During twenty minutes no word was said. The nurse was in charge of Fancy and the baby. Mrs. Yellam had looked forward to assisting at these first rites. The expected pleasure had turned into a grinding pain.
Fancy was going, drifting out of life. Probably her baby would not survive her many days. But she, the old woman, would remain. She gazed down the long perspective of the years to come, cold, dull days without one gleam of sunshine, full of inevitable pain.
"I can't bear it," she said aloud. "It be too much for me."
Solomon heard. He knew, of course, that the long-awaited words were not addressed to him, but they sounded a clarion note of distress.
He laid his head against her knee.
She looked at him, meeting his clear young eyes. They seemed to be full of interrogation.
"If you want to talk, why not talk to me instead of to yourself?"
She patted his head, and let her hand rest upon it. According to Uncle, fool-wisdom in dogs warned them of impending disaster. Mrs. Yellam knew that Solomon had behaved strangely upon the fifteenth of December. Uncle had drawn conclusions from this which he shared with Fancy and his sister. If fool-wisdom on the part of dogs could be interpreted by man, and he held that he was the man to do it, why, then, the fact of Solomon acting "queer" during the day of the fifteenth surely indicated fore-knowledge of Alfred's danger. But the attack had taken place at night. And the dog had exhibited no "queerness" after sundown. Fancy had been much impressed. In his heart, however, Uncle could not envisage Alfred as a prisoner. And we know that Mrs. Yellam shared this view. At the same time, with her loss of faith in the mercy of Omnipotence, and filling the vacuum which Hamlin so abhorred, came the old craving to clutch at "signs." It is quite likely that if the cards had "told true," and if a boy were now lying in the cradle upstairs, that Mrs. Yellam would have fought despair more valiantly. She might have persuaded herself that Fancy would "pull through" and that Alfred would come back.
At this moment she was at a low ebb mentally, although physically able to confront any emergency. Despair destroys morale, as soldiers know, and, paralysing action, heightens sensation. Mrs. Yellam's overwrought brain refused to function normally.
Solomon, she reflected, was not acting "queer."