But always after one of these
missionary efforts he would suffer agonies of suffocation when he had
forgotten, for a while, that his heart was a bubble of glass.
It was an unreal world, this shadowed world of the old farm. It centred
round Andrew Lashcairn's bed--he was its sun, its king, its autocrat
still. But things material had slipped from him--or rather, material
interests were all centralized in his tortured body. At first during his
illness he had worried about the farm, sending messages to Duncan much
more than he had done during the days when he was shut behind the green
baize door. But now all the farm had slipped from him. He was alone with
his body and his soul and God. Most often his soul cried out. Sometimes
his body broke through and showed its pains and the strength of old
desires.
As he grew weaker he tried to grasp out at strength. Aunt Janet, who had
"ruled herself" to nervelessness, had nothing of the mother, the nurse
in her make-up; there was no tenderness in what she did for him. It was
not that she had any spirit of getting her own back on Andrew for his
tyranny, his impoverishment, his ill-usage of her in the past. She would
have given him her last crumb of food if she had thought of it. But a
thing atrophied as she was could not think or feel, and so he went
without the small tendernesses that would have come to him had Rose, the
soft little Englishwoman, lived.
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