At last the cab stopped before one of the narrow doors, flanked with little iron railings, the usual parlour window over-looking a narrow little area. In the room above a light was burning, and all the rest of the house dark. A square printed advertisement of some trade was in the parlour window, just visible by the lamplight, and a painted board of the same description was attached to the railings. The door was opened by a young woman with a candle in her hand, which nearly blew out with the entry of the blast of night air, and flickered before her face so that it was difficult to make out her features. She gave a little cry, ‘Oh, it’s Mr. Wentworth!’ and bade him come in. To describe the sensation with which Wentworth realised his position, known and expected in this house, going up the narrow stair which was all that separated him from the sickroom, from the dying woman, between whom and himself he was thus acknowledging a connection, is more than I can attempt. There was no secret here—a man in the slipshod dress of a worker at home looked out from the little back room and asked, ‘Has he come?’ as he passed. On the top of the stairs an older woman, with the dreadful black cap of the elderly decent English matron of the lower classes, came out to meet him, and put out her hand in welcome. ‘How do you do, Mr. Wentworth? She’s that excited there’s no keeping her still: and I’m so glad you’ve come.’
In the face of all this, his heart sank more and more. He felt himself no longer on a mission of mercy, but going to meet his fate.
CHAPTER IV.
The room was small and dingy: opposite to the door an old-fashioned tent-bed hung with curtains of a huge-patterned chintz, immense flowers on a black ground: a candle standing on a small table by the bedside, another faintly blinking from the mantelpiece beyond, the darkness of everything around bringing into fuller relief the whiteness of the bed, the pillows heaped up to support a restless head, a worn and ghastly face, with large, gleaming eyes, which seemed to have an independent, restless life of their own. The face had been pretty when Wentworth had known it first. It was scarcely recognisable now. The cheek bones had become prominent, the lower part of the face worn away almost to nothing, the eyes enlarged in their hollow caves. She looked as she had been said to be—dying—except that the light in her eyes spoke of a secret force which might be fever, or might be because they were the last citadel of life. But though she seemed at the last extremity of existence, a few efforts had been made to ornament and adorn the dying creature, efforts which added unspeakably, horribly, to the ghastly look of her face. The collar of her night-dress had been folded over a pink ribbon, leaving bare an emaciated throat, round which was a little gold chain, suspending a locket: and her hair, still plentiful and pretty, the one human decoration which does not fade, was carefully dressed, though somewhat disordered by the continual motion of her restlessness. It was all horrible to Wentworth, death masquerading in the poor little vanities which were so unspeakably mean and small in comparison with that majesty, and all to please him—God help the forlorn creature! to make her look as when he had praised her prettiness, she from whom every prettiness, every possibility of pleasing, had gone.
She held out her two hands, which were worn to skin and bone, ‘Oh, Oliver, my Oliver! oh, I knew he would come. Oh, didn’t I say he would come?’ she cried. Wentworth could not but take the bony fingers into his own. He saw that it was expected he should kiss her; but that was impossible. He sat down in the chair which had been placed for him by the bedside.
‘I am very sorry to see you so ill, my poor girl,’ he said.
‘Ill’s not the word, Mr. Wentworth; she’s dying. She hasn’t above an hour or two in this world,’ said the mother, or the woman who took a mother’s place.
He gave her a look of horrified reproach, with the usual human sense that it is cruel to announce this fact too clearly. ‘I hope it is not quite so bad as that.’
‘Yes, Oliver; oh, dear Oliver, yes, yes,’ said the sick woman. ‘This is—my last night—on earth.’ She spoke with difficulty, pausing and panting between the words, her thin lips distended with a smile, the smile (he could not help remarking) that had always been a little artificial, poor girl! at her best. But even at that awful moment she was endeavouring to charm him still (he felt with horror) by the means which she supposed to have charmed him in the past.
‘Tell him, mother, tell him. I haven’t got—the strength.’ She put out her hands for his hand, which he could not refuse, though her touch made him shiver, and lay looking at him, smiling, with that awful attempt at fascination. He covered his eyes with his disengaged hand, half because of the horror in his soul, half that he might not see her face.