The rest were so wearied of the effort to console him that they grew disgusted with grief. Patty had just so much sympathy in her heart. When that was used up, you came to the bitter lees of it. She began to scold her father and at length produced a bottle of laudanum that she kept to quiet the children with when they cried too long. She threatened her father with it now:
“You big baby! If you don’t stop that noise and go to sleep this very instant, I’ll give you enough of these sleeping drops to quiet you for a week.”
She remembered afterward the strange look he cast upon the phial and how his eyes followed it when she put it back in the cupboard’s little forest of drugs and lotions that had accumulated there for years.
Her father wept no more. He lay so quiet that she put her mother to bed alongside him. As she bent to kiss him good night, he put up his ancient arms and drew her head down and whispered, like a repentant child:
“I’m sorry, my sweet, to be so great a pest to everybody. Forgive me, honey! I wanted to cover you with jewels and satins and everything your pretty heart could wish, but—but—I’ve lived too long.”
“Now! now!” said Patty, kissing him again as she turned away to quell the sobs that sprang to her throat.
Her mother was already fast asleep in her nightcap and her well-earned wrinkles; her teeth on the bureau and her mouth cruelly ancient. Her father stared at Patty with the somber old eyes of a beaten hound. Life had whipped him.
Doleful enough, Patty lay down at the side of her husband, who was even more forlorn than usual. She groaned:
“Oh, dear, such an unhappy world as this is!”
Then she sank away to sleep. She dreamed at length of hands snatching at her, of Macbeth and his hags about the cauldron of trouble.