Sir Walter was with his daughter when Mannering arrived.The doctor had been a crony of the elder for many years.He was about the average of a country physician - a hard-bitten, practical man who loved hisprofession, loved sport, and professed conservative principles.Experience stood in place of high qualifications, but he kept in touch with medical progress, to the extent of reading about it and availing himself of improved methods and preparations when opportunity offered.He examined the dead man very carefully, indicated how his posture might be rendered more normal, and satisfied himself that human power was incapable of restoring the vanished life.He could discover no visible indication of violence and no apparent excuse for Tom May's sudden end.He listened with attention to the little that Henry Lennox could tell him, and then went to see Mary May and her father.
The young wife had grown more collected, but she was dazed rather than reconciled to her fate; her mind had not yet absorbed the full extent of her sorrow.She talked incessantly and dwelt on trivialities, as people will under a weight of events too large to measure or discuss.
"I am going to write to Tom's father," she said."This will be an awful blow to him.He was wrapped up in Tom.And to think that I was troubling about his letter! He will never see the sea he loved so much again.He always hated that verse in the Bible that says there will be no more sea.I was asleep so near him last night.Yet I never heard him cry out or anything."Mannering talked gently to her.
"Be sure he did not cry out.He felt no pain, no shock - I am sure of that.To die is no hardship to the dead, remember.He is at peace, Mary.You must come and see him presently.Your father will call you soon.There is just a look of wonder in his face - no fear, no suffering.Keep that in mind.""He could not have felt fear.He knew of nothing that a brave man might fear, except doing wrong.Nobody knows how good he was but me.His father loved him fiercely, passionately; but he never knew how good he was, because Tom did not think quite like old Mr.May.I must write and say that Tom is dangerously ill, and cannot recover.That will break it to him.Tom was the only earthly affection he had.It will be terrible when he comes."They left her, and, after they had gone, she rose, fell on her knees, andso remained, motionless and tearless, for a long time.Through her own desolation, as yet unrealized, there still persisted the thought of her husband's father.It seemed that her mind could dwell on his isolation, while powerless to present the truth of her husband's death to her.By some strange mental operation, not unbeneficent, she saw his grief more vividly than as yet she felt her own.She rose presently, quick-eared to wait the call, and went to her desk in the window.Then she wrote a letter to her father-in-law, and pictured his ministering at that moment to his church.Her inclination was to soften the blow, yet she knew that could only be a cruel kindness.She told him, therefore, that his son must die.Then she remembered that he was so near.A telegram must go rather than a letter, and he would be at Chadlands before nightfall.She destroyed her letter and set about a telegram.Jane Bond came in, and she asked her to dispatch the telegram as quickly as possible.Her old nurse, an elderly spinster, to whom Mary was the first consideration in existence, had brought her a cup of soup and some toast.It had seemed to Jane the right thing to do.
Mary thanked her and drank a little.She passed through a mental phase as of dreaming - a sensation familiar in sleep; but she knew that this was not a sleeping but a waking experience.She waited for her father, yet dreaded to hear him return.She thought of human footsteps and the difference between them.She remembered that she would never hear Tom's long stride again.
It often broke into a run, she remembered, as he approached her; and she would often run toward him, too - to banish the space that separated them.She blamed herself bitterly that she had decreed to sleep in her old nursery.She had loved it so, and the small bed that had held her from childhood; yet, if she had slept with him, this might not have happened.
"To think that only a wall separated us!" she kept saying to herself."And I sleeping and dreaming of him, and he dying only a few yards away."Death was no disaster for Tom, so the doctor had said.What worthless wisdom! And perhaps not even wisdom.Who knows what a disaster death may be?And who would ever know what he had felt atthe end, or what his mind had suffered if time had been given him to understand that he was going to die? She worked herself into agony, lost self-control at last and wept, with Jane Bond's arms round her.
"And I was so troubled, because I thought he had been called back to his ship!" she said.
"He's called to a better place than a ship, dear love," sobbed Jane.After they left her, Sir Walter and Dr.Mannering had entered the GreyRoom for a moment and, standing there, spoke together.
