The women came downstairs at last. At last, to Edwin's intense relief,
every one was going. Albert went into the hall to meet the women.
Edwin rose and followed him. And Darius came as far as the door of the
dining-room. Less than twenty-four hours had passed since Edwin had
begun even to suspect any sort of disaster to his father. But the
previous night seemed an age away. The day had been interminable, and
the evening exasperating in the highest degree. What an evening! Why
had Albert and Clara and Auntie Hamps all of them come up just at
supper-time? At first they would not be persuaded! No! They had just
called--sheer accident!--nothing abnormal! And yet the whole of the
demeanour of Auntie Hamps and Clara was abnormal. Maggie herself,
catching the infection, had transformed the meal into a kind of abnormal
horrible feast by serving cold beef and pickles--flesh-meat being
unknown to the suppers of the Clayhangers save occasionally on Sundays.
Edwin could not comprehend why the visitors had come. That is to say,
he understood the reason quite well, but hated to admit it. They had
come from a mere gluttony of curiosity. They knew all that could be
known--but still they must come and gaze and indulge their lamentable
hearts, and repeat the same things again and again, ten million times!
Auntie Hamps, indeed, probably knew more than Edwin did, for she had
thought fit to summon Dr Heve that very afternoon for an ailment of her
own, and Clara, with an infant or so, had by a remarkable coincidence
called at Mrs Hamps's house just after the doctor left. "Odious,"
thought Edwin.
These two had openly treated Darius as a martyr, speaking to him in soft
and pitiful voices, urging him to eat, urging him to drink, caressing
him, soothing him, humouring him; pretending to be brave and cheerful
and optimistic, but with a pretence so poor, so wilfully poor, that it
became an insult. When they said fulsomely, "You'll be perfectly all
right soon if only you'll take care and do as the doctor says," Edwin
could have risen and killed them both with hearty pleasure. They might
just as well have said, "You're practically in your grave." And
assuredly they were not without influence on Maggie's deportment. The
curious thing was that it was impossible to decide whether Darius
loathed, or whether he liked, to be so treated. His face was an enigma.
However, he was less gloomy.
Then also the evening had necessarily been full of secret conferences.
What would you? Each had to relate privately the things that he or she
knew or had heard or had imagined. And there were questions of urgency
to be discussed. For example the question of the specialist. They were
all positively agreed, Edwin found, that a specialist was unnecessary.
Darius was condemned beyond hope or argument. There he sat, eating and
talking, in the large, fine house that he had created out of naught,
looking not at all like a corpse; but he was condemned. The doctor had
convinced them. Besides, did not everybody know what softening of the
brain was? "Of course, if he thinks he would prefer to have a
specialist, if he has the slightest wish--" This from Auntie Hamps.
There was the question, further, of domestic service. Mrs Nixon's
niece had committed the folly of marriage, and for many months Maggie
and the old servant had been `managing;' but with a crotchety invalid
always in the house, more help would be indispensable. And still
further--should Darius be taken away for a period to the sea, or Buxton,
or somewhere? Maggie said that nothing would make him go, and Clara
agreed with her. All these matters, and others, had to be kept away
from the central figure; they were all full of passionate interest, and
they had to be debated, in tones hushed but excited, in the hall, in the
kitchen, upstairs, or anywhere except in the dining-room. The excuses
invented by the conspiring women for quitting and entering the
dining-room, their fatuous air of innocent simplicity, disgusted Edwin.
And he became curter and curter, as he noticed the new deference which
even Clara practised towards him.
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