"You won't be able to see," Montagu said sadly; "she sleeps at the top, and her house is higher than ours—I saw her open her window yesterday while I was in bed."
"You wait," said Edmund, wagging his curly head. "I bet you I'll see something somehow—and then I'll punish her for vexing Guardie."
"I expect she only meant to be kind," Mrs. Methuen suggested. "She probably realised that you, none of you, had thought of anyone seeing in."
"She might have waited a wee while," said Edmund, not at all disposed to take a charitable view of Miss Selina Brooks; "one can't have everything straight in a new house all in a minute. Why is your house like a church outside?"
Mrs. Methuen laughed. "It isn't in the least like a church inside. Come and see!" and as she opened the front door the boys followed her into a square hall furnished like a room. It was a big house, and extremely comfortable, with wide staircase and easy steps not half so steep as those in Holywell.
Mrs. Methuen ran up very fast, the boys after her.
She took them into a room where a plump, pink baby, about eighteen months old, had just been bathed and was sitting smiling and majestic on the nurse's knee. His clothing, it was a boy baby, as yet consisted of a flannel band; while a dab of violet powder on one cheek gave him a rakish air.
"My precious," said Mrs. Methuen, kissing the scantily attired one; "you must look after these gentlemen for me for a few minutes;" and she forthwith vanished from the room.
The nurse smiled and nodded to them. The baby remarked, "Mamma!" to no one in particular, and looked puzzled and hurt that she could tear herself away so soon. He wasn't used to it.
Edmund and Montagu advanced shyly towards their youthful host.
"Say how d'you do to the nice young gentlemen, like a good baby," said the nurse in tones that subtly combined command and supplication.
"Do," said the baby obediently.
"Will I turn for him?" asked Edmund, who had an idea that infants must always be amused or else they cried. Without waiting for an affirmative he flung himself over on his hands and turned Catherine wheels right round the room. Edmund was light and active and an adept in the art. The baby was charmed. His fat sides shook with delighted laughter, and he shouted gleefully, "Adain!"
Nurse deftly slipped a little shirt over his head and a flannel nightgown over that, and behold! he sat clothed and joyous on her knee before Edmund had finished his second acrobatic feat.
Edmund walked on his hands. He did handsprings. He turned somersaults, and finally played leap-frog with Montagu, but whatever he did that insatiable baby shouted, "Adain," bouncing up and down on his nurse's knee in enthusiastic appreciation of the entertainment.
Meanwhile Mrs. Methuen had found and packed up two pairs of thick cream-coloured casement curtains. She ran tapes in them ready to put up, for she was convinced there would be no rods; she also packed a hammer and nails, but she never knew what it was caused her to slip her travelling flask of brandy into the pocket of her coat.
She fetched the boys, and her small son roared in indignation at their departure, which upset her extremely.
However, it was getting late and the windows in Holywell were bare.
Meanwhile Mr. Wycherly had been working very hard: stooping and lifting, carrying and stretching, to arrange the Earlier Latin Authors in the top shelf of an empty bookcase. Some of the authors were heavy and calf-bound and Mr. Wycherly, who had eaten hardly anything at all that day, began to feel very tired. He was quite unused to violent exercise of any kind, and presently he became conscious of a most unpleasant pain in his left side. "A stitch, I suppose," he said to himself and went on stooping and lifting, for he had come to the last layer of books and wanted to feel that one case at any rate was unpacked.
The boys and Mrs. Methuen returned, but he didn't hear them.
"I'll go upstairs and begin at once," said Mrs. Methuen, "and you needn't tell Mr. Wycherly anything about it till I've gone."
She and Edmund went up into Mr. Wycherly's bedroom while Montagu tried to find his guardian. He was not in either of the sitting-rooms. That they had seen from the windows before they came in. Nor was he in the kitchen or the garden. At last Montagu bethought him of the hitherto unused study, climbed the steep, crooked staircase, and went down the sloping passage to look.
Mrs. Methuen was standing on a chair at one side of the window fastening the tape of a curtain round a nail she had just knocked in, while Edmund stood on another chair at the other side, holding the rest of the curtain that its fairness might not be sullied by contact with the extremely dusty floor, when Montagu burst into the room looking very frightened.
"D'you think you could come?" he asked breathlessly. "I'm afraid Guardie's ill or something, he's so white and he doesn't seem able to speak for gasping."
Down went the nice curtains in an untidy heap on the dressing-table as Mrs. Methuen leapt off the chair, seized something from her coat which was lying on the bed, and followed Montagu. Edmund had already gone.
Mr. Wycherly was sitting huddled up in his chair. His face looked wan and drawn in the fading light; he certainly was breathing heavily and with great difficulty. But when he saw Mrs. Methuen he made an ineffectual attempt to rise. She tore the silver cup from the bottom of the flask and tumbled the contents hastily into it.
"Don't try to get up," she said as she knelt down beside him; "you're a little faint; drink this, please, at once."
She literally poured the brandy down Mr. Wycherly's throat. "Clear those books off the sofa, boys," she commanded; "carefully now! Ah, that's better. Now you must lie down for a few minutes; it's bad to sit forward like that."
Somehow in three minutes this energetic young lady had taken entire command of the situation. Mr. Wycherly was helped on to the sofa, Edmund had fetched a rug to cover him, and she and Montagu were wrestling with the huge gothic window, which should have opened like a door in the centre and was, apparently, hermetically sealed. At last it yielded to their combined efforts, and the sweet, fresh evening air rushed into the room.
"Please finish the brandy," said Mrs. Methuen in precisely the same voice in which she would have adjured her baby not to leave any milk in his bottle. "You're completely done up; no proper food, no fresh air. I never felt anything like the atmosphere of this room; and then stooping and lifting heavy books on the top of all the rest. No wonder your heart gave out. I can't think why they make the cups of flasks such an awkward shape."
Mr. Wycherly meekly took the cup from her hand and drained it. Already his face looked less ashy and he could speak.
"I cannot tell you," he began——
"Don't try to tell us anything yet; for five minutes you are to stay perfectly quiet. I'll leave Montagu in charge, and he is not to allow you to stir till I come back. Come, Edmund."
Edmund's round face was very serious as he followed Mrs. Methuen back to the bedroom. Aunt Esperance, as he always put it, "was away." Aunt Esperance, who had seemed a necessary part of life—beneficent, immutable, inevitable. Yet she had gone, and her place knew her no more. Might not a like thing happen to Mr. Wycherly? And, if so, what was to become of him and Montagu?
Edmund was not imaginative. He lived his jolly life wholly without thought of the morrow. But at that moment he was startled into a realisation of how much he loved his guardian.
As once more he and Mrs. Methuen mounted their two chairs and started to put up the curtains again he looked across at her and noted with a sudden painful contraction of the heart that her face was very grave.
"You don't think, do you," he asked in a low voice, "that Guardie is going to die?"
Mrs. Methuen started and nearly dropped the curtain. "Oh, dear, no," she exclaimed hastily; "but you must take more care of him and not let him lift books or anything of that sort.