Dr. Jenkins pulled himself up sharply, feeling that he had been too brutal.
"No," he said; "it's not so bad as that; but I have some fear of hysteria. The boy is suffering from nervous shock."
Mrs. Raymond, coming into the study a little later, found the Vicar sitting alone with an ashen face. He rose hastily as she entered; the consciousness that he had lost the respect of his parishioners was enough to bear, without the sight of his wife's swollen eyelids.
"Josiah!" she said with an effort, as he was leaving the room. He turned back and faced her proudly.
"Yes, Sarah?"
"When you go upstairs... would you mind... not speaking in the passage? It... upsets Jack so..."
"My voice upsets him, do you mean?"
"I... you remember calling Mary Anne last night? Jack heard you, and he went into a sort of fit. He's... he's very ill, Josiah."
Her voice trailed off into a miserable quaver. After all her years of wifely submission, she was ashamed of her husband.
She would have died rather than tell him so; and there was no need, for he had read it in her eyes.
Perhaps the only person in Porthcarrick who heard nothing of the subject was Jack himself. It was, of course, never mentioned in his room; nor, indeed, was he in a state to listen, had it been spoken of. For a fortnight he was more or less delirious every evening and some part, at least, of nearly every night. In the daytime he usually lay quite passively, sometimes moaning under his breath, more often in a kind of heavy stupor. If spoken to, he would raise his eyelids slowly, with a look of weary indifference or cold dislike, and drop them again, still in silence. His uncle's presence in the sickroom threw him into such paroxysms of terror that Dr. Jenkins was obliged to prohibit it altogether; but nothing else seemed to affect him at all. Even the daily ordeal of dressing the wounds scarcely roused him. On the first occasion Mrs. Raymond, who was helping the doctor, had burst into passionate tears of horror and shame when the bandages were removed; and the boy had merely glanced at her with a faint, petulant whisper: "I wish you'd let me alone!"
His illness was a longer one than had been at first expected. No complications set in, but for some time he simply failed to get well. The arm was mending steadily; even the lacerations were nearly healed, and he still lay in the same state of utter prostration, of continually recurring slight fever. With time and careful nursing, however, he began to rally; and at last, one day in August, a listless, pallid ghost of Jack came downstairs to lie on the drawing-room sofa.
Little as it mattered, there was a certain consolation in getting well. People left off fidgetting about, and sitting in the room, and asking, "Does your head ache?" and, "Did I hurt you?" Indeed, when Dr. Jenkins said, "He's all right now; he only needs to get strong again," Aunt Sarah and every one else seemed to feel a sense of relief in being able to avoid him. They still treated him as an invalid; arranged the sofa-cushions carefully, and dosed him at stated intervals with tonics and beef tea; but otherwise they left him alone. Molly he saw now and then for a moment, a scared, shy creature in a pinafore, staring at him timidly from behind tangled curls; she had caught the sense of horror and of secrecy about the house, and connected it vaguely with the big brother who was ill. He, for his part, would glance at her and turn away; she no longer interested him. The worst was that, coming back into the life of the household, he must perforce meet his uncle again. Yet, for all his agony of dread beforehand, when the time came he was indifferent. They spoke of trifles, avoiding one another's eyes.
Out of apathy and blankness he passed into dull curiosity. His mind, that had stopped as a clock stops in an earthquake, stirred again reluctantly, but only to move round and round in one small circle, a lethargic bondslave stumbling through careless repetitions of a task without a meaning.
Always and always it was the same riddle: the underlying connection between ugly things externally so different. That such a connection existed he had no doubt at all; what it might be he cared little, yet came back to the problem day after day, brooding indifferently, piecing out, bit by bit, a dim and shapeless theory of monstrous things that madhouse doctors know.
Fragments overheard, in far-off days before the mavis flew away, of whispered conversations between schoolmates who had seemed to him boys like himself; phrases from the Bible, read so often that the sequence of their words had grown familiar, while yet they had no meaning; chance things seen on neighbouring dairy farms; scraps of old stories from the Latin Reader; the photographs which had shown him what all these things were, came back and ranged themselves before his understanding. Also he remembered the look on his uncle's face that last night in the gable room, and the faint foreshadowing of that same look when their eyes had met above the helpless dog in the stable yard.
Such a face, surely, Tarquin had worn by the bedside of Lucrece.
On the last Sunday in the month Dr. Jenkins called at the Vicarage. Afternoon service was over, but the family had not yet returned from church. He found Jack alone, lying on the couch beside the window, staring out across the rain swept moorland with wide, hopeless eyes.
Like every one else, the doctor had taken the truth of the accusations for granted, and until now he had felt toward the boy only a cold and impersonal pity; but at this moment he forgot everything except the desire to comfort
"Don't you think," he said presently, "that you would get on better away from home?"
Something stiffened in the tragic face.
"Yes; that's why uncle won't let me go."
It was said without any hysterical bitterness, simply as a statement of a fact.
"Have you spoken to him about it?"
"I asked him whether I might go to school in some other part of the country."
"And he objects?"
"Of course."
"Jack," said the doctor after a pause, "do you understand why your uncle does not let you go?"
"I never supposed he would," Jack answered quietly, "when he can have the fun of keeping me here. Did you ever watch him train a puppy? Uncle likes to see anything kick."
His tone made the doctor shudder; it was so still and murderous. A little silence followed, while the man frowned thoughtfully and the boy returned to his hopeless scrutiny of the wet landscape.
"I believe," Dr. Jenkins said at last, "I could persuade him."
"Of course you could; you know too much."
"Look here, my boy, I don't like cynics, even grown-up ones. Suppose I were to speak for you?"
Jack's mouth set itself in a harder line.
"Why should you? What is it to you?"
"Nothing; except that I see you are unhappy, and am sorry for you."
Jack turned suddenly, sitting bolt upright; and some hidden thing leaped up in his eyes.
"D'you mean you want to help me?"
"If I can," the doctor answered, perplexed and very grave.
Jack was crushing his hands together fiercely; his voice sounded hoarse and broken. "Then get me out of this! Get me away somewhere, so I shan't see uncle any more. I... can't go on here... you don't understand, of course; I'll keep on as long as I can, but I shan't be able to stand it much longer..."
His speech faded out suddenly, like a gusty wind dying down. The doctor looked at him, wondering.
"Let us be open with each other, boy," he said at last. "I know all this has been hard on you — brutally hard; and I'm more sorry for you than I can say. I believe if your uncle had begun by trusting you instead of... well, never mind that. Anyway, suppose we try trusting you now. Most likely the real reason he won't let you go to school is that he's afraid you... won't be a good companion for the boys you'll meet there. Isn't that..?"