The children at home went unreproved by him. The chatter of poor little Loulou had ceased to irritate, although it occasionally gave him a spasm of pain. They were nothing to him, mere simulacrums of what had once power to please or displease. Even Stan did not come in for the usual disapprobation on the dirty hands, the slouching walk, or the uncouth expressions which characterized him. To Mr. Nichols his wife was the only real person in the house, and there was but one thought between them—the thought of Quintilia.
The mother worked untiringly, while Miss Candy curled her hair, and wrote interminable reports, and stood in charming professional attitudes when the doctor was present, and sent the household individually and collectively for belated prescriptions, and bottles that were “just out,” and glycerine, and boracic acid, and camphorated oil, and disinfectants, and oiled silk, and medicine-droppers, and rubber water-bags, and absorbent cotton, and whisky, and malted milk, and biscuits, and candles, and lime-water, and all the various foods so chemically prepared that they are warranted to be retained by the weakest stomach, and of which no invalid can ever be persuaded to swallow more than the first teaspoonful. The doctor studied Miss Candy’s reports—patently composed from memory—with an imperturbable face, and questioned Mrs. Nichols closely afterwards. Mr. Nichols, as a mortal man, still derived a vague satisfaction in her presence, although he spent his tired evenings in going errands for her; she looked so pretty that he always felt as if Quintilia must be better.
Sometimes he was allowed to sit by the child while his wife took a short rest. He knew, most humbly, his deficiencies in the sick-room—by some ulterior influence when he moved fire-irons fell over, bottles broke, papers rattled, his shoes made an earthquake, whatever he touched creaked. He would sit in a rigidly quiet attitude until his wife returned, with his head on his hand, watching the little pinched face, the half-closed eyes, listening to the breathing, the rise and fall of the little chest. Oh, God, the hours by a sick child!
A night came that was long to be remembered in the Nichols household—a night of ringing bells and shutting doors and hurried running up and down stairs, with the scared children in their white night-gowns peeping out of the bedroom door after their tearful prayers for little sister.
In the small hours the doctor’s steady tread could be heard in the sick-room, or on the landing where he came to give brief orders. Mr. Nichols sat on a couch in the wide hall outside the door. Sometimes his wife came from the sick-room and sat down by him for a few seconds, and they were together in an anguish of dreadful love. When she was gone he remained with his head on his breast thinking.
He thought of the years of happiness they had had; he thought of the beloved sleeping children around them and of honest, clumsy Stan, and troublesome, inconsequent Loulou with special tenderness; he thought of all the blessings that had been his.
It was as if life were brought to a close, and he humbly confessed to himself the unfaithfulness of his own part in it, his faults of temper, his neglect of opportunities to make others happy. He might have been drowning. His gaze, brought back to land once more, questioned those who passed him in the hall. Miss Candy went by once with red eyes, her cap pushed to one side, and her pretty hair all out of curl. She did not even see him as she passed.
“Father dear!”
He looked up—it was the little eldest daughter of the house, Christine. “Father dear, I can’t go to sleep, and I’ve been lying in bed so long!”
She sat down beside him and slipped her hand into his; her blue eyes had the depth that comes from lying awake in darkness. “I’m thinking all the time of baby. Mayn’t I stay here with you, father dear? I want to stay with you so much.”