VI.
She was sitting in the big leather chair in the consulting-room. The small grey-white window panes and the black crooked bough of the apple tree across them made a pattern in her brain. Dr. Charles stood before her on the hearthrug. She saw his shark's tooth, hanging sharp in the snap of his jaws. He was powerful, savage and benevolent.
He had told her what was wrong with Roddy.
"What—does—it—mean?"
The savage light went out of his eyes. They were dull and kind under his red shaggy eyebrows.
"It means that you won't have him with you very long, Mary."
That Roddy would die. That Roddy would die. Roddy. That was what he had come home for.
"He ought never to have gone out with his heart in that state. It beats me how he's pulled through those five years. Five weeks of it were enough to kill him…. Jem Alderson must have taken mighty good care of him."
Jem Alderson. She remembered. The big shoulders, the little screwed up eyes, the long moustaches, the good, gladiator face. Jem Alderson had taken care of him. Jem Alderson had cared.
"I don't know what your mother could have been thinking of to let him go."
"Mamma doesn't think of things. It wasn't her fault. She didn't know.
Uncle Edward and Uncle Victor made him."
"They ought to be hung for it."
"They didn't know, either. It was my fault. I knew."
It seemed to her that she had known, that she had known all the time, that she remembered knowing.
"Did he tell you?"
"He didn't tell anybody…. Did he know?"
"Yes, Mary. He came to me to be overhauled. I told him he wasn't fit to go."
"I did try to stop him."
"Why?"
He looked at her sharply, as if he were trying to find out something, to fix responsibility.
"Because I knew."
"You couldn't have known if nobody told you."
"I did know. If he dies I shall have killed him. I ought to have stopped him. I was the only one who knew."
"You couldn't have stopped him. You were only a child yourself when it happened. If anybody was to blame it was his mother."
"It wasn't. She didn't know. Mamma never knows anything she doesn't want to know. She can't see that he's ill now. She talks as if he ought to do something. She can't stand men who don't do things like Mark and Dan."
"What on earth does she suppose he could do? He's no more fit to do anything than my brother James…. You'll have to take care of him, Mary."
A sharp and tender pang went through her. It was like desire; like the feeling you had when you thought of babies: painful and at the same time delicious.
"Could you?" said Dr. Charles.
"Of course I can."
"If he's taken care of he might live—"
She stood up and faced him. "How long?"
"I don't know. Perhaps—" He went with her to the door. "Perhaps," he said, "quite a long time."
(But if he didn't live she would have killed him. She had known all the time, and she had let him go.)
Through the dining-room window she could see Roddy as he crouched over the hearth, holding out his hands to the fire.
He was hers, not Mamma's, to take care of. Sharp, delicious pain!