He rose and held out a sympathetic hand.
“We won’t talk of dying yet awhile. He’s got a splendid constitution. He ought to pull through. But we won’t risk any further excitement. Except for Mr Burton and the nurses, I don’t wish anyone to go into his room. Fresh faces set the mind working, and we must keep him tranquil and composed.”
“A very unpleasant duty,” he remarked to the Colonel, who accompanied him outside. “I am sorry for the wife; she takes it badly. But in cases of sickness it is the patient we have to consider.”
“How’s it going with him?” the Colonel asked bluntly.
“At this stage, impossible to say. It will be touch and go. But as I dislike losing my patients, I never admit the go until the hammer falls.”
The Colonel looked after him as he walked away in the sunshine, feeling oddly discouraged, and very disinclined to re-enter the sitting-room. When, bracing himself to face it, he turned the door-handle and went in, he found that Mrs Lawless had dried her eyes, and was sitting very quiet and entirely composed, looking out of the window.
Chapter Thirty.
Who shall tell of the moods and feelings, the alternating between hope and despair, that govern the mind of the looker-on at the conflict between life and death about the bed of one who is dear; the futility of tears, of intercession; the long drawn agony of suspense? Day by day, hourly almost, the mood varies, hope fluctuates, till finally depression settles upon the spirit, crushes it, reduces it to a state of dull acquiescence in the inevitable ordering of things.