"I couldn't say; but she took her nightgown with her."
"Oh! Then I may as well go home at once. And when she wants me again, she can send me word." I was inclined to be annoyed with Emily for running me about for nothing, but—providentially—it occurred to me to inquire what her errand was.
"It's the child," said Mrs. Blount, "that's not very well."
"What child?"
"The little Juke baby. He has only a cold, his mother thinks, but, as the doctor is away just now, she's nervous about him. So she sent for Emily."
"For Emily!" My heart swelled. I cannot describe the feeling that came over me. Mrs. Blount stared at me in an odd way, and I have no doubt had cause to do so; I must have stared at her like a daft creature. Neither of us spoke another word. I just turned and ran out of the house, ran all the way to the tram road, ran after a tram that had already passed the end of the street, and in a quarter of an hour was jumping from the dummy of another opposite my darling daughter's door. No doubt my fellow travellers smiled to see a matron of my years conducting herself in that manner, but I cast dignity to the winds. A new maid who did not know me answered my sharp pull at the house bell, and told me Mrs. Juke was not at home to visitors.
"How is the baby?" I gasped out, trembling in every limb.
"We have just sent for Dr. Errington," she replied. And then I rushed past her and upstairs to Phyllis's room.
As soon as I opened the door, and heard the sound in the air, I recognised croup. It reminded me of times, in years gone by, when I had wakened in the night and wondered for a moment what the extraordinary noise was that pulsed through the house like the snoring of a wild animal, and then leaped from my bed in agony as if a sword had gone through me. I could see my own child's face, swollen and dark with threatened suffocation, looking to her mother for help with those beseeching eyes: just in the same way they looked at me now, only now the mother-anguish was wringing her poor heart. She was walking up and down the floor distractedly, with the baby in her arms—he had grown a huge fellow, and weighed her down; and Emily was wildly turning the leaves of a great medical book of Edmund's, blind with tears. Dear, loving, futile creatures! It was more than I could bear to see them, and to hear my Phyllis cry, "Mother! Mother! Oh, mother, tell us what to do!"
In one moment my cloak was on the floor and the babe was in my arms. He struggled to cry, but could not get the sound out—only the brazen crow, and harsh, strangled breath, which, I was informed, were symptoms of a crisis which had only just appeared, attacking him in his sleep—and Phyllis, when she had given him to me, clasped and unclasped her hands, wrung them, and moaned as if some one were killing her.