“What was the good?”
“You ought to have called me,” he said with curt displeasure, not really against Maggie, but against himself for having heard naught of all these happenings. Maggie had no appearance of having passed the night by her father’s bedside.
“Oh,” she said lightly, “I dozed a bit now and then. And as soon as the girl was up I got her to come and sit with him while I spruced myself.”
“I’ll have a look at him,” said Edwin, in another tone.
“Yes, I wish you would.” Now, as often, he was struck by Maggie’s singular deference to him, her submission to his judgement. In the past her attitude had been different; she had exercised the moral rights of an elder sister; but latterly she had mysteriously transformed herself into a younger sister.
He went towards his father, drawing his dressing-gown more closely round him. The chamber had an aspect of freshness and tidiness that made it almost gay—until he looked at the object in the smoothed and rectified bed. He nodded to his father, who merely gazed at him. There was no definite, definable change in the old man’s face, but his bearing, even as he lay, was appreciably more melancholy and impotent. The mere sight of a man so broken and so sad was humiliating to the humanity which Edwin shared with him.
“Well, father,” he nodded familiarly. “Don’t feel like getting up, eh?” And, remembering that he was the head of the house, the source of authority and of strength, he tried to be cheerful, casual, and invigorating, and was disgusted by the futile inefficiency of the attempt. He had not, like Auntie Hamps, devoted a lifetime to the study of the trick.
Darius feebly moved his hopeless head to signify a negative.
And Edwin thought, with a lancinating pain, of what the old man had mumbled on the previous evening: “I shall never go down them stairs again.” Perhaps the old man never would go down those stairs again! He had paid no serious attention to the remark at the moment, but now it presented itself to him as a solemn and prophetic utterance, of such as are remembered with awe for years and continue to jut up clear in the mind when all minor souvenirs of the time have crumbled away. And he would have given much of his pride to be able to go back and help the old man upstairs once more, and do it with a more loving patience.
“I’ve sent Jane,” said Maggie, returning to the bedroom. “You’d better go and finish dressing.”