“I don’t know,” moaned the sick woman, unable to consider.
Louisa did it. The doctor came and gave serious examination. He looked very grave.
“What is it, doctor·” asked the old lady, looking up at him with old, pathetic eyes in which already hope was dead.
“I think you’ve torn the skin in which a tumour hangs,” he replied.
“Ay!” she murmured, and she turned away.
“You see, she may die any minute—and it may be swaled away,”said the old doctor to Louisa.
The young woman went upstairs again.
“He says the lump may be swaled away, and you may get quite well again,” she said.
“Ay!” murmured the old lady. It did not deceive her. Presently she asked: “Is there a good fire·”
“I think so,” answered Louisa.
“He’ll want a good fire,” the mother said. Louisa attended to it.
Since the death of Durant, the widow had come to church occasionally, and Louisa had been friendly to her. In the girl’s heart the purpose was fixed. No man had affected her as Alfred Durant had done, and to that she kept. In her heart, she adhered to him. A natural sympathy existed between her and his rather hard, materialistic mother.
Alfred was the most lovable of the old woman’s sons. He had grown up like the rest, however, headstrong and blind to everything but his own will. Like the other boys, he had insisted on going into the pit as soon as he left school, because that was the only way speedily to become a man, level with all the other men. This was a great chagrin to his mother, who would have liked to have this last of her sons a gentleman.
But still he remained constant to her. His feeling for her was deep and unexpressed. He noticed when she was tired, or when she had a new night-cap. And he bought little things for her occasionally. She was not wise enough to see how much he lived by her.
At the bottom he did not satisfy her; he did not seem manly enough. He liked to read books occasionally, and better still he liked to play the piccolo. It amused her to see his head nod over the instrument as he made an effort to get the right note. It made her fond of him, with tenderness, almost pity, but not with respect. She wanted a man to be fixed, going his own way without knowledge of women. Whereas she knew Alfred depended on her. He sang in the choir because he liked singing. In the summer he worked in the garden, attended to the fowls and pigs. He kept pigeons. He played on Saturday in the cricket or football team. But to her he did not seem the man, the independent man her other boys had been. He was her baby—and whilst she loved him for it, she was a little bit contemptuous of him.
