"Of course, I'd do my best," he continued. "But you see ten to one I shan't be here at the moment. As it is I have neglected lingering sicknesses and sudden deaths, hysterical girls, croupy children, broken legs, and all the other pretty little amusements of a rather large practice, waiting for me. Suppose I happen to be twenty miles away on the far side of Westchurch, or seeing after some of Lady Fallowfeild's numerous progeny engaged in teething or measles? Lady Calmady might be kept waiting, and we cannot afford to have her kept waiting in this crisis."
"I wish to God my aunt, Mrs. St. Quentin, was here!" Ormiston exclaimed. "But she is not, and won't be, alas."
"Well, then, who remains?"
As the doctor spoke he pressed his fingers against the edge of the table, leaned forward, and looked keenly at Ormiston. He was extremely ugly just then, ugly as the weather-worn gargoyle on some mediæval church tower; but his eyes were curiously compelling.
"Good heavens! you don't mean that I've got to tell her!" Ormiston cried.
He rose hurriedly, thrust his hands into his pockets, and walked a little unsteadily across to the window, crunching the shining pieces of Mrs. Ormiston's sacrificial wine-glass under foot. Outside the night was very wild. In the colourless sky stars reeled among the fleets of racing cloud. The wind hissed up the grass slopes and shouted among the great trees crowning the ridge of the hill. The prospect was not calculated to encourage. Ormiston turned his back on it. But hardly more encouraging was the sombre, gray-blue-walled room. The vision of all that often returned to him afterwards in very different scenes—the tall lamps, the two men, so strangely dissimilar in appearance and temperament, sitting on either side the dinner-table with its fine linen and silver, wines and fruits, waiting silently for him to speak.
"I can't tell her," he said, "I can't. Damn it all, I tell you, Knott, I daren't. Think what it will be to her! Think of being told that about your own child!" Ormiston lost control of himself. He spoke violently. "I'm so awfully fond of her and proud of her," he went on. "She's behaved so splendidly ever since Richard's death, laid hold of all the business, never spared herself, been so able and so just. And now the baby coming, and being a boy, seemed to be a sort of let up, a reward to her for all her goodness. To tell her this horrible thing will be like doing her some hideous wrong. If her heart has to be broken, in common charity don't ask me to break it."
There was a pause. He came back to the table and stood behind Julius March's chair.
"It's asking me to be hangman to my own sister," he said.
"Yes, I know it is a confoundedly nasty piece of work. And it's rough on you, very rough. Only, you see, this hanging has to be put through—there's the nuisance. And it is just a question whether your hand won't be the lightest after all."