Father carried her upstairs, and put her on her bed; and mother cried and was frightened. And all we could do, she would not come to herself. At first we only thought she was knocked up and faint, but presently we began to see that things were worse, and father went off for the doctor.
When the doctor came, he said grannie was very ill indeed, and could not possibly be moved next day. He said it must have been coming on for some days, and he told us pretty plainly that he did not believe she would get over it. "She's an old woman, you know," he said.
I did not half know what he meant. It seemed too dreadful to think of grannie dying. I never knew till then how much I loved her.
I had a busy enough life the next week, what with nursing and work. I couldn't bear to leave grannie, yet mother expected me to do all that I commonly did and attend to grannie too. Our move had to be put off, of course, and mother was vexed. She did not believe that grannie was so bad as the doctor said. Father was very anxious, and he stayed a great deal at home, and often sat with grannie. But she did not know him or any of us.
Things went on so up to Christmas Eve. And then there was just a little glimmer of sense. She seemed to look at me, and I heard her say, "Home! going Home!"
"Perhaps not just yet, grannie," I said. But she smiled again, in a sort of eager way. She had pretty nearly lost the power of speech, yet she managed to say again, "Going Home—Home, Phœbe."
And that was all. She looked peaceful, and we thought her better. Mr. Scott came to see her a little later, but she had dropped into a sleep, and from that sleep she never woke. Nobody could tell the moment when she died, she went so quietly.
It was a sad Christmas for us all, and saddest of all, I think, for me; for I had been more her child than mother's, and she had taught me everything, and I seemed to feel as if I didn't know how to live without her.
Father was miserable, for he had loved her dearly. It was only of late that he had ever said a sharp word to her, and I suppose those sharp words came back now and troubled him. And he had no real comfort like me; so after all he was the worst off. For I could think of grannie in her happy Home, with the Lord Jesus and the bright angels, singing songs to God; but father could only think about his own loss. He did not care to think about Heaven, and he only felt very wretched. And the day after grannie's death, he did what he had never never done before—stayed ever so long at the public-house drinking, and came back the worse for what he had taken.