Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/407



URING the whole of that July and the first week of August Stephen Sorrell passed the greater part of the day in his garden. So long as his own legs would carry him into it he used them, and when his strength failed towards the end, big Hulks would carry him out in his arms and lay him on a long chair. Sorrell had refused a trained nurse, and as it happened a nurse would have been superfluous, for all those good friends with whom he had worked gathered round him with so practical a devotion that he lacked for nothing. Moreover, he had not to Dey the softness and sympathy of ministering and tender ands.

Molly had taken her husband's sorrow as her own. She was living in the cottage, occupying Kit's old room, and it was she who realized—even more than Kit did—the extraordinary nature of this man's fortitude. He was never out of pain, for the morphia had ceased to quell completely the gnawings of that greedy and alien thing. The very business of living had become full of physical distresses, pathetic struggles, yet never did she hear Sorrell complain. She knew how he suffered; she heard it, felt it, yet when Kit appeared—he was travelling to and fro from town every other night,—Sorrell would greet him with a smile. "Oh, it is not so bad, old chap." But Molly knew how bad it was. That pinched, yellow, hawk-like profile endured against a background of pain, patiently and proudly. His poor neck was a starved yet magnificent stalk upon which his courage refused to wilt. His patience amazed her.

She called him "The Old Roman."

For the crumbling of a diseased body can be a sordid and repulsive process, yet Molly's fastidiousness was never shocked. Sorrell—somehow or other—refused to be overwhelmed by the squalor of his own poor body, illuminating