Volume Three--Chapter Sixteen.
After the Banquet.
“Yes, yes,” said Edwin, impatiently, in reply to some anxious remark of Maggie’s, “I shall be all right with him. Don’t you worry till morning.”
They stood at the door of the sick-room, Edwin in an attitude almost suggesting that he was pushing her out.
He had hurried home from the festival, and found the doctor just leaving and the house in a commotion. Dr Heve said mildly that he was glad Edwin had come, and he hinted that some general calming influence was needed. Nurse Shaw had developed one of the sudden abscesses in the ear which troubled her from time to time. This radiant and apparently strong creature suffered from an affection of the ear. Once her left ear had kept her in bed for six weeks, and she had arisen with the drum pierced. Since which episode there had always been the danger, when the evil recurred, of the region of the brain being contaminated through the tiny orifice in the drum. Hence, even if the acute pain which she endured had not forced her to abandon other people’s maladies for the care of her own, the sense of her real peril would have done so. This masterful, tireless woman, whom no sadness nor abomination of her habitual environment could depress or daunt, lived under a menace, and was sometimes laid low, like a child. She rested now in Maggie’s room, with a poultice for a pillow. A few hours previously no one in the house had guessed that she had any weakness whatever. Her collapse gave to Maggie an excellent opportunity, such as Maggie loved, to prove that she was equal to a situation. Maggie would not permit Mrs Hamps to be sent for. Nor would she permit Mrs Nixon to remain up. She was excited and very fatigued, and she meant to manage the night with the sole aid of Jane. It was even part of her plan that Edwin should go to bed as usual—poor Edwin, with all the anxieties of business upon his head! But she had not allowed for Edwin’s conscience, nor foreseen what the doctor would say to him privately. Edwin had learnt from the doctor—a fact which the women had not revealed to him—that his father during the day had shown symptoms of ‘Cheyne-Stokes breathing,’ the final and the worst phenomenon of his disease; a phenomenon, too, interestingly rare. The doctor had done all that could be done by injections, and there was absolutely nothing else for anybody to do except watch.
“I shall come in in the night,” Maggie whispered.
Behind them the patient vaguely stirred and groaned in his recess.
“You’ll do no such thing,” said Edwin shortly. “Get all the sleep you can.”
“But Nurse has to have a fresh poultice every two hours,” Maggie protested.