CHAPTER XX.

PREGNANT FANTASIES.

WOULD Claudia be "all right" by the morning? Olivia felt som e doubt on the subject, and her doubt was justified by the event. was a little later than usual when she came downstairs next morning; but Olivia found no one in the breakfast parlour but Mr. Estcourt. An open letter in his hand, that gentleman was restlessly pacing the apartment to and fro; and although he paused on Miss Ashmead's entrance, and turned to greet her, Olivia fancied that, for a moment, he looked as though he scarcely recognised her. To her satisfaction, moreover, his manner was changed from that of last evening, and he quite neglected to persevere with his somewhat antiquated lovemaking. At all events, he had not pulled himself together sufficiently from the preoccupying interests of his letter to offer her a single compliment before Captain Awdry made his appearance.

Her very first glance at the latter showed Olivia that something was wrong. All Douglas's little habits and personal idiosyncrasies were familiar to an observation quickened by love, and his "cousin" at once detected certain signs which, even in boyhood, had invariably marked occasions of mental disturbance on the young fellow's part. The first of these was that, as he came into the room, Douglas walked with his right hand tightly clenched and held a little behind his erect, soldierly figure; the second that he kept gnawing gently, but incessantly, at his lower lip. These actions, in Miss Ashmead's opinion, demonstrated themselves. They evidenced (so it had always seemed to her) a nature sensitive to feel and to suffer, but strong to exercise self-control.

"Olivia," he said, taking her hand, but forgetting to wish her the customary "good morning," "my wife is not at all well this morning. Indeed, I am afraid she is very ill. I have just sent off for a physician."

"Oh, I am so sorry! I will run up to see her!" exclaimed Olivia in quick sympathy.

"What did you say, Awdry? Who is not well? Claudia?" "Yes, Mr. Estcourt. I beg your pardon?" added the young man, becoming conscious that he had acted rather strangely in addressing the information first, and exclusively, to the friend of his wife, rather than to her father. "Yes, it is poor Claudia. She has passed a very restless and feverish night; and this morning her hands are burning hot, and she complains of a violent headache. I VOL. CCLVIII. NO. 1853.

HH

hope it may turn out to be nothing serious, but I feel, I confess, a good deal concerned."

Mr. Estcourt thrust his letter into his pocket, and rewarded his son-in-law, for a second or two, with a blank stare. "Claudia ill?" he repeated, as though taking in the intelligence with difficulty. "We must have advice. We must send for a doctor."

"I have done so already, sir. Jacobs has gone for Dr. Bellamy, who, I believe, is a very clever man. He will wait to bring him back. Don't go upstairs yet, Olivia! Breakfast is in, you see. Let us have it first, please!" He placed a chair for her at the table. "Besides, I want to talk to you. Don't you think this has been coming on for some days?"

"I think, at any rate, that Claudia appeared rather unwell last evening," Olivia admitted.

"Very unwell, I am afraid. Yes, I noticed how flushed she looked, poor child, and how unlike herself she seemed in many ways. How I regret that I went out! I ought to have remained with her -I wish I had!"

"I wish so too, Douglas, because "Olivia hesitated. "I think it my duty to mention something that I fear will distress you." And she went on to tell him how Claudia had spent the entire evening in the garden in her thin dress, and with no covering on head or shoulders.

Douglas pushed back his chair from the table. "Good heavens !" he ejaculated. "And how came you to let her do it? My poor darling! With her delicate constitution, it is enough to kill her. I ... I ...” He paused suddenly, under the sense that he was glaring at Olivia Ashmead in reproachful anger, and that she was returning his gaze with a strange, intent look—a look which he could not exactly fathom, but which somehow reminded him of that which he had seen in the eyes of a favourite dog of his own, as it was led off to be shot on account of some incurable disease. In another moment, the look had so far penetrated the young man's understanding as to cause him to ask himself, with a thrill of pain and dismay, whether it was possible that Miss Ashmead still cared for him more than as a cousin or a friend. In that case, how must his own complete forgetfulness of their former relations have affected her! How must this excessive anxiety on his wife's account, which had led him to speak to her as he had just done, strike her! A hot blush of distress and confusion mounted to the very roots of Captain Awdry's hair. "Pray, pray, pardon me!" he implored. "What a brute you must think me! I have no right

to blame you for Claudia's doings, or to expect you to act as her keeper. Please try to forgive my brusquerie! . . . I think, however, that you, Mr. Estcourt, might have had some regard to your daughter's health," he added, turning upon that gentleman. "Were you with her out-of-doors ? Really, I cannot understand the business at all! It seems to me such "— he flashed out again into resentful indignation-"such unparalleled carelessness."

"But Awdry, my dear fellow, we didn't know where she was— either Miss Ashmead or I," began Mr. Estcourt, in a feeble, fatuous kind of way. "We . . ."

But Olivia broke in upon his apology. To offer Douglas any satisfactory explanation of the fact that Claudia had chosen to spend the evening apart from her father and herself, and that she had made no effort to have it otherwise, would, she had reflected, be impossible, without an allusion to the disturbing events of the afternoon. It would be better to stop any further discussion of the matter. "The simple truth, Douglas, is this," she observed quietly-"I was at the piano for a long time after dinner, and I believe Mr. Estcourt was listening to me. Then, we had a game of chess, and in the interest of it failed to notice Claudia's continued absence. You must lay the blame where you choose—on Claudia for not looking after us, or on us for not looking after her. But there can be no use, it appears to me, in either excuses or recriminations about the matter."

Douglas bowed. "You are perfectly right," he replied. "I am behaving very discourteously. I must ask Mr. Estcourt's forgiveness now! My uneasiness on poor Claudia's account is making me shockingly cantankerous, I am afraid, sir."

He ac

Nevertheless, it was evident that, despite this acknowledgment, the young husband was feeling seriously disaffected against the elder, at least, of his two companions; and that breakfast did not prove a very pleasant or social meal. It had barely come to an end before Dr. Bellamy was announced. This gentleman's report upon his patient was somewhat vague. He pronounced no clear diagnosis. either as to the nature of the attack or its probable cause. knowledged, however, that the symptoms were a little serious, and proposed to call again in the evening. But by the evening it was plain enough, without professional assurance on the subject, that the symptoms were becoming more than a little serious. All day Claudia had been tossing from side to side in a state of high fever, and, once or twice, towards the close of it, Olivia fancied that she was growing rather light-headed. The next day this suspicion was put beyond a doubt. At intervals the invalid's mind did unques

tionably wander-though only for a few seconds at a time--and there was an evident incapacity for fixing the attention on anything requiring a continued effort of thought. Thus, through its various stages, phrenitis advanced in conjunction with the febrile disease, until it had assumed the nature of delirium.

On the fourth or fifth day of her illness, Claudia had lost all power of receiving external impressions, or at all events of apprehending them. Her present surroundings had become a blank, and the poor sufferer was living in a world of distorted ideas, based, however, on vivid memories of the past.

As may be imagined, her devoted husband passed his time in a state of the utmost alarm and solicitude. Outwardly, however, Douglas was calmer and more self-controlled now than in the first moment after the calamity had broken upon him. Only by those wordless signs, which Olivia Ashmead was so quick to recognise, did the young man betray how intense was his distress. That distress was heightened for him by the circumstance that, unless in the rare moments when sleep had been induced by the use of sedatives, he was rigorously excluded from his wife's chamber. For strange to say (at least, it would have seemed strange had not custom rendered the phenomenon familiar), Claudia in her state of dementia had conceived a violent antipathy to the two beings whom she loved best in the world-her husband and her baby. If Douglas put his head in at the door, or even if she heard his voice in the passage outside, it was sufficient to increase her excitement, whilst as for her child, who had been introduced in the hope of producing a beneficial effect on the mother's mind, the bare sight of him drove her to frenzy. Terrified by her screams, the poor little "Grand Turk " (this nickname was a libel on the most amiable and placid of infants) had to be borne from the room screaming in concert, and the experiment of bringing him there was not repeated.

The presence of Olivia Ashmead, on the other hand, possessed a strangely soothing influence on the patient's irritable nerves. In her moments of highest exacerbation, a touch of her fingers (Olivia had that firm, warm, untremulous clasp which goes with a strong but sympathetic nature) would almost invariably induce a sort of mesmeric submission and quietude. And yet Claudia did not, it was evident, know her. Nearly always, if she gave her a name at all, it was that of Ella Thorne. But, by whatever name she called her, there was Olivia constantly by her side-from the very first hour of her illness her devoted attendant and patient nurse. It is true that 2 regular, trained nurse had been engaged from one of the hospitals,

and, also, that Claudia's maid, and other of the servants, showed the kindliest readiness to attend upon their young mistress. After the first few days, however, Miss Ashmead would admit none of the latter to the room, and the nurse and she shared between them, night and day, those onerous and painful vigils. Painful, at least, they proved to Olivia, and something more than painful!

Ever since she had known Douglas Awdry's wife, Olivia had been studying her character-looking, so far as she could look, into her mind. But, to some extent, her scrutiny had been baffled, and though she had shifted her point of view all round her object, she had found but few and small apertures to which to apply her eye. How many of us, indeed, can do more than peep through a very dark lens into the natures even of those who are nearest and dearest to us? But now, with the loss of consciousness, certain barricades had fallen, and Claudia's mind and soul seemed to be laid bare to her companion's gaze. In its present condition, however, the poor girl's mind was like a broken mirror, or a wind-swept lake. Though it reflected objects, it reflected them all awry and distorted, so that the true shape and meaning of them could not be discerned.

Still, among the many strange notions, memories, or imaginings which passed like a changing and troubled phantasmagoria across the field of Claudia's disturbed intellect, and to a large extent beneath Olivia's vision, there was one idea so persistently present-one object so uniformly mirrored amongst those broken reflections-that the reluctant observer began, bye-and-bye, to feel sure-albeit that she shrank with unutterable dismay from the conclusion-that this impression must represent a reality. And what was that impression? It was one wherewith the unfortunate patient was not only continuously haunted, but as continuously excited. Living now almost entirely in the past, memory had, nevertheless, played poor Claudia a strange trick. The fact of Hubert Stephens' death appeared to have been blotted from her recollection, and the notion that she had married Douglas Awdry whilst he was still alive had taken full possession of her disordered faculties. Further, in her fancy, she rarely got beyond her wedding-day, and never away from Canada.

"Ella! Ella!" she would murmur in a thrilling whisper, seizing Olivia by the arm. "He was in the church-Hubert-didn't you see him? He watched me marry Douglas; and he is coming on after us to denounce me at the wedding-breakfast, before all those people, and to claim me as his wife-his! his! But I'll go back and kill him. Ella, come with me, and help me to kill him-to kill him! to kill him!" Her voice rising to a shriek of wild rage.