It was just a week before the end came that Hermia wrote, but day passed after day without bringing a response of any kind. The dying woman listened with an eagerness painful to witness, for her son's footfall on the stairs, but listened in vain.
"Who knows but that he's in trouble again and can't come," she moaned wearily to herself more than once.
During those last few days Hermia was a great deal with her. The person in whose house Mrs. Varrel lodged happened also to be ill at the time, and could not wait upon her as she had been in the habit of doing. As the dying woman's weakness increased she began to wander in her mind, but in all her wanderings her son seemed somehow to be mixed up. As far as Hermia could make out, he appeared to be always in some dire trouble from which his mother was vainly trying to extricate him; but there was nothing coherent about her utterances--they were merely a jumble of disconnected sentences, the gaps between which her listener lacked the knowledge needful to enable her to fill up. But, indeed, Hermia took very little heed of anything that fell from the widow's lips at such times, but waited patiently till the light of reason came back to her poor bewildered brain, for such wanderings were only occasional; the greater part of the time she was as mentally clear as ever she had been.
One day, however--it was the third day before she died--while one of her wandering fits was on her, she gave utterance to a remark which startled Hermia not a little. "There's blood on the notes!" she exclaimed. "Why should you want me to have charge of them? Take them back! I won't touch them!" Then her voice died away in an inarticulate murmur. After that it was impossible for Hermia to do otherwise than listen.
About an hour later, after a long silence, the dying woman cried out in a voice which sent a shiver through the girl, "No, no, I won't believe it! What! My boy--my Richard! Anyone but him--anyone but him!" Then later still, as before, "There's blood on the notes! I won't touch them!"
Hermia went home that night in a maze of perplexity and wonder. She felt as if she were standing on the verge of some dark mystery which might or might not be presently illumined for her by some unexpected. flash. She knew not what to think, what to do. What, indeed, could she do? She told herself nothing.
Next day Mrs. Varrel was perceptibly weaker, and although her mind wandered at times, her voice was so faint that it was only now and then it rose above a whisper. One connected sentence and no more, but one full of significance, reached the ears of the wondering girl. "Thirty--forty--fifty bright new sovereigns. Not one of them will I touch till you have told me where you got them from--not one!"
Did she fancy she was addressing her son? If not, whom?
It was an hour or two later. Mrs. Varrel had been asleep. Suddenly she awoke, and sat up in bed without help, a thing she had not been able to do for several weeks. The clear light of sanity had come back to her eyes. Laying a hand on Hermia's wrist, she said in a quavering voice. "He won't come now. I feel it--I know it. Before it is too late--and very soon it will be--I have something to give into your charge, Miss Hermy--something which I want you to promise to send to my boy after I'm gone, with just a line to say how his mother longed to see him before she died, but that she loved him to the last in spite of all." Then, after glancing round, although there was no one but themselves in the room, she drew Hermia closer to her and whispered, "It's money--money, my dear Miss Hermy, that I want to give into your charge."
"Whatever I can do in the way of helping you to carry out your wishes, Mrs. Varrel, you may rely upon my doing," replied the girl, in her most earnest tones.