"If you please, sir, Mr. Chichester wants to know if it's anything important. He's feeling very bad, poor gentleman. But of course if it's anything important, he wouldn't for all the world say no."
"It is important."
"Then I was to ask you to walk in, sir, please."
Chichester's sitting-room was empty when Malling came into it, and the folding-doors between it and the bedroom were shut. Ellen went away, and Malling heard a faint murmur of voices, and then Ellen's footstep retreating down the stairs. Silence followed. He waited, at first standing. Then he sat down near the piano. Not a sound reached him from the bedroom. On the curate's table lay a book. Malling took it up. The title was "God's Will be Done." The author was a well-known high-church divine, Father Rowton. To him, then, Henry Chichester betook himself for comfort. The piano stood open. On it was music. Malling looked and saw, "Oh, for the wings, for the wings of a dove!" by Mendelssohn. The little room seemed full of pious orthodoxy. Surely its atmosphere was utterly changed since Malling last was in it. The melody of "Oh, for the wings!" went through his brain. That the Henry Chichester he had recently known, that cruel searcher after and expounder of truth, that he should be helped by those words, by that melody, in an hour of sorrow!
There was a movement in the bedroom. The folding-doors opened inward, and the curate appeared. He was very pale, and looked really ill. His face had fallen in. His fair hair was slightly disordered, and his blue eyes were surrounded by red rims. His expression suggested that he had recently undergone an extremely violent shock, which had shaken badly both body and mind. He looked dazed. Coming forward feebly, he held out his hand.
"I believe it is something important," he said in a gentle, rather wavering voice; "otherwise—I am hardly fit, I fear, to be with my kind. I"—He sat down—"I have had a terrible shock, Mr. Malling. You have heard?"
"You mean Mr. Harding's death?"
"Yes."
"I have just heard of it."
"It occurred at half-past three o'clock last night, or, rather, this morning. He had been declining for a long while. At the last he just faded out, as it were. The strange thing is that I knew the exact moment when he entered into rest."