Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/408

 its starved yellowness with the glow of his unconquered self, investing its grotesqueness with an uncomplaining dignity. At night, sometimes, she would hear a little groaning, and she would get up if Kit was away, slip on her dressing-gown and go in to him.

"You want morphia."

With that emaciated head propped high, he would climb to the height of a wry smile.

"No. I have managed it. Don't bother, dear. I rather prefer to get my dog-fight through in my own corner."

It seemed so heartless to leave him alone, and yet she felt that he preferred it. He hated fuss.

"I'm not lonely. I can feel you all—near."

Other sides of life were revealed to Molly during those weeks of Sorrell's passing. He wrung from her a compassion, a tenderness, and an admiration that taught her to approach her own creative world with a new humility and a more poignant understanding. The merely clever became contemptible under the eyes of this dying man. He liked her to sit and talk to him. He grew reminiscent, and his wanderings into the past had a peculiarly vital interest, for these were not the meanderings of an old man, but rather the pregnant sayings of a very live one, the sap of a tree that was to fall in autumn and not in winter. He talked a great deal about Kit. It was as if he were living life over again, or re-reading a beloved book and making little wise, tender comments upon it, and his acceptance of her as part of the great plan touched her very deeply. When he was dead she would carry on. Kit would need her.

"And I," she said, "shall need him."

But she helped Sorrell to play his part, and to keep that old Roman head of his erect. The compact was a silent one, but realized by both of them. She worked; she had never worked better or with a more human insight; she shared with Fanny Garland the picking and arranging of his flowers, for the room was kept full of them. Sometimes she read some of her work to him,—and they discussed it.

"Yes,—you are much cleverer than Kit," he said to her one afternoon; "but I don't think you will let him find that out. It won't matter. I don't think he will bore you."