Elinor was down on her knees again beside the bed. “What would you like to eat, my darling?” But the child did not hear her question.
“I’m hungry,” he repeated.
“He’s still deaf,” said Philip.
“But he can see again, he can speak.” Elinor’s face was transfigured. She had known all the time, in spite of everything, that it was impossible he shouldn’t get well. Quite impossible. And now she was being proved right. “Stay here,” she went on. “I’ll run and get some milk.” She hurried out of the room.
Philip remained at the bedside. He stroked the child’s hand and smiled. Little Phil smiled back. He too began to believe that there really might have been a miracle.
“Draw me something,” the child commanded.
Philip pulled out his fountain pen and, on the back of an old letter, scribbled one of those landscapes full of elephants and airships, trains and flying pigs and steamers, for which his son had such a special partiality. An elephant came into collision with a train. Feebly, but with a manifest enjoyment, little Phil began to laugh. There could be no doubt of it; the miracle had really happened.
Elinor returned with some milk and a plate of jelly. There was colour in her cheeks, her eyes were bright and the face which, all these days, had been drawn and rigidly set had in a moment recovered all its mobility of expression. It was as though she had suddenly come to life again.
“Come and look at the elephants,” said little Phil. “So funny!” And between each sip of milk, each spoonful of jelly, Philip had to show him the latest additions to his crowded landscape—whales in the sea, and divers being pinched by lobsters, two submarines fighting, and a hippopotamus in a balloon; a volcano in eruption, cannons, a lighthouse, a whole army of pigs.
“Why don’t you ever say anything?” the child suddenly asked.
They looked at one another. “He can’t hear us,” said Philip.
Elinor’s expression of happiness was momentarily clouded. “Perhaps tomorrow,” she said. “If the blindness has gone today, why shouldn’t he hear tomorrow?”
“Why do you whisper?” said the child.
The only answer she could make was to kiss him and stroke his forehead.
“We mustn’t tire him,” said Elinor at last. “I think he ought to go to sleep.” She shook up his pillow, she smoothed the sheets, she bent over him. “Goodbye, my little darling.” He could answer at least to her smile.
Elinor drew the curtains and they tiptoed out. In the passage she turned and waited for her husband to come up to her. Philip put his arm round her and she pressed herself against him with a great sigh.
“I was beginning to be afraid,” she said, “that the nightmare was going on forever. To the end.”
Luncheon that day was like a festival of resurrection, an Easter sacrament. Elinor was unfrozen, a woman of flesh again, not of stone. And poor Miss Fulkes, in whom the symptoms of misery had been identical with those of a very bad cold in the head accompanied by pimples, reassumed an almost human appearance and was moved to all but hysterical laughter by the jokes and anecdotes of the resuscitated John Bidlake. The old man had come in, rubbing his hands.
“What a landscape!” he exclaimed as he took his seat. “So juicy, so succulent, if you know what I mean, so fleshy—there’s no other word. It makes one’s mouth water to look at it. Perhaps that’s why I’m so ravenously hungry.”
“Here’s your broth,” said Mrs. Bidlake.
“But you can’t expect me to do a morning’s painting on slops!” And in spite of protests, he insisted on eating a cutlet.
The news that little Phil was better increased his satisfaction. (He touched wood three times with both hands at once.) Besides, he was really very fond of his grandchild. He began to talk, and it was the old Gargantuan Bidlake who spoke. Miss Fulkes laughed so violently at one of his anecdotes about Whistler that she choked and had to hide her face in her napkin. In the vague benevolence even of Mrs. Bidlake’s smile there was a hint of something like hilarity.
At about three o’clock John Bidlake began to feel a familiar discomfort, growing momently more acute, in the region of his midriff. He was shaken by spasmodic hiccups. He tried to go on painting; but all his pleasure in the work had evaporated. Diana’s breasts and the angel’s hind quarters had lost all their charm for him. “A slight obstruction at the pylorus.” Sir Herbert’s medical phrases reechoed in his memory. “The contents of the stomach … a certain difficulty in passing into the duodenum.” After a particularly violent hiccup, he put down his brushes and walked into the house to lie down.
“Where’s Father?” Elinor enquired, when she came down to tea.
Mrs. Bidlake shook her head. “He’s not feeling very well again.”
“Oh, dear.”
There was a silence, and it was as though death were suddenly in the room with them. But, after all, he was old, Elinor reflected; the thing was inevitable. He might be worse, but little Phil was better; and that was all that really mattered. She began to talk to her mother about the garden. Philip lighted a cigarette.
There was a knock at the door. It was the housemaid with a message from Nurse Butler: would they please come up at once.
The convulsions had been very violent; the wasted body was without strength. By the time they reached the nursery, little Phil was dead.
XXXVI
The Webley Mystery, as the papers lost no time in calling it, was complete. There was no clue. At the offices of the British Freemen nobody knew anything. Webley had left at the usual hour and by his usual mode of conveyance. He was not in the habit of talking to his subordinates about his private affairs; nobody had been told where he was going. And outside the office nobody had observed the car from the time Webley had told his chauffeur
