“Well—I guess I’ll go up,” said Jane. How long had they all been staring in silence at the door that had closed behind the doctor?
“I’ll take you, Mrs. Carver,” said Minnie officiously.
Jane looked steadily into her eager, resentful face. Dear old Minnie, who had been with them all for more than thirty years! Jane slipped her arm around the plump waist above the white apron strings.
“Thank you, Minnie,” she said.
As she left the room, she saw her mother sink into her father’s leather armchair. She walked slowly down the hall and up the stairs with Minnie. She had a queer dazed feeling that this—this couldn’t be happening. Not to her father. Not to the Wards. Nothing—nothing—really serious had ever happened to them. Jimmy’s death, of course. But that had only happened to her. It had not torn the fabric of family life—it had not uprooted the associations of her earliest childhood. Cicily’s marriage—worrying, perplexing, of course, but not—not terrifying, like this sort of worry.
The house seemed quieter than usual. Hushed. Expectant. Jane suddenly remembered the sinister silence of the upper corridor of Flora’s house that April morning twenty-two years ago, when she had walked out under the budding elm trees for her first encounter with death. The battered door—the smell of gas—the feeling of little living Folly beneath her feet—the incredulity—the finality—the horror. And Stephen—hushed young Stephen—standing so gravely between the green-and-gold portieres in Flora’s hall. The terrible vividness of youthful impressions! But why did it all come back to her now? Now—when she was trying to fight off this senseless sense of impending tragedy—of terror.
Jane tapped lightly on her father’s door. It was opened by Miss Coulter, in crisp, starched linen. Her smile, as she took the roses, was just as brisk, just as cheerful as Dr. Bancroft’s had been. Jane entered her father’s room. He was lying, under meticulously folded sheets, in the big double black walnut bedstead that he had shared with Jane’s mother since Jane’s earliest memory. His eyes were closed and he was resting easily. His breath came curiously, however, in long, slow gasps. His breast, beneath the meticulously folded sheets, rose and fell, laboriously, with the effort of his breathing.
Nevertheless, at the sight of him, Jane felt a sudden flood of reassurance. He did not look very ill. His face, beneath his neatly combed white hair, was smoothly relaxed in sleep.
It looked unnatural only because Miss Coulter had removed his gold-framed spectacles.
The nurse came softly to the bedside, the roses in a glass vase in her hand. She placed them on the bed table.
“I’ll tell him that you brought them, Mrs. Carver,” she murmured. “I think you hadn’t better stay just now.”
All sense of reassurance fell away from Jane at her hushed accents. Of course, he was terribly ill. He was seventy-three years old and he had double pneumonia. She would not kiss him—she would not touch him—she would not disturb him. He must have every chance. Jane turned from the bedside and joined Minnie on the threshold. With an air of crisp and kindly competence, Miss Coulter noiselessly closed the bedroom door.
When Jane reentered the library, her mother was crying in her father’s armchair. Isabel, standing on the hearthrug, was looking at her a little helplessly. She turned to stare at Jane’s sober face. Jane realized, with a sudden sense of shock, that she had not seen her mother cry since her own wedding day.
“Mamma—don’t,” she said brokenly, as she sank down on the arm of her father’s chair. “I think he looks very well—”
Mrs. Ward only shook her grey head and went on silently crying. Isabel still stared helplessly from the hearthrug. A curious little flame of macabre excitement was flickering about the ashes of pity and grief and terror that choked Jane’s heart. Her father had double pneumonia. Her father might be going to die. Something really serious had happened to the Wards.
III
Jane sat in a rocking-chair, drawn closely to her father’s bedside. Beyond the bed, on a little walnut sofa, her mother and Isabel were sitting. At the farther end of the room, in two chairs by the fireside, Robin and Stephen were sharing their quiet vigil.
They were waiting in silence. They had been waiting in silence, just like that, for more than three hours. Dr. Bancroft and Miss Coulter had been in and out. They were talking to each other, now, in the dressing-room beyond the fireplace. Jane could hear their whispering voices very faintly in the silence of the sickroom. A silence otherwise unbroken, save for the occasional staccato whirr of a passing motor on the boulevard in front of the house, and by the slow rhythmic cadence of Mr. Ward’s loud, laboured breathing. It was four o’clock in the morning and the motors passed very infrequently. The breathing went steadily on, however, with a dreadful, mechanical regularity. It assaulted the ear. It filled the quiet room like the roar of a bombardment. One shell fell. Then silence. Then another shell. Then silence. Then another shell.
The night-light was placed so that the bed lay in shadow, but Jane could see her father’s figure very distinctly. His chest rose and fell, mechanically, in his rhythmic struggle for breath. The oxygen tank had been abandoned. It still stood on the floor beneath the bed table. Mr. Ward’s face was white and pinched and drawn and completely weary—weary with the supreme exhaustion of approaching death. It showed no sign of consciousness. The eyes were closed and the mouth was slightly open. His hands lay relaxed on the meticulously ordered sheets.
Jane sat looking at those hands. Old hands, fragile and blue-veined,
