“There he is,” cried Cherry. There was a look in his eyes for a moment as if he hardly knew how they were to meet; but as Alvar advanced into the room, all his vehemence subsided. He came up to the bed, and laid his hand on Cheriton’s with the old tender touch.
“You are ill, mi caro. I think you must not talk so much just now.”
Cheriton looked up in his face, and read in it, steady as was the voice, an altogether new terror and trouble.
“This is my own fault,” he said. “I was in such a hurry—that—I would not wait for the carriage. After all, there would have been time.”
“Oh, my brother—my brother!” cried Alvar, losing his self-control, “your fault! Grandmother, it is I who have let him kill himself.”
“You are just crazy,” said Mrs Lester, agitated and angry, as Alvar rushed up to her, and threw himself on his knees beside her chair, clasping her hands in his. “I don’t care whose fault it is. No doubt you are one as bad as the other. For the last half hour I have been trying to make Cherry hold his tongue, and now you make a worse turmoil than ever. Since my poor son went there is no one to look to.”
Mrs Lester was shaken and terrified by the shock of sudden alarm, and agitated by Alvar’s extraordinary behaviour, and thus her still fresh grief came back on her, and she burst into tears.
“Oh, granny, don’t—don’t!” cried Cherry, and the distress of his tone recalled Alvar to his senses.
“Oh, I am a fool!” he said, and getting up, he applied himself to soothe his grandmother with all the tact of which he was master, and was so successful, that in a few minutes she went away in search of some remedy for Cheriton, who, as he was left alone with his brother, felt, spite of his increasing suffering, the old sense of repose in Alvar’s care creep over him.
“As violent an attack as the last, and much less strength to meet it,” was the doctor’s verdict, and the great common terror hushed for the time all disputes and differences.