There was a momentary pause; and then I heard the boy’s voice once more.
“There’s a slice of bread-and-butter, missy. You must wait for your egg till I can boil it. Don’t you eat too fast, or you’ll choke yourself. What’s the matter with your mamma? Are you asleep, ma’am?”
I could barely hear the answering voice—it was so faint; and it uttered but one word: “No!”
The boy spoke again.
“Cheer up, missus. There’s a doctor outside waiting to see you.”
This time there was no audible reply. The boy showed himself to me at the door. “Please to come in, sir. I can’t make anything of her.”
It would have been misplaced delicacy to have hesitated any longer to enter the room. I went in.
There, at the opposite end of a miserably furnished bed-chamber, lying back feebly in a tattered old arm-chair, was one more among the thousands of forlorn creatures, starving that night in the great city. A white handkerchief was laid over her face as if to screen it from the flame of the fire hard by. She lifted the handkerchief, startled by the sound of my footsteps as I entered the room. I looked at her, and saw in the white, wan, death-like face the face of the woman I loved!
For a moment the horror of the discovery turned me faint and giddy. In another instant I was kneeling by her chair. My arm was round her—her head lay on my shoulder. She was past speaking, past crying out: she trembled silently, and that was all. I said nothing. No words passed my lips, no tears came to my relief. I held her to me; and she let me hold her. The child, devouring its bread-and-butter at a little round table, stared at us. The boy, on his knees before the grate, mending the fire, stared at us. And the slow minutes lagged on; and the buzzing of a fly in a corner was the only sound in the room.
The instincts of the profession to which I had been trained, rather than any active sense of the horror of the situation in which I was placed, roused me at last. She was starving! I saw it in the deadly color of her skin; I felt it in the faint, quick flutter of her pulse. I called the boy to me, and sent him to the nearest public-house for wine and biscuits. “Be quick about it,” I said; “and you shall have more money for yourself than ever you had in your life!” The boy looked at me, spit on the coins in his hand, said, “That’s for luck!” and ran out of the room as never boy ran yet.