Margaret Oliphant - Salem Chapel. Volume 2/2

It was quite dark when Dr. Rider came. Mary held the candle for him as he felt Susan’s pulse, and examined her wide-open eyes. The doctor knew nothing about her any more than if he had not been a doctor. He said it must have been some dreadful mental shock, with inquiring looks at Mrs. Vincent, who began to recover herself. He put back the heavy locks of golden brown hair, which had been loosened down from Susan’s head, and said he was afraid there was pressure on the brain. What could he say? – he knew nothing more about it. He left some simple directions, said he would send some medicine, and took Mrs. Vincent into a corner to ask what it was. “Some severe mental shock?” asked Dr. Rider; but, before she could reply, a cab drove rapidly up to the door, and sounds of a sudden arrival were audible in the house. “Oh, doctor, thank God, my son is come – now I can bear it,” said the widow. Dr. Rider, who was of a compassionate nature, waited with pitying eyes till the minister should come up, and went to take another look at the patient, relieved to think he could speak to her brother, instead of racking her mother’s heart. Mrs. Vincent grew calm in the sudden consolation of thinking Arthur at hand. She sat down by the bedside, with her eyes fixed on the door, yearning for her son, the only living creature from whom she could have entire sympathy. Was it necessary that they should speak so loudly as they came up-stairs? – could he be bringing a stranger with him to Susan’s sickroom? Her heart began to beat louder with mingled expectation and displeasure. It was not like Arthur – and there was no sound of his voice in the noise that swept up the stair. She rose up instinctively as the footsteps approached – heavy steps, not like her son’s. Then the door was thrown open. It was not Arthur who stood upon the dim threshold. It was a stranger in a rough travelling-coat, excited, resolute, full of his own errand. He made a stride into the room to the bedside, thrusting Mrs. Vincent aside, not wittingly, but because she was in his way. Mary stood at the other side with the doctor, holding up the one pale candle, which threw a flickering light upon the marble white figure on the bed, and the utter consternation and surprise in Dr. Rider’s face. Mrs. Vincent, too much alarmed and astonished to offer any resistance, followed the man who had thus entered into her sanctuary of anguish. He knew what he was doing, though nobody else did. He went straight forward to the bed. But the sight of the unconscious figure there appalled the confident stranger. “It is she, sure enough,” he said; “are you a doctor, sir? is the lady taken ill? I’ve come after her every step of the way. She’s in my custody now. I’ll not give any trouble that I can help, but I must stay here.”

Mrs. Vincent, who scarcely could endure to hear, and did not understand, rushed forward while he was speaking, and seized him by the arm – “Leave the room!” she cried with sudden passion – “He has made some impudent mistake, doctor. God help me! – will you let my child be insulted? Leave the room, sir – leave the room, I say! This is my daughter, Miss Vincent, lying here. Mary, ring the bell – he must be turned out of the room. Doctor, doctor! you are a man; you will never let my child be insulted because her brother is away.”

“What does it mean?” cried Dr. Rider – “go outside and I will come and speak to you. Miss Vincent is in a most dangerous state – perhaps dying. If you know her – ”

“Know her, doctor! you are speaking of my child,” cried Mrs. Vincent, who faced the intruder with blazing eyes. The man held his ground, not impertinently, but with steadiness.

“I know her fast enough,” he said; “I’ve tracked her every step of the way; not to hurt the lady’s feelings, I can’t help what I’m doing, sir. It’s murder; – I can’t let her out of my sight.”

Mrs. Vincent clasped her hands together with a grasp of desperation. “What is murder?” she said, in a voice that echoed through the room. The doctor, with an exclamation of horror, repeated the same question. Murder! it seemed to ring through the shuddering house.

“It’s hard upon a lady, not to say her mother,” said the man, compassionately; “but I have to do my duty. A gentleman’s been shot where she’s come from. She’s the first as suspicion falls on. It often turns out as the one that’s first suspected isn’t the criminal. Don’t fret, ma’am,” he added, with a glance of pity, “perhaps it’s only as a witness she’ll be wanted – but I must stay here. I daren’t let her out of my sight.”

There was a dreadful pause. Mrs. Vincent looked up at the two men before her with a heartrending appeal in her eyes. Would anybody tell her what it meant? – would nobody interfere for Susan? She moaned aloud inarticulate in her voiceless misery. “And Arthur is not here!” was the outcry which at last burst from her heart. She was beyond feeling what this was – her senses were confused with extremity of suffering. She only felt that another blow had been dealt at her, and that Arthur was not here to help to bear it. Then the stranger, who had put himself so horribly in possession of Susan’s sickroom, once more began to speak. The widow could not tell what he said – the voice rang in her ears like a noise of unmeaning sound, but it stirred her to a flush of female passion, as violent as it was shortlived. She sprang forward and took hold of his arm with her white little trembling hand: “Not here – not here!” cried the mother in her passion. With her feeble force excited into something irresistible, she put the astonished stranger out of the room before he knew what she was doing. If an infant had done it the man could not have been more utterly astonished. Outside, the people of the house were standing in an excited group. She thrust the dreadful messenger of justice out with those hands that shook with tremors of anguish and weakness. She shut the door upon him with all her feeble strength, locked it, put a chair against it; then she stumbled and fell as she stretched out for another – fell down upon her knees, poor soul! and remained so, forgetting, as it seemed, how she came there, and gradually, by instinct, putting together the hands which trembled like leaves in the wind – “Lord, Lord!” cried the mother, hovering on the wild verge between passion and insensibility. She called Him by name only as utter anguish alone knows how; she had nothing to tell Him; she could only call upon Him by His name.

Dr. Rider took the half-insensible form up in his arms and carried her to the bedside, where Susan still lay motionless with her eyes wide open, in an awful abstraction and unconsciousness. He put Mrs. Vincent tenderly into the chair, and held the hands that shook with that palsied irrestrainable tremor. “No one can bring her to life but you,” said the doctor, turning the face of the miserable mother towards her child. “She has kept her senses till she reached you; when she was here she no longer wanted them; she has left her life in your hands.” He held those hands fast as he spoke; pressed them gently, but firmly; repeated his words over again. “In your hands,” said the doctor once more, struck to his heart with horror and pity. Susan’s bare beautiful arm lay on the coverlid, white, round, and full, like marble. The doctor, who had never seen the fair Saxon girl who was Mrs. Vincent’s daughter a week ago, thought in his heart that this full developed form and face, rapt to grandeur by the extremity of woe, gave no contradiction to the accusation he had just heard with so much horror. That week had obliterated Susan’s soft girlish innocence and the simplicity of her eighteen years. She was a grand form as she lay there upon that bed – might have loved to desperation – fallen – killed. Unconsciously he uttered aloud the thought in his heart – “Perhaps it would be better she should die!”