Superseded Part 12

A vague fear clutched at the Old Lady's heart.

"Then, Juliana, you are not well. Hadn't you better see"--she hesitated--pausing with unwonted delicacy for her words--"a doctor?"

"I don't want to see a doctor. There is nothing the matter with me." And still insisting that there was nothing the matter with her, she went to bed.

And old Martha had come with her early morning croak to call Miss Juliana; she had dumped down the hot-water can in the basin with a clash, pulled up the blind with a jerk, and drawn back the curtains with a clatter, before she noticed that Miss Juliana was up all the time. Up and dressed, and sitting in her chair by the hearth, warming her feet at an imaginary fire.

She had been sitting up all night, for her bed was as Martha had left it the night before. Martha approached cautiously, still feeling her way, though there was no need for it, the room being full of light.

She groped like a blind woman for Miss Juliana's forehead, laying her hand there before she looked into her face.

After some fumbling futile experiments with brandy, a looking-gla.s.s and a feather, old Martha hid these things carefully out of sight; she disarranged the bed, turning back the clothes as they might have been left by one newly wakened and risen out of it; drew a shawl over the head and shoulders of the figure in the chair; pulled down the blind and closed the curtains till the room was dark again. Then she groped her way out and down the stairs to her mistress's door. There she stayed a moment, gathering her feeble wits together for the part she meant to play. She had made up her mind what she would do.

So she called the Old Lady as usual; said she was afraid there was something the matter with Miss Juliana; thought she might have got up a bit too early and turned faint like.

The Old Lady answered that she would come and see; and the two crept up the stairs, and went groping their way in the dark of the curtained room.

Old Martha fumbled a long time with the blind; she drew back the curtains little by little, with infinite precaution letting in the light upon the fearful thing.

But the Old Lady approached it boldly.

"Don't you know me, Jooley dear?" she said, peering into the strange eyes. There was no recognition in them for all their staring.

"Don't know _me_, m'm," said Martha soothingly; "seems all of a white swoon, don't she?"

Martha was warming to her part. She made herself busy; she brought hot water bottles and eau de cologne; she spent twenty minutes chafing the hands and forehead and laying warmth to the feet, that the Old Lady might have the comfort of knowing that everything had been done that could be done. She shuffled off to find brandy, as if she had only thought of it that instant; and she played out the play with the looking-gla.s.s and the feather.

The feather fluttered to the floor, and Martha ceased bending and peering, and looked at her mistress.

"She's gone, m'm, I do believe."

The Old Lady sank by the chair, her arms clinging to those rigid knees.

"Jooley--Jooley--don't you _know_ me?" she cried, as if in a pa.s.sion of affront.

CHAPTER XII

Epilogue.--The Man and the Woman

By daylight there is neither glamour nor beauty in the great burying-ground of North London; you must go to it at evening, in the first fall of the summer dusk, to feel the fascination of that labyrinth of low graves, crosses and headstones, urns and sarcophagi, crowded in the black-green of the gra.s.s; of marble columns, granite pyramids and obelisks, ma.s.sed and reared and piled in the grey of the air. It is nothing if not fantastic. Even by day that same mad grouping and jostling of monumental devices, gathered together from the ends of the world, gives to the place a cheerful half-pagan character; now, in its confusion and immensity, it might be some city of dreams, tossed up in cloud and foam and frozen into marble; some aerial half-way limbo where life slips a little from the living and death from the dead.

For these have their own way here. No priest interferes with them, and whatever secular power ordains these matters is indulgent to its children. If one of them would have his horse or his dog carved on his tomb instead of an angel, or a pair of compa.s.ses instead of a cross, there is no one to thwart his fancy. He may even be humorous if he will.

It is as if he implored us to laugh with him a little while though the jest be feeble, and not to chill him with so many tears.

At twilight a man and a woman were threading their way through this cemetery, and as they went they smiled faintly at the memorial caprices of the living and the still quainter originalities of the dead. But on the whole they seemed to be trying not to look too happy. They said nothing to each other till they came to a mound raised somewhere in the borderland that divides the graves of the rich from the paupers' ground.

There was just room for them to stand together on the boards that roofed in the narrow pit dug ready for the next comer.

"If I believed in a Creator" (it was the man who spoke), "I should want to know what pleasure he found in creating that poor little woman."

The woman did not answer as she looked at him.

"Yet," he went on, "I'm selfish enough to be glad that she lived. If I had not known Miss Quincey, I should not have known you."

"And I," said the woman, and her face was rosy under the touch of grief, "if I had not loved Miss Quincey, I could not have loved you."

They seemed to think Miss Quincey had justified her existence. Perhaps she had.

And the woman took the roses that she wore in her belt and laid them on the breast of the grave. She stood for a minute studying the effect with a shamefaced look, as if she had mocked the dead woman with flowers flung from her wedding-wreath of youth and joy.

Then she turned to the man; the closing bell tolled, and they pa.s.sed through the iron gates into the ways of the living.

THE END