For ten hours a day they stitched carpets at the big factory near the Cathedral, earning enough money to keep them in tolerable comfort in their two-roomed lodging in Rue Egnatia. But the time soon came when Jason was unfit for work, and the twenty-five drachma note that Artemis carried home each week had to provide for the needs of both. Artemis made a great show of eating big meals, but she denied herself even the necessaries of life in order that Jason might have the costly foods that nourished him.
If she had loved him in health, she now worshipped him in sickness, for Jason was not only husband—he was like a son as well. And, indeed, he soon became as helpless as a little child. Her grief was bearable because she was so constantly employed that she had no time in which to brood upon it; the circumstances that poisoned her mind was that she could not tend him in the daytime, for she was compelled by her work to leave him in the care of their landlady.
Very soon their savings came to an end. Medicines and rich foods exhausted her weekly wage two days after she received it, and it became imperative to earn a much larger sum.
“Dear Artemis,” said Jason one evening, as he lay in bed watching her mending a stocking, “it’s wonderful how far you make the money go. But I think I can guess how you manage it. You don’t eat enough yourself. You are pale and thin, and your beautiful hair is losing its lustre.”
With her needle poised in the air, she turned to him with a smile.
“I don’t eat enough? Why, I sometimes think I eat too much. I know I’m pale and perhaps a little thin, but just think of the weather we’re having! It’s the hottest August we’ve had for years and years. Besides, I never was one to have much colour.”
She continued looking at him, for she loved his handsome dark face, now grown weirdly beautiful with the ravages of disease.
“I wish the end would come more quickly,” he said. “Sometimes I think it is wrong for me to take medicines and eat costly food. No one can save me—what’s the use of it? Why prolong my wretched life?”
“Because, living, you make me happy. In all the world I have only you, Jason. Do not leave me an hour before you must.... But we must not talk like this; we must not grow sad when the evening comes. I’ll light the lamp; it will be a companion for us. And then, if you like, I will sing you a new song I learned to-day from one of the girls at the factory.”
But though she spoke so cheerfully, her heart was as heavy as lead. She had come to the end of her money, and Jason’s food for the morrow had yet to be bought.