The doctors had paid a last visit, superfluous as they knew it to be. Dr. Beale had come with the departure of his dinner guests; Mr. Snow earlier in the evening: she was dying, they said, calmly and peacefully: and those friends who had wished to take their farewell had taken it ere they left the house, leaving her, as she wished, alone with her husband.
Margery came in with a noiseless step. If Margery had come in once upon the same errand which brought her now, she had come in ten times. Maria turned her eyes towards her.
“She would be a sight better in bed. It has gone midnight. It can’t do any good, her lying there.”
Meta partly stirred her golden curls as she moved nearer to her mother, and Maria’s feeble hand tightened its clasp on the little one. George nodded; and Margery went back rather in dudgeon, and gave the fire in the next room a fierce poke.
“It’s not well to let her see a mortal die. Just you hold your tongue, Jean, about mother and child! Don’t I know it’s parting them as well as you?—but the parting must come, and before another hour is over; and I say it would be better to bring her away now. Master has no more sense than a calf, or he’d send her. Not he! He just gave me one of his looks, as much as to say, ‘You be off again; she isn’t coming.’”
“How does she seem now?” asked Jean, a tall woman, with a thin, straight figure, and an old-fashioned, large white cap.
“I saw no change. There won’t be any till the minute comes.”
On the table was a tray of cups and saucers. Margery went up to them and drew two from the rest. “We may as well have a drop o’ tea now,” she said, taking up a small black tea-pot that was standing on the hob—for the grate was old-fashioned. “Shall I cut you a bit of bread and butter, Jean?”
“No, thank you. I couldn’t eat it.”
They sat on either side the table, the tea-cups between them. Margery put the tea-pot back on the hob. Jean stirred her tea noiselessly.