§ 4
The door at the foot of his bed opened, and Mrs. Huss appeared.
She had an effect of appearing suddenly, and yet she moved slowly into the room, clutching a crumpled bit of paper in her hand. Her face had undergone some extraordinary change; it was dead white, and her eyes were wide open and very bright. She stood stiffly. She might have been about to fall. She did not attempt to close the door behind her.
Mrs. Croome became audible rattling her pans downstairs.
When Mrs. Huss spoke, it was in an almost noiseless whisper. “Job!”
He had a strange idea that Mrs. Croome must have given them notice to quit instantly or perpetrated some such brutality, a suspicion which his wife’s gesture seemed to confirm. She was shaking the crumpled scrap of paper in an absurd manner. He frowned in a gust of impatience.
“I didn’t open it,” she said at last, “not till I had eaten some breakfast. I didn’t dare. I saw it was from the bank and I thought it might be about the overdraft.... All the while....”
She was weeping. “All the while I was eating my egg....”
“Oh what is it?”
She grimaced.
“From him.”
He stared.
“A cheque, Job—come through—from him. From our boy.”
His mouth fell open, he drew a deep breath. His tears came. He raised himself, and was reminded of his bandaged state and dropped back again. He held out his lean hand to her.
“He’s a prisoner?” he gasped. “Alive?”
She nodded. She seemed about to fling herself violently upon his poor crumpled body. Her arms waved about seeking for something to embrace.
Then she flopped down in the narrow space between bed and paper-adorned fireplace, and gathered the counterpane together into a lump with her clutching hands. “Oh my baby boy!” she wept. “My baby boy....
“And I was so wicked about the mourning.... I was so wicked....”
Mr. Huss lay stiff, as the doctor had ordered him to do; but the hand he stretched down could just touch and caress her hair.