Philip arrived by the twelve-twenty. He had been in no hurry to get up and come by an earlier train. It annoyed him to have to leave town. His late arrival was in the nature of a protest. Elinor must really learn not to make such a fuss every time the child had a stomach ache. It was absurd.
She met him at the door as he stepped out of the car, so white and haggard, and with such dark-circled and desperate eyes, that he was shocked to see her.
“But you’re the one who’s ill,” he said anxiously. “What is it?”
She did not answer for a moment, but stood holding him, her face hidden on his shoulder, pressing herself against him. “Dr. Crowther says it’s meningitis,” she whispered at last.
At half-past five arrived the nurse for whom Mrs. Bidlake had telegraphed in the morning. The evening papers came by the same train; the chauffeur returned with a selection of them. On the front page was the announcement of the discovery, in his own motor car, of Everard Webley’s body. It was to old John Bidlake, dozing listlessly in the library, that the papers were first brought. He read and was so excited by the news of another’s death that he entirely forgot all his preoccupations with his own. Rejuvenated, he sprang to his feet and ran, waving the paper, into the hall. “Philip!” he shouted in the strong resonant voice that had not been his for weeks past. “Philip! Come here at once!”
Philip, who had just come out of the sick room and was standing in the corridor, talking to Mrs. Bidlake, hurried down to see what was the matter. John Bidlake held out the paper with an expression almost of triumph on his face. “Read that,” he commanded importantly.
When Elinor was told the news, she almost fainted.
“I believe he’s better this morning, Dr. Crowther.”
Dr. Crowther fingered his tie to feel if it were straight. He was a small man, brisk and almost too neatly dressed. “Quieter, eh? Sleeps?” he enquired telegraphically. His conversation had been reduced to bedrock efficiency. It was just comprehensible and nothing more. No energy was wasted on the uttering of unnecessary words. Dr. Crowther spoke as Ford cars are made. Elinor disliked him intensely, but believed in him for just those qualities of perky efficiency and self-confidence which she detested. “Yes, that’s it,” she said. “He’s sleeping.”
“He would be,” said Dr. Crowther, nodding as though he had known everything in advance—which indeed he had; for the disease was running its invariable course.
Elinor accompanied him up the stairs. “Is it a good sign?” she asked in a voice that implored a favourable answer.
Dr. Crowther pushed out his lips, cocked his head a little on one side, then shrugged his shoulders. “Well …” he said non-committally, and was silent. He had saved at least five foot-pounds of energy by not explaining that, in meningitis, a phase of depression follows the initial phase of excitement.
The child now dozed away his days in a kind of stupor, suffering no pain (Elinor was thankful for that), but disquietingly unresponsive to what was going on about him, as though he were not fully alive. When he opened his eyes she saw that the pupils were so enormously dilated that there was hardly any iris left. Little Phil’s blue and mischievous regard had turned to expressionless blackness. The light which had caused him such an agony during the first days of his illness no longer troubled him. No longer did he start and tremble at every sound. Indeed, the child did not seem to hear when he was spoken to. Two days passed and then, quite suddenly and with a horrible sinking sense of apprehension, Elinor realized that he was almost completely deaf.
“Deaf?” echoed Dr. Crowther, when she told him of her dreadful discovery. “Common symptom.”
“But isn’t there anything to be done about it?” she asked. The trap was closing on her again, the trap from which she had imagined herself free when that terrible screaming had quieted into silence.
Dr. Crowther shook his head, briskly, but only once each way. He did not speak. A foot-pound saved is a foot-pound gained.
“But we can’t let him be deaf,” she said, when the doctor was gone, appealing with a kind of incredulous despair to her husband.
“We can’t let him be deaf.” She knew he could do nothing; and yet she hoped. She realized the horror, but she refused to believe in it.
“But if the doctor says there isn’t anything to be done …”
“But deaf?” she kept repeating, questioningly. “Deaf, Phil? Deaf?”
“Perhaps it’ll pass off by itself,” he suggested consolingly, and wondered, as he spoke the words, whether she still imagined that the child would recover.
Early next morning when, in her dressing gown, she tiptoed upstairs for nurse’s report on the night, she found the child already awake. One eyelid was wide open and the eye, all pupil, was looking straight up at the ceiling; the other was half shut in a permanent wink that imparted to the thin and shrunken little face an expression of ghastly facetiousness.
“He can’t open it,” the nurse explained. “It’s paralyzed.”
Between those long and curly lashes, which she had so often envied him, Elinor could see that the eyeball had rolled away to the exterior corner of the eye and was staring out sideways in a fixed, unseeing squint.
“Why the devil,” said Cuthbert Arkwright, in the tone of one who has a personal grievance, “why the devil doesn’t Quarles come back to London?” He hoped to extort from him a preface of his new illustrated edition of the Mines of Herondas.
The rustication, Willie Weaver explained polysyllabically, was not voluntary. “His child’s ill,” he added, uttering his little cough of self-applause. “It seems very reluctant, as they would say in Denmark, to absent itself from felicity much longer.”
“Well, I wish it would hurry up about it,” grumbled Arkwright. He frowned. “Perhaps I’d better try to get hold of someone
