Athelstan Taylor gave a low whistle. "Oho!—that's where we are, is it?" He at once recognised the little girl whose fame had reached him from the great house at Royd, with which he was of course in frequent communication. "You're Lizarann Coupland, then; Lady Arkroyd's friend?"
"Yass!" said Lizarann, nodding. Not that she was sure of it. But she knew there was a Lidy, come to see Teacher at School, she did; and she couldn't have been certain, off-hand, that this wasn't the Lidy's nime, in the face of the gentleman's statement. So she assented. She felt rather proud. Her daddy was well spoken of among the élite evidently. She continued: "And the boy said, he did, they could mike Daddy's leg well any day of the week at the Sospital, because they done his Aunt and Uncle. And a gentleman was a corpse they done, out of a shore. And Mr. Parker's teef they done, as good as new! So they was all singin'! Yass—they was!" This came in instalments; our report is shortened, for convenience.
Athelstan Taylor said afterwards to his friend: "I was getting so sleepy by that time, that I didn't above half enjoy the little maid's hopeful chatter about her Daddy, which of course I confirmed. I had to commit it to memory to laugh at it afterwards." Indeed, his great strength and endurance had been sorely taxed by the trying nature of his long vigil; mere sitting up all night he would have made light of.
When Aunt Stingy appeared a few minutes after, having been employed in lighting the kitchen fire as projected, she found Lizarann still on Mr. Taylor's knee, kept warm in the extemporized wrap, and filling in the blanks in her narrative, in reply to his cross-questionings. With a curious lack of tact and insight, Mrs. Steptoe immediately denounced her niece's presumption, suggesting that the child had taken the gentleman by storm, as it were; and alleging that little g'yells ought to know better how to behave than that. The gentleman cut this ill-judged attempt to creep up his sleeve very short indeed.
"Now listen to me, if you please, Mrs. ... what's your name? ... oh—Steptoe. Mrs. Steptoe. I am going at once to get the nearest doctor to see your husband. And I think the best thing you can do will be to leave him quiet in the front room till I come back. He won't take any harm. And I hope when I come back I shall find the little girl dressed, with a nice warm fire to warm herself at. I suppose you can't get any breakfast for her yet awhile?... Well!—do what you can in that direction. Yesterday's milk is better than no milk." And with a very decisive refusal to take a cup of tea at any future time, on any terms, he buttoned his coat tight round him, and left the room. Lizarann heard the street door open and close, and then she was left friendless and alone with a formidable aunt. That good woman stepped out after the street door closed, and listened a moment at that of the front room, but finding all silent did not open it. She saw it had been locked, as the key had been inside overnight. Evidently her visitor had locked it.
She returned and afflicted Lizarann by a destructive co-operation in the gettin' of her frock on, a form of help that twitched its victim to and fro under the pretext of promoting her stability; that resented her offered assistance and denounced it as henderin'; that left her penalized by a sense of wrong hooks in wrong eyes, buttons adrift from their holes, and holes aghast at the intrusion of strange buttons. But Lizarann was used to this, and discerned in it the shortness of her aunt's temper. Her Daddy he'd always said poor Aunty she couldn't help her nater, and we must bottle up according. Lizarann beheld her aunt through a halo of Jim's patience and forgiveness.
Athelstan Taylor soon found the doctor in Cazenove Street, who came readily in answer to his summons. It wouldn't do to lose sight of the case, he said. The man, who was quite well known to him as a typical case of Alcoholism, to the police as an habitual drunkard, and to the neighbourhood as always the worse for liquor, might very easily die of collapse if he wasn't carefully nourished when the reaction came. He would be much safer in a Hospital. Often in cases of this sort, life or death would turn on an injection of morphine on the spot. Heart-failure might be very rapid. He spoke as though Mr. Steptoe's decease would be a real calamity. Mr. Taylor, tramping beside him through the snow, tried to shape a thought that hung in his mind. How if he himself, who preached a Resurrection or Hereafter that as like as not this scientific gentleman did not believe in—how if he was less keen to preserve this depraved life, as a chance to clean it up a bit for a wholesomer departure later on, than the doctor in his professional enthusiasm, his sportsmanlike eagerness to win in a game of Therapeutics against Death? He felt a little ashamed of having thought more than once that the miserable victim of vice would be "best out of the way." Out of the way!... where? And then, how did he know that this consensus of all mortals to try and save even the most worthless lives may not be an unconscious tribute to the underlying sense of immortality throughout mankind? Would an honest belief in extinction fight to preserve a life that is a pain to itself and a curse to its neighbours? So thinking, he turned with his companion into Tallack Street. "Last house on the right, isn't it?" said the doctor.
What was that policeman doing in front of the last house on the right? Looking about on the snow as though in search for something, and then stooping forward over the low railing to examine the window-fastenings. It was all secure there when Athelstan Taylor came away. He quickened his pace, and the doctor did so too.