Why should it agitate him? Why should it not be the most natural thing in the world to see them by his bedside? That this should not have been his first thought was beyond measure extraordinary to the girls; but they yielded to the wonderful, appalling argument after a little. If it would agitate him, if it might hurt him, whatever it might cost them, they must stay away. There could not be any question about that. After a while they went, sick-hearted and miserable, into the sitting-room where their breakfast was laid, and where, the one persuading the other, they swallowed each a cup of tea. Then they sat down to wait the coming of the doctor. They had a long time to wait. It was a bright morning after the rain, and they sat at the window and watched all the comings and goings in the dingy London street. Opposite to them was a tall house with a balcony, filling up all the horizon; and the tradesmen’s carts jostled up and down for an hour or two, and lugubrious organ-grinders stopped underneath, encouraged by the sight of the two faces, possible listeners, which appeared at their window. And thus the first of the morning passed, and hansom cabs began to rattle about, depositing, with loud clang and hum, now young men and now old, at the different doors; and the stream of passers-by quickened; and postmen and telegraph boys came and went with sharp rattles of knocking; and quick footsteps beating up and down the street. The girls were not always at the window: now one, now another would go to the door of the sick-room and listen to the sounds inside. And sometimes the door would be opened, and something asked for, which Grace or Milly, far more rapid than any waiter, would rush to get. “Just the same, just the same,” was all the nurse could say to them. They began to feel as if they were entirely dependent upon this woman, and that in her hand was the decision of all.
When the doctor appeared at last he was so rapid and so hurried that it was all they could do to get him to pause to speak to them as he left the room. “No better; but I did not expect it,” he said. “No worse: these things must take their course.”
“But we are his daughters,” cried Grace. “Is it possible that you will shut us out from his bedside? Whenever he has been ill, we have always nursed him. Oh, why must we be kept out now?”
“Always nursed him?” said the doctor; “that is well thought of. Step in here. Do you mean to say that he has had this before?”
“What is it?” said Grace. “He has had bad colds, very bad colds. Mamma was always anxious when he had one of his colds.”
“And mamma told us above all things that we must not allow him to catch cold,” cried Milly. “Oh, how badly we must have managed! but how could we know? and what could we do? And it was only the second night.”
The doctor was quick-witted and sympathetic; but naturally he thought of his patient as a case, and not as a man. “Not to allow him to catch cold! that’s easier said than done,” he said with a half-smile, shaking his head. “I thought there must be delicacy of the chest to begin with; all that could not have been done in one day.”
“No, no, there was no delicacy; he was always well and strong—always strong,” the girls cried, emulating and supplementing each other. They poured upon him instantly a hundred examples of their father’s robustness. He had never been ill in his life, except with a cold, and everybody has colds. He never took any special care. Mamma was anxious, but then mamma was always anxious about us all, though we are known to be the healthiest family! To all these eager explanations Doctor Brewer listened with that half-smile, shaking his head; but he was interested. From looking at this matter as only a case, he began to realise the human creatures involved in it, and to perceive that the man who was ill was the head of an anxious, probably dependent family, and that these two pale, frightened, eager girls, with their young beauty all obscured by this cloud of pale terror and confusion, were his children. He began to look at them with a certain tenderness of pity.
“You are very young,” he said at last, when they gave him time to speak. “I think you had better telegraph at once for your mother.”
“For mamma?” their faces were pale before, but this suggestion withdrew from them every tinge of colour.