"It is lonely," he said, carelessly. "I told you so, you remember; but, from its very loneliness, all the better for my too excitable patient."
Mrs. Sharpe"s face seemed to say she thought it might be more conducive to begetting melancholy madness than curing it, but her tongue said nothing. Two big dogs, barking furiously, came tumbling round the angle of the house. Dr. Oleander struck at them with his whip.
"Down, Tiger! Silence, Nero, you overgrown brute!" he cried, with an angry oath. "Come along, Mrs. Sharpe. There"s no occasion to be alarmed; they won"t touch you."
Mrs. Sharpe, despite this a.s.surance, looking mortally afraid, kept close to the doctor, and stood gazing around her while waiting to be admitted.
Bolts grated, the key creaked, and heavily and warily old Peter opened the door and reconnoitered.
"It is I, Peter, you old fool! Get out of the way, and don"t keep us waiting!"
With which rough greeting the young man strode in, followed by the nurse.
"He fetches a woman every time," murmured old Peter, plaintively, "and we"ve got a great plenty now, Lord knows!"
"This way, ma"am," called Dr. Oleander, striding straight, to the kitchen; "we"ll find a fire here, at least. It"s worse than Greenland, this frigid-zone!"
Mrs. Oleander sat before the blazing fire, plucking a fowl; Sally stood at the table, kneading dough. Both paused, with feminine exclamations, at sight of the doctor, and turned directly, with feminine curiosity, to stare at the woman.
"How do, mother? How are you, Sally? Back again, you see, like the proverbial bad shilling! This is Mrs. Susan Sharpe, the nurse I promised to bring. How"s our patient?"
He turned anxiously to his mother. She took her eyes from Mrs. Sharpe to answer.
"I don"t know; she frightens me, Guy."
"Frightens you!" growing very pale. "How? Is she so violent?"
"No; it"s the other way. She"s so still; she"s like one dead in life.
She sits all day, and never moves nor speaks. She doesn"t eat enough to keep a bird alive, and she never sleeps, I believe; for, go into her room night or day, there you find her sitting wide awake."
Dr. Oleander looked white with dismay.
"Does she never speak?" he asked.
"She never spoke to me but once, and that was to ask me who I was. When I told her I was your mother, she turned her back upon me, with the remark, "He says I"m mad, and surely none but a mad-woman would look for mercy from a tiger"s dam!" She has never spoken to me since."
Dr. Oleander stood listening with a very gloomy face. Mrs. Sharpe, sitting warming herself before the fire, looked straight at it, with a blank, sallow face.
"What do you find her doing mostly?" he asked, after awhile.
"Sitting by the window, looking at the sea," answered his mother--"always that--with a face the color of snow."
The gloom on the young man"s face deepened. What if he should prove himself a prophet? What if this spirited, half-tamed thing should go melancholy mad?
"I will go to her at once!" he exclaimed, starting up. "If she goes into a pa.s.sion at sight of me, it will do her good. Anything is better than this death in life."
He held out his hand for the key of the room upstairs. His mother handed it to him, and he strode out at once; and then Mrs. Oleander turned her regards upon the new nurse.
Strangers were "sight for sair een" in that ghostly, deserted farmhouse. But the new nurse never looked at her; she sat with those impenetrable green gla.s.ses fixed steadfastly on the blazing fire.
CHAPTER XIX.
MISTRESS SUSAN SHARPE.
Dr. Oleander was by no means a coward, yet it is safe to say his heart was b.u.mping against his ribs, with a sensation that was near akin to fear, as he ascended the stairs. He was really infatuatedly in love with his fair-haired little enchantress, else he never had taken his late desperate step to win her; and now, having her completely in his power, it was rather hard to be threatened with her loss by melancholy madness.
"What _shall_ I do with her?" he asked himself, in a sort of consternation. "I must keep her here until I get my affairs settled, and that will be a week at the soonest. If we were safely _en route_ for Havana, I should cease to fear. How will she receive me, I wonder?"
He tapped softly at the door. There was no response. The silence of the grave reigned all through the lonely old house. He tapped again. Still no answer. "Mollie!" he called. There was no reply. The next moment he had inserted the key, turned it, and opened the prison door.
Dr. Oleander paused on the threshold and took in the picture. He could see the low-lying, sunless afternoon sky, all gray and cheerless; the gray, complaining sea creeping up on the greasy shingle; the desolate expanse of road; the tongue of marshland; the strip of black pine woods--all that could be seen from the window. The prison-room looked drear and bleak; the fire on the hearth was smoldering away to black ashes; the untasted meal stood on the table. Seated by the window, in a drooping, spiritless way, as if never caring to stir again, sat bright Mollie, the ghost of her former self. Wan as a spirit, thin as a shadow, the sparkle gone from her blue eyes, the golden glimmer from the yellow hair, she sat there with folded hands and weary, hopeless eyes that never left the desolate sea. Not imprisonment, not the desolation of the prospect, not the loneliness, not the fasting had wrought the change, but the knowledge that she was this man"s wife.
Dr. Oleander had ample time to stand there and view the scene. She never stirred. If she heard the door open, she made no more sign than if she were stone deaf.
"Mollie!" he called, advancing a step.
At the sound of that hated voice she gave a violent start, a faint, startled cry, and, turning for the first time, eyed him like a wild animal at bay.
"Mollie, my poor little girl," he said in a voice of real pity, "you are gone to a shadow! I never thought a few days" confinement could work such a change."
She never spoke; she sat breathing hard and audibly, and eying him with wild, wide eyes.
"You mustn"t give way like this, Mollie; you mustn"t really, you know.
It will not be for long. I mean to take you away from here. Very soon we will go to Cuba, and then my whole life will be devoted to you. No slave will serve his mistress as I will you."
He drew nearer as he spoke. Quick as lightning her hand sought her breast, and the blue gleam of the dagger dazzled his eyes.
"One step nearer," she hissed, between set, glistening teeth, "and I"ll bury it in your heart or my own!"
She raised it with a gesture grand and terrible, and rising slowly from her seat, confronted him like a little tigress.
"Mollie," he said, imploringly, "listen to me--your husband!"
Her white teeth locked together with a clinching noise; she stood there like a pale little fury.
"Have you no pity for such love as mine, Mollie? Is your heart made of stone, that all my devotion can not melt it?"
To his horror, she broke into a discordant, mirthless laugh.
"His devotion! He tears me away from my friends, he locks me up in a dungeon until he drives me mad! His devotion!"
She laughed hysterically again.
"It seems harsh, Mollie, but it is not meant in harshness. If there were any other way of winning you, you know I would never resort to such extreme measures. I am not the only man that has carried off the woman he loved, when other means failed to win her."