'Ay, I'm better, lass,' he said, returning the pressure of the hand she laid on his.
'Wilt have a light?'
'Not yet a-bit,' he answered. 'I like to lie so, and watch the day right out,' and he turned his face towards the square of grey sky framed by the window.
There was hardly more pleasantness left in his life than in the dreary rain-washed garden outside. And yet his life had not been without its triumphs—as the world counts success. He had, when still young, married the woman he passionately loved, and work for her sake had seemed so easy that he had risen from poverty to competence, and from competence to wealth. Born in the poorest ranks of the workers in a crowded Stockport alley, he had started in life as a mill 'hand,' and he was ending it now a millowner, and master of many hands.
He had himself been taught in no school but that of life; but he did not attribute his own success to his education any more than he did the fatuous failure of some University men to their peculiar training; so he had sent his sons to Cambridge, and had lived to see them leave their college well-grown and handsome, with not more than the average stock of prejudices and follies, and fit to be compared, not unfavourably, with any young men in the county.
But by some fatality he had never tasted the full sweetness of any of the fruit his life-tree had borne him. His parents had died in want and misery at a time when he himself was too poor to help them. His wife, who had bravely shared his earlier struggles, did not live to share their reward. She patiently bore the trials of their early married life, but in the comfort that was to follow she had no part. She died, and left him almost broken-hearted. Her memory would always be the dearest thing in the world to him; but a man's warm, living, beating heart needs something more than a memory to lavish its love upon. This something more he found in her children. In them all his hopes had been centred; for them all his efforts had been made. They were, individually, all that he had dreamed they might be, and they were both devoted to him; and yet, as he lay on his deathbed, his mind was ill at ease about them. Did he exaggerate? Was it weakness and illness, the beginning of the end, that had made him think, through these last few weeks, that there was growing up between these two beloved sons a coolness—a want of sympathy, an indisposition to run well in harness together—which might lead to sore trouble?
There certainly had been one or two slight quarrels between them which had been made up through his own intervention. How would it be, he wondered, when he was not there any more to smooth things over? Somehow he did not feel that he cared to live any longer, even to keep peace between his boys. That must be done some other way. Truth to say, he was very tired of being alive.
The October day faded, and presently the sick-room was lighted only by the red flickering glow of the fire, which threw strange fantastic shadows from the handsome commonplace furniture, and made the portraits on the walls seem to look out of their frames with quite new expressions.
Old Ferrier lay looking at the pictures in a tremor of expectation that made the time seem very long indeed. At last his strained sense caught the faint click of the Brahma lock as it was opened by a key from without, and the bang of the front door as it was closed somewhat hurriedly from within.
'There they are,' he said at once. 'Send them up, Letitia.'