When Edwin the next morning, rather earlier than usual on Sundays, came
forth from his bedroom to go into the bathroom, he was startled by a
voice from his father's bedroom calling him. It was Maggie's. She had
heard him open his door, and she joined him on the landing.
"I was waiting for you to be getting up," she said in a quiet tone. "I
don't think father's so well, and I was wondering whether I hadn't
better send Jane down for the doctor. It's not certain he'll call
to-day if he isn't specially fetched."
"Why?" said Edwin. "What's up?"
"Oh, nothing," Maggie answered. "Nothing particular, but you didn't
hear him ringing in the night?"
"Ringing? No! What time?"
"About one o'clock. Jane heard the bell, and she woke me. So I got up
to him. He said he couldn't do with being alone."
"What did you do?"
"I made him something hot and stayed with him."
"What? All night?"
"Yes," said Maggie.
"But why didn't you call me?"
"What was the good?"
"You ought to have called me," he said with curt displeasure, not really
against Maggie, but against himself for having heard naught of all these
happenings. Maggie had no appearance of having passed the night by her
father's bedside.
"Oh," she said lightly, "I dozed a bit now and then. And as soon as the
girl was up I got her to come and sit with him while I spruced myself."
"I'll have a look at him," said Edwin, in another tone.
"Yes, I wish you would." Now, as often, he was struck by Maggie's
singular deference to him, her submission to his judgement. In the past
her attitude had been different; she had exercised the moral rights of
an elder sister; but latterly she had mysteriously transformed herself
into a younger sister.
He went towards his father, drawing his dressing-gown more closely round
him. The chamber had an aspect of freshness and tidiness that made it
almost gay--until he looked at the object in the smoothed and rectified
bed. He nodded to his father, who merely gazed at him. There was no
definite, definable change in the old man's face, but his bearing, even
as he lay, was appreciably more melancholy and impotent. The mere sight
of a man so broken and so sad was humiliating to the humanity which
Edwin shared with him.
"Well, father," he nodded familiarly. "Don't feel like getting up, eh?"
And, remembering that he was the head of the house, the source of
authority and of strength, he tried to be cheerful, casual, and
invigorating, and was disgusted by the futile inefficiency of the
attempt. He had not, like Auntie Hamps, devoted a lifetime to the study
of the trick.
Darius feebly moved his hopeless head to signify a negative.
And Edwin thought, with a lancinating pain, of what the old man had
mumbled on the previous evening: "I shall never go down them stairs
again." Perhaps the old man never would go down those stairs again! He
had paid no serious attention to the remark at the moment, but now it
presented itself to him as a solemn and prophetic utterance, of such as
are remembered with awe for years and continue to jut up clear in the
mind when all minor souvenirs of the time have crumbled away. And he
would have given much of his pride to be able to go back and help the
old man upstairs once more, and do it with a more loving patience.
"I've sent Jane," said Maggie, returning to the bedroom. "You'd better
go and finish dressing."
On coming out of the bathroom he discovered Albert on the landing,
waiting.
"The missis would have me come up and see how he was," said Albert. "So
I've run in between school and chapel. When I told her what a doing he
gave us, getting him upstairs, she was quite in a way, and she would
have me come up. The kid's better." He was exceedingly and quite
genuinely fraternal, not having his wife's faculty for nourishing a
feud.
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