"If that is the only way, I must take it. I thought, I hoped that if things were as I feared she would tell me herself, but she never has. It is useless, now, to hope for her confidence. The instinct is so strongly for concealment. We must help her in spite of herself."
"Hurry then! I shall wait here. You will call me if necessary?"
She did not ask him exactly what it was that he feared nor did he tell her, but for the first time in many weeks they were able to look at each other as comrades look. The eruption of the old trouble into the new obscured the latter so that, for the time at least, the sick woman behind the locked door held first place in both their thoughts.
It seemed to Esther that she waited a long time before the summons came. Then she heard him call, "Esther!" It was a doctor's call, cool, passionless, commanding. She flew up the stairs, closing Jane's door as she hurried by. The door to her mother's room was open. It was brightly lighted. The shade of the lamp had been removed and its garish yellow fell full upon the bed and the strange figure which lay there.
Mary Coombe had apparently thrown herself down fully dressed—but in what a costume! Surely no nightmare held anything more bizarre. Esther had no time to notice details but she remembered afterwards how the feet were clothed in different coloured stockings and that while one displayed a gaily buckled slipper, the other was carefully laced into a tan walking boot. Just now she could see nothing but the face, for the greatest shock was there. It did not look like Mary's face at all—it was strange, old, yellow and repulsive. Her unbrushed, lustreless hair hung about it in a dull mat, one of her hands was clutched in it—the hand was dirty.
A terrible thought struck every vestige of colour from Esther's cheek. Her terrified gaze swept over the disordered room, up to the face of the man who stood there so silently, then down again to the inert woman upon the bed. Once, not long ago, she had seen a drunken man asleep upon the roadside grass—like this.
"Is it—is it drink?" The words were a whisper of horror.
The doctor shook his head.
"I wish it were. I wish it were only that. Have you never heard of the drug habit—morphia, opium? That is what we have to fight—and it is what I feared."
"Oh!" It was a breath of relief. To Esther, who knew nothing of drugs, or drug habits, the truth seemed less awful than the thing she had imagined.