HARKNESS gained steadily for a week, and then he began to grow restless and intractable. His whims and exactions exhausted Emily’s strength, and when he could think of nothing else for her to do, he at last demanded that she read to him, and she had to settle to this labor, though her spirits wholly lacked that sense of leisure and repose so necessary to the enjoyment of such a task. He chose his old favorite, Scott, and for hours each afternoon, until the early twilight gathered in the room, she read to him from the novels he had loved so long. It was a test of her devotion, for she had long since outgrown Scott, as she had been fond of declaring, but he would not hear to Howells, nor Meredith, nor Hardy, nor any of the moderns.
One afternoon the doctor entered the room in the midst of the reading. He heard Emily’s low, placid voice as he noiselessly approached the room upstairs where his patient lay:
“‘At length the Norman received a blow which, though its force was partly parried by his shield, for otherwise nevermore would De Bracy have again moved limb, descended yet with such violence on his crest that he measured his length on the paved floor.’”
Emily closed the book upon her finger as he entered and stood just inside the door with the smell of the cold air and his own cigar upon him, but her father reared himself on his elbow, and, shaking his tousled gray head, said:
“We’re just storming a castle, Doc. You sit down and wait, and then I’ll attend to you.”
The doctor smiled.
“I guess you’re getting along all right without me any more,” he said. And Emily took up her tale:
“‘“Yield thee, De Bracy,” said the Black Champion, stooping over him, and holding against the bars of his helmet the fatal poniard—’”
He was bolstered up in a big chair by the time Christmas drew on, and Emily was bustling happily about the house hanging wreaths of holly in the windows, and striving to draw out of all the uncertainties of the time a spirit of holiday warmth and cheer. She wrote Jerome all the details of the little celebration she was planning, and warned him to be home in time to hang up the baby’s stocking for Christmas. By way of further inducement she said she had many things to tell him, though they could hardly have piqued his curiosity, for she straightway proceeded to relate them. She had had, for instance, a long letter from Dade, announcing dramatically that she and her mother were coming home. They were tired of Europe, and her engagement with the German baron was broken. She felt, after all, so she wrote, that she would rather marry an American—as if marriage were the whole duty of woman.
The ugly stories about Pusey’s appointment as postmaster, and of the dire results to follow, had reached Emily, penetrating even to that shaded sick room, but of these she did not write. She had too many perplexities already, and with a power she could command in certain mental crises she put this subject aside, awaiting Jerome’s coming and his explanation, and resolutely setting her heart toward the happier aspect of things she was always seeing in the future.