Gladys, the Reaper

by Anne Beale

'Put—out—the—candle,' he muttered.

As the night was fast drawing in, Mrs Jenkins hesitated.

'Put—out—the—candle,' repeated the dying man, with a still stronger effort to rise and extinguish it himself. 'The ruling passion strong in death' must be attended to, and the light was extinguished.

Rowland Prothero clasped his hands with a groan, and repeated aloud a prayer from the service for the dying. The terrified wife knelt down by the bed in the deep gloom, and in the still deeper gloom behind, the son buried his face in his arms, and leaned upon the little table.

Whilst Rowland Prothero was praying from the very depth of his heart for the soul that was thus awfully passing to its account, they were all aroused by the last fearful struggle between death and life of him who had made gold his god. For some time they feared to rekindle the light, but at last they ventured. It was but to witness the last dread pangs of one who had made wife and son secondary to the great absorbing passion of avarice; and now he was constrained to depart from the scene of his toil, and to leave all that he had grovelled for behind him, for ever!

We will not dwell upon the awful hours that succeeded his final words. He neither spoke nor was conscious again. Light and dark were alike to him. Save that he grasped something in his right hand with an iron hold, reason and power had left him; death was still fighting with life, and gradually gaining the last great victory.

A few hours afterwards, and when that victory had been gained, the scene was changed in that small house. The chamber of death was deserted, and the wretched clay of the miser, decently covered with a white sheet, lay heavy and still, where the spirit that formerly animated it had been accustomed to brood over the miserable gains of its clays and years on earth.

In the small sitting-room below, behind the little shop where these gains had been begun and continued for half-a-century or more, sat the widow, surrounded by a score of gossips, who had left their beds and homes at daybreak to condole with her.

It would have been much more unnatural than natural if Mrs Jenkins had grieved at heart for the husband she had lost. Married, or rather sold to him, when he was fifty and she thirty, she had lived five or six and twenty years of pure misery with him. She had starved with him, when she could not pilfer from him, and had endured patiently all these years what seemed past endurance in expectation of the closing scene. She had married and lived upon the prospect of his death, and it was come at last; and now that it was come, the awfulness of that last struggle overpowered her, and she wept and lamented as copiously as if her husband had been the kindest and most liberal in the world. Still, she was free, with competence, she hoped, in perspective? and this thought, together with the ever all-pervading one of her idol, her treasure, her only son, and his expectations, more than counterbalanced that of the death she had witnessed.

'Come you, don't you be takking on so,' said one old woman soothingly, as the widow rocked herself to and fro, and held her handkerchief to her eyes.