He thought it over and over, and could not bring himself to see that he had done wrong in promising to hide the facts. If he went that hour and stood in the market-place and shouted them forth to all hearers, it could not bring back the forfeited life; it could not remedy the past in the remotest degree. He thought of his dead brother, Caroline's father; he remembered the words he had sent out to him to soothe his dying bed--"The child shall be to me as a daughter." He could not, on the very threshold of her wedded life, bring obloquy on the husband of her choice, and blight his good name, his fair prospects. And so _he resolved to keep the secret_--to guard the fatal mistake from the knowledge of the world. Only their own two selves were privy to it; therefore Mark was perfectly safe--save for him. The administering the chloroform must be looked upon as an error in judgment, of his own as well as of Mark's: and yet scarcely an error, for perhaps nine surgeons out of ten would so have administered it to a patient under similar circumstances, and have made no exception in Lady Oswald. He, Dr. Davenal, must suffer this to be assumed, saying himself as little as was possible upon the matter to any one: in a case where the termination had been so unfortunate his reticence would be excused.
He leaned his head upon his hand in the dark twilight, and pondered over the circumstances: he could not keep his mind from dwelling upon them almost morbidly. A strange fatality seemed to have attended the affair altogether. There had beat the obstinate persistence of Lady Oswald to see her landlord, in spite of common-sense and of Mr. Oswald Cray's representation that it could not possibly serve her; there had been the sudden falling lame of the carriage horse, for which the coachman had been unable to account; and then there had been the accident to the train. Parkins had had told him a confused tale--confused through her own grief, poor woman--of their having gone by mistake, she and her mistress, to the wrong side of the station at Hildon to take the return train, and had thereby lost a train. They went, naturally enough perhaps to inexperienced travellers, to the side of the platform on which they had descended on going; and it was not until a train came up to the other side, took in the passengers waiting on that side of the platform, and went on to Hallingham, that they discovered their mistake. But for that, they would have been at Hallingham safe and sound when the accident happened to the late train. Then there was the fact of Mark Cray's having been in the train, of his having been the first to see Lady Oswald. When brought afterwards to the home terminus, she had said, "Mr. Cray will go home with me:" and later she had insisted on his taking the operation. He himself had been called out to Thorndyke, had been kept there while the long hours of the best part of the day had flitted away: had he not been called out, why the operation would, beyond all question, have been performed in the morning, probably by himself, for he should have seen her early and detected its need. There was the absence of the pupil, Julius Wild, through what appeared an unaccountable mistake: had that pupil been present, to him would have fallen the task of getting Parkins from the room, and the chloroform could not have been administered. A curious chapter of accidents--or what are called such--and Dr. Davenal lost himself in the chain of thought. "O merciful Father, forgive him! forgive him this night's work!" he murmured. "And mayst Thou have taken that poor woman to her rest!"