Cilia only nodded and hid her streaming eyes in her apron, but the cook said dully: "It's about over."
"About over? Will he really die Wolfgang, the boy?" The woman stared incredulously: that was impossible. But she had turned terribly pale.
"Well, it's bad enough," said the cook. "Our doctor has called in another professor, a very well-known one--he was here yesterday--but they don't believe that they can do anything more. The illness has attacked the kidneys and heart. He no longer knows anybody, you know. I was in the room this morning, I wanted to see him once more--there he lay quite stiff and silent, as though made of wax. I don't believe he'll pull through." The good-natured woman wept.
They all three wept, sitting round the kitchen table. Frau Lämke entirely forgot that she had made up her mind never to enter that kitchen again, and that her cabbage, that she had put on for their dinner, was probably burning. "Oh, dear, oh dear," she repeated again and again, "how will she get over it? Such a child--and an only child, whom she adored so."
Upstairs the doctors were standing at the sick-bed, the old family doctor and the great authority, who was still a young man. They were standing on the right and the left of it.
The rash had quite disappeared; there was not a trace of red on the boy's face now, and his eyes with their extremely black lashes remained persistently closed. His lips were blue. His broad chest, which was quite sunken now, trembled and laboured.
At every gasping breath he took his mother gasped too. She was sitting in a chair at the foot of the bed, stiffly erect; she had sat like that the whole night. Her piercing eyes with their terrified expression flew to the doctors' grave faces, and then stared past them into space. There they stood, to the right and to the left--but there, there!--did they not see it?--there at the head of the bed stood Death!
She started up with an inarticulate sound, then sank down again as though broken in spirit.
The doctors had given the child, who was so dangerously ill, an injection; his heart was very weak, which made them fear the worst. Then the authority took leave: "I'll come again to-morrow"--but a shrug of the shoulders and a "Who knows?" lay in that "I'll come again to-morrow."
The family doctor was still there; he could not leave them, as he was their friend. Käte had clung to him: "Help! Help my child!" Now he was sitting with Paul Schlieben downstairs in his study; Käte had wished to remain alone with the sick boy, she only wanted to know that he was near.