"Yes, yes," said Edwin, impatiently, in reply to some anxious remark of
Maggie's, "I shall be all right with him. Don't you worry till
morning."
They stood at the door of the sick-room, Edwin in an attitude almost
suggesting that he was pushing her out.
He had hurried home from the festival, and found the doctor just leaving
and the house in a commotion. Dr Heve said mildly that he was glad
Edwin had come, and he hinted that some general calming influence was
needed. Nurse Shaw had developed one of the sudden abscesses in the ear
which troubled her from time to time. This radiant and apparently
strong creature suffered from an affection of the ear. Once her left
ear had kept her in bed for six weeks, and she had arisen with the drum
pierced. Since which episode there had always been the danger, when the
evil recurred, of the region of the brain being contaminated through the
tiny orifice in the drum. Hence, even if the acute pain which she
endured had not forced her to abandon other people's maladies for the
care of her own, the sense of her real peril would have done so. This
masterful, tireless woman, whom no sadness nor abomination of her
habitual environment could depress or daunt, lived under a menace, and
was sometimes laid low, like a child. She rested now in Maggie's room,
with a poultice for a pillow. A few hours previously no one in the
house had guessed that she had any weakness whatever. Her collapse gave
to Maggie an excellent opportunity, such as Maggie loved, to prove that
she was equal to a situation. Maggie would not permit Mrs Hamps to be
sent for. Nor would she permit Mrs Nixon to remain up. She was
excited and very fatigued, and she meant to manage the night with the
sole aid of Jane. It was even part of her plan that Edwin should go to
bed as usual--poor Edwin, with all the anxieties of business upon his
head! But she had not allowed for Edwin's conscience, nor foreseen what
the doctor would say to him privately. Edwin had learnt from the
doctor--a fact which the women had not revealed to him--that his father
during the day had shown symptoms of `Cheyne-Stokes breathing,' the
final and the worst phenomenon of his disease; a phenomenon, too,
interestingly rare. The doctor had done all that could be done by
injections, and there was absolutely nothing else for anybody to do
except watch.
"I shall come in in the night," Maggie whispered.
Behind them the patient vaguely stirred and groaned in his recess.
"You'll do no such thing," said Edwin shortly. "Get all the sleep you
can."
"But Nurse has to have a fresh poultice every two hours," Maggie
protested.
"Now, look here!" Edwin was cross. "Do show a little sense. Get--
all--the--sleep--you--can. We shall be having you ill next, and then
there'll be a nice kettle of fish. I won't have you coming in here. I
shall be perfectly all right. Now!" He gave a gesture that she should
go at once.
"You won't be fit for the shop to-morrow."
"Damn the shop!"
"Well, you know where everything is." She was resigned. "If you want
to make some tea--"
"All right, all right!" He forced himself to smile.
She departed, and he shut the door.
"Confounded nuisance women are!" he thought, half indulgently, as he
turned towards the bed. But it was his conscience that was a confounded
nuisance. He ought never to have allowed himself to be persuaded to go
to the banquet. When his conscience annoyed him, it was usually Maggie
who felt the repercussion.
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