The History of David Grieve Part 114

'_June 4th_.--These last two days she is much worse. The local trouble is stationary; but there must be developments we know nothing of elsewhere. For she perishes every day before our eyes--we cannot give her sleep--there is such malaise, emaciation, weariness.

'She is wonderfully patient. It seems to me, looking back, that a few days ago came a change. I cannot remember any words that marked it, but it is as though--without our knowing it--her eyes had turned themselves irrevocably from us and from life, to the hills of death. Yet--strange!--she takes more notice of those about her.

Yesterday she showed an interest just like her old self in the children's going to a little fete at Ambleside. She would have them all in--Sandy and the landlady's two little girls--to look at them when they were dressed.--What strikes me with awe is that she has no more tears, though she says every now and then the most touching things--things that pierce to the very marrow.

'She told me to-day that she wished to see her father. I have written to him this evening.'

'_June 6th_.--Purcell has been here a few hours, and has gone back to-night. She received him with perfect calmness, though they have not spoken to each other for ten years. He came in with his erect, military port and heavy tread, looking little older, though his hair is gray. But he blenched at sight of her.

'"You must kiss me on the forehead," she said to him feebly, "but, please, very gently."

'So he kissed her, and sat down. He cleared his throat often, and did not know what to say. But she asked him, by degrees, about some of her mother's relations whom she had not seen for long, then about himself and his health. The ice thawed, but the talk was difficult. Towards the end he inquired of her--and, I think, with genuine feeling--whether she had "sought salvation." She said faintly, "No;" and he, looking shocked and shaken, bade her, with very much of his old voice and manner, and all the old phraseology, "lay hold of the merits of Jesus."

'Towards the end of his exhortations she interrupted him.

'"You must see Sandy, and you must kiss me again. I wasn't a good daughter. But, oh! why wouldn't you make friends with me and David?

I tried--you remember I tried?"

'"I am ready to forgive all the past," he said, drawing himself up: "I can say no more."

'"Well, kiss me!" she said, in a melancholy whisper. And he kissed her again.

'Then I would not let him exhaust her any more, or take any set farewell. I hurried him away as though for tea, and nurse and I p.r.o.nounced against his seeing her again.

'On our walk to the coach he broke out once more, and implored me, with much unction and some dignity, not to let my infidel opinions stand in the way, but to summon some G.o.dly man to see and talk with her. I said that a neighbouring clergyman had been several times to see her, since, as he probably knew, she had been a Churchwoman for years. In my inward frenzy I seemed to be hurling all sorts of wild sayings at his head; but I don't believe they came to speech, for I know at the end we parted with the civility of strangers. I promised to send him news. What amazed me was his endless curiosity about the details of her illness. He would have the whole history of the operation, and all the medical opinion she could remember from the nurse. And on our walk he renewed the subject; but I could bear it no more.

'Oh, my G.o.d! what does it matter to me _why_ she is dying?'

'Then, when I got home, I found her rather excited, and she whispered to me: "He asked me if I had sought salvation, and I said No. I didn't seek it, David; but it comes--when you are here." Then her chest heaved, but with that strange instinct of self-preservation she would not say a word more, nor would she let me weep. She asked me to hold her hands in mine, and so she slept a little.

'Dora writes that in a fortnight more she can get a holiday of a week or two. Will she be in time?

'It is two months to-day since we went to London.'

On one of the last days in June Dora arrived. It seemed to her that Lucy could have but a few days to live. Working both outwardly and inwardly, the terrible disease had all but done its work. She had nearly lost the power of swallowing, and lived mainly on the morphia injections which were regularly administered to her. But at intervals she spoke a good deal, and quite clearly.

And Dora had not been six hours with her before a curious thing happened. The relation which, ever since their meeting as girls, had prevailed between her and Lucy, seemed to be suddenly reversed.

She was no longer the teacher and sustainer; in the little dying creature there was now a remote and heavenly power; it could not be described, but Dora yielded with tears to the awe and sovereignty of it.

She saw with some plainness, however, that it depended on the relation between the husband and wife. Since she had been with them last, it had been touched--this relation--by a Divine alchemy. The self in both seemed to have dropped away. The two lives were no longer two, but one--he cheris.h.i.+ng, she leaning.

The night she came she pressed Lucy to take the Holy Communion.

Lucy a.s.sented, and the Communion was administered, with David kneeling beside her pillow. But afterwards Lucy was troubled, and when Dora proposed at night to read and pray with her, she said faintly, 'No; David does.' And thenceforward, though she was all gentleness, Dora did not find it very easy to get religious speech with her, and went often--poor Dora!--sadly, and in fear.

Dora had been in the house five days, when new trouble followed on the old. David one morning received a letter from Louie, forwarded from Manchester, and when Dora followed him into the garden with a message, she found him walking about distracted.

'Read it!' he said.

The letter was but a few scrawled lines:--

'Cecile has got diphtheria. Our doctor says so, but he is a devil. I must have another--the best--and there is no money. If she dies, you will never see me again, I swear. I dare say you will think it a good job, but now you know.'

The writing was hardly legible, and the paper had been twisted and crumpled by the haste of the writer.

'What is to be done?' said David, in pale despair. 'Can I leave this house one hour?--one minute?'

Then a sudden thought struck him. He looked at Dora with a flash of appeal.

'Dora, you have been our friend always, and you have been good to Louie. Will you go? I need not say all shall be made easy. I could get John to take you over. He has been several times to Paris for me this last five years, and would be a help.'

That was indeed a struggle for Dora! Her heart clung to these people she loved, and the devote in her yearned for those last opportunities with the dying, on the hope of which she still fed herself. To go from this deathbed, to that fierce mother, in those horrible surroundings!

But just as she had taught Louie in the old days because David Grieve asked her, so now she went, in the end, because he asked her.

She was to be away six days at least. But the doctor thought it possible she might return to find Lucy alive. David made every possible arrangement--telegraphed to Louie that she was coming; and to John directing him to meet her at Warrington and take her on; wrote out the times of her journey; the address of a pension in the Avenue Friedland, kept by an English lady, to which he happened to be able to direct her; and the name of the English lawyer in Paris who had advised him at the time of Louie's marriage, had done various things for him since, and would, he knew, be a friend in need.

Twelve hours after the arrival of Louie's letter, Dora tore herself from Lucy. 'Don't say good-bye,' said David, his face working, and to spare him and Lucy she went as though she were just going across the road for the night. David saw her--a white and silent traveller--into the car that was to take her on the first stage of a journey which, apart from everything else, alarmed her provincial imagination. David's grat.i.tude threw her into a mist of tears as she drove off. Surely, of all the self-devoted acts of Dora's life, this mission and this leave-taking were not the least!

Lucy heard the wheels roll away. A stony, momentary sense of desolation came over her as this one more strand was cut. But David came in, and the locked lips relaxed. It had been necessary to tell her the reason of Dora's departure. And in the course of the long June evening David gathered from the motion of her face that she wished to speak to him. He bent down to her, and she murmured:--

'Tell Louie I wished I'd been kinder--I pray G.o.d will let her keep Cecile.... She must come to Manchester again when I'm gone.'

The night-watch was divided between David and the nurse. At five o'clock in the summer morning--brilliant once more after storm and rain--he injected morphia into the poor wasted arm, and she took a few drops of brandy. Then, after a while, she seemed to sleep; and he, stretched on a sofa beside her, and confident of waking at the slightest sound, fell into a light doze.

Lucy woke when the sun was high, rather more than an hour later.

Her eyes were teased by a c.h.i.n.k in the curtain; she hardly knew what it was, but her dying sense shrank, and she vaguely thought of calling David. But as she lay, propped up, she looked down on him, and she saw his pale, sunken face, with the momentary softening of rest upon it. And there wandered through her mind fragments of his sayings to her in that last evening of theirs together in the Manchester house,--especially, '_It can only be proved by living--by every victory over the evil self_.' In its mortal fatigue her memory soon lost hold of words and ideas; but she had the strength not to wake him.

Then as she lay in what seemed to her this scorching light--in reality it was one little ray which had evaded the thick curtains-- a flood of joy seemed to pour into her soul. 'I shall not live beyond to-day,' she thought, 'but I know now I shall see him again.'

When at last she made a faint movement, and he woke at once, he saw that the end was very near. He thought of Dora in Paris with a pang, but there was no help for it. Through that day he never stirred from her side in the darkened room, and she sank fast. She spoke only one connected sentence--to say with great difficulty, 'Dying is long--but--_not_--painful.' The words woke in him a strange echo; they had been among the last words of 'Lias, his childhood's friend. But she breathed one or two names--the landlady of the lodging-house, and the servants, especially the nurse.

They came in on tiptoe and kissed her. She had already thanked each one.

Sandy was just going to bed, when David carried him in to her. One of her last conscious looks was for him. He was in his nightgown, with bare feet, holding his father tight round the neck, and whimpering. They bent down to her, and he kissed her on the cheek, as David told him, 'very softly.' Then he cried to go away from this still, grey mother. David gave him to the nurse and came back.

The day pa.s.sed, and the night began. The doctor in his evening visit said it would be a marvel if she saw the morrow. David sat beside the bed, his head bowed on the hand he held; the nurse was in the farther corner. His whole life and hers pa.s.sed before him; and in his mind there hovered perpetually the image of the potter and the wheel. He and she--the Hand so unfaltering, so divine had bound them there, through resistance and anguish unspeakable. And now, for him there was only a sense of absolute surrender and submission, which in this hour of agony and exaltation rose steadily into the ecstasy--ay, the _vision_ of faith! In the pitying love which had absorbed his being he had known that 'best'

at last whereat his craving youth had grasped; and losing himself wholly had found his G.o.d.

And for her, had not her weak life become one flame of love--a cup of the Holy Grail, beating and pulsing with the Divine Life?

The dawn came. She pulled restlessly at her white wrapper--seemed to be in pain--whispered something of 'a weight.' Then the last change came over her. She opened her eyes--but they saw no longer.

Nature ceased to resist, and the soul had long since yielded itself. With a meekness and piteousness of look not to be told, never to be forgotten, Lucy Grieve pa.s.sed away.

CHAPTER X