My Little Lady Part 10

"But, _ma chere pet.i.te_--" began Madame.

"I must wait," repeated Madelon, piteously; "I always sit up for him."

Graham thought he could not do better than leave her in the hands of the landlady, and with a friendly good-night, and a promise to come and see her the next day, he went back to his own room. In a few minutes, he heard Madame pa.s.s along the corridor and go upstairs to bed; but, though tired enough himself after a day of Paris sight-seeing, he could not make up his mind to do the same, when, on opening his door, he saw Madelon standing where he had left her. He could not get rid of the thought of this lonely little watcher at the end of the pa.s.sage, and taking up a book he began to read. From time to time he looked out, but there was no change in the posture of affairs; through the half-open door opposite he could see the lights burning in the still empty room, and the small figure remained motionless at the moonlit window. All sounds of life and movement were hushed in the hotel, all the clocks had long since struck midnight, and he was considering whether he should not go and speak to Madelon again, when he heard a faint cry, and then a rush of light feet along the pa.s.sage and down the staircase.

"So he has come at last," thought Graham, laying down his book with a sense of relief, not sorry to have his self-imposed vigil brought to an end. He still sat listening, however; his door was ajar, and he thought he should hear the father and child come up together. There was a moment's silence as the sound of the footsteps died away, and then succeeded a quick opening and shutting of doors, the tread of hasty feet, a confusion of many voices speaking at once, a sudden clamour and stir breaking in on the stillness, and then suddenly subdued and hushed, as if to suit the prevailing quiet of the sleeping house.

"Something must have happened," thought Graham. "That poor child!--perhaps her father has, after all, met with some accident!" He left his room and ran quickly downstairs. The confused murmur of voices grew louder as he approached the hall, and on turning the last angle of the staircase, he at once perceived the cause of the disturbance.

A little group was collected in the middle of the hall, the night porter, one or two of the servants of the hotel, and some men in blouses, all gathered round a tall prostrate man, half lying on a bench placed under the centre lamp, half supported by two men, who had apparently just carried him in.

He was quite insensible, his head had fallen forward on his breast, and was bound with a handkerchief that had been tied round to staunch the blood from a wound in his forehead; his neckcloth was unfastened and his coat thrown back to give him more air. The little crowd was increasing every moment, as the news spread through the house; the _porte-cochere_ stood wide open, and outside in the street a _fiacre_ could be seen, standing in the moonlight.

"A doctor must be fetched at once," someone was saying, just as Horace came up and recognized, not without difficulty, in the pale disfigured form before him, the handsome fair-haired M. Linders he had met at Chaudfontaine five years before.

"I am a doctor," he said, coming forward. "Perhaps I can be of some use here."

No one seemed to notice him at first--a lad had already started in quest of a surgeon, and jumping into the empty _fiacre_ that had brought the injured man to the hotel, was driving off; but Madelon turned round at the sound of Graham's voice, and looked up in his face with a new expression of hope in her eyes, instead of the blank, bewildered despair with which she had been gazing at her father and the strange faces around. To the poor child it seemed as if she had lived through an unknown s.p.a.ce of terror and misery during the few minutes that had elapsed since from the pa.s.sage window she had seen the _fiacre_ stop, and, with the presentiment of evil which had been haunting her during these last hours of suspense, intensified to conviction, had flown downstairs only to meet her father's insensible form as he was carried in. She was kneeling now by his side, and was chafing one of his cold hands between her poor little trembling fingers; but when she saw Graham standing at the edge of the circle she got up, and went to him.

"Will you come to papa?" she said, taking him by both hands and drawing him forward.

"Don't be frightened," said Horace, in his kind, cheerful voice, trying to encourage her, for her face and lips were colourless, and she was trembling as with a sudden chill. He put one arm round her, and came forward to look at M. Linders.

"Allow me," he said; and this time his voice commanded attention, and imposed a moment's silence on the confusion of tongues. "I am a doctor, and can perhaps be of some use; but I must beg of you not to press round in this way. Can anyone tell me what has happened?" he added, as he bent over M.

Linders.

"It was an accident, Monsieur," said a man of the working- cla.s.s, standing by, "this poor gentleman must have had some kind of fit, I think. I was crossing the Boulevards with him about ten o'clock; there were a good many carriages about, but we were going quietly enough, when suddenly I saw him stop, put his hand to his head, and fall down in the road. I had to run just then to get safely across myself, and when I reached the other side, I saw a great confusion, and heard that a carriage had driven straight over him."

There was a moment's pause, and Madelon said in a tremulous whisper, "Papa used to have vertiges last winter, but he got quite well again."

"To be sure," said Graham; "and so we must hope he will now.

That was more than two hours ago," he said, turning to the man--"what have you been doing ever since?"

"We carried him into the nearest _cafe_, Monsieur, and some proposed taking him to a hospital, but after a time we found a letter in his pocket addressed to this hotel, and we thought it best to bring him here, as he might have friends; so we got a _fiacre_. But it was a long way off, and we were obliged to come very slowly."

"A hospital would perhaps have been the better plan," said Graham; "or you should have found a doctor before moving him.

However, now he must be carried upstairs without further delay. My poor child," he said, turning to Madelon, "you can do no good here--you had better go with Madame, who will take care of you; will you not, Madame?" he added, turning to the landlady, who, roused from her bed, had just appeared, after a hasty toilette.

"Yes, yes, she can come with me," said Madame Lavaux, who was not in the best of tempers at the disturbance; "but I beg of you not to make more noise than you can help, Messieurs, or I shall have the whole house disturbed, and half the people leaving to-morrow."

The sad little procession moved quietly enough up the stairs, and along the corridor to M. Linders' room. Graham had gone on in front, but Madame Lavaux had held back Madelon when she would have pressed forward by the side of the men who were carrying her father, and she had yielded at first in sheer bewilderment. She had pa.s.sed through more than one phase of emotion in the course of the last ten minutes, poor child! The first overwhelming shock and terror had pa.s.sed away, when Graham's rea.s.suring voice and manner had convinced her that her father was not dead; but she had still felt too stunned and confused to do more than obey pa.s.sively, as she watched him carefully raised, and slowly carried from the hall. By the time they reached the top of the staircase, however, her natural energy began to rea.s.sert itself; and, as she saw him disappear within the bedroom, her impatient eagerness to be at his side again, could not be restrained. His recent illness was still too fresh a memory for the mere sight of his present suffering and insensibility to have any of the terrors of novelty, after the first shock was over, and all her former experiences went to prove that his first words on recovering consciousness would be to ask for her. Her one idea was that she must go at once and nurse him; she had not heeded, nor, perhaps, even heard Graham's last words, and she was about to follow the men into the bedroom, when Madame Lavaux interposed to prevent her.

"Run upstairs to my room, _pet.i.te_," she said; "you will be out of the way there, and I will come to you presently."

"No," said Madelon, refusing point-blank, "I am going with papa."

"But it is not possible, my child; you will only be in the way. You heard what M. le Docteur said?"

"I _will_ go to papa!" cries Madelon, trembling with agitation and excitement; "he will want me, I know he will, I am never in his way! You have no right to prevent my going to him, Madame! Let me pa.s.s, I say," for Madame Lavaux was standing between her and the door of the room into which M. Linders had been carried.

"_Allons donc_, we must be reasonable," says Madame. "Your papa does not want you now, and little girls should do as they are told. If you had gone to bed an hour ago, as I advised, you would have known nothing about all this till to-morrow. Eh, these children! there is no doing anything with them; and these men," she continued, with a sigh, "the noise they make with their great boots! and precisely Madame la Comtesse, au _premier_, had an _attaque des nerfs_ this evening, and said the house was as noisy as a barrack--but these things always happen at unfortunate moments!"

No one answered this little speech, which, in fact, was addressed to no one in particular. It was, perhaps, not altogether Madame Lavaux' fault that through long habit her instincts as the proprietor of a large hotel had ended by predominating so far over her instincts as a woman as always to come to hand first. The nice adjustment between the claims of conscience and the claims of self-interest, between the demands of her bills and the demands of never-satisfied, exacting travellers, alone involved a daily recurring struggle, in which the softer emotions would have been altogether out of place, we may suppose. In the present instance she considered it a hard case that her house should be turned topsy-turvy at such an untimely hour, and its general propriety endangered thereby; and Madelon's grief, which at another time would have excited her compa.s.sion, had for the moment taken the unexpected form of determined opposition, and could only be looked upon as another element of disturbance. Madelon herself, however, who could hardly be expected to regard her father's accident with a view to those wider issues that naturally presented themselves to Madame Lavaux, simply felt that she was being cruelly ill-used. She had not attended to a word of this last speech, but nevertheless she had detected the want of sympathy, and it by no means increased her desire to accede to Madame's wishes.

"I _will_ go to papa," she repeated, the sense of antagonism that had come uppermost gaining strength and vehemence from the consciousness of the underlying grief and sore trouble that had aroused it, "or I will stay here if you will not let me pa.s.s; rather than go away I will stand here all night."

Graham had heard nothing of this little altercation, but now coming out of the bed-room to speak to Madame Lavaux, he found a most determined little Madelon standing with her hands clasped behind her, and her back set firmly against the wall, absolutely refusing to retreat.

She sprang forward, however, as soon as she saw him.

"I may go to papa now, may I not?" she cried.

"Mademoiselle wants to go to her papa," says Madame, at the same moment, "I beg of you, Monsieur, to tell her it is impossible, and that she had better come with me. She a.s.serts that her father will want her."

"That is all nonsense," said Graham hastily; "of course she cannot come in now," then noticing Madelon's poor little face, alternately white, and flushed with misery and pa.s.sion, he said, "Listen to me, Madelon; you can do your father no good now. He would not know you, my poor child, and you would only be in the way. But I promise you that by-and-by you shall see him."

"By-and-by," said Madelon; "how soon?"

"As soon as we can possibly manage it."

Nothing, perhaps, would have induced Madelon at that moment to have given into Madame Lavaux' unsupported persuasions, but she yielded at once to Horace; indeed her sudden pa.s.sion had already died away at the sight of his face, at the sound of the kind voice which she had somehow begun to a.s.sociate with a sense of help and protection. She did not quite give up her point even now, however.

"I need not go upstairs," she said, with trembling lips and tears in her eyes. "I may go into my own room, may I not?"

"Your room? Which is that?" asked Graham.

"This one--next to papa," she said, pointing to the door that led into the pa.s.sage.

"Yes, you can stay there if you like; but don't you think you would be better with Madame Lavaux, than all by yourself in there?"

"No, I would rather stay here," she answered, and then pausing a moment at the door, "I may come and see him presently?" she added wistfully, "I always nursed him when he was ill before."

"I am sure you are a very good little nurse," said Graham kindly, "and I will tell you when you may come; but it will not be just yet. So the best thing you can do will be to go to bed, and then you will be quite ready for to-morrow."

He had no time to say more, for his services were required. He gave Madelon a candle, closed the door that communicated between the two rooms, and she was left alone.

CHAPTER II.

A Farewell Letter.

Madelon was left alone to feel giddy, helpless, bewildered in the reaction from strong excitement and pa.s.sion. She was quite tired and worn-out, too, with her long watching and waiting; too weary to cry even, or to think over all that had happened.

She did not go to bed, however; that would have been the last thing she would have thought of doing; for, Graham's last words notwithstanding, she had a notion that in a few minutes she would be called to come and watch by her father, as she had often done in the old days at Florence; so she only put down her candle on the table, and curled herself up in a big arm-chair; and in five minutes, in spite of her resolution to keep wide awake till she should be summoned, she was sound asleep.

Low voices were consulting together in the next room, people coming in and out; the French doctor who had been sent for arriving; cautious footsteps, and soft movements about the injured man. But Madelon heard none of them, she slept soundly on, and only awoke at last to see her candle go out with a splutter, and the grey light of dawn creeping chilly into the room. She awoke with a start and s.h.i.+ver of cold, and sat up wondering to find herself there; then a rush of recollections came over her of last night, or her father's accident, and she jumped up quickly, straightening herself, stretching her little stiff limbs, and pus.h.i.+ng back her tumbled hair with both hands from the sleepy eyes that were hardly fairly open even now.

Her first movement was towards the door between the two bedrooms, but she checked herself, remembering that Monsieur le Docteur had told her she must not go in there till she was called. There was another door to her room leading into the corridor, and just at that moment she heard two people stop outside of it, talking together in subdued tones.