And she forgot to feel any wonder that Flaxman, in his chivalry, should treat her as though she were a girl with nerves.
'Well, it was the surroundings that were so ghastly. When we got to the house an old woman rushed at me—"His wife's in there, but ye'll not find her in her senses; she's been at it from eight o'clock this morning. We've took the children away." I didn't know what she meant exactly till we got into the little front room. There, such a spectacle! A young woman on a chair by the fire sleeping heavily, dead drunk; the breakfast things on the table, the sun blazing in on the dust and the dirt, and on the woman's face. I wanted to carry him into the room on the other side—he was unconscious; but a doctor had come up with us, and made us put him down on a bed there was in the corner. Then we got some brandy and poured it down. The doctor examined him, looked at his foot, threw something over it. "Nothing to be done," he said—"internal injuries—he can't live half an hour." The next minute the poor fellow opened his eyes. They had pulled away the bed from the wall. Your husband was on the farther side, kneeling. When he opened his eyes, clearly the first thing he saw was his wife. He half sprang up—Elsmere caught him—and gave a horrible cry—indescribably horrible. "At it again, at it again! My God!" Then he fell back fainting. They got the wife out of the room between them—a perfect log—you could hear her heavy breathing from the kitchen opposite. We gave him more brandy and he came to again. He looked up in your husband's face. "She hasn't broke out for two months," he said, so piteously, "two months—and now—I'm done—I'm done—and she'll just go straight to the devil!" And it comes out, so the neighbours told us, that for two years or more he had been patiently trying to reclaim this woman, without a word of complaint to anybody, though his life must have been a dog's life. And now, on his deathbed, what seemed to be breaking his heart was, not that he was dying, but that his task was snatched from him!'
Flaxman paused, and looked away out of window. He told his story with difficulty.
'Your husband tried to comfort him—promised that the wife and children should be his special care, that everything that could be done to save and protect them should be done. And the poor little fellow looked up at him, with the tears running down his cheeks, and—and—blessed him. "I cared about nothing," he said, "when you came. You've been—God—to me—I've seen Him—in you." Then he asked us to say something. Your husband said verse after verse of the Psalms, of the Gospels, of St. Paul. His eyes grew filmy, but he seemed every now and then to struggle back to life, and as soon as he caught Elsmere's face his look lightened. Towards the last he said something we none of us caught; but your husband thought it was a line from Emily Brontë's "Hymn," which he said to them last Sunday in lecture.'
He looked up at her interrogatively, but there was no response in her face.
'I asked him about it,' the speaker went on, 'as we came home. He said Grey of St. Anselm's once quoted it to him, and he has had a love for it ever since.'
'Did he die while you were there?' asked Catherine presently after a silence. Her voice was dull and quiet. He thought her a strange woman.
'No,' said Flaxman, almost sharply; 'but by now it must be over. The last sign of consciousness was a murmur of his children's names. They brought them in, but his hands had to be guided to them. A few minutes after it seemed to me that he was really gone, though he still breathed. The doctor was certain there would be no more consciousness. We stayed nearly another hour. Then his brother came, and some other relations, and we left him. Oh, it is over now!'
Hugh Flaxman sat looking out into the dingy bit of London garden. Penetrated with pity as he was, he felt the presence of Elsmere's pale, silent, unsympathetic wife an oppression. How could she receive such a story in such a way?
The door opened and Robert came in hurriedly.