She hated a priest, and never knelt at a confessional again.
She did not die in the great house where she had passed the days of her power; every place she dwelt in sank into decay, the swifter where its integrity seemed permanent and secure; nothing purged the ambiguous spell which dragged them down together to the dust. The great house stood a ruin above a ruined court, a wreck of its former pride and splendor, black and foul; the fountain had fallen long ago, its pipes strangled and eaten away to crusts of lead and thready ribs of iron in the sand. Lilac lane was gone; there was no lane there any more, and had been none for years; there was no trace of where it ran, its hedge-rows or its gardens, or of Margot’s cottage other than a mouldering heap of broken brick, bleak rafters of the fallen roof, and one stark, fallen gable; of Gabrielle’s garden nothing remained.
Margot died in a dirty hovel in an unkempt alleyway, in the midst of a negro quarter, where, if one beat a drum or caused an instrument of an orchestra to sound, the people swarmed from the tenements like ants out of a hill. The place was fallen and foul, and filled with beggary; and that is the end of a tenement; for beggars are like distemper, the place where they have lived is hard to cure. All the houses in the alley were filthy; but none was filthy as hers.
There was a tremendous storm that night. Her house was ablaze with light; the little tailor who lived next door said, “Aha! Mother Go-go has company!” But the only person seen was one of the religious sort, a tall man, with a face like an unpleasant taste.
The thunder was terrific; the storm wild beyond compare. The wind blew with a sound like wild, gigantic laughter. “Ff-ff-ff!” went the gale; the gusts howled through the tailor’s house; the whole place shook; the blinds banged and crashed; the wind wailed, and sucked down the chimney with a sound like awful weeping; the little tailor’s soul was filled with a sense of enormous terror.
All night long the thunder rolled like the laughter of an angry god. Dislodged by the tremendous concussions the cockroaches flew out of the walls; and, in the morning, after the storm, the parrakeets which lived in the trees were all turned gray as ashes.
The windows and doors of Old Mother Go-go’s house were standing open wide. It was plain that they had stood open all night, and that the rain had beaten into the house unopposed.
This, however, occasioned but brief surprise. When they peered in at the door the rats were playing around the floor with the beads of a broken rosary.
A priest came, hurrying in. He did not stay in long. When he came out his face was white as a sheet and his lips were drawn and gray.