CHAPTER V
AT DAWN
I think it must have been nearly a half-hour—though the minutes were themselves hours—before I, waiting in the upper hall beside the window, through which the arc lights from the street threw jumping white patches on the ceiling, heard the sound of the old dog’s claws on the floor below and her little catches of breath as she came up.
At the top she buried her face for a moment on my shoulder.
“I love you more than ever,” she whispered. “I want you to stay.—Call Margaret and do what you can. I will come to you by and by.”
With these words she pressed my forearm in the grip of her strong fingers and, entering her own room, shut the door.
I found, when I did mechanically as she had bade me do, that Margaret, with the instinct of an old servant, which is sometimes as keen as that of an animal, had already sensed the presence of some crisis and prowled about in her soft-footed way until she had discovered the truth. She was lying at the bottom of the stairs, her face buried in her hands and her broad back rising and falling with slow and silent tides of grief. Julianna and her father were together the old woman’s life. One half had gone.
“Come, Margaret,” said I softly.
“Very well, sir,” she answered after a minute, and rising, straightened her cap, preparing for duty like a broken-hearted soldier. And so she went on in that next hour or two, telephoning, directing, arranging and doing with me all those necessary things. In spite of her labors she seemed always to be at my elbow, a ceaseless little whimpering in her throat. Her spectacles were befogged with the mist from her old blue eyes, which, like the color of old china, had faded with wetting and drying in years of family use, but she did not again give up to her grief.