CHAPTER XLII: TWIN DEATHBEDS
Grandmother and Aunt Jael were failing every hour. On the afternoon of the morrow of my misery old Doctor le Mesurier took me aside—I was the mistress now—and told me that for both of them it was only a matter of days.
"Which will be the first?" I asked him, between tears.
"I should not like to say."
"'Tis a close race, my dearie," was the way my Grandmother put it when, a few minutes later, I went upstairs to cry my heart out by her side: "a close race to glory, and the odds are even."
She smiled, with a tender frivolity that was new to me. New too was this form and manner of speech.
Both she and Aunt Jael knew that the end was near. I got a nurse the same evening, who took turns with me throughout the night, crossing from one bedroom to the other. I could not forget my own grief, but had little time to remember it. I was so dead-tired when I got to my bed that, almost for the first time in my life, there was no long waking-time: the breeding-time of misery and fear.
Aunt Jael developed jaundice, also a bronchial cough. She was soon too weak and suffering to be her own unpleasant self. The Devil, however, as late as four days before the end, made a last desperate struggle for the soul that had so long been His. It was one evening; I had brought the last beef-tea for the night, changed the hot-water jar, straightened her pillows and put everything right. Suddenly, without warning, she dashed the cup, full of the steaming liquid, into my face, which it cut and scalded; screaming the while like a mad thing. She was a vile, a repulsive sight. With her toothless hairy face distorted with rage, foul also with the dark-yellowish taint of the jaundice; with her beady black eyes gleaming savagely, her immense nose, her crested nightcap, she looked like some obscene monster, half-bird, half-witch. She clutched the ancient stick, slashed out at me savagely-feebly; her failure to hurt me bringing her to the last livid agony of rage. She screamed, grimaced, dribbled: "Ingrate, minx, harlot—oh, I'll kill 'ee, you and yer wicked idle Grandmother. I'll—." She was cut short by a fit of violent coughing. She lay back sweating with pain, almost unconscious with hate, her face too loathsome to behold. She was possessed of the Devil.