Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/409

 She asked him what he meant by cleverness, and he was unable to explain his meaning.

"I don't know. Just seeing an inch or two farther—and more quickly than the others. It is not the sort of cleverness that hurts people—provided that it does not want to show off."

She looked at his thin hands lying on the rug.

"You have got me. I did want to show off. You have stopped that. It would have been bad for my work."

"And Kit."

"Who never shows off. Never seems to occur to him. He is right in and part of the heart of his work. I am learning."

He smiled that little wincing smile of his.

"You will do big things. Life should be a good business for both of you."

Days came when Stephen Sorrell went no longer into his garden, but looked at the trees and the sky from the little platform of his bed. He would never leave it again as a live man. He was an earthy coloured, emaciated creature whose very knees seemed to be thrusting through the bed-clothes. He was dying of pain and of starvation and of sleeplessness, but on that poor stalk of a neck a head, that looked enlarged, continued to endure. Looking at him Molly would wonder how he kept his soul erect, for he had no definite faith in a life beyond. It was just the quiet, indomitable nature of the man refusing to complain, to appeal, or to cry out.

But, during that last week, it was she who realized how near Sorrell was to breaking-point. She understood it better than did his son, though Kit was with them now till the end should come. Sorrell's son looked tired, gently and desolately tired, a little dazed too and dumb, with helpless, waiting eyes. He would sit and look at his father as though it hurt him to look, and yet as though there was nothing else to do. He gave him morphia, but the pain had become a flame of anguish that would not be quenched.