‘Last the night? No, I don’t think she’ll last the night: but you never can tell exactly with such nervous subjects. She might put on a spurt and come round again for a little while.’
‘Then,’ said Wentworth, with a sense that he was acquiring information clandestinely, ‘there is no hope of any permanent recovery?’
The doctor laughed him to scorn. If he had not been a parish doctor, accustomed to very poor patients and their ways, he would not have allowed himself to laugh in such circumstances.
‘When she has not above half a lung, and her heart is--but you don’t understand these matters, perhaps. She may make a rally for a few hours, but I doubt if she will see out this night.’
After this, Wentworth went home to the closed-up chambers, where nobody expected him, and to which he got admittance with difficulty. He had to walk miles, he thought, through those dreadful streets, all like each other, all gleaming with wet, before he could even find a cab. There was no strength left in him. He went on and on mechanically, and might, he thought, have been wandering all night, but that the sight of a slowly passing cab, which he knew he wanted, brought him back to a dull sense of the necessity of shelter. The cold rooms, so vacant and unprepared, which were just shelter and no more, were scarcely an improvement upon the mechanical march and movement, which deadened his mind and made him less sensible of his terrible position. It had been arranged that if she was still alive in the morning, a messenger was to be sent to him, and that then he was to take the necessary steps to redeem his pledge. But he said to himself that it was impossible--that she could not live till morning. It was a horrible moment for a man to go through--a man whose life had blossomed into such gladness and prosperity. But still, if he could but be sure that nothing worse was to come of it--and what could come of it when the doctor himself was all but sure that she could not see out the night?
Oliver spent a disturbed and sleepless night. He went to bed as a form, one of those things that people do mechanically, and because the cold of the shut-up rooms went to his heart. But he was astir very early, before it was daylight. He had not slept but only dozed, miserably repeating in dreams which that film of half sleep made into mere distortions of his waking thoughts, the circumstances of the past evening, the journey, the leave-taking with Grace, the horror at the end. It was a relief to be fully awake and only have reality to contend with, miserable as that was. Dawn came slowly stealing, filtering in marred and broken light through the clouds and the rain which had continued through the night. His whole being was concentrated in expectation of a sound at his door. Every moment which passed without a summons encouraged him. He said to himself, ‘It must be all over, all over.’ A dozen times the tension of his great excitement seemed to produce a tingling in the silence which simulated the sound of the bell. But it was nothing, and the cold dawn gradually developed into full but colourless day. He was saying to himself for the hundredth time, ‘It must be all over,’ and feeling for the first time a little ease in his mind as if it might really be so, when suddenly the bell rang. Ah! that was no vibration of excitement in the air; it was the bell, very distinctly, loudly rung, and pealing into the stillness. It rang and echoed into Wentworth’s very heart, the brazen tinkle wounding him like a knife, so sudden, so sharp and keen. There was no one to open the door but himself, no one in the place to do anything for him. He did not move for a moment, finding that he needed time to recover from the sting of that blow, when it was repeated more sharply still, not without impatience. It occurred to him, then, that it might be something else than the messenger of fate--the postman, perhaps--some one who had nothing to do with this tragedy. These hopes, if hopes they could be called, were dissipated, however, when he opened the door. Outside stood a young man in shabby clothes with a face which reminded him of poor Alice at her best. ‘Mother sent me to tell you that Ally’s living and a little better. If you’ll come at eleven, she’ll have the parson there as visits in our street.’