"There, now," cried Ernest, irritated concern clouding his features, "what did I tell you! You've wakened her. I knew you would. It's very bad for her to be disturbed like this at her age."
Augusta said, without flurry: "Wakefield, go to my mother's room. Open the door quietly and say: 'There is nothing wrong, Grandmama. Please compose yourself.'"
The picture thus conjured of this scene between his small brother and his ancient grandmother caused Piers to emit a snort of laughter. His aunt and uncle Ernest looked at him with disapproval.
Ernest remarked: "It is just as well, Piers, to teach the boy to be polite."
Wakefield crossed the hall, solemn with the weight of his own importance. He opened the door of his grandmother's room and, gliding in, looked almost fearfully about that dim chamber, revealed, rather than lighted, by a night-light placed on a low table near the head of the bed. Before he spoke, he closed the door behind him to shut out the robust mingling of voices from across the hall. He wanted to frighten himself a little—just a little—with the strangeness of being alone with Grandmother in this ghostly light, with the rain dripping from the eaves outside her windows, and a single red eye glowing on the hearth, as though some crouching evil spirit were watching him. He stood very still, listening to her rather wheezy breathing, just able to make out the darkness of her face upon the pillows and the restless movement of one hand upon the crimson quilt.
The flowers and fruit painted on the old leather bedstead which she had brought with her from the East glowed duskily, less bright than the plumage of the parrot perching there. A sigh from the bed quivered on the heavy air like the perfume from some forgotten potpourri of petals gathered long ago. The bygone memories of the bed were drawn upward in the sigh. In it Augusta, Nicholas, Ernest, dead Philip, father of all the turbulent young Whiteoaks, had been conceived, in it all four had been given birth. There Philip, their
