IV

One afternoon when I got home from school I found a note from Mrs.

Henshawe under my door, and went to her at once. She greeted me and

kissed me with unusual gravity.

“Nellie, dear, will you do a very special favour for me to-morrow?

It is the fifteenth of April, the anniversary of Madame Modjeska’s

death.” She gave me a key and asked me to open an old trunk in the

corner. “Lift the tray, and in the bottom, at one end, you will find

an old pair of long kid gloves, tied up like sacks. Please give them

to me.”

I burrowed down under old evening wraps and dinner dresses and came

upon the gloves, yellow with age and tied at both ends with corset

lacings; they contained something heavy that jingled. Myra was

watching my face and chuckled. “Is she thinking they are my wedding

gloves, piously preserved? No, my dear; I went before a justice of

the peace, and married without gloves, so to speak!” Untying the

string, she shook out a little rain of ten- and twenty-dollar gold

pieces.

“All old Irish women hide away a bit of money.” She took up a coin

and gave it to me. “Will you go to St. Joseph’s Church and inquire

for Father Fay; tell him you are from me, and ask him to celebrate

a mass to-morrow for the repose of the soul of Helena Modjeska,

Countess Bozenta-Chlapowska. He will remember; last year I hobbled

there myself. You are surprised, Nellie? Yes, I broke with the

Church when I broke with everything else and ran away with a German

free-thinker; but I believe in holy words and holy rites all the

same. It is a solace to me to know that to-morrow a mass will be

said here in heathendom for the spirit of that noble artist, that

beautiful and gracious woman.”

When I put the gold back into the trunk and started making the

tea, she said: “Oswald, of course, doesn’t know the extent of my

resources. We’ve often needed a hundred dollars or two so bitter

bad; he wouldn’t understand. But that is money I keep for unearthly

purposes; the needs of this world don’t touch it.”

As I was leaving she called me back: “Oh, Nellie, can’t we go to

Gloucester’s cliff on Saturday, if it’s fine? I do long to!”

We went again, and again. Nothing else seemed to give her so much

pleasure. But the third time I stopped for her, she declared she was

not equal to it. I found her sitting in her chair, trying to write

to an old friend, an Irish actress I had met at her apartment, in

New York, one of the guests at that New Year’s eve party. Her son, a

young actor, had shot himself in Chicago because of some sordid love

affair. I had seen an account of it in the morning paper.

“It touches me very nearly,” Mrs. Henshawe told me. “Why, I used to

keep Billy with me for weeks together when his mother was off on

tour. He was the most truthful, noble-hearted little fellow. I had so

hoped he would be happy. You remember his mother?”

I remembered her very well--large and jovial and hearty she was. Myra

began telling me about her, and the son, whom she had not seen since

he was sixteen.

“To throw his youth away like that, and shoot himself at

twenty-three! People are always talking about the joys of youth--but,

oh, how youth can suffer! I’ve not forgotten; those hot southern

Illinois nights, when Oswald was in New York, and I had no word from

him except through Liddy, and I used to lie on the floor all night

and listen to the express trains go by. I’ve not forgotten.”

“Then I wonder why you are sometimes so hard on him now,” I murmured.

Mrs. Henshawe did not reply to me at once. The corners of her mouth

trembled, then drew tight, and she sat with her eyes closed as if she

were gathering herself for something.

At last she sighed, and looked at me wistfully. “It’s a great pity,

isn’t it, Nellie, to reach out a grudging hand and try to spoil the

past for any one? Yes, it’s a great cruelty. But I can’t help it.

He’s a sentimentalist, always was; he can look back on the best of

those days when we were young and loved each other, and make himself

believe it was all like that. It wasn’t. I was always a grasping,

worldly woman; I was never satisfied. All the same, in age, when the

flowers are so few, it’s a great unkindness to destroy any that are

left in a man’s heart.” The tears rolled down her cheeks, she leaned

back, looking up at the ceiling. She had stopped speaking because

her voice broke. Presently she began again resolutely. “But I’m made

so. People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know. We

were.... A man and woman draw apart from that long embrace, and see

what they have done to each other. Perhaps I can’t forgive him for

the harm I did him. Perhaps that’s it. When there are children, that

feeling goes through natural changes. But when it remains so personal

... something gives way in one. In age we lose everything; even the

power to love.”

“He hasn’t,” I suggested.

“He has asked you to speak for him, my dear? Then we have destroyed

each other indeed!”

“Certainly he hasn’t, Mrs. Myra! But you are hard on him, you know,

and when there are so many hard things, it seems a pity.”

“Yes, it’s a great pity.” She drew herself up in her chair. “And I’d

rather you didn’t come any more for the time being, Nellie. I’ve been

thinking the tea made me nervous.” She was smiling, but her mouth

curled like a little snake, as I had seen it do long ago. “Will you

be pleased to take your things and go, Mrs. Casey?” She said it with

a laugh, but a very meaning one.

As I rose I watched for some sign of relenting, and I said humbly

enough: “Forgive me, if I’ve said anything I shouldn’t. You know I

love you very dearly.”

She mockingly bowed her tyrant’s head. “It’s owing to me infirmities,

dear Mrs. Casey, that I’ll not be able to go as far as me door wid

ye.”

[Illustration: (Two lit candles in tall candlesticks)]

V

For days after that episode I did not see Mrs. Henshawe at all. I

saw Oswald at dinner in the restaurant every night, and he reported

her condition to me as if nothing had happened. The short-haired

newspaper girl often came to our table, and the three of us

talked together. I could see that he got great refreshment from

her. Her questions woke pleasant trains of recollection, and her

straightforward affection was dear to him. Once Myra, in telling

me that it was a pleasure to him to have me come into their lives

again thus, had remarked: “He was always a man to feel women, you

know, in every way.” It was true. That crude little girl made all

the difference in the world to him. He was generous enough to become

quite light-hearted in directing her inexperience and her groping

hunger for life. He even read her poor little “specials” and showed

her what was worst in them and what was good. She took correction

well, he told me.

Early in June Mrs. Henshawe began to grow worse. Her doctors told us

a malignant growth in her body had taken hold of a vital organ, and

that she would hardly live through the month. She suffered intense

pain from pressure on the nerves in her back, and they gave her

opiates freely. At first we had two nurses, but Myra hated the night

nurse so intensely that we dismissed her, and, as my school was

closed for the summer, I took turns with Oswald in watching over

her at night. She needed little attention except renewed doses of

codeine. She slept deeply for a few hours, and the rest of the night

lay awake, murmuring to herself long passages from her old poets.

Myra kept beside her now an ebony crucifix with an ivory Christ. It

used to hang on the wall, and I had supposed she carried it about

because some friend had given it to her. I felt now that she had it

by her for a different reason. Once when I picked it up from her bed

to straighten her sheet, she put out her hand quickly and said: “Give

it to me. It means nothing to people who haven’t suffered.”

She talked very little after this last stage of her illness began;

she no longer complained or lamented, but toward Oswald her manner

became strange and dark. She had certain illusions; the noise

overhead she now attributed entirely to her husband. “Ah, there’s

he’s beginning it again,” she would say. “He’ll wear me down in the

end. Oh, let me be buried in the king’s highway!”

When Oswald lifted her, or did anything for her now, she was careful

to thank him in a guarded, sometimes a cringing tone. “It’s bitter

enough that I should have to take service from you--you whom I have

loved so well,” I heard her say to him.

When she asked us to use candles for light during our watches, and to

have no more of the electric light she hated, she said accusingly, at

him rather than to him: “At least let me die by candlelight; that is

not too much to ask.”

Father Fay came to see her almost daily now. His visits were long,

and she looked forward to them. I was, of course, not in her room

when he was there, but if he met me in the corridor he stopped to

speak to me, and once he walked down the street with me talking of

her. He was a young man, with a fresh face and pleasant eyes, and

he was deeply interested in Myra. “She’s a most unusual woman, Mrs.

Henshawe,” he said when he was walking down the street beside me.

Then he added, smiling quite boyishly: “I wonder whether some of the

saints of the early Church weren’t a good deal like her. She’s not at

all modern in her make-up, is she?”

During those days and nights when she talked so little, one felt

that Myra’s mind was busy all the while--that it was even abnormally

active, and occasionally one got a clue to what occupied it. One

night when I was giving her her codeine she asked me a question.

“Why is it, do you suppose, Nellie, that candles are in themselves

religious? Not when they are covered by shades, of course--I mean the

flame of a candle. Is it because the Church began in the catacombs,

perhaps?”

At another time, when she had been lying like a marble figure for a

long while, she said in a gentle, reasonable voice:

“Ah, Father Fay, that isn’t the reason! Religion is different from

everything else; _because in religion seeking is finding_.”

She accented the word “seeking” very strongly, very deeply. She

seemed to say that in other searchings it might be the object of the

quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental

that one got on the way; but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it

was the seeking itself that rewarded.

One of those nights of watching stands out in my memory as embracing

them all, as being the burden and telling the tale of them all. Myra

had had a very bad day, so both Oswald and I were sitting up with

her. After midnight she was quiet. The candles were burning as usual,

one in her alcove. From my chair by the open window I could see her

bed. She had been motionless for more than an hour, lying on her

back, her eyes closed. I thought she was asleep. The city outside was

as still as the room in which we sat. The sick woman began to talk to

herself, scarcely above a whisper, but with perfect distinctness; a

voice that was hardly more than a soft, passionate breath. I seemed

to hear a soul talking.

“I could bear to suffer ... so many have suffered. But why must it be

like this? I have not deserved it. I have been true in friendship;

I have faithfully nursed others in sickness.... Why must I die like

this, alone with my mortal enemy?”

Oswald was sitting on the sofa, his face shaded by his hand. I looked

at him in affright, but he did not move or shudder. I felt my hands

grow cold and my forehead grow moist with dread. I had never heard a

human voice utter such a terrible judgment upon all one hopes for.

As I sat on through the night, after Oswald had gone to catch a few

hours of sleep, I grew calmer; I began to understand a little what

she meant, to sense how it was with her. Violent natures like hers

sometimes turn against themselves ... against themselves and all

their idolatries.

[Illustration: (A leaning tree on a hill overlooking the sea)]