“Mrs. Elles sent me an urgent telegram, bidding me come here at once on a matter of life and death,” said Rivers simply, “so of course I came.”
“It is a matter of death,” Mrs. Elles said, tottering back to the sofa. “Listen, both of you. I have done this because I was so miserable, and my life seemed of no use to any one—rather the reverse, in fact. I saw so well, that if I lived, I should live only to disgrace you, Edmund. People have explained to me what it was that I should be doing to you, injuring you, preventing you from ever being President, forcing you to live abroad, and ruining you generally. I saw the thought in your eyes that last time that I was with you, and that you almost hated me—I represented disgrace and shame to you! Oh, don’t deny it! I am quite sure that you do not love me, or you would have loved through it all, and been willing to go through it all gladly for the sake of getting me. Men do—some men! So I took the only way—I took poison!”
She allowed herself to fall back exhausted.
“Tchk! Tchk!” came from Edmund or Egidia. The Nemesis of Pose still pursued her votary. They neither of them believed in her.
“Now look here, Phœbe!” said Egidia, speaking to her severely, as to a spoilt child. “Look here! What tricks have you been playing with yourself? I insist on knowing.”
“And I want to tell you,” Mrs. Elles replied plaintively, “if only you would let me! I never thought people treated—people like me—like this! It isn’t even kind.”
So speaking, she clearly signified her annoyance at the complete failure of this scene, as a scene, though she knew that she had the trump card of death up her sleeve, and that in less than ten minutes the inherent tragedy of it all would be proved to both these scoffers in the most effectual way.
“Listen,” she said to them again, and her voice was very poignant and low. “I will tell you. I asked a man, who had promised me that he would do anything in the world for me, that I might ask him to do, to give me the means of death in an envelope sealed, so that I might use it if the burden of life became too great for me to bear. I told him that the mere knowledge that I could end it at any given time would help me to bear it. I did not tell him that I meant to use what he gave me at once, I perhaps did not—quite—but this morning in the fog—I felt it all so hopeless—so sad—and the future as black as the present, that I drank it off all at once. That was an hour ago—and in another hour I shall be dead.”
“Who do you say gave it you?” Rivers asked quickly, when she had finished.
“Dr. André. Now please don’t—bother me any more.” She sank back—she had literally grown ashen.