“I am so sorry to have called you out on Christmas Day, and for what, after all, was no work of yours,” said Lucy to the doctor as he came back through the hall, drawing down his cuffs and straightening his coat.
He gave his head a queer little shake.
“It’s hard to know what is a doctor’s work and what isn’t,” he said. “But it’s always a doctor’s work to be useful, if not to the case, why, then, to its caretaker. Get rid of that woman directly she wakes, Mrs. Challoner. Such as she are at the bottom of two-thirds of the awful accidents which happen in the world.”
“She might have broken her neck if she had fallen on the stairs,” observed Lucy.
“And as she didn’t, she may live to break some other body’s neck,” said the doctor as he went away.
Lucy opened the dining-room door and went in, to find poor little Hugh still dutifully watching at the window as Miss Latimer had bidden him. And there was the dining-table, with its gleaming napery and sparkling crystal, standing there as in mockery of the squalid scene which had just been enacted.
“And is it to this misery that I have invited my guests?” cried Lucy. Even as she spoke her eye fell on her little desk, with her unfinished letter to Charlie peeping out of the blotting-case. That letter could not be finished now. It could never be sent. Then the memory of all she had believed and hoped rolled back on her. If there is anything calculated to give us the sensation of despair, it is the recollection of thanksgiving offered for what in the end has proved disastrous!
For one moment Lucy sat down on a chair, covered her face and wept. She might have had “a good cry,” but for her sudden realisation that she was not alone, that her guests were in the house, and that she had a duty to discharge towards them. She sprang up and dashed away her tears. Where had the guests gone? What were they doing? She had been so occupied with the unhappy drunkard that she had not realised what else had gone on around her. In her confusion she went first to the drawing-room. The door was wide open and the room was empty, an album lying on the floor just as she had dropped it. She paused, puzzled. Then she heard sounds below. It was evident that her friends were all in the kitchen.
There she found them, busy. The pudding was already in the pot. The burned serviettes were put aside. Tom Black had carried the rag mat out to the scullery, and Wilfrid Somerset was washing plates.
Lucy cried out in dismay; but they all laughed good-humouredly. The disaster had happened, they said, and now they’d got to make the best of it.