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Impulsively--too impulsively, considering how weak he was--she kissed
his damp forehead, and rushed weeping from his sight.
In the hot evening, while the trained nurse had her tea at grateful
leisure in the housekeeper's room, Deb again took that nurse's place.
She sat by the pillow of the patient, leaning against it, holding his
hand in hers. Only the sound of the cruel north wind and his more cruel
breathing disturbed the stillness that enveloped them. She hoped he was
sleeping, until he spoke suddenly in a way that showed him only too
wide awake.
"Debbie," he said, "if I was quite sure I would not get well
this time, I should put that question to you again."
"What question, dear?" she queried softly.
"The question I asked you just before you left Redford."
"I don't remember--Oh!"
"Yes--that one. But if you consented, I might recover--it would be
enough to make me; then you would repent."
She was silent, agitated in every fibre of her, but thinking hard.
"What put that idea into your head?" she whispered, still holding his
hand.
"It was never put in; it was there always--since you were a kiddie."
"It seems so strange! I thought I was always a kiddie to you." "That
does seem the natural relationship, doesn't it?" There fell another
long silence, and, listening to his dragging breath, her heart smote
her. She squeezed his bony hand.
"I will stay with you, anyway," she comforted him.
He turned his head on the pillow. "Kiss me," he sighed, with eyes
closed.
She did, again and again.
The night was suffocating. She could not sleep for the heat and her
thoughts, and when, towards morning, she heard the nurse stirring, she
got up to inquire how he was.
"Pretty bad," the nurse said. "It's this awful weather. I can't cool
the room, though I've got all the doors and windows open, and the wet
sheets hanging up. It's air he wants, and there isn't any. If
it don't change soon, I'm afraid his strength won't hold out."
It did not change, and consequently grew worse to bear, the parching
and scorching of each day being carried over into the next. What the
newspapers call a heat-wave was drawing to its culmination, which
generally reaches the verge of the unbearable, even to the well and
strong, just before the "change"--that lightning change to coolness,
and even coldness, which comes while one draws a breath. How many a
life has hung upon the chance of the blessed moment coming in time!
The nurse looked at the thermometer in despair. Darkness had not taken
10 degrees from yesterday's temperature of 102 degrees when another
blazing sun arose. The fierce wind had raved and calmed, and raved and
calmed, but it had not shifted. She wetted and she fanned, turn and turn
about with Deb, the livelong day, without freshening the dead air that
soaked the house and seemed to soak the world. The fagged and perspiring
doctor (a great friend of the patient's), who came twice daily, came
again, too tired to care very much even for this special case. He looked
at it, and shook his head, and begged for a cool drink for the Lord's
sake; and then, having muddled the wits he had tried to stimulate with
quarts of whisky-and-soda, went away, saying: "I can do nothing. Send for
me at once if you see a change."
At sunset the sick man was very low, his weak heart and his distressed
lungs labouring heavily, while the sweat of agony glistened on his
forehead and plastered his white hair to his backward-tossed head. Deb
was frantic with fear and grief. She summoned the doctor again, sending
commands to him to summon more doctors--the best in Melbourne,
and any number of them--in defiance of Mr Thornycroft's known wishes
to the contrary. At the same time she sent for the clergyman.
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Cambridge, Ada, 1844-1926 - Sisters