“Ah, that I cannot tell you now. I will, perhaps, if you will let me, sometime. Come out and look at the crocuses. This is just the moment, before the sun goes down.”
“Yes, they shut when the sun goes down,” Katherine said, stepping out from the window.
The air had all the balm of spring, and the crocuses were all the colours of hope. It is delightful to come out of winter into the first gleam of the reviving year.
“We are nothing if not botanical,” said the doctor. “You remember the aloe. It is a fine thing but it is melancholy, for its blossoming is its death. It is like the old fable of the phœnix. When the new comes the old dies. And a very good thing too if we did not put our ridiculous human sentiment into everything.”
“Do you think human sentiment is ridiculous?” said Katherine, half disposed to back him up, half to argue it out.
“Of course I don’t!” said the doctor with vehemence; and then he laughed and said, “We are talking like a book. But I am glad you went to Steephill; there is not any such sentiment there.”
“Do you think, then, I am liable to be attacked by fits of sentiment? I don’t think so,” she said, and then she invited the doctor to leave the crocuses and to come in to tea.
I think it was that day that Dr. Burnet informed Katherine that her father had symptoms of illness more or less serious. He hoped that he might be able to stave off their development, and Mr. Tredgold might yet have many years of tolerable health before him. “But if I am right,” he said, “I fear he will not have the calm life he has had. He will be likely to have sudden attacks, and suffer a good deal, from time to time. I will always be at hand, of course, and ready night and day. And, as I tell you, great alleviations are possible. I quite hope there will be many intervals of comfort. But, on the other hand, a catastrophe is equally possible. If he has any affairs to attend to, it would perhaps be—a good thing—if he could be persuaded to—look after them, as a matter of prudence, without giving him any alarm.”
Such an intimation makes the heart beat of those to whom the angel of death is thus suddenly revealed hovering over their home; even when there is no special love or loss involved. The bond between Mr. Tredgold and his children was not very tender or delicate, and yet he was her father. Katherine’s heart for a moment seemed to stand still. The colour went out of her face, and the eyes which she turned with an appealing gaze to the doctor filled with tears.
“Oh, Dr. Burnet!” she said.