“I wanted her to have the doctor yesterday,” he said, “but she wouldn’t. Ever since you and Mr. Mynors called she’s been cleaning the house down. She said you’d happen be coming again soon, and the place wasn’t fit to be seen. No use me arguing with her.”
“You had better run for a doctor,” Anna said.
“I was just going off when you came. She’s been complaining more of her rheumatism, and pain in her hips, lately.”
“Go now; fetch Mr. Macpherson, and call at our house and say I shall stay here all night. Wait a moment.” Seeing that he was exhausted from lack of food, she cut a thick piece of bread-and-butter. “Eat this as you go,” she said.
“I can’t eat; it’ll choke me.”
“Let it choke you,” she said. “You’ve got to swallow it.”
Child of a hundred sorrows, he must be treated as a child. As soon as Willie was gone she took off her hat and jacket, and lit a lamp; there was no gas in the kitchen.
“What’s that light?” the old woman asked peevishly, rousing herself and sitting up. “I doubt I’ll be late with Willie’s tea. Eh, Miss Terrick, what’s amiss?”
“You’re not quite well, Miss Vodrey,” Anna answered. “If you’ll show me your room, I’ll see you into bed.” Without giving her a moment for hesitation, Anna seized the feeble creature under the arms, and so, coaxing, supporting, carrying, got her to bed. At length she lay on the narrow mattress, panting, exhausted. It was Sarah’s final effort.
Anna lit fires in the kitchen and in the bedroom, and when Willie returned with Dr. Macpherson, water was boiling and tea made.
“You’d better get a woman in,” said the doctor curtly, in the kitchen, when he had finished his examination of Sarah. “Some neighbour for tonight, and I’ll send a nurse up from the cottage-hospital early tomorrow morning. Not that it will be the least use. She must have been dying for the last two days at least. She’s got pericarditis and pleurisy. She’s breathing I don’t know how many to the minute, and her temperature is just about as high as it can be. It all follows from rheumatism, and then taking cold. Gross carelessness and neglect all through! I’ve no patience with such work.” He turned angrily to Willie. “I don’t know what on earth you were thinking of, Mr. Price, not to send for me earlier.”
Willie, abashed and guilty, found nothing to say. His eye had the meek wistfulness of Holman Hunt’s “Scapegoat.”
“Mr. Price wanted her to have the doctor,” said Anna, defending him with warmth; “but she wouldn’t. He is out at the works all day till late at night. How was he to know how she was? She could walk about.”
The tall doctor glanced at Anna in surprise, and at once modified his tone. “Yes,” he said, “that’s the curious thing. It passes me how she managed to get about. But there is no knowing what an obstinate woman won’t force herself to do. I’ll send the medicine up tonight, and come along myself with the nurse early tomorrow. Meantime, keep carefully to my instructions.”
That night remains forever fixed in Anna’s memory: the grim rooms, echoing and shadowy; the countless journeys up and down dark stairs and passages; Willie sitting always immovable in the kitchen, idle because there was nothing for him to do; Sarah incessantly panting on the truckle-bed; the hired woman from up the street, buxom, kindly, useful, but fatuous in the endless monotony of her commiserations.
Towards morning, Sarah Vodrey gave sign of a desire to talk.
“I’ve fought the fight,” she murmured to Anna, who alone was in the bedroom with her, “I’ve fought the fight; I’ve kept the faith. In that box there ye’ll see a purse. There’s seventeen pounds six in it. That will pay for the funeral, and Willie must have what’s over. There would ha’ been more for the lad, but he never paid me no wages this two years past. I never troubled him.”
“Don’t tell Willie that,” Anna said impetuously.
“Eh, bless ye, no!” said the dying drudge, and then seemed to doze.
Anna went to the kitchen, and sent the woman upstairs.
“How is she?” asked Willie, without stirring. Anna shook her head. “Neither her nor me will be here much longer, I’m thinking,” he said, smiling wearily.
“What?” she exclaimed, startled.
“Mr. Sutton has arranged to sell our business as a going-concern—some people at Turnhill are buying it. I shall go to Australia; there’s no room for me here. The creditors have promised to allow me twenty-five pounds, and I can get an assisted passage. Bursley’ll know me no more. But—but—I shall always remember you and what you’ve done.”
She longed to kneel at his feet, and to comfort him, and to cry: “It is I who have ruined you—driven your father to cheating his servant, to crime, to suicide; driven you to forgery, and turned you out of your house which your old servant killed herself in making clean for me. I have wronged you, and I love you like a mother because I have wronged you and because I saved you from prison.”
But she said nothing except: “Some of us will miss you.”
The next day Sarah Vodrey died—she who had never lived save in the fetters of slavery and fanaticism. After fifty years of ceaseless labour, she had gained the affection of one person, and enough money to pay for her own funeral. Willie Price took a cheap lodging with the woman who had been called in on the night of Sarah’s collapse. Before Christmas he was to sail for Melbourne. The Priory, deserted, gave up its rickety furniture to a van from Hanbridge, where, in an auction-room, the frail sticks lost their identity in a medley of other sticks, and ceased to be. Then the bricklayer, the plasterer, the painter, and the paperhanger came to the Priory, and whistled and sang in it.
XIII
The
