Dr. Spenlove, her only friend, had bidden her farewell. She had not a penny in her pocket; there was not a crust of bread in the cupboard, not an ounce of coal, not a stick of wood to kindle a fire. She was thinly clad, and she did not possess a single article upon which she could have obtained the smallest advance. She had taken the room furnished, but even if what it contained had been her property a broker would have given but a few shillings for everything in it.
The little hand instinctively wandered to the mother's wasted breast, and plucked at it imploringly, ravenously. The woman looked around in the last throes of an anguish too deep for expression, except in the appalling words to which she gave despairing utterance.
"Come," she cried, "we will end it!"
Out into the cold streets she crept, unobserved. She shivered, and a pitiful smile crossed her lips.
"Hush, hush!" she murmured to her babe. "It will soon be over. Better dead--better dead--for you and for me!"
She crept towards the sea, and hugged the wall when she heard approaching footsteps. She need not have feared; the night was too inclement for any but selfish consideration. The soft snow fell, and enwrapped her and her child in its pitiless shroud. She paused by a lamp-post, and cast an upward look at the heavens, in which she could see the glimmering of the stars. Then she went on, and fretfully pressed her babe close to her breast, to stifle the feeble sobs.
"Be still, be still!" she murmured. "There is no hope in life for either of us. Better dead--better dead!"
CHAPTER VI.
[THE FRIEND IN NEED.]
Desperately resolved as she was to carry her fatal design into execution she had not reckoned with nature. Weakened by the life of privation she had led for so many months, and also by the birth of her child, her physical forces had reached the limit of human endurance. She faltered and staggered, the ground slipped from beneath her weary feet. Vain was the struggle, her vital power was spent. From her overcharged heart a voiceless and terrible prayer went up to heaven. "Give me strength, O God, give me but a little strength! I have not far to go!" She fought the air with her disengaged hand, and tossed her head this way and that; but her ruthless prayer was not answered, and though she struggled fiercely she managed to crawl only a few more steps. She had yet hundreds of yards to go to reach the sea when some chord within her seemed to snap; her farther progress was instantly arrested, and she found herself incapable of moving backward or forward. Swaying to and fro, the earth, the sky the whirling snow, and the dim light of the stars swam in her sight and faded from before her. In that supreme moment she saw a spiritual vision of her dishonoured life. Deprived early of a mother's counsel and companionship, she had passed her days with a spendthrift father, whose love for her was so tainted with selfishness that it was not only valueless, but mischievous. When she grew to woman's estate she was worse than alone; she had no guide, no teacher, to point out the rocks and shoals of maidenhood, to inculcate in her the principles of virtue which would act as a safeguard against the specious wiles of men whose eyes were charmed by her beauty, and whose only aim was to lure her to ruin. Then her father died, and a friend came forward who offered her a home and an honourable position in the world. Friendless and penniless, she accepted him, and gave him her promise, and accepted his money. Love had not touched her heart; she thought it had when a wilier man wooed her in another and more alluring fashion, and by this man she had been beguiled and betrayed. Then she knew what she had lost, but it was too late; her good name was gone, and she fled to a strange part of the country and lived among strangers, a heartbroken, despairing woman. All the salient features in her career flashed before her. She saw the man who had trusted her, she saw the man in whom she put her trust, she saw herself, an abandoned creature, with a child of shame in her arms. These ghostly figures stood clearly limned in that one last moment of swiftly fading light, as in the moment of sunrise on a frosty morning every distant object stands sharply outlined against the sky; then darkness fell upon her, and with an inarticulate, despairing cry, she sank to the ground in a deathlike swoon. The wind sobbed and shrieked and wailed around her and her child; the falling snow, with treacherous tenderness, fell softly upon them; herself insensible, she had no power to shake it off; her babe was conscious, but its feeble movements were of small avail against the white pall which was descending upon it and its outcast mother. Thicker and thicker it grew, and in the wild outcry of this bitter night Fate seemed to have pronounced its inexorable sentence of death against these unfortunate beings.