Grace was the one who pushed through the crowd. ‘Let us pass, please. We have come to see someone,’ she said, clutching Trix’s dress with her hand.
‘Oh, is that the doctor? Stand back and let the doctor pass,’ said a voice from within the door of the little parlour. The speaker came out as she spoke. She was the mother, with a pale and frightened face surmounted by a bonnet gay with ribbons and flowers. ‘Oh, ladies, I cannot speak to you now! Oh, if it’s anything about the dressmaking, Matilda will come to you to-morrow. We’re in great trouble now. Oh, doctor, doctor, here you are at last!’
Then a man brushed past, hurrying in. Grace followed, not knowing what she did. She never forgot the scene she saw. In an arm-chair, the only one in the room, sat propped up a young woman wrapped in a fur cloak, with a white bonnet covered with flowers. Her eyes were half open; her jaws had dropped. Another young woman, apparently her sister, stood stroking her softly, calling to her: ‘Oh, wake up, Ally!—oh, wake up!—there’s the carriage at the door, and here—here’s the doctor come to see you.’ Through the sound of this frightened, half-weeping voice came the sharp, clear tones of the doctor: ‘How long has she been like this? Lay her down—lay her down anywhere. Yes, on the floor, if there’s nowhere else. Silence, silence, woman! Can’t you see—’
There was an interval of quiet, and then the voice of the mother, ‘I’ll get a mattress in a moment. She can’t lie there on the floor, her that’s been taken such care of. Doctor! is it a faint? is it a faint? is it—’
Another moment of awful suspense, the silence tingling, creeping; the voices of the little crowd sounding like echoes far off. Then the doctor rose from where he had been kneeling on the floor.
‘Why did you let her do this?’ he said, sternly, ‘I warned you she must not do it.’
‘Oh, doctor, her heart was set upon it—and such a beautiful morning, and her new, beautiful fur cloak as she couldn’t catch cold in. Doctor, why don’t you do something? Doctor!’ cried the mother, seizing him by the arm.
He shook her off. He was rough in his impatience. ‘Can’t you see,’ he said, ‘that there is nothing to be done? Take off that horrible finery; the poor girl is dead.’
‘The poor girl is dead.’ Grace thought it was her own voice that repeated those awful words. They went to her heart with a shock, making her giddy and faint. Her voice sounded through the confused cries of the woman about that prostrate figure. ‘Dead!’ The doctor turned to her, as if it was she to whom explanations were due.
‘I warned them,’ he said, ‘that her life hung on a thread. I told them she must make no exertion. I knew very well how it would be. The wonder is that she has lasted so long,’ he added, after that momentary excitement sinking into professional calm. ‘No, no, there’s nothing to be done. Can’t you see that for yourself?’