_Wherein the Tears of Compassion heal the Bleeding Feet of a Straying
Woman_
Betty fell feverishly a-drowsing as the chill dawn crept stealthily
into the room. When she awoke, Noll was still sleeping.
As she sat up in bed, heavy with unfinished sleep, she remembered the
letter of the night before. She slipped out of bed and dressed.
She descended gloomy stairways that were still haunted by the lingering
shadows of the departed night.
She hurried to Moll Davenant’s quarters.
The leaves were falling from the trees, and their bitter scent filled
the air with the pungent fragrance of late autumn.
Betty had not seen Moll for some weeks now--the door had been sternly
closed to her knock. But she decided to haunt the threshold until she
got admittance.
There was little need for setting the will to a stern resolution. As
Betty reached the topmost step of the high climb she paused to take
breath; and from within the door she heard the harsh cough that told of
the girl’s struggle for life.
She knocked, and, waiting for another fit of coughing to pass, she
knocked again.
A dreary pause, and the door opened.
Babette’s face peered round it. She put her finger to her lip and came
out on to the landing, kissed Betty, tears in her eyes, and said:
“She is dying. I got admittance two days ago.”
Betty went in, and as she halted on the threshold, her heart stood
still.
Seated on the side of her bed, in her poor worn night-gown, was Moll
Davenant, struggling for breath.
Betty ran to her, knelt down beside her, and drew a blanket about the
shoulders and limbs; and, as she did so, she saw that her body was
wasted as with old age. She saw also, with the quick sight that is
given to us in emotional moments, that the place was well kept--proofs
of the care of Babette’s hands were everywhere.
Moll Davenant stopped coughing, and a smile came into her eyes. She let
Betty put her gently into the warm bed.
“Betty, dear heart,” said she--“kneel by my bed, that I
may keep my hand on your head a little while.... I am
broken--broken--wounded--dying.... But God in His mercy has sent
you--and my feet have ceased to bleed--there are no thorns upon the
road now--no roughnesses. I cease from stumbling. And there is the
light--flashing up--from afar. And the song of birds. The spring must
be coming.... I have nearly gone mad for want of you----”
“Sh-sh! Molly--I am here,” she said.
As Eustace Lovegood stepped to Molly’s bed, the others slipped quietly
from the lamp-lit room....
The big man had been seated on the side of the bed some time, with
Moll’s slender fingers in his great hand, when she awoke and found him
there.
She leaped up and clasped her arms about him, as a frightened child
runs and hides itself in its mother’s skirts.
“Molly,” said he, taking her terrified face between his hands and
holding her eyes to his until the pallid face of fear became a flush of
shyness: “Molly, you are not frightened?”
She buried her face on his neck:
“I have been a mistake--a large mistake, all through,” she said.
She was seized with a violent fit of coughing.
The big man put her gently into the bed--the air was nipping, spite of
the room’s warmth.
“No, Moll, you always overstate a case.” He smiled sadly. “You even
admire my verses.”
She laughed in spite of herself--gladly; but fear lurked in her eyes.
Her mood turned to sudden terror. She leaped up, and held him with
fearful hands--the sweat stood in cold beads upon her flesh:
“For God’s sake, Eustace; don’t go away again----”
“No, Moll--I will never go away again.”
He soothed her, racked with the torture of violent coughing, her veins
standing out like cords upon the torn meagre body; and as the struggle
ran down he set her gently back amongst the pillows and warm bedclothes.
“Molly, you must be still--Betty sent me word that you were ill--and I
have come.”
She lay, her eyes closed, her hand in the big protecting hand of the
great-hearted man who sat beside her; lay so quietly there that he
thought she slept.
After awhile she turned to him and spoke:
“I have lain here, panic-stricken, doomed, wholly terrified, alone--in
my ears the sound of the worm’s nibble eating through the dull wood of
the narrow confining coffin--I have smelt corruption--I have died many
times--discarded--a rejected thing--flung into an unwept grave----”
“Hush, Molly----”
She smiled:
“Tush,” said she, “it is finished. I do not even fear to recall it.
It’s but a ghost’s walk seen by daylight--a ridicule that in the night
was a tragedy. Now there comes to me the fragrance of flowers. I am
in the arms of the sweet brown earth. I rise through sap and root and
stem and blossom of the dear plants to become life again, and a part of
the sweet exhalation of eternity. My heart’s blood leaps within me--I
am glad.... Your voice fills my ears, dear heart--if God’s be only as
exquisite!... Yours and Betty’s and this tender Babette’s--the voices
of them that I love are the refrain of an eternal hymn to me.”
“Molly”--he knelt beside her--“I am glad then that I have come.”
She ran her slender fingers over his hands with loving touch:
“I have been polluted,” she said. “They whispered, with evil satyr
eyes upon me, of what they called Love--and I had so little a while to
live--and I went. They stripped me naked, body and soul, and took me
furtively down the mean ways of adultery.... Oh, it was such shabby,
shabby sin!”
“Hush, Molly!”
“But Betty came--and the sunlight with her--and sweetness and delight.
And this other wounded woman brought me the light--brought her to
me--led me into pleasant ways again.... And thou, dear heart, at the
end of the journeying--that I might know love before I died.”
She sat up suddenly:
“But I am wasted, shrivelled, withered like the old,” she said--“look
at me and see it.”
She watched him hungrily, with anxious eyes.
He put his arms about her and held her to him.
She flung her arms about his great head, and held his face close to her:
“It is worth dying--to have loved a _man_,” she said.
She lay back quietly for a long while, gazing at the big fellow, who
put her back so gently amongst the propping pillows, where he sat
beside her. Her eyes were rid of frown and fret, suspicion and distrust
gone wholly from her. She held his hand in pathetic transparent
fingers; and a smile played about the corners of her mouth:
“Thou art wholly mine,” she said. “They will none know thee as I know
thee, my beloved--the hearing of none will hang expectant on thy
footfall as my hearing has served thee--none will wait upon thy dear
whims as my whims have waited--the notes and shades of thy dear voice
shall arouse in none other the sweet reverberations that have echoed
in the hollows of my quick ears.... Thou wilt bury with me thy largest
self.... I die wholly rich.... The rest may have the unessential husk
of thee.... Thou hast given me the Realities.... Thou hast brought me
into Paradise....”
For near upon a month Moll Davenant lay a-dying to the sublime litany
of a great passion; and in her dying touched the hem of the garment
that veils the majesty of Life.
She died on the Day of the Dead--her slender fingers in
Betty’s--passed, with a little sigh of glad relief to be asleep, into
the eternal mystery.
Eustace Lovegood, his head buried in his arms, knelt by the bed. He was
roused to consciousness of death by a sob from Betty as she touched the
sightless eyes and drew down the blinds of the dead woman’s soul.
“Betty,” said he, a great tear trickling slowly down the gentle
fellow’s pale cheek, “she was happy, indeed, to go into the dark
holding your dear hand.”
The last leaves of the year were falling, a threadbare russet carpet to
their feet, as they bore Moll’s still white body to her grave. Babette
with Betty added the holiness of her innocent heart’s service to the
simple dignity of the slow procession.
As they turned out of the street into the Boule Miche, all wayfarers
halting and standing with heads uncovered as the poor silent body
passed to its chill resting-place--children ceasing from play,
hushedly, to pull off caps of reverence; workmen and loafers, students
and women, merchants and servants, paying homage to that strange
procession of the dead which all must one day lead--a workman turned to
another:
“Poor soul,” said he, with a great pity--“she will never walk Paris
again.”
So might that sorrowing angel have spoken as, with irrevocable clang,
he sadly shut on departing Eve the excluding gates of Paradise.