She sat silent in one corner of the darkened room.
It was the bedroom that Frederick R. Woods formerly
occupied—on the ground floor of Selwoode,
opening into the living-hall—to which they
had carried Billy.
Jukesbury had done what he could. In the bed
lay Billy Woods, swathed in hot blankets, with bottles
of hot water set to his feet. Jukesbury had washed
his face clean of that awful red, and had wrapped bandages
of cracked ice about his head and propped it high with
pillows. It was little short of marvellous to
see the pursy old hypocrite going cat-footed about
the room on his stealthy ministrations, replenishing
the bandages, forcing spirits of ammonia between Billy’s
teeth, fighting deftly and confidently with death.
Billy still breathed.
The Colonel came and went uneasily. The clock
on the mantel ticked. Margaret brooded in a silence
that was only accentuated by that horrible wheezing,
gurgling, tremulous breathing in the bed yonder.
Would the doctor never come!
She was curiously conscious of her absolute lack of
emotion.
But always the interminable thin whispering in the
back of her head went on and on. “Oh, if
he had only died four years ago! Oh, if he had
only died the dear, clean-minded, honest boy I used
to know! When that noise stops he will be dead.
And then, perhaps, I shall be able to cry. Oh,
if he had only died four years ago!”
And then da capo. On and on ran the interminable
thin whispering as Margaret waited for death to come
to Billy. Billy looked so old now, under his
many bandages. Surely he must be very, very near
death.
Suddenly, as Jukesbury wrapped new bandages about
his forehead, Billy opened his eyes and, without further
movement, smiled placidly up at him.
“Hello, Jukesbury,” said Billy Woods,
“where’s my armour?”
Jukesbury, too, smiled. “The man is bringing
it downstairs now,” he answered, quietly.
“Because,” Billy went on, fretfully, “I
don’t propose to miss the Trojan war. The
princes orgulous with high blood chafed, you know,
are all going to be there, and I don’t propose
to miss it.”
Behind his fat back, Petheridge Jukesbury waved a
cautioning hand at Margaret, who had risen from her
chair.
“But it is very absurd,” Billy murmured,
in the mere ghost of a voice, “because men don’t
propose by mistake except in farces. Somebody
told me that, but I can’t remember who, because
I am a misogynist. That is a Greek word, and
I would explain it to Peggy, if she would only give
me a chance, but she can’t because she has those
seventeen hundred and fifty thousand children to look
after. There must be some way to explain to her,
though, because where there’s a will there is
always a way, and there were three wills. Uncle
Fred should not have left so many wills—who
would have thought the old man had so much ink in him?
But I will be a very great painter, Uncle Fred, and
make her sorry for the way she has treated me, and
then Kathleen will understand I was talking
about Peggy.”
