CHAPTER XIV.

LUCILLE HAS STRANGE DREAMS.

For a few nights, while Lucille’s fever was at the worst, Lucius Davoren took up his abode in Cedar House, and established himself in that little room adjoining Mr. Sivewright’s bedchamber which had been lately occupied by Lucille. Here he felt himself a sure guardian of his patient’s safety. No one could harm the old man while he, Lucius, was on the spot to watch by night, and while Mrs. Milderson, the nurse, in whom he had perfect confidence, was on guard by day. His own days must needs be fully occupied out of doors, whatever private cares might gnaw at his heartstrings; but after introducing the ex-policeman and his wife, who came to him with a kind of warranty from Mr. Otranto, and who seemed honest people, he felt tolerably satisfied as to the safety of property in the old house, as well as about that more valuable possession—life. He had locked the door of the room which contained the chief part of Mr. Sivewright’s collection, and carried the key about with him in his pocket; but there was still a great deal of very valuable property scattered about the house, as he knew.

One thing troubled him, and that was the existence of the secret staircase, communicating in some manner—which he had been up to this point unable to discover—with Mr. Sivewright’s bedroom. He had sounded Homer Sivewright cautiously upon this subject, and the old man’s answers had led him to believe that he, so long a tenant of the house, knew absolutely nothing of the hidden staircase; or it might be only an exaggerated caution and a strange passion for secrecy which sealed Homer Sivewright’s lips.

Once, when his patient was asleep, Lucius contrived to examine the panelling in front of the masked staircase, but he could discover no means of communication. If there were, as he fully believed, a sliding panel, the trick of it altogether baffled him. This failure worried him exceedingly. He had a morbid horror of that possible entrance to his patient’s room, which it was beyond his power to defend by bolt, lock, or bar, since he knew not the manner of its working. For worlds he would not have alarmed Mr. Sivewright, who was still weak as an infant, although wonderfully improved during the last few days. He was therefore compelled to be silent, but he felt that here was the one hitch in his scheme of defence from the hidden enemy.

‘After all, there is little need to torment myself about the mystery,’ he thought sometimes. ‘It is clear enough that these Winchers were guilty alike of the robbery and the attempt to murder. The greater crime was but a means of saving themselves from the consequences of the lesser; or they may possibly have supposed that their old master had left them well provided for in his will, and that the way to independence lay across his grave. It is hard to think that human nature can be so vile, but in this case there is scarcely room for doubt.’

He thought of that man whom he had seen in the brief glare of the frequent lightning—the man who had raised himself from his crouching attitude to look up at the lighted window on the topmost story, and had then scaled the wall.

‘The receiver of stolen goods, the medium by which they disposed of their booty, no doubt,’ he said to himself; ‘their crime would have been incomplete without such aid.’

Although all his endeavours to find the key belonging to the door of the staircase leading to the upper story had failed, Lucius had not allowed himself to be baffled in his determination to explore those unoccupied rooms. Now that Lucille’s prostration and the Winchers’ dismissal had made him in a manner master of the house, he sent for a blacksmith and had the lock picked, and then went up-stairs to explore, accompanied by the man, whom he ordered to open the doors of the rooms as he had opened the door of the staircase. There was little to reward his perseverance in those desolate attic chambers. Most of them were empty; but in one—that room whose door he had seen stealthily opened and stealthily closed on his previous visit to those upper regions—he found some traces of occupation. Two or three articles of battered old furniture—an old stump bedstead of clumsy make, provided with bedding and blankets, which lay huddled upon it as if just as its last occupant had left it—the ashes of a fire in the narrow grate—a table, with an old ink-bottle, a couple of pens, and a sheet of ink-stained blotting-paper—an empty bottle smelling of brandy on the mantelpiece, a bottle which, from its powerful odour, could hardly have been emptied very long ago—a tallow-candle, sorely gnawed by rats or mice, in an old metal candlestick on the window-seat—a scrap of carpet spread before the hearth, a dilapidated arm-chair drawn up close to it: a room which, to Lucius Davoren’s eye, looked as if it had been the lair of some unclean creature—one of those lost wretches in whom the fashion of humanity has sunk to its lowest and vilest phase.

He looked round the room with a shudder.

‘There has been some one living here lately,’ he said, thinking aloud.

‘Ay, sir,’ answered the blacksmith, ‘it looks like it; some one who wasn’t over particklar about his quarters, I should think, by the look of the place. But he seems to have had summat to comfort him,’ added the man, with mild jocosity, pointing to the empty bottle on the chimneypiece.

Some one had occupied that room; but who was that occupant? And had Lucille known this fact when she so persistently denied the evidence of her lover’s senses—when she had shown herself so palpably averse to his making any inspection of those rooms?

Who could have been hidden there with her cognisance, with her approval? About whom could she have been thus anxious? For a moment the question confounded him. He could only wonder, in blank dull amazement.

Then, in the next moment, the lover’s firm faith arose in rebuke of that brief suspicion.

‘What, am I going to doubt her again,’ he said to himself, ‘while she lies ill and helpless, with utmost need of my affection? Of course she was utterly ignorant of the fact that yonder room was occupied, and therefore ridiculed my statement about the open door. Was it strange if her manner seemed flurried or nervous, when she had just been startled by the sight of her father’s portrait? I am a wretch to doubt her, even for a moment.’

He went up to the loft, and thoroughly examined that dusty receptacle, but found no living creature there except the spiders, whose webs festooned the massive timbers that sustained the ponderous tiled roof. This upper portion of the house was vacant enough now; of that there could be no doubt. There was as little doubt that the room yonder had been lately occupied. There could but be one solution of the mystery, Lucius decided, after some anxious thought. Jacob Wincher had accommodated his accomplice with a lodging in that room while the two were planning and carrying out their system of plunder.

This examination duly made, and the doors fastened up again in a permanent manner, by the help of the blacksmith, Lucius felt easier in his mind. There was still that uncomfortable feeling about the secret staircase; but with the upper part of the house under lock-and-key, and the lower part carefully guarded, no great harm could come from the mere existence of that hidden communication. In any case, Lucius had done his utmost to make all things secure. His most absorbing anxiety now was about Lucille’s illness.

His treatment had been to a considerable extent successful; the delirium had passed away. The sweet eyes recognised him once again; the gentle voice thanked him for his care. But the fever had been followed by extreme weakness. The sick girl lay on her bed from day to day, ministered to by Mrs. Milderson, and had scarcely power to lift her head from the pillow.

This prostration was rendered all the more painful by the patient’s feverish anxiety to recover strength. Again and again, with a piteous air of entreaty, she asked Lucius when she would be well enough to get up, to go about the house, to attend to her grandfather.

‘My dearest,’ he answered gravely, ‘we must not talk about that yet awhile. We have sufficient reason for thankfulness in the improvement that has taken place already. We must wait patiently for the return of strength.’

‘I can’t be patient!’ exclaimed Lucille, in the feeble voice that had changed so much since her illness. ‘How can I lie here patiently when I know that I am wanted; that—that everything may be going on wrong without me?’

‘Was there ever such ingratitude and distrustfulness,’ cried the comfortable old nurse, with pretended chiding, ‘when she knows I’m that watchful of the poor old gentleman, and give him all he wants to the minute; and that when things was at the worst you slept in the little room next him, Mr. Davoren, so as to keep guard, as you may say, at night?’

‘Forgive me,’ said Lucille, stretching out her wasted hand to the nurse, and then to the doctor, who bent down to press his lips to the poor little feverish hand. ‘I daresay I seem very ungrateful; but it isn’t that—I only want to be well. I feel so helpless lying here; it’s so dreadful to be a prisoner, bound hand and foot, as it were. Can’t you get me well quickly somehow, Lucius? Never mind if I’m ill again by and by; patch me up for a little while.’

‘Nay, dearest, there shall be no half cure, no patching. With God’s help, I hope to restore you to perfect health before very long. But if you are impatient, if you give way to fretfulness, you will lessen your chances of a rapid recovery.’

Lucille gave no answer save a long weary sigh. Tears gathered slowly in her sad eyes, and she turned her face to the wall.

‘Yes, poor dear,’ said Nurse Milderson, looking down at her compassionately; ‘as long as she do fret and werrit herself so, she’ll keep backarding of her recovery.’

Here the nurse beckoned mysteriously to Lucius, and led him out of the room into the corridor, where she unbosomed herself of her cares.

‘It isn’t as I want to alarm you, Dr. Davoren’—Lucius held brevet rank in the Shadrack-road,—‘far from it; but I feel myself in duty bound to tell you that she’s a little wrong in her head still of a night, between sleeping and waking, as you may say, and talks and rambles more than I like to hear. And it’s always “father,” rambling and rambling on about loving her father, and trusting him in spite of the world, and standing by him, and suchlike. And last night—it might have been from half-past one to two—say a quarter to two, or perhaps twenty minutes,’ said Mrs. Milderson, with infinite precision, ‘I’d been taking forty winks, as you may say, in my chair, being a bit worn out, when she turns every drop of my blood to ice-cold water by crying out sudden, in a voice that pierced me to the marrow—’

‘_What_, nurse? For goodness’ sake, come to the point,’ cried Lucius, who thought he was never to hear the end of Mrs. Milderson’s personal sensations.

‘I was coming to it, sir,’ replied that lady, with offended dignity, ‘when you interrupted me; I was only anxious to be exack. “O,” she cried out, “not poison! Don’t say that—no, not poison! You wouldn’t do that—you wouldn’t be so wicked as to poison your poor old father.” I think that was enough to freeze anybody’s blood, sir. But, lor, they do take such queer fancies when they’re lightheaded. I’m sure, I nursed a poor dear lady in Stevedor-lane, in purpleoral fever—which her husband was in the coal-and-potato line, and ginger-beer and bloaters, and suchlike—and she used to fancy her poor head was turned into a york-regent, and beg and pray of me ever so pitiful to cut the eyes out of it. I’m proud to say, tho’, as I brought her round, and there isn’t a healthier-looking woman between here and the docks.’

Lucius was silent. His own suggestion of a possible attempt to poison was sufficient to account for these delirious words of Lucille. It was only strange that she should have associated her father’s name with the idea; that in her distempered dream, he, the father—to whose image she clung with such fond affection—should have appeared to her in the character of a parricide.

‘We must try and get back her strength, nurse,’ said Lucius, after a thoughtful pause; ‘with returning health all these strange fancies will disappear.’

‘Yes, sir, with returning health!’ sighed Mrs. Milderson, whose cheerfulness seemed somewhat to have deserted her.

This sick-nursing was, as she was wont to remark, much more trying than attendance upon matrons and their new-borns. It lacked the lively element afforded by the baby. ‘I feel lonesome and down-hearted-like in a sick-room,’ Mrs. Milderson would remark to her gossips, ‘and the cryingest, peevishest baby that ever was would be a blessing to me after a fever case.’

‘You don’t think her worse, do you?’ asked Lucius, alarmed by that sigh.

‘No, sir; but I don’t think her no better,’ answered Mrs. Milderson, with the vagueness of an oracle. ‘She’s that low, there’s no cheering of her up. I’m sure, I’ve sat and told her about some of my reglar patients—Mrs. Binks in the West Inja-road, and Mrs. Turvitt down by the Basin—and done all I could think of to enliven her, but she always gives the same impatient sigh, and says, “I do so long to get well, nurse.” She must have been very low, Dr. Davoren, before she took to her bed.’

‘Yes,’ said Lucius, remembering that sudden fainting-fit. ‘She had allowed herself too little rest in her attendance upon her grandfather.’

‘She must have worn herself to a shadder, poor dear young creature,’ said Mrs. Milderson. ‘But don’t you be uneasy, sir,’ pursued the matron, having done her best to make him so; ‘if care and constant watchfulness can bring her round, round she shall be brought.’

Thus Lucius Davoren went about his daily work henceforward with a new burden on his mind—the burden of care for that dear patient, for whom, perchance, his uttermost care might be vain.