The door from the outside opened, and Mr. Markham came in. He looked puzzled and surprised to see Tom there. Tom rose to meet him.
“Hush!” he whispered. “May is in there with Lambert. He is on the point of death. He has been asking for her all the evening, they say.”
Mr. Markham began taking off his coat, and stood for a moment before the fire.
“I shall wait a minute or two till May comes out,” he said.
At a sudden impulse, however, Tom rose, quietly closed the door into the sick room, and sat down again by the fire. All the sordid shabbiness of the place contrasted too painfully with the supreme scene which was going on within, and he wished to separate the two. On the table stood a teapot, and a teacup without a saucer, into which was thrust a half-eaten crust of bread. A dull, spiritless fire, half-choked in grey ash, smouldered in the grate, and the kettle, with its lid off, stood in the fender, half-overturned, in a puddle of water. A wooden china-faced clock, painted with a scroll of pink and blue flowers, stood on the mantelpiece between two white crockery dogs, and marked the moments with a harsh insistence. There was a slipper, worn down at the heel, lying on the shabby worsted rug, which lay crooked by the fender, and another, presumedly its fellow, half under the table. A hungry, mournful-looking cat sat blinking at them from under the table with anxious, perturbed eyes, while inside that door May knelt by the bed of a dying cottager, and in some mysterious way knew how to reach the dim-lit soul of the old man, and to make it easy for him to die. There was a reality about it which Tom felt the revivalist meeting had lacked.
The clock on the mantelpiece had scarcely beaten out five loud minutes when the door opened again and May came out.
“Ah! you have come,” she said in a low voice to her father; “it is just too late. He died quite peacefully and happily.”
“I was here this afternoon,” he replied, “and I just went back to the vicarage, and came on again.”
May turned to Tom.
“Tom, dear, you’d better go home. I must wait here a little. These poor people want me.”