No.
To do so would only be a concession to the panic instinct.
She knew exactly what was the matter with Samuel: a severe cough persistently neglected, no more.
As she had expressed herself many times to inquirers,
"He's never been what you may call ill."
Nevertheless, as she laid him in bed and possetted him, how frail and fragile he looked!
And he was so exhausted that he would not even talk about the trial.
"If he's not better to-morrow I shall send for the doctor!" she said to herself.
As for his getting up, she swore she would keep him in bed by force if necessary.
IV
The next morning she was glad and proud that she had not yielded to a scare. For he was most strangely and obviously better.
He had slept heavily, and she had slept a little.
True that Daniel was condemned to death!
Leaving Daniel to his fate, she was conscious of joy springing in her heart.
How absurd to have asked herself: "Will he ever come down those stairs again?"!
A message reached her from the forgotten shop during the morning, that Mr. Lawton had called to see Mr. Povey.
Already Samuel had wanted to arise, but she had forbidden it in the tone of a woman who is dangerous, and Samuel had been very reasonable.
He now said that Mr. Lawton must be asked up.
She glanced round the bedroom.
It was 'done'; it was faultlessly correct as a sick chamber.
She agreed to the introduction into it of the man from another sphere, and after a preliminary minute she left the two to talk together.
This visit of young Lawton's was a dramatic proof of Samuel's importance, and of the importance of the matter in hand.
The august occasion demanded etiquette, and etiquette said that a wife should depart from her husband when he had to transact affairs beyond the grasp of a wife.
The idea of a petition to the Home Secretary took shape at this interview, and before the day was out it had spread over the town and over the Five Towns, and it was in the Signal.
The Signal spoke of Daniel Povey as 'the condemned man.'
And the phrase startled the whole district into an indignant agitation for his reprieve.
The district woke up to the fact that a Town Councillor, a figure in the world, an honest tradesman of unspotted character, was cooped solitary in a little cell at Stafford, waiting to be hanged by the neck till he was dead.
The district determined that this must not and should not be.
Why!
Dan Povey had actually once been Chairman of the Bursley Society for the Prosecution of Felons, that association for annual eating and drinking, whose members humorously called each other 'felons'!
Impossible, monstrous, that an ex-chairman of the
'Felons' should be a sentenced criminal!
However, there was nothing to fear.
No Home Secretary would dare to run counter to the jury's recommendation and the expressed wish of the whole district.
Besides, the Home Secretary's nephew was M.P. for the Knype division.
Of course a verdict of guilty had been inevitable.
Everybody recognized that now.
Even Samuel and all the hottest partisans of Daniel Povey recognized it.
They talked as if they had always foreseen it, directly contradicting all that they had said on only the previous day.
Without any sense of any inconsistency or of shame, they took up an absolutely new position.
The structure of blind faith had once again crumbled at the assault of realities, and unhealthy, un-English truths, the statement of which would have meant ostracism twenty-four hours earlier, became suddenly the platitudes of the Square and the market-place.
Despatch was necessary in the affair of the petition, for the condemned man had but three Sundays.
But there was delay at the beginning, because neither young Lawton nor any of his colleagues was acquainted with the proper formula of a petition to the Home Secretary for the reprieve of a criminal condemned to death.
No such petition had been made in the district within living memory.
And at first, young Lawton could not get sight or copy of any such petition anywhere, in the Five Towns or out of them.
Of course there must exist a proper formula, and of course that formula and no other could be employed.
Nobody was bold enough to suggest that young Lawton should commence the petition,
"To the Most Noble the Marquis of Welwyn, K.C.B., May it please your Lordship," and end it,
"And your petitioners will ever pray!" and insert between those phrases a simple appeal for the reprieve, with a statement of reasons.
No! the formula consecrated by tradition must be found.