A Mummer's Wife Part 58

'Ah, if,' Laura interjected, and curtseying to him she led the doctor to the door. 'Nothing,' she began, 'can be worse than the present state of earth-life, and in all its phases; if the human race is to be evolved into a higher degree of perfection, no weak half-measures will avail to effect the change; there must, on the contrary, be a radical change in hereditary environment.'

The doctor listened a moment and, as if enchanted with the impression she had produced, Laura went back to the writing-table, and settling the folds of her brown silk widely over the floor, she began to write:

'"Ye G.o.ds, they fail, they falter, Thy hand hath struck them down.

Their woof the Parcae alter, Beware thy mother's frown!

What such as I in glory Compared with such as thee?

Would, in the conflict gory, That I had died for thee!"'

At this point the inspiration seemed to desert her, and raising her pen from the paper, she bit its end thoughtfully, seeking for a transitional phrase whereby she might be able to allude to the Light-G.o.d.

They were in a six-shilling-a-week bedroom in the neighbourhood of the Strand. The window looked on to a bit of red-tiled roofing, a cistern, and a clothes-line on which a petticoat flapped, and in a small iron bedstead, facing the light, Kate lay delirious, her stomach enormously distended by dropsy. From time to time she waved her arms, now wasted to mere bones. She had been insensible for three whole days, speaking in broken phrases of her past life--of Mrs. Ede, the potteries, the two little girls, Annie and Lizzie. d.i.c.k, she declared, had been very good to her. Ralph, too, had been kind, and she was determined that the two men should not quarrel over her.

They must not kill each other; she would not allow it; they should be friends. They would all be friends yet; that is to say, if Mrs. Ede would permit of it; and why should she stand between people and make enemies of them? She fell back into stupor; and next day her ideas were still more confused. In the belief that it was for the part of the Baillie that d.i.c.k and Ralph were quarrelling she began to express her regret that there was nothing in the piece for her. Nor were memories of the baby girl who had died in Manchester lacking. She prayed Ralph to believe that the child was not his but d.i.c.k's child. She prayed and supplicated in Laura's arms till Laura laid her back on the pillow exhausted.

'Give me something to drink; I'm dying of thirst,' the sick woman murmured faintly.

Laura started from her reveries, and going over to the fireplace, where the beef-tea was standing, poured out half a cup; but, owing to great difficulty in breathing, it was some time before the patient could drink it.

After a long silence Kate said:

'I've been very ill, haven't I? I think I must be dying.'

'Death is not death,' Laura answered, 'when we die for Pan, the undying representative of the universe cognizable to the senses.'

Over Kate's mind lay a vague dream, through whose gloom two things were just perceptible--an idea of death and a desire to see d.i.c.k. But she was almost too weak to seek for words, and it was with great effort that she said:

'I don't remember who you are; I can think of nothing now, but I should like to see my husband once more. Could you fetch him? Is he here?'

'You've not been happy with him, I know, my sister; but I don't blame you.

Your marriage was not a psychological union; and when marriage isn't that, woman cannot set her foot on the lowest temple of Eros.'

'I'm too ill to talk with you,' Kate replied, 'but I loved my husband well, too well. I keep all my little remembrances of him in that box; they aren't much--not much--but I should like him to have them when I'm gone, so that he may know that I loved him to the last. Perhaps then he may forgive me.

Will you let me see them?'

She looked at the packet of letters, kissed the crumpled calico rose, the b.u.t.ton she had pulled off his coat in a drunken fit and preserved for love, and she even slipped on her wrist the last few pearls that remained of the chaplet she wore when they played at sweethearts in _The Lovers'

Knot_. But after the love-tokens had been put back in the box, and Kate again asked Mrs. Forest to bring d.i.c.k to her, she began to ramble in her speech, and to fancy herself in Hanley. The most diverse scenes were heaped together in the complex confusion of Kate's nightmare; the most opposed ideas were intermingled. At one moment she told the little girls, Annie and Lizzie, of the immorality of the conversations in the dressing-rooms of theatres; at another she stopped the Rehearsal of an _opera bouffe_ to preach to the mummers--in phrases that were remembrances of the extemporaneous prayers in the Wesleyan Church--of the advantages of an earnest, working religious life. It was like a costume ball, where chast.i.ty grinned from behind a mask that vice was looking for, while vice hid his nakedness in some of the robes that chast.i.ty had let fall. Thus up and down, like dice thrown by demon players, were rattled the two lives, the double life that this weak woman had lived, and a point was reached where the two became one, when she began to sing her famous song:

'Look at me here, look at me there,'

alternately with the Wesleyan hymns. Sometimes in her delirium she even fitted the words of one on to the tune of the other.

Still, Laura took no notice, and her pen continued to scratch, scratch, till it occurred to her that although d.i.c.k's marriage had not been a psychological one, it might be as well that he should see his wife before she died; and having come to this conclusion suddenly, she put on her bonnet and left the house.

The landlady brought in the lamp, placing it on the table, out of sight of the dying woman's eyes.

A dreadful paleness had changed even the yellow of her face to an ashen tint; her lips had disappeared, her eyes were dilated, and she tried to raise herself up in bed. Her withered arms were waved to and, fro, and in the red gloom shed from the ill-smelling paraffin lamp the large, dimly seen folds of the bedclothes were tossed to and fro by the convulsions that agitated the whole body. Another hour pa.s.sed away, marked by the cavernous breathing of the woman as she crept to the edge of death. At last there came a sigh, deeper and more prolonged; and with it she died.

Soon after, before the corpse had grown cold, heavy steps were heard on the staircase, and d.i.c.k and Laura entered, one with a quant.i.ty of c.o.c.katoo-like flutterings, the other steadily, like a big and ponderous animal. At a glance they saw that all was over, and in silence they sat down, their hands resting on the table. The man spoke hesitatingly in awkward phrases of a happy release; the woman listened with a calm serenity that caused d.i.c.k to wonder. She would have liked to have said something concerning psychological marriages, but the appearance of the huge body beneath the bed-clothes restrained her: he wished to say something nice and kind, but Laura's presence put everything out of his head, and so his ideas became more than ever broken and disjointed, his thoughts wandered, until at last, lifting his eyes from the ma.n.u.script on the table, he said:

'Have you finished the second act, dear?'

THE END