His head moved again impatiently. He turned to look for the lemonade which should have been on the table by his bedside. An angry exclamation broke from him. The table with the lemonade was placed exactly where he could not reach it; what was the use of all his years of labour, of all the wealth he had acquired, if now he could not even obtain the common necessaries of life?
The electric bell beside the bed was close to his hand. He rang it furiously, and his valet arrived, panting and breathless.
"Why can't you put the things within my reach?" the old man asked irritably. "Am I to die of thirst, because you are careless?"
The servant moved the table nearer to his master, handed him the tumbler, and, in his own mind, considered the pros and cons of giving warning on the spot. A dim hope of a possible legacy gave the cons the victory, but the man did not remain in the sick-room a moment longer than was absolutely necessary. As he confided to the wife of the porter, in the basement, "Old Saunders was getting that unbearable in his illness, it was hard to stand him."
The sick man lay quiet after the servant had left him, his eyes fixed upon the waving green of the tree-tops in the square. A faint curiosity as to what tree it was that he could see, ran through his mind. Was it an elm, he wondered?
There had been elms in the meadow behind the old Rectory garden where he had played as a boy--great elms in which the rooks had built year after year. It was a long, long time since he had heard the soft cawing of the rooks. He had a faint remembrance of picking daisies and buttercups in those fields under the elms, whilst the rooks cawed soothingly overhead.
A little smile flickered across his hard old face. Perhaps the tree in the square was not an elm after all. It might be a lime. There had been limes in another garden, and the bees had hummed amongst their blossoms on that summer's day when--when---- Why, how many years ago was it? Forty? Fifty? Could it be forty years? He had been a young fellow then, at the beginning of his career, and life had been less crammed with work and business.
Yes! He had been able then to notice the sweetness of a girl's eyes, to heed the music of a girl's voice.