“Even that doctor never understood her,” he said despondently. “And I must owe him two hundred dollars or so this minute! Sometimes, Letitia, I think there is no compassion left in the world. Even the neighbors neglect her nowadays; I don’t believe there has been a bowl of calf’s-foot jelly sent to her in months.”
“Really?” said Tish. “It is surprising, when you think of the things folks might send her and don’t. Every now and then you read of somebody getting a bomb, or poisoned candy.”
He looked at her, but she went on fixing Emmie’s tray in her usual composed manner.
We had a day or two of peace after that. Tish brought Doctor Snodgrass, her own physician, out from town. And after a short talk with her, he put Emmie on a very light diet and went away again. As Tish had put a padlock on the kitchen cupboard the light diet was all Emmie got, too. She had a bowl of junket for breakfast, beef tea for lunch and in the evening she had some milk toast, and if ever I’ve seen a woman suffer she did. We did not run every time she rang her bell, either. She would jingle it for half a dozen times, and for a feeble woman the way she could fling it when nobody came was a marvel.
But, looking back, I can see that we underestimated her intelligence. She had a good bit of time, by and large, to think things out, and she was no fool, whatever else she might be. And I imagine it galled her, too, to see Will filling out and looking more cheerful every day. He was spending more time than ever downstairs and, instead of tiptoeing into the room when he came home at night, he would walk in briskly and say: “Well, how’s the old girl to-night?”
He still wandered across to the cemetery now and then, but we fancied there was more of speculation than of grief in his face when he picked the daisies off his lot. And one night, I remember, he came back and said it was a curious thing that Emmie’s mother had lived to be eighty, as frail as she had been, and that Emmie was like her in a lot of ways.
Tish eyed him.
“She certainly is,” she said. “I thought of that the night I found her in the pantry.”
And then one night there was a yell and a crash upstairs, and when we all ran up, with Will in the lead, we found Emmie stretched out on the floor, and she said she was paralyzed from the waist down!
It took the four of us to get her back into bed. She gave Tish a glance of triumph when she was finally installed and then grabbed Will’s hand and began to groan.