Chapter XXV
“The queer thing about it, miss,” Steptoe was saying to Barbara, “is that I didn’t ’ear no noise. My winder is just above the front door, two floors up, and it was open. I always likes an open winder, especially when the weather begins to get warm—makes it ’ealthier like, and so––”
“Yes, but tell me just how he is.”
“That’s what I’m comin’ to, miss. The minute I see what an awful styte we was in, I says, Miss Walbrook, she’ll ’ave to know, I says; and so I called up. Well, as I was a-tellin you, miss, I couldn’t sleep all night, ’ardly not any, thinkin of all what ’ad ’appened in the ’ouse, in the course of a few months, as you might sye—and madam run awye—and Mr. Rash ’e not ’ome—and it one o’clock and lyter. Not but what ’e’s often lyter than that, only last night I ’ad that kind of a feelin’ which you’ll get when you know things is not right, and you don’t ’ardly know ’ow you know it.”
“Yes, Steptoe,” she interposed, eagerly; “but is he conscious now? That’s what I want to hear about.”
Steptoe’s expression of grief lay in working up to a dramatic climax dramatically. He didn’t understand the hurried leaps and bounds by which you took the tragic on the skip, as if it were not portentous. In his response to Miss Walbrook there was a hint of irritation, and perhaps of rebuke.
“I couldn’t sye what ’e is now, miss, as the doctor and the nurse is with ’im, and won’t let nobody in till they decides whether ’e’s to live or die.” Rocking himself back and forth in his chair he moaned in stricken anticipation. “If ’e goes, I shan’t be long after ’im. I may linger a bit, but the good Lord won’t move me on too soon.”
Barbara curbed her impatience to reach the end, going back to the beginning. “Well, then, was it you who found ’im?”
“It was this wye, miss. Knowin’ ’e wasn’t in the ’ouse, I kep’ goin’ to my winder and listenin’—and then goin’ back to bed agyne—I couldn’t tell you ’ow many times; and then, if you’d believe it I must ’ave fell asleep. No; I can’t believe as I was asleep. I just seemed to come to, like, and as I laid there wonderin’ what time it was, seems to me as if I ’eard a kind of a snore, like, not in the ’ouse, but comin’ up from the street.”