; but, such as it was, she was bound to face it all through unaided.
For two long hours she sat there, with her head in her hands, and still her husband never spoke a word, nor moved a finger, except to turn from time to time on his side restlessly. Yet now and again Linda fancied he was fumbling with something unseen beneath the bed-clothes. But he was ill, oh, so ill! — how ill Linda hardly dared confess to herself, and that made things all the worse. For if Bertie were to die, feeling towards her like this, she didn’t know how on earth she could ever look up again.
At five o’clock that evening Sir Frederick called again. He was a little dried-up old man, with parched yellow skin, and small ferret eyes that seemed to pierce one through and through every time he looked at one. The moment he saw the Duke, his round pursed lips and puckered forehead proclaimed at once to Linda’s observant gaze that he found his patient much worse than he left him.
‘What have you been giving him, Duchess?’ he asked, in a very low tone. ‘No quackery, I hope; no nostrums, no hypnotism. This comatose condition is simply inexplicable. Did you let him have his tonic, as I told you, at three?’ He shook his head, much puzzled. ‘I can’t at all understand it,’ he mumbled once more below his gray moustache. ‘Most singular; mo-st sin-gular.’
‘Yes,’ Linda faltered out; ‘I gave him the medicine myself, as you directed. Nobody else has fed him with anything to-day or yesterday. I was so afraid, from what you said, the nurse might have made some stupid mistake, that I’ve measured each dose out carefully in a minim glass, and held it to his lips with my own hands. I’m sure he’s had everything exactly as you prescribed it.’
‘And after every dose,’ the professional nurse put in, coming forward from behind, and folding her hands demurely, ‘the Duke has seemed to get drowsier and drowsier.’
‘Curious,’ the doctor said, stroking his chin reflectively. ‘Most curious. Most cu-rious. There’s a dose due now. Temperature, one hundred and four and one-tenth. Let me look at the bottle.’
Linda moved hurriedly across to the table before the nurse could anticipate her. Sir Frederick followed her with keen little pursed-up eyes of silent inquiry. She handed him the medicine. He took out the cork, sniffed at it, turned it upside down with one finger on the mouth, and tasted a drop on the end of his finger.
‘Very odd,’ he said once more, smacking his lips critically. ‘It’s bitterer than it ought to be. I can’t make it out. Unsatisfactory, very. I’ll take this bottle away with me, if you’ll allow me, Duchess, and get my own chemist to send you another.’
‘But it’s time for a dose now,’ Linda faltered out timorously. ‘Shall I give it him or not? He seems so terribly weak and faint just this minute.’
The doctor glanced at her once more with those keen small eyes of his.
‘Certainly not,’ he answered, in a very decisive voice. ‘It can do him no good. There’s some mistake of somebody’s. I’ll call round in my carriage and get another lot of this mixture made up under my own eyes. It won’t take ten minutes, and I’ll bring it round myself. The case is urgent. I must see to it at once.’ He eyed her hard. ‘There’s something very odd,’ he said, with slow deliberation, ‘going on somewhere.’
As he spoke, the Duke lifted up his head drowsily from the pillow, and stared around him with a blank, open-mouthed stare of surprise and wonder. His look was idiotic. Presently, with a start, he seemed to recollect himself.
‘Linda,’ he murmured, in a very feeble voice, ‘will you leave me for a minute, please? And you, too, nurse. I’ve something I want to speak to Sir Frederick ... alone ... about.’
With a ghastly misgiving in her breast, Linda staggered from the room, hardly knowing what she did, and tottered into her boudoir next door in an agony of horror. Two minutes later she heard Sir Frederick open the bedroom door and call in the nurse in a very low voice. His tone was most mysterious. Then came sounds of whispering, and a short consultation. When it ended, he knocked at her boudoir lightly.
‘For the present, madam,’ he said, in a very formal voice, ‘I think your grace had better not enter the Duke’s room. He’s best left alone just now with the regular nurse. Understand, this is urgent. To disturb him may imperil your husband’s life. I forbid you to go in to him. I’m seeing after his food and medicine myself. I’ll call round again to watch the further effect of the tonic the very first thing to-morrow morning.’
Linda sank down on her sofa in a perfect paroxysm of horror, suspense, and misery. What on earth could it all mean? Why was Bertie so strange? And why did Sir Frederick forbid her so strictly to wait at such a crisis upon her own dying husband?