And then, as I said, the insurance man and the parson began to call again on that foolish woman, but she would not alter her ways for any of them. Not one bit. The things she had once enjoyed before her marriage, the things she had wanted her own husband to do but were all against his grain, these she could nohow bring herself to do when he was dead and gone and she was alone and free to do them. What a farce human nature can be! There was an Italian hawker came along with rings in his ears and a coloured cart full of these little statues of Cupid, and churches with spires a yard long and red glass in them, and heads of some of the great people like the Queen and General Gordon.
“Have you got a head of Lord Beaconsfield?” Molly asks him.
He goes and searches in his cart and brings her out a beautiful head on a stand, all white and new, and charges her half a crown for it. Few days later the parson calls on the job of persuading her to return to his flock now that she was free to go once more. But no. She says: “I can never change now, sir, it may be all wrong of me, but what my man thought was good enough for me, and I somehow cling to that. It’s all wrong, I suppose, and you can’t understand it, sir, but it’s all my life.”
Well, Twamley chumbled over an argument or two, but he couldn’t move her; there’s no mortal man could ever more that woman except Ted—and he didn’t give a damn.
“Well,” says parson, “I have hopes, Mrs. Wickham, that you will come to see the matter in a new light, a little later on perhaps. In fact, I’m sure you will, for look, there’s that bust,” he says, and he points to it on the mantelpiece. “I thought you and he were all against Gladstone, but now you’ve got his bust upon your shelf; it’s a new one, I see.”
“No, no, that isn’t Gladstone,” cried Molly, all of a tremble, “that isn’t Gladstone, it’s Lord Beaconsfield!”
“Indeed, but pardon me, Mrs. Wickham, that is certainly a bust of Mr. Gladstone.”
So it was. This Italian chap had deceived the silly creature and palmed her off with any bust that come handy, and it happened to be Gladstone. She went white to the teeth, and gave a sort of scream, and dashed the little bust in a hundred pieces on the hearth in front of the minister there. O, he had a very vexing time with her.
That was years ago. And then came the fire, and then the bullseye shop. For ten years now I’ve prayed that woman to marry me, and she just tells me: No. She says she pledged her solemn word to Ted as he lay a-dying that she would not wed again. It was his last wish—she says. But it’s a lie, a lie, for I heard them both. Such a lie! She’s a mad woman, but fond of him still in her way, I suppose. She liked to see Ted make a fool of himself, liked him better so. Perhaps that’s what she don’t see in me. And what I see in her—I can’t imagine. But it’s a something, something in her that sways me now just as it swayed me then, and I doubt but it will sway me for ever.