“Ah!” exclaimed the doctor, nodding his head. “Well, now has come a crisis in Mrs. Fullerton’s condition. This illness has been incubating for years. She must have undergone mental misery of a very acute kind, whether or not the cause may have been adequate. If her children desire to keep her among them, it will be necessary to treat her with the utmost care, and to oppose her in nothing. Further disappointment or chagrin, she has no longer the power to stand. There are complications. Her heart will give trouble, and all your vigilance and forbearance are called for, to avoid serious consequences. I think it right to speak frankly, for everything depends—and always hereafter will depend—on the patient’s being saved as much as possible from the repetition of any former annoyance or sorrow. At best, there will be much for her to endure; I dread an uprooting of long familiar habits for any one of her age. Her life, if not her reason, are in her children’s hands.”
A time of terrible anxiety followed, for the inmates of the Red House. The doctor insisted on a trained nurse. Algitha and Hadria felt uneasy when they were away, even for a moment, from the sick-room, but the doctor reminded them of the necessity, for the patient’s sake as well as their own, of keeping up their strength. He warned them that there would be a long strain upon them, and that any lack of common sense, as regards their own health, would certainly diminish the patient’s chances of recovery. Nobody had his clearest judgment and his quickest observation at command, when nervously exhausted. Everything might depend on a moment’s decision, a moment’s swiftness of insight. The warning was not thrown away, but both sisters found the incessant precautions trying.
Every thought, every emotion was swallowed up in the one awful anxiety.
“Oh, Hadria, I feel as if this were my fault,” cried Algitha, on one still, ominous night, after she had resigned her post at the bedside to the nurse, who was to fill it for a couple of hours, after which Hadria took her turn of watching.
“You? It was I,” said Hadria, with trembling lips.
“Mother has never been strong,” Algitha went on. “And my leaving home was the beginning of all this trouble.”
“And my leaving home the end of it,” her sister added.
Algitha was walking restlessly to and fro.
“And I went to Dunaghee so often, so often,” she cried tearfully, “so that mother should not feel deserted, and you too came, and the boys when they could. But she never got over my leaving; she seemed to resent my independence, my habit of judging for myself; she hated every detail in which I differed from the girls she knew. If I had married and gone to the Antipodes, she would have been quite satisfied, but——”
“Ah, why do people need human souls for their daily food?” cried Hadria mournfully. She flung open the window of the bedroom, and looked out over the deadly stillness of the fields and the heavy darkness. “But they do need them,” she said, in the same quiet, hopeless tone, “and the souls have got to be provided.”