‘If you won’t mock at me,’ Stephen pursued, ‘I will show you an example you would do well to imitate. It is our old servant, now my kindest, truest friend. If I could hope that you will let her be your friend, it would help to put my mind at rest. Don’t look down upon her,—that’s such a poor way of thinking. Of all the women I have known, she is the best. Don’t be too proud to learn from her, Nancy. In all these twenty years that she has been in my house, whatever she undertook to do, she did well;—nothing too hard or too humble for her, if she thought it her duty. I know what that means; I myself have been a poor, weak creature, compared with her. Don’t be offended because I ask you to take pattern by her. I know her value now better than I ever knew it before. I owe her a debt I can’t pay.’
Nancy left the room burdened with strange and distressful thoughts. When she saw Mary she looked at her with new feelings, and spoke to her less familiarly than of wont. Mary was very silent in these days; her face had the dignity of a profound unspoken grief.
To his son, Mr. Lord talked only of practical things, urging sound advice, and refraining, now, from any mention of their differences. Horace, absorbed in preoccupations, had never dreamt that this illness might prove fatal; on finding Nancy in tears, he was astonished.
‘Do you think it’s dangerous?’ he asked.
‘I’m afraid he will never get well.’
It was Sunday morning. The young man went apart and pondered. After the mid-day meal, having heard from Mary that his father was no worse, he left home without remark to any one, and from Camberwell Green took a cab to Trafalgar Square. At the Hotel Metropole he inquired for Mrs. Damerel; her rooms were high up, and he ascended by the lift. Sunk in a deep chair, her feet extended upon a hassock, Mrs. Damerel was amusing herself with a comic paper; she rose briskly, though with the effort of a person who is no longer slim.
‘Here I am, you see!—up in the clouds. Now, did you get my letter?’
‘No letter, but a telegram.’
‘There, I thought so. Isn’t that just like me? As soon as I had sent out the letter to post, I said to myself that I had written the wrong address. What address it was, I couldn’t tell you, to save my life, but I shall see when it comes back from the post-office. I rather suspect it’s gone to Gunnersbury; just then I was thinking about somebody at Gunnersbury—or somebody at Hampstead, I can’t be sure which. What a good thing I wired!—Oh, now, Horace, I don’t like that, I don’t really!’
The young man looked at her in bewilderment.