Grace took her sister into her arms standing by the bedside, while the other sat up, her hair hanging about her, her face distraught with a passion of grief over which she had no control. The tears rained from Grace’s eyes, but she stood firm as a rock.
“We must bear it,” she said; “we must bear it, Milly. We cannot have that to bear again. We will not make it harder for mamma.”
This scene upset the kind doctor for the day; he could not give his attention to the other cases which awaited him for thinking of this heartrending picture. And as for the nurse, whose services were imperatively demanded for another “case”—she could not bear to take leave of them at all, but stole away as if she had done them a wrong.
“How could any woman with a heart in her bosom leave them in their trouble?” she said, sobbing, to the doctor; “but I am not a woman, I am only a nurse——”
“And there is a life to be preserved,” the doctor said. The woman, after all, was only a woman, petulant and unreasonable.
“We are all fools and know nothing. We could not save this life,” she said, “though there were no complications.”
Dr Brewer, too, felt a little ashamed. What was the good of him? He had done everything that his science was capable of, but that had been nothing. Old Death, the oldest of practitioners and the most experienced, had laughed at him, and out of his very hands had taken the prey.
The girls never knew what happened till the funeral was over; and yet it troubled them in the midst of their distress that there was nobody to ask to it, no train of mourners to do honour to their father. They went themselves, following the lonely coffin, and the doctor, half ashamed, half astonished at his own emotion, went with them, to see the stranger buried. He had sent the introductory letter to the Colonial office, accompanied by a statement of the circumstances; but the Minister was up to his eyes in parliamentary work, and his aides knew nothing about Mr Robert Yorke of Quebec. The landlord, out of respect for what had happened in his own house—though at first he had been very angry that any one should have taken such a liberty as to die in his house at the beginning of the season—followed at a little distance. He came by himself in the second mourning coach which the undertakers felt to be necessary, and in which it was well there should be some one for the sake of respectability. Notwithstanding all that had been said and done, it did not seem to the girls that they had ever realised what had happened till they came back that dreary afternoon, and sat down hand in hand in their sitting-room, the door closed upon all things, the murk evening closing in, and nothing to look forward to now—nothing to think of but their own desolation. They “broke down;” what could they do else? But when there are two to break down, it is inevitable that one of the two must see the vanity of tears and make an effort to check them.
“We cannot go on like this,” Grace said. “We will only kill ourselves too; that will not be any comfort for mamma. In the first place, we must find out whether there was anything that—papa wanted done while he was in England. Yes! I mean to talk of him,” she said, “just as if he were in Canada, as if he were next door; he must not be banished from his own because he is dead. Mamma will never let him be forgotten and put aside. We must accustom ourselves to talk about him. Perhaps there was something he wanted done. Do you recollect, Milly? he went away by himself that night?”
“Oh, Grace,” cried her sister, “whoever they are, I hate those people. They were the cause of it. He would never have caught cold but for——”