"I got her up to my bed, sir, and I half-carried her. She wouldn't go to their bedroom for fear of frightening master, and him so bad, too!"
"Of course, you couldn't send for me because you'd no one to send, had you?" The doctor began to move towards the stairs.
"Oh, I could have sent someone, sir. There's several about here could have gone. But I understood you were coming, and I said to myself half an hour more or less, like, that can't make much difference. And missis didn't want me to send anyone else, either; she didn't want it to get about too much, sir. Not that that would have stopped me, sir. Soon as I see her really ill, I says I'm responsible now, I says—of course, under you, sir, and I shouldn't have listened to her. No, sir."
The doctor was very considerably impressed, and relieved, by Elsie's dignity, calm and power. An impassible common sense had come to life in the sealed house. She was tidy, too; no trace on her of a disturbed night and morning, and she was even wearing a clean apron. No wearisome lamentation about the shop having to be closed! Elsie had instinctively put the shop into its place of complete unimportance.
As they passed the shut door of the principal bedroom the doctor, raising his eyebrows, gave an inquiring jerk.
"I did knock, sir. There was no answer, so I took the liberty of looking in. He seemed to be asleep."
"You're sure he was asleep?"
"Well, sir," said Elsie, stolidly and yet startlingly, "he wasn't dead. I'll say that."
They passed to the second floor. There lay the mistress on the servant's narrow bed, covered with Elsie's half-holiday garments on the top of the bedclothes. That Violet was extremely ill and in pain was obvious from the colours of her complexion and the sharp, defeated, appealing expression on her face. The doctor saw Elsie smile at her; it was a smile beaming out help and pure benevolence, and it actually brought some sort of a transient smiling response into the tragic features of the patient; it was one of the most wonderful things that the doctor had ever seen. Nobody could have guessed that only thirty-six hours before Elsie had been a thief convicted of stealing and eating raw bacon. And, indeed, the memory of the deplorable episode was erased as completely from Elsie's mind as from her mistress's.
"I shall take you to the hospital at once, Mrs. Earlforward," the doctor said in his prim, gentle tone, after the briefest examination. He added rather abruptly: "I've got a taxi waiting. I think you've borne up marvellously." In a few moments he had changed his plans to meet the new developments, and he was now wondering whether he might not have difficulty in securing a bed for Mrs. Earlforward.