"You came like an honest man," said James, "not gallivanting round as one of the gentry might. That's good enough for I, and that's good enough for she. Come Lammas I shall be seventy, which is a late age for making a long journey unless it be that powerful long journey out of this world into the next. My brother Henry set out forty-three years ago for Australia, and I've only heard from him once, and that was Christmas two years ago. I put off answering the letter, for I write a very crooked hand and was never one for letters. Get the ink-horn, Lizzie. By God A'mighty, I'll write him now and say we'll pay him a visit in the spring of the year. I still have a pretty hand wi' sheep, and I reckon Henry will find us all a job."
"Why, that's the very thing," cried Edward. "Emigration! What a fool I was not to have thought of it myself."
Old James wrote a letter to his brother, who was evidently a squatter of considerable affluence and who, judging by the cordial tone of the only letter he had written, would be glad in his old age, being a childless widower, to welcome his kinsfolk from England. It was decided to give up the farm at Christmas and to sail as early as possible in the New Year. Fortune was kind up to the point of granting old James a good harvest that season, and although the new tenant, Farmer Wilberforce, did not pay as he ought to have paid for the live and dead stock, James scraped together enough to enable the three of them to equip themselves for a long journey and avoid the steerage. It became important to start as early as possible in the New Year, because Elizabeth was with child, and it was hoped to leave England in time to avoid childbirth on the high seas. Edward was painfully conscious of being able to do very little to help old James, and he tried to console himself with the belief that once ashore in Australia he would by his energy make amends for his present helplessness. Places were secured in the second class of the Mariana, a ship of 1,374 tons, which was due to sail from Liverpool in the first week of January; but on the night before her departure, when all on board were making merry to the strains of an emigrant fiddler and an emigrant piper, an alarm of fire was raised. There was plenty of help at hand from the crowded shipping of the Mersey; the passengers with their luggage were taken off by steam-tugs and boats; and the vessel was run ashore, where when the tide left her high and dry she was gutted by the flames.
Elizabeth bore the terrifying experience with fortitude, and when the shipping agents in Liverpool told them of a ship sailing from London within a few days she was not backward in urging her husband and grandfather to make every effort to obtain a passage. Nevertheless, the nervous tension to which she had been exposed proved too much for her, and even before the train journey was accomplished her travail began prematurely. There was no time to search for comfortable lodgings. The first rooms they found in Pomona Terrace, a dreary by-street off the Euston Road, had to serve their need, and while the landlady, a good-natured, grubby Irishwoman, helped Elizabeth to bed, Edward rushed out into the wet foggy night to summon a doctor.
In a crescent of decaying houses he soon perceived like rubies on the murky air the lamps of two doctors adjacent. Had his need been less urgent, such a juxtaposition would have presented an insoluble problem to Edward whose attitude to life was one long hesitation between his right and his left. As it was, he hurried up the first pair of steps and was on the point of pulling the bell, when through a broken slat of the Venetian blinds he saw the occupant of the room thus revealed pour himself out a very generous allowance of whisky or brandy from a dusty decanter unsteadily held in a dirty hand. He paused with his fingers on the knob of the bell while the occupant of the gas-lit room held the decanter in mid-air, listening. The face with its expression of interrupted desire and expectant cunning was so repulsive that Edward was horrified at the idea of such a creature's attending upon his beloved Elizabeth, and in a moment he had put his leg over the low stone parapet that divided the steps of one doctor from the steps of the other.
"Yes," the maid told him, "Dr. Harrison is in."
Edward explained the case to the doctor, while the latter packed his bag with various instruments, and so much excited was he that he could hardly refrain from plucking at the doctor's sleeve when they were hurrying back through the fog to the lodgings in Pomona Terrace. Dr. Harrison was a young man, scarcely more than thirty, whose manner carried such assurance that Edward was able to feel that his choice had been the right one. When they reached the house the doctor was at once taken upstairs, while Edward, on the suggestion of Mrs. Gallagher, accommodated himself in the kitchen. Here he found old James Taylor on one side of the range talking of agriculture to Mr. Gallagher, a workman in the employ of one of the great railway companies, who was displaying his agreement or disagreement with, his interest in or boredom at the farmer's observations only by the way he sucked at his clay pipe. For an Irishman he was strangely taciturn. From time to time slatternly young women passed through; but whether they were the daughters or servants of the Gallaghers or lodgers in the house, there was no telling. Though Edward took a chair next old Taylor, his thoughts were upstairs, and the old man's lecture on clovers meant as little to him as the chirping of the crickets in the walls of the house. His anxiety over Elizabeth was so sharp that the incongruity of his surroundings never struck him. His whole being was too much involved with his wife's for what is called reality to affect him more nearly than might the incidents of a dream. That he should share a bedroom with old Taylor, that he should find himself deferring to a Gallagher, that he should be expected to take his place at an ill-laid table and eat the malodorous mess there set down by a slut with grimy hands made no impression upon Edward. Had his mother floated into this squalid kitchen and pointed a delicate finger in scorn at his surroundings, he would not have listened one whit less intensely for the slightest sound from above. Whatever disgusted him in Pomona Terrace took its place in the general purgatory of deprivation of the sight of Elizabeth, and the farthest that his mind wandered from that room upstairs was to that broken slat in the Venetian blinds through which he had seen that drunken doctor's face. Thank God he had! Thank God!
A long time passed. Mr. Gallagher had fallen asleep and was snoring loudly. Old Taylor was asleep too, his jaw dropped upon his chest, his whole aspect senility incarnate. The restless slatterns no longer moved in and out with unwashed dishes and bawdy gigglings.
Now the crickets were silent in the glooms; Gallagher had ceased to snore; there was no sound except an occasional cough from the subsiding fire. So silent was it that Edward could hear his watch ticking with what seemed a terrible rapidity in the pocket of his waistcoat. At last the doctor put his head round the door and beckoned. Edward was beside him in a moment, gasping forth his alarms.
"She's not dead? Why didn't you call me sooner?"