"So your pride is satisfied. I am glad of that, my dear Madam Dignity. Now let us go and sit with Emmie."
CHAPTER IX.
AN ERRAND OF MERCY.
"Speak gently to the aged one;
Grieve not the careworn heart:
The sands of life are nearly run,
Let such in peace depart."
Christian Lyrics.
Caleb Runciman had told Queenie that Mr. Calcott was seriously ill; but the girl had received the news with indifference, making no comments. "What was his life—his useless, loveless life—in comparison with Emmie's?" she thought with bitterness.
Presently, when her trouble had lightened a little, and Emmie was slowly advancing towards convalescence, she remembered her hardness with some compunction; and her heart grew soft and pitiful over the thought of that lonely sick-room.
"I wonder if Mr. Calcott remembers my visit?" she said once to Caleb, but Caleb only shook his head in silence. He had not as yet been admitted to his employer's presence. The illness was enveloped in mystery, and all sorts of reports were current with respect to it.
Neither of them guessed the truth, or knew the strange thoughts and memories that haunted the sick man's pillow. The past was ever before him; conscience, so long dormant, had roused at last, and had laid hold of him with fierce and angry grip; he saw himself the victim of a hypochondria so fell and senseless that it had warped and scathed his better nature.
His past life was mapped out before him: a youth of disease and suffering, soothed only by a sister's love; a querulous, discontented manhood, darkened by fits of strange melancholy; then years of loneliness and brooding.
Why had he failed with his life? Other men had suffered as well as he; other men had experienced the same passionate sorrows, had reaped disappointment where they had expected happiness, had battled with chronic disease, and yet had borne themselves bravely before the world! Why had he grown so hardened and exasperated against his kind that his very servants trembled in his presence?