Sad at heart, Richard set out for Clerkenwell. He was ill able for the journey, but Arthur was dying! He would brave the mother for the sake of the son! He got into an omnibus which took him a good part of the way, and walked the rest. When at length he looked up at the dreary house, he saw the blinds of the windows drawn down. A pang of fear went through his heart, and an infilial murmur awoke in his brain:—why was he, on whom those poor lives almost depended, made feeble as themselves, and incapable of helping them? After all his hoping and trusting, could there be a God in the earth and things go like that? The look of things seemed the truth of things; the seen denied the unseen. Cold and hunger and desertion; ugly, mocking failure; heartless comfort, and hopeless misery, made up the law of life! Moody and wretched he went up the stair to the darkened floor.
When he knocked at the front room, that in which Alice slept with her mother, it was opened by Alice, looking more small and forlorn than he had yet seen her, with hollower cheeks and larger eyes, and a smile to make an angel weep.
“Richard!” she cried, with a voice in which the very gladness sounded like pain. A pink flush rose in her poor wasted cheeks, and she lay still in his arms as if she had gone to live there.
He could not, for pity, speak one word.
“How ill you look!” she murmured. “I knew you must be ill! I thought you might be dead! Oh, God is good to leave you to us!” Then bursting into tears, “How wicked of me,” she sobbed, “to feel anything like gladness, with my mother lying there, and me not able to do anything for her, and not knowing what's become of her, or how things are going with her!—We shall never see her again!”
“Don't say that, Alice! Never say never about anything except it be bad. You can't be sure, you know. You can't be sure of anything that's not in your very mouth—and then sometimes you can't swallow it!—But how's Arthur?”
“He'll know all about it soon!” she answered, with a touch of bitterness. “If he had been left me, we should have got along somehow. He would have lain in bed, and I would have worked beside him! How I could have worked for him! But he's past hope now! He'll never get up again.”
“Oh God,” cried Richard in his heart, where an agony of will wrestled with doubt, “if thou art, thou wilt hear me, and take pity on her, and on us all!—I dare not pray, Alice,” he went on aloud, “that he may live, but I will pray God to be with him. It would be poor kindness to want him left with us, if he is taking him where he will be well. May I go and see him?”
“Surely, Richard.—But mayn't I let him know first? The surprise might be too much for him.”
Their talk had waked him, however, and he knew his brother's voice. “Richard! Richard!” he cried, so loud that it startled Alice: he had not spoken above a whisper for days. Richard opened his door, and went in. But when he saw Arthur, he could scarcely recognize him, he was so wasted. His eyes stood out like balls from his sunken cheeks, and the smile with which he greeted him was all teeth, like the helpless smile of a skull. Overcome with tenderness, the stronger that he would have passed him in the street as one unknown, Richard stooped and kissed his forehead, then stood speechless, holding the thin leaf of a hand that strained his. Arthur tried to speak, but his cough came on, and his brother begged him to be silent.