At length Angela opened, with a key from her satchel, a door on the top
landing, and we entered a darkened room which was partly in the roof.
As we stepped in I heard rapid breathing, which told me that we were in
a sick chamber, and then a man's voice, very husky and weak, saying:
"Is that you, Agnes?"
"It's only me, dear," said Angela..
After a moment she turned up the solitary gas-jet, which had been
burning low, and I saw the shadowy form of a man lying in a bed that
stood in a corner. He was wasted with consumption, his long bony hands
were lying on the counterpane, his dark hair was matted over his
forehead as from sweat, but I could not mistake the large, lively grey
eyes that looked out of his long thin face. It was Father Giovanni.
Angela went up to him and kissed him, and I could see that his eyes
lighted with a smile as he saw her coming into the room.
"There's somebody with you, isn't there?" he said.
"Yes. Who do you think it is?"
"Who?"
"Don't you remember little Margaret Mary at the Sacred Heart?"
"Is this she?"
"Yes," said Angela, and then in a hoarse, angry voice the man said:
"What has she come here for?"
Angela told him that I had seen her on Piccadilly, and being a great
lady now, I (Oh heaven!) was one of the people who came out into the
streets at midnight to rescue lost ones.
"She looked as if she wondered what had brought me down to that life, so
I've fetched her home to see."
I was shocked at Angela's mistake, but before I could gather strength or
courage to correct her Giovanni was raising himself in bed and saying,
with a defiant air, his eyes blazing like watch-fires:
"She does it for me, if you want to know. I've been eleven months
ill--she does it all for me, I tell you."
And then, in one of those outbursts of animation which come to the
victims of that fell disease, he gave me a rapid account of what had
happened to them since they ran away from Rome--how at first he had
earned their living as a teacher of languages; how it became known that
he was an unfrocked and excommunicated priest who had broken his vows,
and then his pupils had left him; how they had struggled on for some
years longer, though pursued by this character as by a malignant curse;
and how at length his health had quite broken down, and he would have
starved but for Agnes (Angela being her nun's name), who had stuck to
him through everything.
While the sick man said this in his husky voice, Angela was sitting on
the bed by his side with her arm about his waist, listening to him with
a sort of pride and looking at me with a kind of triumph.
"I dare say you wonder why I didn't try to get work," she said. "I
_could_ have got it if I had wanted to. I could have got it at the
Italian laundry. But what was two shillings a day to a man who was
ordered new milk and fresh eggs five times every twenty-four hours, not
to speak of the house rent?"
"She ought to have let me die first," said Giovanni, and then, looking
at me again with his large, glittering, fierce eyes, he said:
"_You_ think she ought to have let me die, don't you?"
"No, no, no," I said--it was all I _could_ say, for their mistake about
myself was choking me.
Perhaps my emotion appeased both of them, for after a moment Angela beat
out Giovanni's pillow and straightened his counterpane, and then told
him to lie down and be quiet, while she brought a chair for me and took
off her things in her own bedroom.
But hardly had she gone into an adjoining chamber when the sick man
raised himself again and, reaching over in my direction, told me in a
hoarse whisper the story of the first night of her present way of
life--how the doctor had said he must be removed to the hospital; how
Agnes would not part with him; how the landlord had threatened to turn
them out; and how at last, after sitting with her head in her hands the
whole evening, Aggie had got up and gone out and, coming back at
midnight, had thrown two sovereigns on the table and said, "There you
are, Giovanni--that's our rent and your eggs and milk for one week,
anyway."
By this time Angela had returned to the room (her paint and rouge washed
off, and her gay clothes replaced by a simple woollen jacket over a
plain underskirt), and she began to beat up an egg, to boil some milk,
to pour out a dose of medicine, and to do, with all a good woman's tact,
a good woman's tenderness, the little services of which an invalid
stands in need.
Oh heavens, how beautiful it was--fearfully, awfully tragically
beautiful!
I was deeply moved as I sat in silence watching her; and when at length
Giovanni, who had been holding her hand in his own long, bony ones and
sometimes putting it to his lips, dropped off to sleep (tired out,
perhaps, by talking to me), and she, drawing up to where I sat by the
end of the bed, resumed her self-defence, saying in a whisper that
ladies like me could not possibly understand what a woman would do, in
spite of herself, when the life of one she loved was threatened, I could
bear her mistake no longer, but told her of my real condition--that I
was no longer a lady, that I had run away from my husband, that I had a
child, and was living as a poor seamstress in the East End of London.
Angela listened to my story in astonishment; and when I had come to an
end she was holding my hand and looking into my eyes with just that look
which she had when she put me to bed for the first time at school, and,
making her voice very low, told me to be a good child of the Infant
Jesus.
"It's nearly one o'clock. You can't go back to the East End to-night,"
she whispered.
"Oh, I must, I must," I said, getting up and making for the door. But
before I had reached it my limbs gave way, whether from the strain of
emotion or physical weakness, and if it had not been for Angela I should
have dropped to the floor.
After that she would hear of no excuses. I must stay until morning. I
could sleep in her own bed in the other room, and she could lay a
mattress for herself on the floor by the side of Giovanni's. There
would be no great sacrifice in that. It was going to be one of
Giovanni's bad nights, and she was likely to be up and down all the time
anyway.
Half an hour later I was in bed in a little room that was separated by a
thin papered partition from the room of the poor consumptive, and
Angela, who had brought me a cup of hot milk, was saying in a whisper:
"He's very bad. The doctor says he can't last longer than a week. Sister
Veronica (you remember her, she's Mildred Bankes that used to be) tried
to get him into a home for the dying. It was all arranged, too, but at
the last moment he wouldn't go. He told them that, if they wanted to
separate him from Agnes, they had better bring his coffin because he
would be dead before they got him to the door."
When she had gone I lay a long time in the dark, listening to the sounds
on the other side of the partition.
Giovanni awoke with an alarming fit of coughing, and in the querulous,
plaintive, fretful, sometimes angry tones which invalids have, he
grumbled at Angela and then cried over her, saying what a burden he was
to her, while she, moving about the room in her bare feet, coaxed and
caressed him, and persuaded him to take his milk or his medicine.
Through all this I would hear at intervals the drumming noises of the
singing downstairs, which sounded in my ears (as the singers were
becoming more and more intoxicated) like the swirling and screeching of
an ironical requiem for the dying man before he was dead:
"_Oh bella Napoli, Oh suol beato
Onde sorridere volle il creato_."
But somewhere in those dead hours in which London sleeps everything
became still, and my mind, which had been questioning the grim darkness
on the worst of the world's tragedies (what a woman will do for those
she loves), fell back on myself and I thought of the Christian
institutions which had turned me from their doors, and then of this
"street-walker" who had given up her own bed to me and was now lying in
the next room on a mattress on the floor.
I could not help it if I felt a startling reverence for Angela, as a
ministering angel faithful unto death, and I remembered that as I fell
asleep I was telling myself that we all needed God's mercy, God's
pardon, and that, God would forgive her because she had loved much.
But sleep was more tolerant still I dreamt that Angela died, and on
reaching the gates of heaven all the saints of God met her, and after
they had clothed her in a spotless white robe, one of them--it was the
blessed Mary Magdalene--took her hand and said:
"Here is another of the holy martyrs."
I awoke from that dream with beads of perspiration on my forehead. But I
dare not say what confused and terrible thoughts came next, except that
they were about baby--what I might do myself if driven to the last
extremity. When I slept and dreamt again, it was I who was dead, and it
was my darling mother who met me and took me to the feet of the Blessed
Virgin and said:
"Mother of all Mothers, who knows all that is in a mother's heart, this
is my little daughter. She did not intend to do wrong. It was all for
the sake of her child."
When I awoke in the morning, with the darkness shivering off through the
gloom, this last dream was sitting upon me like a nightmare. It
terrified me. I felt as if I were standing on the edge of a precipice
and some awful forces were trying to push me over it.
The London sparrows were chirping on the skylight over my head, and I
could faintly hear the Italian criers in the front street:
"Latte!" "Spazzina!" "Erbaggi freschi!"
In spite of myself (hating myself for it after all the tenderness that
had been shown me), I could not overcome a feeling of shame at finding
myself lying where I was, and I got up to run away that I might cleanse
my soul of the evil thoughts which had come to me while there.
As I dressed I listened for a sound from the adjoining room. All was
quiet now. The poor restless ones were at last getting a little rest.
A few minutes afterwards I passed on tiptoe through their room without
looking towards the bed, and reaching the door to the staircase I opened
it as noiselessly as I could.
Then I closed it softly after me, on so much suffering and so much love.