CHAPTER x.x.xV.
Two days later, Nell sat beside Falconer. He was asleep, but every now and then he moved suddenly, and his brows knit as if he were suffering.
The great surgeon--who, by the way, was small and short of stature--had come down, made his examination, said a few cheerful words to the patient, gone up to the Hall to dinner--at which he had talked fluently of everything but the case--and returned to London with a big check from Drake. But though he did not appear to have accomplished anything beyond a general expression of approval of everything the local man had done, all persons concerned felt encouraged and more hopeful by his visit; and when Falconer showed signs of improvement it was duly placed to Sir William"s credit. There is much magic in a great name.
But the improvement was very slight, and Nell, as she watched the wounded man, often felt a pang of dread shoot through her. Sometimes she was a.s.sailed by the idea that Falconer was not particularly anxious to live. When he was awake he would lie quite still, save when a spasm of pain visited him, with his dark eyes fixed dreamily upon the window; though when she spoke to him he invariably turned them to her with a world of grat.i.tude, a wealth of devotion in them.
And for the last two days the pity in Nell"s tender heart had grown so intense that it had become own brother to love itself. When a woman knows that she can make a good man happy by just whispering "I love you," she is sorely tempted to utter the three little pregnant words, especially when she herself knows what it is to long for love.
She could make this man who worshiped her happy, and--and was it not possible in doing so she might find, if not happiness, contentment for herself?
A hundred times during the last two days she had asked herself this question, until she had grown to desire that the answer might be in the affirmative. Perhaps if she were betrothed to Falconer she would learn to forget Drake, for whose voice and footstep she was always waiting.
On this afternoon, as she sat at her post, she was dwelling on the problem, which had become almost unendurable at last, and she sighed wearily.
Falconer awoke, as if he had heard her, and turned his eyes upon her with the slow yet intense regard of the very weak.
"Are you there still?" he asked, in a low voice. "I thought you promised me that, if I went to sleep, you would go out, into the garden, at least."
"It wasn"t exactly a promise. Besides, I don"t think you have been really asleep; and if you have it is not for long enough," she said, smiling, and "hedging" in truly feminine fashion. "Are you feeling better--not in so much pain?"
"Oh, yes," he replied. "I"m in no pain." He told the falsehood as admirably as he managed his face when he was awake, but it gave him away when he was asleep. "I shall be quite well presently. I wish to Heaven they would let me be removed to the hospital!"
"That sounds rather ungrateful," said Nell, with mock indignation.
"Don"t you think we are taking enough care of you?"
He sighed.
"When I lie here and think of all the trouble I"ve given, I sometimes wish that that fellow"s knife had found the right place. Though I suppose they"d have hanged him if it had."
Nell shuddered.
"Is that the only reason you regret he did not kill you?" she said.
"Am I to speak the truth?"
"Nothing else is ever worth speaking," she remarked, in a low voice.
"Well, then, yes. I am not so enamored of life as to cling to it very keenly," he said, stifling a sigh. "I don"t mean because I have had a rough time of it--the majority of the sons of men find the way paved with flints--but because----What an ungrateful brute I must seem to you.
Forgive me; I"m still rather weak."
"Rather!"
"Very weak, then; and I talk like a hysterical girl. But, seriously, if any man were given his choice, I think he"d prefer to cross the river at once to facing the gray and dreary days that lie before him."
"But the days that lie before you are brilliant; crimson with fame and fortune, instead of gray and dreary," she said. "Have you forgotten your success at--at the ball? that you were to play at the d.u.c.h.ess"?
Everybody says that you will become famous, that a great future lies before you, Mr. Falconer."
"Do they?" he said, gazing at the window dreamily. "No, I have not forgotten. I wonder whether they are right?"
"I know, I feel, they are right," she said quietly. "Very soon we shall all be bragging of your acquaintance--I, for one, at any rate. I shall never lose an opportunity of talking of "my friend, Mr. Falconer, the great musician, you know.""
"Yes," he said, looking at her with a faint smile. "I think you will be pleased. And I----"
He paused.
"Well?" she asked.
"If the prophecy comes true, I shall spend my time looking back at the old days, and sighing for the Buildings, for that sunny room of yours, with the tea kettle singing on the hob, and----Has d.i.c.k come back from Angleford?"
Nell nodded.
"And the man? Has he been committed for trial?"
"Yes," she replied. "But I don"t want to speak of that--it isn"t good for you."
He was silent a moment; then he said:
"Do you know, I"ve got a kind of sneaking pity for the man. He wanted the diamonds badly--he needed them more than the countess did. What would it have mattered to her if he had got off with them? And he risked his liberty and his life for them. A man can"t do more than that for the thing he wants."
Nell tried to laugh.
"I have never listened to a more immoral sentiment," she said. "I think you had better go to sleep again. But I understand," she added, as if she were compelled to do so.
"And I fancy the reflection that he made a good fight for it--and it was a good one; he was a plucky fellow!--must console him for his failure.
After all, one can only try."
"Try to steal other people"s jewels," said Nell.
"Try for what seems the best--what one wants," he said dreamily. "I wonder whether he would have been satisfied if he had got off with, say, a small box of trinkets?"
"I should imagine he would consider himself very lucky," said Nell, her eyes downcast.
"Do you think so?" asked Falconer quietly. "Somehow, I fancy you"re wrong. He would have hankered after those diamonds for the rest of his life, and no amount of small trinkets would have consoled him for having missed them. Though I dare say, being a plucky fellow, he would have made the best of it."
Nell began to tremble. The parable was plain to her. The man beside her had failed to win the woman he loved, and would try to make the best of the poor trinkets of fame and success. Her lips quivered, and her eyes drooped lower.
"Perhaps--perhaps he would have tried for the diamonds again," she said, almost inaudibly.
He looked at her with a sudden light in his eyes, a sudden flush on his white face.
"Do--do you think so? Do you think it would have been any use?"
Nell rose, and brought some milk and water for him.
"I--I don"t know," she said. "I--I think, if he felt that he wanted them so badly, he would have tried again; and that--that--he might----"