I drew softly away from her. I felt as guilty in listening to her self-communing as I could have felt had I opened and read one of her letters. I took my cloak, and as I drew it on, I heard her low voice saying: “You said my tongue was not sharp enough, Philip; that was because I loved you! Her tongue was sharp, she cursed and flouted you, and stung and maddened, and tossed you a favor as a bone is tossed to a dog! She was not even beautiful, your frail one, but she knew well the ways that lead down to darkness and to death! She led, steeped in vice and reeling with wine, and you followed because you were without soul, my Philip!”
I crept out of the door and left the bowed, weary, old woman patiently examining the torn meshes of two webs. One her web of lace, the other her web of life. And as I stole through the chilly, gaunt, old house not one of its faint voices—and it had many—whispered to me: “It is nearly over—a little while and you will come no more! A little while and she will have gone, and there will be no one, and nothing here only the old, old house, and we, its voices!”
Some very busy days followed—long rehearsals every morning, and a new part, of greater or lesser length, every night; and it must have been a fortnight later when, being out of the bill, I put a bit of work in my pocket, took a book in my hand, and thus prepared for finding my old friend either in or out, started to make her a visit.
As I approached her door, I heard her talking, and said to myself, she must be over by the fire-place, her voice is so indistinct.
I tapped, but received no answer. Just then there came a pause in the talk within, and I tapped again; this time more loudly, but, to my surprise, I received no invitation to enter, though the talking was resumed in another moment.
I felt somewhat hurt, and turned to go away, but something restrained me, and I thought I would first make quite sure that she knew of my presence, I would knock loudly. As I raised my hand to do so, I heard a groan. That was enough for me; I waited no longer for permission, but opened the door and stepped in, and there amazement held me motionless; I no not know how long, for this room, whose orderliness had always been of that precise and rigid kind suggesting daily measurements with a foot-rule, was now in complete confusion. Chairs out of place, garments here and there, and the usually spotless hearth a mass of gray ashes and fallen black cinders.
And that small, rumpled heap of clothing at the foot of the bed, with white hair tossed and tangled—was that—could that be my Mrs. Worden?—she whose habits of neatness and purity were carried to the extremities; she who on a bitter winter morning, as on every other morning, sought such cramped privacy as her gaunt, old screen could secure for her, in the farthest, bleakest corner of her room, and there, with unskimped thoroughness, went through with the same process of grooming she had indulged in sixty years before, when she had had her maids to help her, after which she put herself into a sort of bolster case, with a hole in the far end for the passage of her head—and in this blue linen bag she became her own housemaid, and when the toilet of the room was finished to the points of its very fingers she again retired to the privacy of her screen and finally emerged “clothed and in her right mind,” as she used to say, when she appeared in her worn, old black gown, her black silk apron, her snow-white collar and small cuffs, and her bit of white tulle, by way of cap, upon her satin-smooth hair—and was this she, was this her room?
Suddenly Mrs. Worden drew down the arm which had been resting across her face, and, looking at me, exclaimed: “Oh, Betty, you are so late! Is breakfast ready now? My head aches, Betty; you never kept me waiting so long before!”
She rolled her head from side to side, and moaned a little, and while I threw off my wraps I recalled, with a heavy heart, the words of Mrs. Bulkley: “She’s breakin’ up; old Myra Worden is breakin’ fast.”
I hastened to reduce the room to something like order, to mend the fire and prepare some tea and rather doubtful toast, and when I had placed her in her chair and her eyes took in the familiar picture of the lake, they cleared perceptibly. She nodded her head and murmured: “Yes, my dearies, yes! I’m waiting for the sign, you won’t be long now! no, not long, not long!”