She did not quite understand all this. Those looks of interest, so inexpressibly sweet to her, she thought were excited by the view of her position as affected her health and comfort. She thought it was that consumption which, sooner or later, she believed must be her fate, which he was anticipating with so much compassion. She was blind to the far more dreadful dangers which surrounded her.
Poor Mrs. Saunders! At last it could no longer be concealed from her. She must die.
He broke the intelligence to her in the gentlest terms, as she, at last, in a paroxysm of terror, asked the question; giving her what hope he could, but still not denying that she stood in a fearful strait. It was a terrible scene that followed. Such a frightful agitation and hurry to accomplish in a few counted hours what ought to have been the business of a life. Such calling for psalms and prayers; such piteous beseechings for help; and, last of all, such an awful awakening of a slumbering conscience.
Like Richard's bed, on the eve of Bosworth fight, it seemed as if the spectral shadows of all those she had injured in the body or the soul, by her unerring demands upon one, and her negligence as to the other, rose a host of dismal spectres round. Their pale, exhausted, pleading looks, as she scolded and threatened, when the clock struck one, and the task was yet undone, and the head for a moment dropped, and the throbbing fingers were still. Those hollow coughs in which she would not believe—those hectic flushes that she would not see—and worse, those walks, those letters, at which she had connived, because the girls did so much better when they had some nonsense to amuse them.
What fearful revelations were made as she raved aloud, or sank into a drowsy, dreary delirium The old clergyman, who attended her, consoled, and reasoned, and prayed in vain. The two young people—that lovely girl, and that feeling, interesting, young man—stood by the bed appalled: he, ghastly pale—pale with an agony of despairing pity—she, trembling in every limb.
The death agony, and then that poor woman went to her account. There was no one in the room but themselves; it was late in the night, the morning, indeed, began faintly to dawn. The maids were all gone to bed, glad enough to escape the scene. He stood silently watching the departing breath. It stopped. He gave a deep sigh, and, stooping down, piously closed the eyes. She had turned away in horror and in dread, but shedding some natural tears. He stood looking at her some time, as there she stood, weeping by the bed; at last he spoke.
"This may seem a strange time to choose, but I have something to say to you. Will you listen to me?"
She took her handkerchief from her eyes, and gazed at him with a wondering, grave sort of look, as a child might do. His voice had something so very remarkable in it.
He passed to the side where she was standing, and said, "I am a very, very poor man, and I have a helpless mother entirely dependent upon me for support, and, if it were my last morsel of bread, ay, and wife and children were perishing for want of it, it is she who should have it."
She only looked at him wondering like.