“But how can I help it!” argued the girl, dashing down the long flights of stairs two steps at a time. “How can I see her suffer so and not try to get somebody who knows more than we do to relieve her! Even though it will take her many hours of hard labor to pay for the physician’s visit.”
Meanwhile Robert led Mr. Brook into the corner, dignified by the name of “withdrawing room,” and the old gentleman laid his hand affectionately upon the boy’s shoulder. “My dear, I would like to help you all, if I can. I do not wish to ask you anything which your mother would not be willing you should answer; but anything that you can tell me about your affairs, anything which your conscience does not warn you had best be kept to yourself, I wish you would tell me. Remember I was the friend of your grandfather, and try to feel as if you were talking to him.”
This speech was better suited to the ears of the elder son than to those of “Humpty-Dumpty,” and in the first case would have been answered judiciously; but judgment and reticence were qualities unknown to this small boy, and he now made as clean a breast of family matters as he was capable of doing. If there was anything he did not tell, it was something he had forgotten.
Mr. Brook listened with sympathy and some compunction; and as soon as the physician whom Beatrice had summoned pronounced Mrs. Beckwith “out of danger for the present,” took his leave, hunted up the long-suffering cab-driver who had brought him thither, and returned to his hotel.
There he burst rather excitedly into his own apartments, with the exclamation “I’ve found them, Dolloway! The Beckwiths, at last!”
“You don’t say so!” returned the other old fellow, who had left his bed for a cushioned chair close to a grate fire, and who had the name of being Mr. Brook’s servant, but was, at times, his master—through rheumatism, which mastered both.
“But I have. That must be what my anxiety to see the horse-show meant. Else why, after all these years, should I have been suddenly rendered too uneasy to abide at home, and must needs not only put myself out but you as well? How goes it, Dolloway?”
“Bad, sir; about as bad as it can be. But a body must expect that who goes a trapesing off after will-o’-wisps, at our time of life, leaving good, respectable feather beds to sleep on boards in a barn of a place like this.”
“Not boards, Dolloway. The best mattresses the city affords, the manager assures me; and comfortable enough to those who like them. Yes, yes, yes. In some ways it is a pity. Yet—it is the most fortunate thing. Had any supper, Dolloway?”
“Don’t want any, sir. Thank you.”