Hedvig had turned nurse again. Silent, indefatigable, with the expression of painfully heroic resignation of her profession she moved silently about his bed. Not a word did they speak of what had passed between them. They were like people who have become sober and who scarcely suspect what they have done during their intoxication.
Until one day Percy wanted to be carried out into the new gallery.
At first Hedvig objected vehemently. He was not to be moved. He could not bear the least movement. Only after persistent prayers did she give in to his whim, but with an injured, worried expression. And she did not leave him alone. Erect and rigid she stood on guard by his pillow in the hall.
Here the dying Percy lay amongst all his new art. A look of bitterness and weariness fell across his face. He shivered a little. The walls looked around him indescribably cold and unsubstantial. They seemed to radiate cold and meaninglessness. The stiffness and perverse spasms of the latest fashion in art gave him a terrible feeling of a blighted life frozen in death.
“They can never have had a fire here,” he mumbled, and crept right down under the bedclothes.
Hedvig was already prepared to have him carried back to the bedroom. But then Percy caught a glimpse through his half-closed eyelids of a little spring landscape, a hill with apple trees in bloom against white walls. In the midst of all the frostiness he received a lovely impression of a pure motive, of a simplicity that was full of meaning and of quiet appealing beauty. And he remembered again his promises in Paris. They again seemed to him important and binding. He took the picture with him and had it placed at the foot of the bed when he was carried back into his “crypt,” as he called his bedroom alcove. Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow I will send for a lawyer and will arrange the matter.
But the lawyer was not sent for. Percy had other things to dream about. In the twilight Hedvig came and sat down on the edge of his bed. She had been into town for a while, for the first time for weeks. She looked as solemn as a priestess. And after a moment’s silence she told him that she expected a child.
Percy did not say much. He whispered thanks. Then he kissed her hand and put it on his chest. And then he lay there trying to imagine that new life that he would never raise up in his arms. But it was difficult to feel that it was true. He could scarcely imagine Hedvig as a mother. He had remorse because he did not feel this more deeply. He kissed her hand again.
Percy lived one week longer. He had several troublesome attacks of suffocation after which he was seized by a death-like weakness. But as soon as he had a clear moment Hedvig spoke to him of the child. It grew, it developed, it lived in her consciousness. It was a boy and he was called Percy. He was a little delicate, but handsome, with dark hair like his mother’s, blue eyes like his father’s. Hedvig was no longer so quiet. She spoke quickly, nervously, in short breathless sentences. It seemed as if she had tried to put her own fear to sleep. She made a convulsive and touching effort to keep death away with the last resources of her womanhood.
And still the whole thing was a lie.