§11
Suddenly came a running in the passage outside, a rap at the door and the nurse entered, scared, voluble in Italian, but with gestures that translated her.
Lady Harman rose, realized the gravity and urgency of the moment and hurried with her along the passage. “Est-il mauvais?” the poor lady attempted, “Est-il——”
Oh! what words are there for “taken worse”?
The woman attempted English and failed. She resorted to her native Italian and exclaimed about the “povero signore.” She conveyed a sense of pitiful extremities. Could it be he was in pain again? What was it? What was it? Ten minutes ago he had been so grimly angry.
At the door of the sick room the nurse laid a warning hand on the arm of Lady Harman and made an apprehensive gesture. They entered almost noiselessly.
The Bavarian doctor turned his face from the bed at their entrance. He was bending over Sir Isaac. He held up one hand as if to arrest them; his other was engaged with his patient. “No,” he said. His attention went back to the sick man, and he remained very still in that position, leaving Lady Harman to note for the first time how broad and flat he was both between his shoulders and between his ears. Then his face came round slowly, he relinquished something heavy, stood up, held up a hand. “Zu spät,” he whispered, as though he too was surprised. He sought in his mind for English and then found his phrase: “He has gone!”
“Gone?”
“In one instant.”
“Dead?”
“So. In one instant.”
On the bed lay Sir Isaac. His hand was thrust out as though he grasped at some invisible thing. His open eyes stared hard at his wife, and as she met his eyes he snored noisily in his nose and throat.
She looked from the doctor to the nurse. It seemed to her that both these people must be mad. Never had she seen anything less like death. “But he’s not dead!” she protested, still standing in the middle of the room.
“It iss chust the air in his throat,” the doctor said. “He went—so! In one instant as I was helping him.”
He waited to see some symptom of feminine weakness. There was a quality in his bearing—as though this event did him credit.
“But—Isaac!”
It was astounding. The noise in his throat ceased. But he still stared at her. And then the nurse made a kind of assault upon Lady Harman, caught her—even if she didn’t fall. It was no doubt the proper formula to collapse. Or to fling oneself upon the deceased. Lady Harman resisted this assistance, disentangled herself and remained amazed; the nurse a little disconcerted but still ready behind her.
“But,” said Lady Harman slowly, not advancing and pointing incredulously at the unwinking stare that met her own, “is he dead? Is he really dead? Like that?”
The doctor’s gesture to the nurse betrayed his sense of the fine quick scene this want of confidence had ruined. Under no circumstances in life did English people really seem to know how to behave or what was expected of them. He answered with something bordering upon irony. “Madam,” he said, with a slight bow, “he is really det.”
“But—like that!” cried Lady Harman.
“Like that,” repeated the doctor.
She went three steps nearer and stopped, open-eyed, wonder-struck, her lips compressed.