Agnes got out of her humble cab from the station in the middle of the avenue, and walked the rest of the way to the house. Now that she was so near she pushed off the moment of certainty with the instinct of anxiety. The windows were all open, he was living at least, there was still hope. And even that was a relief. In the hall she found the daily bulletin placed there for inquirers. “No change; strength fairly maintained,” which gave her another shock of acute consolation, if such words can be used. “But I must see him. You know me. I am Lord Frogmore’s aunt,” she cried. “No, I cannot wait till Mrs. Parke comes in. I must see him. I must see him.” The footman called the butler, who did not know how to stop this impetuous visitor; but before he had appeared Agnes had flown upstairs, feeling a freedom in the absence of Letitia which increased the sense of relief. The nurse came to the door of Mar’s room, with her fingers to her lips, as she heard the hasty footstep. It was the cheerful nurse, the optimist, who thought that young patients recover from everything. She perceived in a moment that this was no formal inquiry, and hastened to say that the patient was “no worse.” “You may think that’s not much, but it’s a great deal,” she added, coming out into the outer room.
“Oh, nurse, God bless you! I thank you with all my heart!” cried poor Agnes, bursting out, but noiselessly, into a passion of tears.
Upon which the cheerful woman shook her head. “We must not go too fast,” she said. “He is very bad. But I have never been one that took the worst side. I’ve seen that kind before; a long, weedy slip of a boy that’s outgrown, you would say, his strength. But they’re stronger than you think for. I say, while there’s life there’s hope.”
Agnes Hill had heard these words often before, as we all have done, and looking up through her grateful tears with a fresh accès of misery she said, “Is that all? Oh, is that all?”
“The doctor gives him the six weeks,” said the nurse, pursuing her own line of thought, “but I shouldn’t be surprised if there was a change to-morrow or next day. That will be five weeks. I can’t tell you why I think it, but one can’t be so long with a case without forming an opinion. To-morrow night or early on Thursday morning I shouldn’t wonder if the change came.”
“Oh, nurse, the change!” said Agnes, clasping her hands, with the full sense of the words flashing on her mind.
“Yes,” said the nurse. “I can’t say, and no one can say, what change it will be—but I believe the fever will go. And then—it all depends upon his strength,” she added, “and I take the cheerful view.”
“You think there is still hope?” said Agnes, taking the woman’s hand in hers.
“Oh, plenty of hope!” said the optimist. But when the anxious visitor was allowed to come within the door, and from that corner saw Mar lying in the doze in which he spent most of his time, her heart sank within her. Nothing could look more feeble, more like death, as if he were gone already, than the waxen face of the boy, with his dark eyelashes against his cheek. She turned away and put her hands to her eyes, thinking he was already gone. What did it matter what any one said? Hope died with a pang unspeakable in the anxious woman’s breast. She came away again without listening to the further words of comfort which the nurse poured into her ears. Comfort—what comfort was there possible when he lay there, gone, wasted to a shadow, shrunken to nothing, with those wide circles round his eyes, and the blue veins like streaks of color? Agnes said to herself she had seen too many to deceive herself. She knew, whatever any one might say.
As she came down again to the hall, Letitia’s carriage arrived at the door. Though Agnes was so hopeless and so entirely convinced that nothing could now avail, the sound of the carriage wheels on the gravel made her shrink and glow with indignation, as if the noise might harm him. The first words she said to Mrs. Parke were of reproach. “Couldn’t you drive round another way, not to disturb him?” she said.