A sudden jealousy flashed into his orange-green eyes. “I believe, if I died, you would marry the doctor,” he said.
Her face flushed protest; her heart thumped assent. “You have no right to say that, or anything like it,” she cried. “I have been a faithful wife to you, Jacóbus. Keep your dirty money.”
Her rising violence always cowed him. “Tut, tut,” he said; “so I shall. For many a long year, perhaps, and after that you may have it.”
“Not on those conditions.” She turned away from him altogether. “Make your will over again,” she said. “Do you hear me? And leave your money to Ursula, whose, in fact, it is by right. I am content with my settlement, as I told you at the time. You will remember that I told you to leave your money to Ursula. Money, with me, is not the one thing worth living for and talking about. But I wanted, in honesty, to warn you. You had better send for the lawyer to-night.”
“What nonsense!” he cried, angrily. “To hear you talk, one would think I hadn’t a week left to live. Is that what the doctor thinks, pray? The wish is father to the thought.”
Harriet controlled herself forcibly. She came close to the bed. “You needn’t make it to-night,” she said, softly. “But you had better make it soon.”
About a fortnight later Mynheer Jacóbus Mopius was buried with all the pomp he had himself prescribed. All his virtues and dignities were engraved upon his tombstone, so that his first wife’s adjoining one looked very bare by comparison. His last words had been, in a tremulous, squeaky sing-song:
“If thy dear hand but lift the fatal kni-i-ife,
I smile, I faint, and bid sweet death ‘All hail!’”