The Golden Calf, Mary Elizabeth Braddon [ebook reader screen .TXT] 📗

to get him to dress himself, or suffer himself to be dressed. A frightful restlessness had taken possession of him, more intense than any previous restlessness, and it was impossible to do anything for him. His hallucinations since daybreak had taken a frightful form; he had seen poisonous snakes gliding in and out of the folds of the bedclothes; he had fancied every kind of hideous monster--the winged reptiles of the jura formation--the armour-plated fish of the old red sandstone--everything that is grotesque, revolting, terrible--skeletons, poison-spitting toads, vampires, were-wolves, flying cats--they had all lurked amidst the draperies of bed or windows, or grinned at him through the panes of glass.

'Look!' he shrieked, as Ida approached him, soothing, pleading in gentlest accents; 'look! don't you see them?' he cried, pointing to the shapes that seemed to people the room, and trying to push them aside with a restless motion of his hands; 'don't you see them, the lares and lemures? Look, there is Cleopatra with the asp at her breast! That bosom was once beautiful, and see now what a loathsome spectacle death has made it--the very worms recoil from that corruption. See, there is Canidia, the sorceress, who buried the boy alive! Look at her hair flying loose about her head! hair, no, those locks are living vipers! and Sagana, with hair erect, like the bristles of a wild boar! See, Ida, how she rushes about, sprinkling the room with water from the rivers of hell! And Veia, whose cruel heart never felt remorse! Yes, he knew them well, Horace. These furies were the women he had loved and wooed!'

Fancies, memories flitted across his disordered brain, swift as lightning flashes. In a moment Canidia was forgotten, and he was Pentheus, struggling with Agave and her demented crew. They were tearing him to pieces, their fingers were at his throat. Then he was in the East, a defenceless traveller in the tropical desert, surrounded by Thugs. He pointed to one particular spot where he saw his insidious foe--he described the dusky supple figure, the sinuous limbs, gliding serpent-like towards him, the oiled body, the dagger in the uplifted hand. An illustration in Sir Charles Bell's classic treatise had flashed into his brain. So, from memory to memory, with a frightful fertility of fancy, his unresting brain hurried on; while his wife could only watch and listen, tortured by an agony greater than his own. To look on, and to be powerless to afford the slightest help was dreadful. Up and down, and round about the room he wandered, talking perpetually, perpetually waving aside the horrid images which pursued and appalled him, his eyeballs in constant motion, the pupils dilated, his hollow cheeks deadly pale, his face bathed in perspiration.

'Send for Mr. Fosbroke,' said Ida, speaking on the threshold of the adjoining room, to the maid who brought her letters; and, in the midst of his distraction, Brian's quick ear caught the name.

'Fosbroke me no Fosbrokes!' he said. 'I will have no village apothecaries diagnosing my disease, no ignorant quack telling me how to treat myself.'

'I will telegraph for Dr. Mallison, if you like, Brian,' Ida answered, gently; 'but I know Mr. Fosbroke is a clever man, and he perfectly understands--'

'Yes, he will have the audacity to tell you he knows what is the matter with me. He will say this is _delirium tremens_--a lie, and you must know it is a lie!'

To her infinite relief, Mr. Jardine appeared at this moment He questioned Towler as to the possibility of tranquillising his patient; and he found that the sedatives prescribed by Dr. Mallison had ceased to exercise any beneficial effect. Nights of insomnia and restlessness had been the rule with the patient ever since Towler had been in attendance upon him.

'I never knew such a brain, or such invention!' exclaimed Towler; 'the people and the places, and the things he talks about is enough to make a man's hair stand on end.'

'The natural result of a vivid memory, and a good deal of desultory reading.'

'Most patients takes an idea and harps upon it,' said Towler. 'It's the multiplication table--or the day of judgment--or the volcanoes and hot-springs, and what-you-may-call-ems, in the centre of the earth; and they'll go on over and over again--always coming back to the same point, like a merry-go-round; but this one is quite different. There's no bounds to his delusions. We're at the North Pole one minute, and digging up diamonds in Africa the next.'

Brian had flung himself upon his bed, rolled in the damask curtain, like Henry Plantagenet, what time he went off into one of his fury-fits about Thomas Becket; and Mr. Jardine and Towler were able to talk confidentially at a respectful distance.

'Are you sure that he does not get brandy without your knowledge?'

'No, sir,' said Towler; 'that is what I am not sure about. It's a puzzling case. He didn't ought to be so bad as he is after my care of him. There ought to be some improvement by this time; instead of which it's all the other way.'

'What precautions have you taken?'

'I've searched his rooms, and not a thing have I found stowed away anywhere. It isn't often that he's left to himself, for when I get my midday sleep Mrs. Wendover sits with him; or, if he's cranky, and wants to be alone, she stays in the next room, with the door ajar between them; and Robert, the groom, is on duty in the passage, in case the patient should get unmanageable.'

'I see--you have been very careful; but practically your patient has been often alone--the half-open door signifies nothing--he was unobserved, and free to do what he pleased all the same.'

'But he couldn't drink if there was no liquor within reach.'

'Was there none? that is the question!' answered Mr. Jardine.

'Look about the rooms yourself, sir, and see if he could hide anything, except in such places as I've overhauled every morning,' said Towler, with an offended air; and then, swelling with outraged dignity, he flung open doors of wardrobes and closets, pulled out drawers, and otherwise demonstrated the impossibility of anything remaining secret from his eagle eye.

'What about the next room?' asked Mr. Jardine, going into the adjoining room, which was Brian's study.

The room was littered with books and papers heaped untidily upon tables and chairs, and even strewn upon the carpet. Brian had objected to any attempt at setting this apartment in order--the servants were to leave all books and papers untouched, on pain of his severe displeasure. Thus everything in the shape of litter had been allowed to accumulate, with its natural accompaniment, dust. Everyone knows the hideous confusion which the daily and weekly newspapers alone can make in a room if left unsorted and unarranged for a mouth or so; and mixed with these there were pamphlets, magazines, manuscripts, and piles of more solid literature in the shape of books brought up from the library for reference and consultation.

In one corner there were a pile of empty boxes, and on one of these Mr. Jardine's eye lighted instantly, on account of its resemblance to a wine merchant's case.

He pulled this box out from the others--a plain deal box, roughly finished, just the size of a two-dozen case. One label had been pulled off, but there was a railway label which gave the data of delivery, just three weeks back.

'Have you any idea what this box contained?' inquired Mr. Jardine.

'No, sir. It was here when I came, just as you see it now.'

'It looks very like a wine merchant's box.'

'Well, it might be a wine-case, sir, as far as the look of it but it might have held anything. It was empty when I came here, and there's no stowage for wine bottles in these rooms, as you have seen with your own eyes.'

'Don't be too sure of that; and now go back to your patient, and get him to eat some breakfast, if you can, while I go downstairs.'

'He can't eat, sir. It's pitiful; he don't eat enough, for a robin. We try to keep up his strength with strong soups, and such like; but it's hard work to get him to swallow anything.'

Mr. Jardine went down to the family breakfast room, where his wife, Ida, and her stepmother were sitting at table, with pale perturbed faces, and very little inclination for that excellent fare which the Wimperfield housekeeper provided with a kind of automatic regularity, and would have continued to provide on the eve of a deluge or an earthquake. He told Ida that all was going on quietly upstairs, and that he would share Towler's task as nurse all that day, so that she might be quite easy in her mind as to the patient. And then the servants came trooping in, as the clock struck nine, and they all knelt down, and John Jardine read the daily portion of prayer and praise.

It had been decreed by medical authority that on this day, provided the sky were propitious and the wind in a warm quarter, Vernon was to go out for his first drive. Mr. Jardine accordingly entreated that the three ladies would accompany him, and that Ida would have no fear as to her husband's welfare during her absence.

'I don't like to leave him,' she said, in confidence, to Mr. Jardine; 'he seems so much worse this morning--wilder than I have ever seen him yet--and so white and haggard.'

'He is very bad, but your remaining indoors will do him no good. I will not leave him while you are away.'

Ida yielded. It was a relief to her to submit to authority--to have some one able to tell her to do this or that. She felt utterly worn out in body and mind--all the energy, the calm strength of purpose, which had sustained her up to a certain point, was now exhausted. Despair had taken possession of her, and with despair came that dull apathy which is like death in life.

John Jardine took his wife aside before he went back to Brian's rooms.

'I want you to take care of Ida, to keep with her all day. She has been sorely tried, poor soul, and needs all your love.'

'She shall have it in full measure,' answered Bessie. 'How grave and anxious you look! Is Brian very ill?'

'Very ill.'

'Dangerously?'

'I am afraid so. I shall hear what Mr. Fosbroke says presently, and if his report be bad, I shall telegraph for the physician.'

'Poor Brian! How strangely he talked at dinner last night! Oh, John, I hardly dare say it--but--is he out of his mind?'

'Temporarily--but it is the delirium of a kind of brain fever, not madness.'

'And he will recover?'

'Please God; but he is very low. I am seriously alarmed about him.'

'Poor dear Brian!' sighed Bess. 'He was once my favourite cousin. But I must go back to Ida. You need not be afraid of my neglecting her. I shan't leave her all day.'

Mr. Jardine went to the housekeeper's room to make an inquiry. He wanted to know what that box from London had contained, a box delivered upon such and such a date.

The housekeeper's mind was dark, or worse than dark upon the subject--an obscurity enlightened by flashes of delusive light. Two housemaids, and an odd man who looked after the coal scuttles, were produced, and gave their evidence in a manner which would have laid them open to the charge of rank prevarication and