“I see no reason for doing that,” he said placidly and firmly. “Let me think now—”
“Shall I run down there myself? It won’t take me long.”
She was ready in the emergency, and in deference to his astounding whims, to take the fearful risks of leaving the two men alone together in the house. Suppose Joe should rise up violent? Suppose Mr. Earlforward should begin in his weakness to explore the house? He was already suspecting something; and she knew him for the most inquisitive being ever born. She trembled. Still, she was ready to go, and to run all the way there and all the way back.
“Oh, no!” he forbade positively. “That won’t do at all.” He was afraid to lose her. He, so seriously ill (he was now seriously ill again!), to be left by himself in the house! It was unthinkable. “Look here. Step across to Belrose’s” (Belrose—the man who had purchased Violet’s confectionery business). “I hear he’s got the telephone now. Ask him to telephone for us to the hospital. Then we shall know at once.”
“We don’t do much with them,” Elsie objected, diffident. The truth was that the Earlforward household bought practically nothing at Belrose’s, Belrose’s not being quite Violet’s “sort of shop” under its new ownership.
Mr. Earlforward almost sat up in his protest against the horrible suggestion contained in Elsie’s remark. What! Would Belrose say: “No, you don’t deal with me, and therefore I won’t oblige you by telephoning to the hospital to find out whether Mrs. Earlforward is alive or dead”? A monstrous notion!
“Don’t be silly,” he chid her gravely. “Do as I tell you and run down at once.”
“And would you like me to ask them to telephone for another doctor for you while I’m about it? There’s Dr. Adhams, he’s in Myddelton Square too. They do say he’s very good.”
“When I want another doctor I’ll let you know, Elsie,” said Mr. Earlforward with frigid calm. “There’s a great deal too many doctors. What has Raste done for me, I should like to know?”
“You wouldn’t let him do anything,” said Elsie sharply.
He had never heard her speak with less benevolence. Of course he was entitled to give her a good dressing-down, and it might even be his duty to do so. But he lacked confidence in himself. Strange, but he was now in the last resort afraid of Elsie! She was like an amiable and tractable animal which astonishingly shows its teeth and growls.
“Leave the door open,” he muttered.
As Elsie descended to the shop there was a peremptory and loud rat-tat, and then a tattoo on the glass of the shop door. It frightened her. She thought naturally of the possibility of bad news by special messenger or telegraph from the hospital. But Mrs. Perkins’s boy Jerry was at the door. He wore his uniform, of which the distinguishing characteristics were a cap with brass letters on the peak and a leathern apron initialled in black. In King’s Cross Road an enormous motor-lorry throbbed impatiently in attendance upon the gnome.
“Here’s yer umbrella, Elsie,” said Jerry proudly. “I thought you might be wanting of it.”
He made no inquiry as to sick persons. He was only interested in the romantic fact that he had used the vast resources of his company to restore the umbrella to his queen, carrying it all day through all manner of streets in his long round, and finally persuading that important personage the motor-driver to stop at Riceyman Steps on no business of the company’s. Elsie took the umbrella from his dirty little hands, which were, however, no dirtier than his grinning face, and he ran off almost before she could thank him.
“Jerry!” she summoned him back, and he came, risking the wrath of the driver. “Come along tonight, will yer, after ye’ve done? Rap quiet on the door. I might want yer.”
“Right O, Elsie!” He was gone. The lorry was gone.
Elsie went upstairs again with the umbrella, not because the umbrella would not have been safe in the shop, but because she felt that she must give another glance at Joe before she left the premises. It was an unconsidered movement. She had forgotten that Mr. Earlforward’s bedroom door was open.
“Elsie,” he called out, as she passed on the landing, “who was that?”
Her tired and exasperated brain worked with extraordinary swiftness. She decided that she could not enter into a long explanation concerning the umbrella and Jerry. Why should she? “He” was already suspicious.
“Postman,” she answered, without the slightest hesitation, lying as glibly and lightly as a born, lifelong liar, and continued her way upstairs. She was somehow vaguely, indirectly, defending the secrecy of Joe.
In her room she put the umbrella in its paper again under her bed, gazing at Joe as she did so. Joe was very ill. She had given him two doses of quinine (which Dr. Raste, making Elsie ashamed of her uncharitable judgments on him, had had sent direct from a chemist’s within an hour and a half of his departure), and she was disturbed that the medicine had not produced an immediate and marked effect on the patient.
Joe had got one arm through the ironwork at the head of the bed, and was tearing off little slips of the peeling wallpaper in the corner. She took hold of his hot hand, and silently guided it back through the ironwork on to the bed.
“Shall I give you another dose?” she suggested tentatively, with brow creased.
He nodded. He knew malaria and he knew quinine; and, fortified by his expert approval, she
