Mrs. Rannock did not live to know of her son's ghastly fate. Her frail life ended peacefully before Faunce's discovery was a week old. Her last breath expired in words of love, her last movement was a feeble motion of her hand towards the beloved figure which her fancy had conjured out of thin air, the figure of her son, standing by her bedside, as she had seen him again and again in delirious dreams.
Faunce did all that compassionate kindness could do for Bolisco's wretched wife. The impression of her letter in the blotting-book had been one of the links in the chain of circumstance, for, taken in conjunction with Chater's evidence, it showed why Rannock had gone to Southampton the day before the American steamer started. Her position as Bolisco's wife made her impossible as a witness; but her letter was evidence, and her relations with the murderer became as notorious as every other detail in the story of the crime.
"It can't hurt me," she told Faunce, the night after the death sentence at Winchester. "I'm past hurting. Bolisco's better out of the world, for he'd never stop doing harm as long as he was in it—and the sooner I follow him the better for me."
Faunce proved a kind friend to the unhappy woman whose days and nights were haunted by the image of her murdered lover. Broken in spirits, all the evil ways of her dissipated youth wreaking their revenge upon health and beauty, the physician to whom Faunce took her pronounced her doom. The hand of death was upon her. It was only a question of time.
"If she stays in London she will hardly last through the winter," he told Faunce. "I should recommend Bournemouth or Ventnor—Ventnor for choice. And she may rub along through next summer. But you must stop the morphia habit."
"I'll do what I can," said Faunce; "but I am a busy man. She is not of my kith and kin. Only I don't want her to die like a dog without a friend near her."
"She has been a very beautiful woman," said the doctor pityingly. "One must be sorry for such a life thrown away."
Faunce engaged Betsy, the good-natured lodging-house drudge, to take care of Mrs. Randall, and took them to cottage lodgings at Ventnor, not far from the Consumption Hospital; and in that lovely spot, facing the blue water, Kate Delmaine lived through the summer and autumn after Bolisco's execution. Faunce looking in at the cottage now and then—a flying visitor from Portsmouth or Southampton—to see that she was being properly cared for.