Mrs. Colquhoun took her face in both hands and kissed her,—really kissed her. Her eyes were very bright, with red rims. She had evidently been crying, and she had the look of those who have reached the end of their tether.
‘All is going well I believe now with Virginia,’ she said. ‘I tell him so, and he won’t listen. Do you think you could make him listen? There was a terrible time before the second doctor came and put her under an anæsthetic, and it upset him so that he—well, you see.’
And she made a gesture, half shame, half anger, and wholly unhappy, towards the figure leaning against the sofa.
Then she added, her bright, tear-stained eyes on Catherine’s, ‘To think that my son and God’s priest should go to pieces like this—should be unable in a crisis to do his duty—should lose—should lose——’
She broke off, continuing to stare at Catherine with those bright, incredulous eyes.
Catherine could only gaze at Stephen in dismay. No wonder Kate downstairs hadn’t succeeded in saying what she was trying to say about the master. Stephen, the firm-lipped, the strong denouncer of weakness, the exhorting calm Christian—what a dreadful thing to happen. She didn’t know husbands ever collapsed like that. George hadn’t. He had been anxious and distressed, but he hadn’t moaned. The moaning had been done, she remembered, exclusively by her. George had been her comfort, her rock. What comfort could Virginia have got that day out of Stephen? And it was after all Virginia who was having the baby.
‘Couldn’t the doctors give him something?’ she asked, feeling that poor Stephen ought certainly too to be given a little chloroform to help him through his hours of misery,—anything rather than that he should be left lying there suffering like that.
‘I asked them to give him a soothing draught,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun, ‘and they only told me to take him away. Of course I took him away, for he was killing Virginia, and here I’ve been shut up with him ever since. Catherine——‘it was the first time she had called her that—‘I don’t remember in our day——? I don’t remember that my husband——?’ And she broke off, and stared at her with her bright, exhausted eyes.
‘George didn’t,’ said Catherine hesitatingly, ‘but I think—I think Stephen loves Virginia more than perhaps——’
‘A nice way of loving,’ remarked Mrs. Colquhoun, who had had a terrible day shut up with Stephen, and whose distress for him was by now shot with indignation.