“Tell me, Mary, dear Mary—forgive me for stopping you,” she said, breathlessly, “but do tell me, do you think he is going to die?”
“I don’t know—oh! Alexa, how can I tell?” said Mary. “Let me go, dear, and try all of you to be good. That’s the only thing you can do just now.”
“I will, indeed I will,” said Alexa, bravely, “and, Mary, you shall see a difference in me from this time, see if you don’t.”
Mary kissed her and hurried out.
“Perhaps there is really more strength and sense in Alexa than we have given her credit for,” she said to herself. It was a very tiny drop of comfort, still there was some in her young sister’s sympathy and evident desire to be of use. “For,” thought Mary, “it is impossible not to recall all dear papa’s forebodings—he has spoken so much of them lately, as to what would become of them all, and Alexa and Josey seemed as much on his mind as any—in case—”
She stopped suddenly as there flashed across her mind the recollection of Lilias’s letter, which by some strange brain freak the new excitement of the last half hour had completely banished from her memory. Could it still be true—this wonderful news which so short a time ago had seemed to illumine the dark future so brilliantly and scatter every cloud? Could it be true?
“And what if it be?” thought Mary, recklessly, a sob rising in her throat. “What shall we care for money or comfort without him! What a mockery it seems coming now when the greatest sorrow of our lives is upon us! What madness it seems ever to have murmured at our small means or privations or difficulties or anything while we were all together and well! Oh, to think that only the last time I walked down this lane I was grumbling to myself at the home worries and the children’s troublesomeness and the monotonous commonplaceness of my life! If only we were back to all that—if only—would I ever grumble again?”
The tears would come. Mary ran faster in hopes of driving them away and preserving the self-possession which she felt she dare not lose, and another ten minutes brought her to the Edge. She knew the ins and outs of the place so well that without knocking she quickly found her way into the kitchen, where Mrs Wills was busy ironing. The familiar kitchen—how little she had thought the last time she saw it, on what an errand she would next be there!
This errand was soon told, and Mrs Wills was full of sympathy. But sympathy, alas! was all she had to give, and Mary was in sore need of something more. It was terribly disappointing to find that Wills himself was not at home, nor likely to be for some hours to come. On his return from Withenden he had ridden on to Bewley, a village some miles the other way, about a horse buying or selling, or some business of the kind, which, rendered diffusive by her excitement, Mrs Wills would have given Mary the whole details of, had not the girl cut her short with an anguished exclamation:
“What am I to do? What can I do?” she cried. “They are all depending on me to find some way—mamma and all—and even now he may be dying. Oh, Mrs Wills!”