This she did, with the result that she returned to Lucy's room with a
little red spot on each cheek; and when she looked at Lucy, still
uneasily sleeping and breathing as though her chest were all sore, the
idea that she was to get up and travel to London made the red spots on
Miss Entwhistle's cheeks burn brighter. She calmed down, however, on
remembering that Everard couldn't see how evidently poorly the child
was, and told herself that if he could he would be all tenderness. She
told herself this, but she didn't believe it; and then she was vexed
that she didn't believe it. Lucy loved him. Lucy had looked perfectly
pleased and content yesterday before she became so ill. One mustn't
judge a man by his way with a telephone.
At ten o'clock the doctor came. He had been in Strorley for years, and
was its only doctor. He was one of those guests who used to dine at The
Willows in the early days of Wemyss's possession of it. Occasionally he
had attended the late Mrs. Wemyss; and the last time he had been in the
house was when he was sent for suddenly on the day of her death. He, in
common with the rest of Strorley, had heard of Wemyss's second marriage,
and he shared the general shocked surprise. Strorley, which looked such
an unconscious place, such a torpid, unconscious riverside place, was
nevertheless intensely sensitive to shocks, and it hadn't at all
recovered from the shock of that poor Mrs. Wemyss's death and the very
dreadful inquest, when the fresh shock of another Mrs. Wemyss arriving
on the scene made it, as it were, reel anew, and made it reel worse.
Marriage so quickly on the heels of that terrible death? The Wemysses
were only week-enders and summer holiday people, so that it wasn't quite
so scandalous to have them in Strorley as it would have been if they
were unintermittent residents, yet it was serious enough. That inquest
had been in all the newspapers. To have a house in one's midst which
produced doubtful coroner's verdicts was a blot on any place, and
the new Mrs. Wemyss couldn't possibly be anything but thoroughly
undesirable. Of course no one would call on her. Impossible. And when
the doctor was rung up and asked to come round, he didn't tell his wife
where he was going, because he didn't wish for trouble.
Chesterton--how well he remembered Chesterton; but after all, it was
only the other day that he was there last--ushered him into the library,
and he was standing gloomily in front of the empty grate, looking
neither to the right nor to the left for he disliked the memories
connected with the flags outside the window, and wishing he had a
partner because then he would have sent him instead, when a spare little
lady, bland and pleasant, came in and said she was the patient's aunt.
An educated little lady; not at all the sort of relative he would have
expected the new Mrs. Wemyss to have.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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