Emily Fox-Seton : being The making of a marchioness and The methods of Lady Walderhurst — John Shaqi
Emily Fox-Seton : being The making of a marchioness and The methods of Lady WalderhurstBurnett, Frances Hodgson
General
Emily Fox-Seton : being The making of a marchioness and The methods of Lady Walderhurst
Burnett, Frances Hodgson
Aristocracy (Social class) -- Fiction; Household employees -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
The attack of fever which had seemed to begin lightly for Lord
Walderhurst assumed proportions such as his medical man had not
anticipated. His annoyance at finding his duties interfered with fretted
him greatly. He was not, under the circumstances, a good patient, and,
partly as a result of his state of mind, he began, in the course of a
few weeks, to give his doctors rather serious cause for anxiety. On the
morning following Emily's confession to Dr. Warren she had received a
letter from her husband's physician, notifying her of his new anxieties
in connection with his patient. His lordship required extreme care and
absolute freedom from all excitement. Everything which medical science
and perfect nursing could do would be done. The writer asked Lady
Walderhurst's collaboration with him in his efforts at keeping the
invalid as far as possible in unperturbed spirits. For some time it
seemed probable that letter writing and reading would be out of the
question, but if, when correspondence might be resumed, Lady Walderhurst
would keep in mind the importance of serenity to the convalescent, the
case would have all in its favour. This, combined with expressions of
sympathetic encouragement and assurances that the best might be hoped
for, was the gist of the letter. When Dr. Warren arrived, Emily handed
the epistle to him and watched him as he read it.
"You see," she said when he looked up, "that I did not speak too soon.
Now I shall have to trust to you for everything. I could _never_ have
borne it _all_ by myself. Could I?"
"Perhaps not," thinking it over; "but you are very brave."
"I don't think I'm brave," thinking it over on her own part, "but it
seemed as if there were things I _must_ do. But now you will advise me."
She was as biddable as a child, he told his wife afterwards, and that a
woman of her height and carriage should be as biddable as she might have
been at six years old, was an effective thing.
"She will do anything I tell her, she will go anywhere I advise. I
advise that she shall go to her husband's house in Berkeley Square, and
that together you and I will keep unobtrusive guard over her. All is
quite simple, really. All would have been comparatively simple at the
outset, if she had felt sure enough of her evidence to dare to confide
in some practical person. But she was too uncertain and too much afraid
of scandal, which might annoy her husband. She is deeply in awe of Lord
Walderhurst and deeply in love with him."
"When one realises how unnecessary qualities and charms seem to be to
the awakening of the tender emotion, it is rather dull, perhaps, to ask
why. Yet one weakly asks it," was Mrs. Warren's summation.
"And one cannot supply the answer. But the mere devotion itself in this
nice creature is a thing to be respected. She will control even her
anxieties and reveal nothing while she writes her cheerful letters, as
soon as she is allowed to write them."
"Lord Walderhurst will be told nothing?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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