Chapter 43

A GREAT MENTAL SHOCK.

"Have you any notion what was the cause?"

"None," said Reginald. "Oh, no, none at all," said Ursula. They were all three standing at the door of the sick-room, in which already a great transformation had taken place. The doctor had sent a nurse to attend upon the patient. He had told them that their father was attacked by some mysterious affection of the brain, and that none of them were equal to the responsibility of nursing him. His children thus banished had set the door ajar, and were congregated round it watching what went on within. They did not know what to do. It was Northcote who was asking these questions; it was he who was most active among them. The others stood half-stunned, wholly ignorant, not knowing what to do.

"I don't think papa is ill at all," said Janey. "Look how he glares about him, just as I've seen him do when he was writing a sermon, ready to pounce upon any one that made a noise. He is watching that woman. Why should he lie in bed like that, and be taken care of when he is just as well as I am? You have made a mistake all the rest of you. I would go and speak to him, and tell him to get up and not make all this fuss, if it was me."

"Oh, Janey! hold your tongue," said Ursula; but she, too, looked half-scared at the bed, and then turned wistful inquiring eyes to Northcote. As for Reginald, he stood uncertain, bewildered, all the colour gone out of his face, and all the energy out of his heart. He knew nothing of his father's affairs, or of anything that might disturb his mind. His mind; all that his son knew of this was, that whatsoever things disturbed other minds his father had always contemptuously scouted all such nonsense. "Take some medicine," Mr. May had been in the habit of saying. "Mind! you mean digestion," was it nothing more than some complicated indigestion that affected him now?

"Is it anything about--money?" said Northcote.

They all turned and looked at him. The idea entered their minds for the first time. Yes, very likely it was money.

"We have always been poor," said Ursula, wistfully. Northcote took her hand into his; none of them except Ursula herself paid any attention to this involuntary, almost unconscious caress, and even to her it seemed a thing of course, and quite natural that he should be one of them, taking his share in all that was going on.

"I--am not poor," he said, faltering. "You must not think me presumptuous, May. But the first thing to be done is to get him out of his difficulties, if he is in difficulties--and you must let me help to do it. I think you and I should go out and see about it at once."

"Go--where?" Reginald, like most young people, had taken little notice of his father's proceedings. So long as things went smoothly, what had he to do with them? When there was a pressure for money, he knew he should hear of it, at least in the shape of reproaches and sneers from his father at his useless life, and the expenses of the family. But even these reproaches had died away of late, since Reginald had possessed an income of his own, and since the revenues of the Parsonage had been increased by Clarence Copperhead. Reginald was more helpless than a stranger. He did not know where to turn. "Do you think we could ask him? I am almost of Janey's opinion. I don't think he is so ill as he seems."

And then they all paused and looked again into the room. The nurse was moving softly about, putting everything in order, and Mr. May watched her from the bed with the keenest attention. His face was still livid and ghastly in colour; but his eyes had never been so full of eager fire in all the experience of his children. He watched the woman with a close attention which was appalling; sometimes he would put his covering half aside as if with the intention of making a spring. He was like some imprisoned animal seeing a possibility of escape. They looked at him, and then at each other, with a miserable helplessness. What could they do? He was their father, but they knew nothing about him, and just because he was their father they were more slow to understand, more dull in divining his secrets than if he had been a stranger. When there came at last a suggestion out of the silence, it was Northcote who spoke.

"I don't see how you can leave him, May. It is plain he wants watching. I will go if you will let me--if Ursula will say I may," said the young man with a little break in his voice. This roused them all to another question, quite different from the first one. Her brother and sister looked at Ursula, one with a keen pang of involuntary envy, the other with a sharp thrill of pleasurable excitement. Oddly enough they could all of them pass by their father and leave him out of the question, more easily, with less strain of mind, than strangers could. Ursula for her