When the woman reached the hospital she was still alive but in acute suffering. She was taken into the female accident ward and placed on a bed in a corner by the door. The hour was very late and the ward had been long closed down for the night. It was almost in darkness. The gas jets were lowered and the little light they shed fell upon the white figures of alarmed patients sitting up in bed to watch this sudden company with something dreadful on a stretcher.

A screen was drawn round the burnt woman’s bed, and in this little enclosure, full of shadow, a strange and moving spectacle came to pass. The miserable patient was burned to death. Her clothes were reduced to a dark, adhesive crust. In the layers of cinder that marked the front of her dress I noticed two needles that had evidently been stuck there when she ceased her work. Her face was hideously disfigured, the eyes closed, the lips swollen and bladder-like and the cheeks charred in patches to a shiny brown. All her hair was burnt off and was represented by a little greasy ash on the pillow, her eyebrows were streaks of black, while her eyelashes were marked by a line of charcoal at the edge of the lids. She might have been burnt at the stake at Smithfield.

As she was sinking it was necessary that her dying depositions should be taken. For this purpose a magistrate was summoned. With him came two policemen, supporting between them the shaking form of the now partly-sobered husband. The scene was one of the most memorable I have witnessed. I can still see the darkened ward, the whispering patients sitting bolt upright in their nightdresses, the darker corner behind the screen, lit only by the light of a hand lamp, the motionless figure, the tray of dressings no longer needed, the half-emptied feeding-cup. I can recall too the ward cat, rudely disturbed, stalking away with a leisurely air of cynical unconcern.

The patient’s face was in shadow, the nurse and I stood on one side of the bed, the magistrate was seated on the other. At the foot of the bed were the two policemen and the prisoner. The man—who was in the full light of the lamp—was a disgustful object. He could barely stand; his knees shook under him; his hair was wild; his eyes blood-shot; his face bloated and bestial. From time to time he blubbered hysterically, rocking to and fro. Whenever he looked at his wife he blubbered and seemed in a daze until a tug at his arm by the policeman woke him up.

The magistrate called upon me to inform the woman that she was dying. I did so. She nodded. The magistrate then said to her—having warned her of the import of her evidence—“Tell me how this happened.” She replied, as clearly as her swollen lips would allow, “It was a pure accident.”

These were the last words she uttered, for she soon became unconscious and in a little while was dead. She died with a lie on her lips to save the life of the brute who had murdered her, who had burned her alive. She had lied and yet her words expressed a dominating truth. They expressed her faithfulness to the man who had called her wife, her forgiveness for his deeds of fiendish cruelty and a mercy so magnificent as to be almost divine.

VI
A SEA LOVER

THE man I would tell about was a mining engineer some forty and odd years of age. Most of his active life had been spent in Africa whence he had returned home to England with some gnawing illness and with the shadow of death upon him. He was tall and gaunt. The tropical sun had tanned his face an unwholesome brown, while the fever-laden wind of the swamp had blanched the colour from his hair. He was a tired-looking man who gave one the idea that he had been long sleepless. He was taciturn, for he had lived much alone and, but for a sister, had no relatives and few friends. For many years he had wandered to and fro surveying and prospecting, and when he turned to look back upon the trail of his life there was little to see but the ever-stretching track, the file of black porters, the solitary camp.

The one thing that struck me most about him was his love of the sea. If he was ill, he said, it must be by the sea. It was a boyish love evidently which had never died out of his heart. It seemed to be his sole fondness and the only thing of which he spoke tenderly.