are not well, my boy,” said his mother, when she saw him. She was almost in tears at having him to herself again.
“No, I've not been well,” he said. “I've seemed to have a dragging cold all the last month, but it's going, I think.”
It was sunny October weather. He seemed wild with joy, like a schoolboy escaped; then again he was silent and reserved. He was more gaunt than ever, and there was a haggard look in his eyes.
“You are doing too much,” said his mother to him.
He was doing extra work, trying to make some money to marry on, he said. He only talked to his mother once on the Saturday night; then he was sad and tender about his beloved.
“And yet, you know, mother, for all that, if I died she'd be broken-hearted for two months, and then she'd start to forget me. You'd see, she'd never come home here to look at my grave, not even once.”
“Why, William,” said his mother, “you're not going to die, so why talk about it?”
“But whether or not—” he replied.
“And she can't help it. She is like that, and if you choose her—well, you can't grumble,” said his mother.
On the Sunday morning, as he was putting his collar on:
“Look,” he said to his mother, holding up his chin, “what a rash my collar's made under my chin!”
Just at the junction of chin and throat was a big red inflammation.
“It ought not to do that,” said his mother. “Here, put a bit of this soothing ointment on. You should wear different collars.”
He went away on Sunday midnight, seeming better and more solid for his two days at home.
On Tuesday morning came a telegram from London that he was ill. Mrs. Morel got off her knees from washing the floor, read the telegram, called a neighbour, went to her landlady and borrowed a sovereign, put on her things, and set off. She hurried to Keston, caught an express for London in Nottingham. She had to wait in Nottingham nearly an hour. A small figure in her black bonnet, she was anxiously asking the porters if they knew how to get to Elmers End. The journey was three hours. She sat in her corner in a kind of stupor, never moving. At King's Cross still no one could tell her how to get to Elmers End. Carrying her string bag, that contained her nightdress, a comb and brush, she went from person to person. At last they sent her underground to Cannon Street.
It was six o'clock when she arrived at William's lodging. The blinds were not down.
“How is he?” she asked.
“No better,” said the landlady.
She followed the woman upstairs. William lay on the bed, with bloodshot eyes, his face rather discoloured. The clothes were tossed about, there was no fire in the room, a glass of milk stood on the stand at his bedside. No one had been with him.
“Why, my son!” said the mother bravely.
He did not answer. He looked at her, but did not see her. Then he began to say, in a dull voice, as if repeating a letter from dictation: “Owing to a leakage in the hold of this vessel, the sugar had set, and become converted into rock. It needed hacking—”
He was quite unconscious. It had been his business to examine some such cargo of sugar in the Port of London.
“How long has he been like this?” the mother asked the landlady.
“He got home at six o'clock on Monday morning, and he seemed to sleep all day; then in the night we heard him talking, and this morning he asked for you. So I wired, and we fetched the doctor.”
“Will you have a fire made?”
Mrs. Morel tried to soothe her son, to keep him still.
The doctor came. It was pneumonia, and, he said, a peculiar erysipelas, which had started under the chin where the collar chafed, and was spreading over the face. He hoped it would not get to the brain.
Mrs. Morel settled down to nurse. She prayed for William, prayed that he would recognise her. But the young man's face grew more discoloured. In the night she struggled with him. He raved, and raved, and would not come to consciousness. At two o'clock, in a dreadful paroxysm, he died.
Mrs. Morel sat perfectly still for an hour in the lodging bedroom; then she roused the household.
At six o'clock, with the aid of the charwoman, she laid him out; then she went round the dreary London village to the registrar and the doctor.
At nine o'clock to the cottage on Scargill Street came another wire:
“William died last night. Let father come, bring money.”
Annie, Paul, and Arthur were at home; Mr. Morel was gone to work. The three children said not a word. Annie began to whimper with fear; Paul set off for his father.
It was a beautiful day. At Brinsley pit the white steam melted slowly in the sunshine of a soft blue sky; the wheels of the headstocks twinkled high up; the screen, shuffling its coal into the trucks, made a busy noise.
“I want my father; he's got to go to London,” said the boy to the first man he met on the bank.
“Tha wants Walter Morel? Go in theer an' tell Joe Ward.”
Paul went into the little top office.
“I want my father; he's got to go to London.”
“Thy feyther? Is he down? What's his name?”
“Mr. Morel.”
“What, Walter? Is owt amiss?”
“He's got to go to London.”
The man went to the telephone and rang up the bottom office.
“Walter Morel's wanted, number 42, Hard. Summat's amiss; there's his lad here.”
Then he turned round to Paul.
“He'll be up in a few minutes,” he said.
Paul wandered out to the pit-top. He watched the chair come up, with its wagon of coal. The great iron cage sank back on its rest, a full carfle was hauled off, an empty tram run on to the chair, a bell ting'ed somewhere, the chair heaved, then dropped like a stone.
Paul did not realise William was dead; it was impossible, with such a bustle going on. The puller-off swung the small truck on to the turn-table, another man ran with it along the bank down the curving lines.
“And William is dead, and my mother's in London, and what will she be doing?” the boy asked himself, as if it were a conundrum.
He watched chair after chair come up, and still no father. At last, standing beside a wagon, a man's form! the chair sank on its rests, Morel stepped off. He was slightly lame from an accident.
“Is it thee, Paul? Is 'e worse?”
“You've
