CHAPTER II.

LUCIUS IS PUZZLED.

When Lucius made his early visit—now always the first duty of every day—to Cedar House on the following morning, he found that Lucille had already acted upon his advice. The dressing-room—a slip of a room communicating with Mr. Sivewright’s spacious chamber—had been furnished in a rough-and-ready manner with a chair and table, an old cabinet, brought down from the loft, to hold cups and glasses, medicine bottles, and other oddments; a little row of saucepans, neatly arranged in a cupboard by the small fireplace; and a narrow little iron bedstead in a corner of the room.

‘I shall sleep here at night,’ said Lucille, as Lucius surveyed her preparations, ‘and if I keep that door ajar, I can hear every sound in the next room.’

‘My darling, it will never do for you to be on the watch at night,’ he answered anxiously. ‘You will wear yourself out in a very short time. Anxiety by day and wakefulness by night will soon tell their tale.’

‘Let me have my own way, Lucius,’ she pleaded. ‘You say yourself that my grandfather wants no attendance at night. He told me only this morning that he sleeps pretty well, and rarely wakes till the morning. But it will be a satisfaction to me if I feel that I am close at hand, ready to wake at his call. I am a very light sleeper.’

‘Was Mrs. Wincher angry at your taking the work out of her hands?’

‘She seemed vexed, just at first; but I gave her a kiss, and talked her over. “You’ll fag yourself to death, Miss Lucille,” she said; “but do as you please. It’ll leave me free for my cleaning.” You know, Lucius, what a passion she has for muddling about with a pail and a scrubbing-brush, and turning out odd corners. The cleaning never seems to make any difference in the look of that huge kitchen; but if it pleases her one cannot complain. O, Lucius,’ she went on, in an anxious whisper, ‘I was awake all the night thinking of your dreadful words. I trust in God you may find my grandfather better this morning.’

‘I hope so, dearest; but, believe me, you attach far too much importance to my foolish words last night. If you can trust the Winchers there can be no possible ground for fear. What enemy could approach your grandfather here?’

‘Enemy!’ repeated Lucille, as if struck by the word. ‘What enemies could he have—a poor harmless old man?’

Lucius went into Mr. Sivewright’s room. He found his patient still suffering from that strange depression of spirits which had weighed him down lately; still complaining of the symptoms which had perplexed Lucius since his return from Stillmington.

‘There are strange noises in the house,’ said the old man querulously, when the usual questions had been asked and answered. ‘I heard them again last night—stealthy footsteps creeping along the passage—doors opening and shutting—cautious, muffled steps, that had a secret guilty sound.’

‘All movement in a house has that stealthy sound in the small hours,’ said Lucius, sorely perplexed himself, yet anxious to reassure his patient. ‘Your housekeeper or her husband may have been up later than usual, and may have crept quietly up to bed.’

‘I tell you this was in the middle of the night,’ answered Mr. Sivewright impatiently. ‘The Winchers are as methodical in their habits as the old clock in the hall. I asked Jacob this morning if he had been astir after midnight, and he told me he had not.’

‘The fact is, my dear sir, you are nervous,’ said Lucius in a soothing tone. ‘You lie awake and fancy sounds which have no existence, or at any rate do not exist within the house.’

‘I tell you this sound awoke me,’ replied the other still more impatiently. ‘I was sleeping tolerably when the sound of that hateful footstep startled me into perfect wakefulness. There was a nameless horror to my mind in that stealthy tread. It sounded like the step of an assassin.’

‘Come, Mr. Sivewright,’ said Lucius in that practical tone which does much to tranquillise a nervous patient, ‘if this is, as I firmly believe it to be, a mere delusion of your senses, it will be easiest dispelled by investigation. Let us face the unknown foe, and make a speedy end of him. Suffer me to keep watch to-night in this room, unknown to all in the house except yourself, and I will answer for it the ghost shall be laid.’

‘No,’ answered Mr. Sivewright doggedly. ‘I am not so childish or so weak-minded as to ask another man to corroborate the evidence of my own senses. I tell you, Davoren, the thing is. If I believed in ghosts the matter would trouble me little enough. All the phantoms that were ever supposed to make night hideous might range these passages, and glide up and down yonder staircase at their pleasure. But I do not believe in the supernatural; and the sounds that I have heard are distinctly human.’

‘Let me hear them too.’

‘No, I tell you,’ answered the patient with smothered anger; ‘I will have no one to play the spy upon my slumber. If this is the delusion of an enfeebled brain, I have sense enough left to find out the falsehood for myself. Besides, the intruder, if there be one, cannot do me any harm. Yonder door is securely locked every night.’

‘Can you trust the lock?’

‘Do you think I should have put a bad one to a room that contains such treasures? No, the lock is one I chose myself, and would baffle a practised burglar. There is the same kind of lock on yonder door, communicating with the dressing-room. I turn the key in both with my own hand every night after Wincher has left me. I am still strong enough to move about the room, though I feel my strength lessening day by day. God pity me when I lie helpless on yonder bed, as I must do soon.’

‘Nay, my dear sir, let us hope for a favourable change ere long.’

‘I have almost left off hoping,’ answered the old man wearily. ‘All the drugs in your surgery will not cure me. I am tired of trying first this medicine and then that. For some time, indeed, I believed that you understood my case; that your medicines were of some good to me. Within the last three weeks they have seemed only to aggravate my disorder.’

Lucius took up a medicine bottle from the little table by the bed half absently. It was empty.

‘When did you take your last dose?’ he asked.

‘Half-an-hour ago.’

‘I will try to find you a new tonic; something that shall not produce the nausea you have complained of lately. I cannot understand how this mixture should have had such an effect; but it is just possible you may have an antipathy to quinine. I will give you a medicine without any quinine.’

Mr. Sivewright gave an impatient sigh, expressive of non-belief in the whole faculty of medicine.

‘Do what you please with me,’ he said. ‘If you do not succeed in lengthening my life, I suppose I may depend upon your not shortening it. And as you charge me nothing for your services, I have no right to complain if their value corresponds with the rate of your recompense.’

‘I am sorry to see you have lost confidence in me, sir,’ said Lucius, somewhat wounded, yet willing to forgive a sick man’s petulance.

‘I have not lost confidence in you individually. It is the science of medicine which I disbelieve in. Here am I, after four months’ patient observance of your regimen, eating, drinking, sleeping, ay, almost thinking according to your advice, and yet I am no better at the end of it all, but feel myself growing daily worse. If all your endeavours to patch up a broken constitution have resulted only in failure, why do you not tell me so without farther parley? I told you at the beginning that I was stoic enough to receive my death-warrant without a pang.’

‘And I tell you again, as I told you then, that I have no sentence of death to pronounce. I confess that your symptoms during the last three weeks have somewhat puzzled me. If they continue to do so, I shall ask your permission to consult a medical man of wider experience than my own.’

‘No,’ answered the old man captiously, ‘I will see no strangers. I will be experimentalised upon by no new hand. If you can’t cure me, put me down as incurable. And now you had better go to your other patients; I have kept you later than usual. You will come back in the evening, I suppose?’

‘Most certainly.’

‘Very well, then, devote your evening to me, for once in a way, instead of to Lucille. You will have plenty of her society by and by, when she is your wife. I want to talk seriously with you. The time has come when there must be no more concealment between you and me. There are secrets which a man may do wisely to keep through life, but which it is fatal to carry to the grave. Give me your hand, Lucius,’ he said, stretching out his wasted fingers to meet the strong grasp of the surgeon; ‘we have not known each other long, yet as much as I can trust anybody I trust you; as much as I can love anybody—since my son turned my milk of human kindness to gall—I love you. Come back to me this evening, and I will prove to you that this is no idle protestation.’

The thin hand trembled in Lucius Davoren’s grasp. There was more emotion in these words of Homer Sivewright’s than Lucius had supposed the old man capable of feeling.

‘Whatever service you may require of me, whatever trust you may confide in me,’ said the surgeon with warmth, ‘be assured that the service shall be faithfully performed, the trust held sacred.’ And thus they parted.