"It would have—to me!" But this is the most she can do in the way of nettle-grasping. She is glad when St. Sennan, from his tower with the undoubted piece of Norman, begins to count twelve, and gives her an excuse for a recall to duty. "Do think how we're keeping poor Mrs. Lobjoit up, you unfeeling child!" is her appeal on behalf of their own fisherman's wife. Sally is just taking note of a finale of the Ethiop choir. "They've done Pesky Jane, and they're going away to bed," she says. "How the black
must come off on the sheets!" And then they hurried home to sleep sound.
But there was little sleep for the doctor that night, perhaps because he had got so young all of a sudden. So it didn't matter much that his mother countermanded his proposal that bed should be gone to, on the ground that it was so late now that she wouldn't be able to sleep a wink. If she could have gone an hour ago it would have been different. Now it was too late. An aggressive submissiveness was utilized by the good lady to the end of his discomfort and that of Mrs. Iggulden, who—perhaps from some memories of the Norman Conquest hanging about the neighbourhood—would never go to bed as long as a light was burning in the house.
"It is very strange and most unusual, I know," she continued saying after she had scarified a place to scratch on. "Your great-uncle Everett Gayler did not scruple to call it phenomenal, and that when I was the merest child. After eleven no sleep!" She continued her knitting with tenacity to illustrate her wakefulness. "But I am glad, dear Conrad, that you forgot about me. You were in pleasanter society than your old mother's. No one shall have any excuse for saying I am a burden on my son. No, my dear boy, my wish is that you shall feel free." She laid aside the knitting needles, and folding her hands across the outline Sally was to be dragged up, or along, dropped her eyelids over a meek glare, and sat with a fixed, submissive undersmile slightly turned towards her son.
"But I thought, mother, as Mrs. Fenwick was here...." Slow, slight, acquiescent nods stopped him; they were enough to derail any speech except the multiplication-table or the House-that-Jack-built! But she waited with exemplary patience for certainty that the train had stopped. Then spoke as one that gives a commission to speech, and observes its execution at a distance. Her expression remained immutable. "She is a well-meaning person," said she.
"I didn't know how late it was." Poor Dr. Conrad gives up self-defence—climbs down. "The time ran away." It had done so, there was no doubt about that.
"And you forgot your mother. But Mrs. Fenwick is a well-meaning person. We will say no more about it."
Whereupon her son, feeling that silence is golden, said nothing. But he went and kissed her for all that. She said inscrutably: "You might have kissed me." But whether she was or wasn't referring to the fact that she had succeeded in negotiating his kiss on the rim of her spectacles, Conrad couldn't tell. Probably she meant he might have kissed her before.
There was no doubt, however, about her intention of knitting till past one in the morning. She did it enlarging on the medical status of her illustrious uncle, Dr. Everett Gayler, who had just crept into the conversation. Her son wasn't so sorry for this as Mrs. Iggulden, who dozed and waked with starts, on principle, outside in the passage unseen. He could stand at the wide-open window, and hear the little waves plash "Sally" in the moonlight, and the counter-music of the down-drawn shingle echo "Sally" back. Sometimes the pebbles and the water gave place for a moment to the tread of two persistent walkers up and down—men who smoked cigars, and became a little audible and died again at every time of passing.