"What! In the daytime?"
"Better do nothing in bed than be choked up."
"I dare say the fog wouldn't go away. You see, it's due to atmospheric conditions, so they say."
"That's only because nobody's there to stop 'em talking nonsense. Look at all that smoke going up our chimney." So it was, and a jolly blaze there was going to be when the three shovelfuls Sally had enthusiastically heaped on had incubated, and the time was ripe for the poker.
Had you been there you would have seen in Sally's face as it caught the firelight-flicker and pondered on the cause of the fog, that she had not heard a choking fit of the poor old sleeper in the next room. And in her mother's that she had, and all the memory of the dreadful hours just passed. Her manner, too, was absent as she talked, and she listened constantly. Sally was to know what it was like soon. The opium sleep would end.
"Isn't that him?" The mother's sharp ear of apprehension makes her say this; the daughter has not heard the buried efforts of the lung that cannot cough. It will succeed directly, if the patient is raised up, so. Both have gone quickly and quietly into the sick-chamber, and it is the nurse who speaks. Her prediction
is fulfilled, and the silent struggle of suffocation becomes a tearing convulsion, that means to last some while and does it. How the old, thin tenement of life can go on living unkilled is a problem to solve. But it survives this time. Perhaps the new cough-mixture will make the job easier next time. We shall see.
Anyhow, this attack—bad as it was—has not been so bad as the one he had at three this morning. Rosalind and Nurse Emilia invent a paroxysm of diabolical severity, partly for the establishment of a pinnacle for themselves to look down on Sally from, partly for her consolation. He wasn't able to speak for ever so long after that, and this time he is trying to say something.... "What is it, dear?"
"Couldn't we have a window open to let a little air in?"
Well!—we could have a window open. We could let a little air in—but only a very little. And that very little would bring with it copious percentages of moisture saturated with finely subdivided carbonaceous matter, of carbon dioxide, and sulphur dioxide, and traces of hydric chloride, who is an old friend of our youth, known to us then as muriatic acid.