When the flame burned clearly she took the candle to the bedside, and, bending down, held it close to the face of the old woman who was lying there. The eyes opened and turned towards the overhanging face: small, dim, blue eyes, full of the stupor of illness, looking out of the pathetically commonplace little old face with a far-away perplexity.
“Was that Francie that was at the door?” she said in a drowsy voice that had in it the lagging drawl of intense weakness.
Charlotte took the tiny wrist in her hand, and felt the pulse with professional attention. Her broad, perceptive finger-tips gauged the forces of the little thread that was jerking in the thin network of tendons, and as she laid the hand down she said to herself, “She’ll not last out the turn of the night.”
“Why doesn’t Francie come in?” murmured the old woman again in the fragmentary, uninflected voice that seems hardly spared from the unseen battle with death.
“It wasn’t her you asked me for at all,” answered Charlotte. “You said you wanted to say good-bye to Susan. Here, you’d better have a sip of this.”
The old woman swallowed some brandy and water, and the stimulant presently revived unexpected strength in her.
“Charlotte,” she said, “it isn’t cats we should be thinking of now. God knows the cats are safe with you. But little Francie, Charlotte; we ought to have done more for her. You promised me that if you got the money you’d look after her. Didn’t you now, Charlotte? I wish I’d done more for her. She’s a good little thing—a good little thing—” she repeated dreamily.
Few people would think it worth their while to dispute the wandering futilities of an old dying woman, but even at this eleventh hour Charlotte could not brook the revolt of a slave.
“Good little thing!” she exclaimed, pushing the brandy bottle noisily in among a crowd of glasses and medicine bottles, “a strapping big woman of nineteen! You didn’t think her so good the time you had her here, and she put Susan’s father and mother in the well!”
The old lady did not seem to understand what she had said.