At six o’clock I was quite ready. Mr. Gould now seemed a little nervous and excited. He kept on giving me fragments of stupid advice and telling me things that he had told me before. The interview was to be a very short one, and the doctor and the nurse were both in the dimly lit room when I entered it, though they stood at some distance from the bed. On the bed lay the dying woman—a handsome old Jewess, with white-yellow skin of one even tint, colourless lips, and blazing eyes. I went straight up to the bed and took her claw of a hand and bent over her and kissed her. She spoke in a very low voice, and I just caught the words, “Thought I’d lost you.”
“No,” I said, “I’m here, and I will not leave you again until you get better.”
Her eyes closed and opened again and fixed themselves on me. “Pray for me,” she said.
Still holding her hand, I dropped down on my knees by her bedside. My thoughts flew frantically in unlikely directions. I remembered my own mother sitting before the fire and saying with helpless solemnity that it was the beginning of the end. I was not quite sure where I had put my watch-key, and puzzled about it. I recalled vividly a fat old woman who had travelled up in the same compartment with me and I wondered where she had gone. And all the time I was holding the old woman’s hands and trying to pray, and hearing the clock on the mantelpiece tick, as it seemed to me, constantly quicker and quicker.
Presently the doctor touched me on the shoulder. I opened my eyes and saw that the old woman had fallen asleep. I released her hand gently, and slipped out of the room. When I got outside I was shaking like a leaf, and there was Mr. Gould full of eager questions. I answered him as well as I could. He was delighted.
“Now,” I said, “let me go to my own rooms for the rest of the day.”
He looked at me curiously. “Why,” he said, “you seem upset. I suppose you are not as used to it as we are. You ought to have a brandy-and-soda. Let me get it for you.”
I refused that, went off to my own room, lay down on the bed, and began to cry. I had not the faintest idea what I was crying about. It was all so strange and horrible. But soon I sat up and bullied myself. I could see that there might be much to do which would want all my sense and none of my emotion. I dined in my own room, and with my dinner there was brought to me a letter from Mr. Gould, thanking me for my kindness and enclosing a five-pound note.
The next two days passed quietly enough. I now saw the old woman two or three times a day. The third day was the day before the birthday. In the afternoon Mrs. Gould, who had been getting much better, became rapidly worse, fainted, and was unconscious for quite a long time. Gould made a fool of himself. He whipped the doctor off into the dining-room, and talked so loudly that I could hear in the drawing-room. “Look here, doctor,” he said, “you must keep her alive for another nine hours. You can do it if you like, you know. Use more stimulants. You want to flog that heart. Keep it going somehow. Were you trying oxygen?”
“Mr. Gould,” said the doctor, “you know that your mother refuses to see any other doctor, and that any attempt to force one upon her would certainly be fatal. Otherwise I should have thrown up this case before. As it is, I am not going to enter into any consultation with yourself or any other ignorant and unqualified person. And it would help me to keep my temper, and would therefore facilitate my work, if I had no interviews with you of any kind. Send your inquiries through the servant.”