THE FATAL KNIFE
Mynheer Mopius was slowly dying. He amused himself with playing the
part and schooling Harriet, little realizing that her willingness
to accept the fiction found its source in her certitude of the fact.
“Harriet has become quite docile,” reflected Jacóbus; “she will
make an excellent wife for my old age. I had always a gift for
managing women. Look at Sarah, my first, whose character was
fundamentally selfish. Love, based upon obedience, that is the
secret of wedded bliss. But it would never do to let the women know
it. When a woman knows a secret there’s no secret left to know.”
Mynheer Mopius spent much of his time in bed, especially the
daytime. At night he would gasp for breath and have to be helped
to an easy-chair, and Harriet nursed him, carefully balancing her
strength.
“Two invalids are no use to any one,” she said, when stipulating
for repose in an adjoining apartment.
“My first wife--” began Mopius, but Harriet stopped him.
“That subject’s tabooed,” she said. “Why, Jacóbus, it is months
since you mentioned her. Your first wife died. What would you do
if, at this moment, I were to die?”
“Marry again,” replied Jacóbus, coughing against his pillows, and
looking exceedingly yellow and bilious and unwholesome.
“It takes two to do that,” said Harriet, coloring, as she spoke,
under the reproach of her own acceptance.
“Does it?” answered Mopius, clinking his medicine-bottles.
“Jacóbus, we have never quarrelled. Don’t let us begin now. There
is only one question I should like to ask you without requiring
an answer. How many people did you propose to when left a widower
before you got down to me?” She left the room abruptly, and in the
passage she struck her white hand across her face.
Not very hard.
Jacóbus sat up and adjusted his nightcap. “Ah, you see, she ran
away,” he said. “A year ago she’d have braved it out. I shall still
make something of Harriet.”
She came back presently with a bundle of papers. It was part of
her daily task to read aloud all the official documents connected
with the government of Drum, which were sent to the caged Town
Councillor. Jacóbus fretted incessantly at the thought how
everything was going wrong.
“The people in the streets look just as usual,” said Harriet; but
that consideration afforded her husband no comfort. She yawned
patiently over endless statistics regarding gas and drains. It was
her ignorance which caused her to wonder whether the town would not
have been governed far better without a council, and especially
without an official printing-press.
“It is time for my medicine,” said Mopius, who, by saying this five
minutes too early, constantly succeeded in suggesting an omission
on Harriet’s part. “Well, what says the Burgomaster concerning
the market dues? He is a fool, that Burgomaster. And so are the
aldermen. Heigho! I wonder what will become of this poor town when
I am gone! It is strange how greatly I have attached myself to it.
Almost as much as if it had been my birthplace. But I had always
‘une nature attachante.’ It is a great mistake.”
“Not necessarily,” said Harriet.
“Yes, yes. Life is too short: here to-day, gone to-morrow. Ah,
well! Is that idiot going to lower the rent for market stands?”
“I don’t know,” said Harriet, wearily, turning over her pile
of documents; “I’ll read you the whole lot; you can see for
yourself.” And she did read, monotonously, for an hour and a half,
Mopius following everything with eager interest, interrupting,
gesticulating, nodding approval or, more frequently, dissent.
“Right, right,” said Jacóbus, in high good-humor over somebody’s
opposition to the powers that be in Drum. “Give it them well. I
never approved of knuckling under to grandees. You gain nothing but
kicks by bowing to ‘My Lord.’ Ah, they’ll miss me when I’m dead,
Harriet, and so will you.”
“Yes, I shall miss you,” replied his wife. “Dear me, Jacóbus, what
shall I do with my time all day?”
“First you will cry,” said Jacóbus, with ghastly enjoyment of a
far-off possibility; “and then you will get tired of crying.” He
waited a little ruefully for a disclaimer. “And then you will begin
to enjoy your money.”
“By-the-bye, that is a subject we have never spoken about since the
marriage settlement,” said Harriet, holding one of the stiff yellow
papers against her cheek. “At least, _I_ have never spoken about
it. Of course, you tell me twenty times in a week that you will
leave me a lot of money; but that counts for nothing. I believe you
used to say the same thing to Ursula. Seriously, Jacóbus, have you
ever made a will?”
“I have,” said Jacóbus, enjoying his importance.
“I thought people who had been notaries always died intestate. If
you had died intestate, Jacóbus, I suppose Ursula would have had
all your money?”
“Ursula and that foolish Josine. Ursula, Baroness van Helmont, of
Horstwyk and the Horst. This conversation appears to me unpleasing,
Harriet.”
“Unavoidable conversations almost always are.” Harriett’s face was
entirely hid by the “Report on Sewage.” “Has this will of yours
really appointed me your heir?”
Mynheer Mopius fell back and gasped. “Can you not wait a little
longer?” he said--“a very little longer?”
“Jacóbus, I am only repeating what you have told me over and over
again. I want to know, if you please, whether you have really left
your whole fortune to me.”
She drew near to the bed.
Mynheer Mopius sat up again, and looked askance at his wife
anxiously. “I’m getting better,” he said. “I feel a great deal
better to-day.”
“I’m so glad. You look better. And now, Jacóbus, answer my
question, on your honor.”
“Harriet, I do believe you want me to die. I don’t think I shall
last much longer; still, don’t reckon too much on my speedy demise.
I heard the other day of a man who was buried and resuscitated, and
lived forty years afterwards.”
“Nonsense,” replied Harriet, unsympathetically. “If you were
buried, I should hardly be asking about your will. Now tell me.”
“What if I don’t?”
Harriet shrugged her handsome shoulders. “I suppose the truth
is you have left me nothing,” she said, walking away, “and you
don’t want to avow your life-long lies. One can never trust your
boastings. Perhaps there isn’t so much to leave.”
“You will be a rich woman, Harriet,” answered Mynheer Mopius,
solemnly, “a very rich woman. Yes, I have left you all, on
condition that you never marry again.”
“A foolish condition,” said Harriet, once more applying the
“Report.” “Should the question present itself, I would certainly
not be influenced by considerations of that kind.”
“Hum!” said Jacóbus. “Well, now I have told you. So let’s talk of
something else. I wish you would give me my jelly.”
She got it for him. “And if I marry, everything goes to Ursula, I
suppose,” she persisted. “Well, so much the better for Ursula.”
A sudden jealousy flashed into his orange-green eyes. “I believe,
if I died, you would marry the doctor,” he said.
Her face flushed protest; her heart thumped assent. “You have no
right to say that, or anything like it,” she cried. “I have been a
faithful wife to you, Jacóbus. Keep your dirty money.”
Her rising violence always cowed him. “Tut, tut,” he said; “so I
shall. For many a long year, perhaps, and after that you may have
it.”
“Not on those conditions.” She turned away from him altogether.
“Make your will over again,” she said. “Do you hear me? And leave
your money to Ursula, whose, in fact, it is by right. I am content
with my settlement, as I told you at the time. You will remember
that I told you to leave your money to Ursula. Money, with me,
is not the one thing worth living for and talking about. But I
wanted, in honesty, to warn you. You had better send for the lawyer
to-night.”
“What nonsense!” he cried, angrily. “To hear you talk, one would
think I hadn’t a week left to live. Is that what the doctor thinks,
pray? The wish is father to the thought.”
Harriet controlled herself forcibly. She came close to the bed.
“You needn’t make it to-night,” she said, softly. “But you had
better make it soon.”
* * * * *
About a fortnight later Mynheer Jacóbus Mopius was buried with all
the pomp he had himself prescribed. All his virtues and dignities
were engraved upon his tombstone, so that his first wife’s
adjoining one looked very bare by comparison. His last words had
been, in a tremulous, squeaky sing-song:
“If thy dear hand but lift the fatal kni-i-ife,
I smile, I faint, and bid sweet death ‘All hail!’”