‘We all see that now,’ said Justine sharply. ‘It is no good to wish that someone had seen it before. That will not help. We can only deal with things as they are.’
‘I thought perhaps no one would notice, if I did not speak,’ said Blanche, as if to herself. ‘Sometimes people don’t see anything.’
Edgar had come to his wife’s side. Dudley and Maria had risen and were talking apart. Matty sat with her eyes on her sister, her expression wavering between uneasiness and irritation at the general concern for someone else. Aubrey looked about for reassurance. There was the sudden stir and threat of acknowledged anxiety.
The thermometer told its tale. Blanche lost her patience twice and delayed its action. Matty and Dudley talked to amuse her while she waited. She was interrupted by her cough, and they all realized its nature and its frequency. Her sister’s face became anxious and nothing else.
‘I heard Mother coughing in the night like that,’ said Aubrey.
‘Then why did you not say so?’ said Clement.
‘That is no good, Clement,’ said Justine. ‘We all wish we had taken earlier alarm. It was not for Aubrey to give us the lead.’
Blanche was found to be in high fever, and seemed to take pleasure and even pride in the discovery.
‘I never make a fuss about nothing,’ she said, as she sat by the fire while her room was warmed. ‘I have always been the last to complain about myself. When I was a child they had to watch me to see if I was ill. I never confessed to it, whatever I felt.’
‘That was naughty, dearest,’ said Matty. ‘And you are not a child now.’
‘An ignorant and arrogant boast, Mother,’ said Mark.
‘Poor Uncle!’ said Justine, in a low tone, touching Dudley’s sleeve. ‘On your engagement day! We are not forgetting it. You know that.’
‘I am oblivious of it. I am lost in the general feeling.’
‘I often kept about when people less ill than I was were in bed,’ continued Blanche, her eyes following this divergence of interest from herself. ‘I remember I once waited on my sister when my temperature was found to be higher than hers. I daresay Miss Sloane remembers hearing of that.’
‘Don’t tell such dreadful stories, dear,’ said Matty.
‘But I often think that not giving in is the best way to get well,’ said Blanche, putting back her hand to a shawl that was round her shoulders, and glancing back at it as a shiver went through her. ‘Staying in bed lowers people’s resistance and gives the illness a stronger hold. Not that I am really ill this time, though a bad chill is something near to it. I shall not give in for long. I am a person who likes to do everything for herself.’
‘It is not always the way to do anything for other people, dear.’
‘You will do it once too often, Mother,’ said Clement, glad that his words were broken by the opening door.
The room was said to be ready. The doctor was heard to arrive. It seemed incredible that an hour before the household had been taking its usual course, even more incredible that the course had been broken as it had.
Blanche sat still, with her eyes narrower than usual and her hands and face less than their normal size, stooping forward to avoid the full breath which brought the cough.
‘I think people know what suits themselves. I have never done myself any harm by keeping about. I shall not stay in bed a moment longer than I must. The very thought of it makes me feel worse. I am worse now just from thinking about it. People’s minds do influence their bodies.’ Her tone showed that she was accounting for her feelings to herself.
The doctor gave his word at a glance. Blanche was wrapped up and taken to her room. Her sons returned with the chair which had carried her, and glanced at each other as they set it down.
‘What a very light chair!’ said Clement, giving it a push.
‘People who are light are often stronger than heavier ones,’ said his brother.
Aubrey began to cry.
‘Come, come, all of you,’ said Justine. ‘Mother can’t have got any lighter in the last days. She can never have weighed much. I always feel a clodhopper beside her.’
‘When is the nurse coming?’ said Mark.
‘As soon as she can,’ said Matty, who had returned from seeing the doctor. ‘That is good news, isn’t it? And I have some better news for you. We are sending for Miss Griffin. Your uncle and Maria have gone to fetch her, and she is the best nurse I have ever known. That is why I am yielding her up to you. So Aunt Matty provides the necessary person a second time.’
Miss Griffin arrived with her feelings in her face, concern for Blanche and pleasure in the need of herself, and settled at once into the sickroom as her natural place. She had more feeling for helpless people than for whole ones, and it was Matty’s lameness rather than the length of their union, which made the bond she could not break. She began to talk to Blanche of Dudley’s engagement, feeling it an interest which could not fail, and making the most of the implication that Blanche was bound up with ordinary life.
But Blanche had taken the news more easily than Miss Griffin, and had a lighter hold on the threads of life, though she seemed to have so many more of them. Her lightness of grasp went with her through the next days, working for her in holding her incurious about her state, against her in allowing her less urge to fight for life. With petulance and heroism, childishness and courage she lived her desperate hours, and emerged into peace and weakness with remembrance rather than realization of what was behind.
Her family was new to such suspense and lived it with a sense of shock and disbelief. After the first relief they accepted her safety and resented that it had been threatened.
When Matty and Maria came to share the rejoicing, they found it took the form of reaction and silence. The first evening after the stress might almost have been one at the height of it.
Justine extended a hand to her uncle as though she had hardly strength to turn her eyes in the same direction.
‘We must seem selfish and egotistic, Uncle, in that we do not remember your personal happiness.’
‘Just now we are sharing yours,’ said Maria.
‘And I am afraid we cannot be showing it,’ said Dudley.
‘We can all share each other’s,’ said Matty. ‘I can give my own illustration. My joy for my sister tonight only gives more foundation to my joy for my friends. Yes, that other happiness which I feel here is very near to my heart.’
‘You are fancying it,’ said Dudley. ‘Maria and I have laid it aside.’
‘You have pushed it deeper down. Into a fitter place.’
‘I am appalled by the threat and danger of life,’ said Mark. ‘It may be good for us to realize that in the midst of life we are in death,’ said his sister.
‘What benefit do we derive from it?’ said Clement.
‘Oh, don’t let us talk like that on this day of all days. It is not suitable or seemly. Our nerves may be on edge, but we must not hold that an excuse for crossing every bound.’
‘We may have no other excuse’, said Edgar, ‘but our guests will accept that one, We have been tried to the end of our strength and I fear beyond.’
‘We are not guests, dear Edgar,’ said Matty. ‘As a family we have been in darkness, and as a family we emerge into the light. And perhaps it is a tiny bit ungrateful not to see the difference.’
‘We do not find the light dazzling,’ said Clement.
‘No, so I see, dear. Now I do find it so, but to me the darkness has been so very dark.’ Matty was easily tried by depression in others, being used to support and cheer herself. ‘You see, my sister and I are so very near. From our earliest memories our lives have been bound in one. And not even the mother’s tie goes back so far.’
‘Really, Aunt Matty, that is too much,’ said Justine. ‘Or I should say it was, if it were not for the occasion.’