"Seriously ill," she said, standing with her back to the door. "The
doctor says he is to be kept perfectly quiet."
Indignant at the effrontery of the woman who was trying to keep me out
of my father's room, I said:
"Let me pass, please."
"S'sh! He has a temperature, and I don't choose that anybody shall
disturb him to-day."
"Let me pass," I repeated, and I must have pitched my voice so high that
my father heard it.
"Is that Mary?" came from the other side of the door, whereupon Nessy
beat a retreat, and at the next moment I was in my father's room.
His massive and powerful head was propped up with pillows in the
camp-bed which was all he ever slept on, and he was looking so ill and
changed in so short a time that I was shocked, as well as ashamed at the
selfishness of having thought only of myself all the morning.
But he would listen to no sympathy, protesting there was little or
nothing the matter with him, that "Conrad was croaking about cancer,"
but the doctor was a fool.
"What about yourself, though?" he said. "Great doings at the Castle,
they're telling me."
I thought this a favourable opportunity to speak about my own affairs,
so I began on my story again, and though I found it harder to tell now
that my listener was my father, I struggled on and on, as well as I
could for the emotion that was choking me.
I thought he would pity me. I expected him to be angry. Although he was
showing me some of the contemptuous tenderness which he had always
assumed towards my mother, yet I was his daughter, and I felt sure that
he would want to leap out of bed that he might take my husband by the
throat and shake him as a terrier shakes a rat. But what happened was
something quite different.
Hardly had I begun when he burst out laughing.
"God bless my soul," he cried, "you're never going to lose your stomach
over a thing like that?"