Part 62 (2/2)

CHAPTER IV

THE MESSAGE

It was nearly a month after Lucas Errol's operation that Bertie and his bride came home from their honeymoon and began the congenial task of setting their house in order.

Dot was thoroughly in her element. The minutest details were to her matters of vital importance.

”We must make it comfy,” she said to Bertie, and Bertie fully agreed.

He had relinquished his study of the law, and had resumed his secretarial duties, well aware that Lucas could ill spare him. He was in fact Lucas's right hand just then, and the burden that devolved upon him was no light one. But he bore it with a cheerful spirit, for Lucas was making progress. Despite his utter helplessness, despite the inevitable confinement to one room, despite the weariness and the irksomeness which day by day were his portion, Lucas was very gradually gaining ground.

Already he suffered less severely and slept more naturally.

His last words to Capper at parting had been, ”Come again in the spring and complete the cure. I shall be ready for you.”

And Capper had smiled upon him with something approaching geniality and had answered, ”You'll do it, and so shall I. So long then!”

But the months that intervened were the chief stumbling-block, and Capper knew it. He knew that his patient would have to face difficulties and drawbacks that might well dismay the bravest. He knew of the reaction that must surely come when the vitality was low, and progress became imperceptible, and the long imprisonment almost unendurable. He knew of the fever that would lurk in the quickening blood, of the torturing cramp that would draw the unused muscles, of the depression that was its mental counterpart, of the black despair that would hang like a paralysing weight upon soul and body, of the _ennui_, of the weariness of life, of the piteous weakness that nothing could alleviate.

He had to a certain extent warned Lucas what to expect; but the time for these things had not yet arrived. He was hardly yet past the first stage, and his courage was buoyed up by high hopes as yet undashed. He had faced worse things without blenching, and he had not begun to feel the monotony that Capper had dreaded as his worst enemy.

He took a keen interest in the doings of the young couple at the Dower House, and Dot's breezy presence was ever welcome.

As for Anne, she went to and fro between Baronmead and the Manor, of which her husband's will had left her sole mistress, no longer leading a hermit's life, no longer clinging to her solitude, grave and quiet, but not wholly unhappy. Those few words Capper had spoken on the day of Lucas's operation had made a marvellous difference to her outlook. They had made it possible for her to break down the prison-walls that surrounded her. They had given her strength to leave the past behind her, all vain regrets and cruel disillusionments, to put away despair and rise above depression. They had given her courage to go on.

Of Nap no word was ever spoken in her presence. He might have been dead, so completely had he dropped out of her life. In fact, he was scarcely ever mentioned by anyone, a fact which aroused in Dot a curiously keen indignation, but upon which a certain shyness kept her from commenting.

She kept him faithfully in mind, praying for him as regularly as she prayed for old Squinny, who still lingered on with exasperating tenacity, and continued to enjoy such help, spiritual or otherwise, as he could extract from the parson's daughter.

That Bertie strongly disapproved of his brother she was aware, but she held no very high opinion of Bertie's judgment, though even he could scarcely have forbidden her to pray for the black sheep of the family.

She had not been brought up to rely upon anyone's judgment but her own, and, deeply as she loved him, she could not help regarding her husband as headlong and inclined to prejudice. He was young, she reflected, and doubtless these small defects would disappear as he grew older. True, he was nearly four years her senior; but Dot did not regard years as in any degree a measure of age. It was all a question of development, she would say, and some people--women especially--developed much more quickly than others. She herself, for instance--At which stage of the argument Bertie invariably said or did something rude, and the rest of her logic became somewhat confused. He was a dear boy and she couldn't possibly be cross with him, but somehow he never seemed to realise when she was in earnest.

Another of the deficiencies of youth!

Meanwhile she occupied herself in her new home with all the zest of the young housewife, returned calls with commendable punctuality, and settled down once more to the many parochial duties which had been her ever-increasing responsibility for almost as long as she could remember.

”You are not going to slave like this always,” Bertie said to her one evening, when she came in late through a November drizzle to find him waiting for her.

”I must do what I've got to do,” said Dot practically, suffering him to remove her wet coat.

”All very well,” said Bertie, whose chin looked somewhat more square than usual. ”But I'm not going to have my wife wearing herself out over what after all is not her business.”

”My dear boy!” Dot laughed aloud, twining her arm in his. ”I think you forget, don't you, that I was the rector's daughter before I was your wife? I must do these things. There is no one else to do them.”

”Skittles!” said Bertie rudely.

”Yes, dear, but that's no argument. Let's go and have tea, and for goodness' sake don't frown at me like that. It's positively appalling.

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