II

Edwin pushed open the door and crept with precautions into the bedroom.

Mrs. Hamps was dozing. In the half-light of the lowered gas he looked at her and was alarmed, shocked, for it was at once apparent that she must be very ill. She lay reclining against several crumpled and crushed pillows, with her head on one side and her veined hands limp on the eiderdown, between the heavy brown side-curtains that hung from the carved mahogany tester. The posture seemed to be that of an exhausted animal, surprised by the unconsciousness of final fatigue, shameless in the intense need of repose. Auntie Hamps had ceased to be a Wesleyan, a pillar of society, a champion of the conventions, and a keeper-up of appearances; she was just an utterly wearied and beaten creature, breathing noisily through wide-open mouth. Edwin could not remember ever having seen her when she was not to some extent arrayed for the world's gaze; he had not seen her at the crisis of any of her recent attacks. He knew that more than once she had recovered when good judges had p.r.o.nounced recovery impossible; but he was quite sure, now, that she would never rise from that bed. He had the sudden dreadful thought: "She is done for, sentenced, cut off from the rest of us. This is the end for her. She won't be able to pretend any more. All her efforts have come to this." The thought affected him like a blow. And two somewhat contradictory ideas sprang from it: first, the entire absurdity of her career as revealed by its close, and secondly, the tragic dignity with which its close was endowing her.

At once contemptible and august, she was diminished, even in size. Her scanty grey hair was tousled. Her pink flannel night-dress with its long, loose sleeves was grotesque; the mult.i.tude of her patched outer wrappings, from which peeped her head on its withered neck, and safety-pins, and the orifice of a hot-water bag, were equally grotesque.

None of the bed-linen was clean, or of good quality. The eiderdown was old, and the needle-points of its small white feathers were piercing it.

The table at the bed-head had a strange collection of poor, odd crockery. The whole room, with its distempered walls of an uncomfortable green colour, in spite of several respectable pieces of mahogany furniture, seemed to be the secret retreat of a graceless and mean indigence. And above all it was damply cold; the window stood a little open, and only the tiniest fire burnt in the inefficient grate.

For decades Auntie Hamps, with her erect figure and handsome face, her black silks, jet ornaments, and sealskins, her small regular subscriptions and her spasmodic splendours of golden generosity, her heroic relentless hypocrisies and her absolute self-reliance and independence, had exhibited a glorious front to the world. With her, person and individuality were almost everything, and the environment she had made for herself almost nothing. The ground-floor of her house was presentable, especially when t.i.tivated for occasional hospitalities, but not more than presentable. The upper floor was never shown. In particular, Auntie Hamps was not one of those women who invite other women to their bedrooms. Her bedroom was guarded like a fastness. In it, unbeheld, lived the other Auntie Hamps, complementary to the grand and ma.s.sive Mrs. Hamps known to mankind. And now the fastness was exposed, defenceless, and its squalid avaricious secrets discovered; and she was too broken to protest. There was something unbearably pitiful in that. Her pose was pitiful and her face was pitiful. Those features were still far from ugly; the contours of the flushed cheeks, the chin, and the convex eyelids were astonishingly soft, and recalled the young girl of about half a century earlier. She was both old and young in her troubled unconsciousness. The reflection was inevitable: "She was a young girl--and now she is sentenced." Edwin felt himself desolated by a terrible gloom which questioned the justification of all life. The cold of the room made him shiver. After gazing for a long time at the sufferer, he tiptoed to the fire. On the painted iron mantelpiece were a basalt clock and three photographs; a recent photograph of smirking Clara surrounded by her brood; a faded photograph of Maggie as a young girl, intolerably dowdy; and an equally faded photograph of himself as a young man of twenty,--he remembered the suit and the necktie in which he had been photographed. The simplicity, the ingenuousness, of his own boyish face moved him deeply and at the same time disgusted him. "Was I like that?" he thought, astounded, and he felt intensely sorry for the raw youth. Above the clock was suspended by a ribbon a new green card, lettered in silver with some verses ent.i.tled "Lean Hard." This card, he knew, had superseded a booklet of similar tenor that used to lie on the dressing-table when he was an infant. The verses began:

_Child of My love, "Lean hard",_ _And let Me feel the pressure of thy care._

And they ended:

_Thou lovest Me. I knew it. Doubt not then,_ _But loving Me, LEAN HARD._

All his life he had laughed at the notion of his Auntie leaning hard upon anything whatever. Yet she had lived continually with these verses ever since the year of their first publication; she had never tired of their message. And now Edwin was touched. He seemed to see some sincerity, some beauty, in them. He had a vision of their author, unknown to literature, but honoured in a hundred thousand respectable homes. He thought: "Did Auntie only pretend to believe in them? Or did she think she did believe in them? Or did she really believe in them?"

The last seemed a possibility. Supposing she did really believe in them? ... Yes, he was touched. He was ready to admit that spirituality was denied to none. He seemed to come into contact with the universal immanent spirituality.

Then he stooped to put some bits of coal silently on the fire.

"Who's that putting coal on the fire?" said a faint but sharply protesting voice from the bed.

The weakness of the voice gave Edwin a fresh shock. The voice seemed to be drawing on the very last reserves of its owner's vitality. Owing to the height of the foot of the bed, Auntie Hamps could not see anything at the fireplace lower than the mantelpiece. As she withdrew from earth she employed her fading faculties to expostulate against a waste of coal and to identify the unseen criminal.

"I am," said Edwin cheerfully. "It was nearly out."

He stood up, smiling slightly, and faced her.

Auntie Hamps, lifting her head and frowning in surprise, gazed at him for a few moments, as if trying to decide who he was. Then she said, in the same enfeebled tone as before:

"Eh, Edwin! I never heard you come in. This is an honour!" And her head dropped back.

"I'm sleeping here," said Edwin, with determined cheerfulness. "Did ye know?"

She reflected, and answered deliberately, using her volition to articulate every syllable:

"Yes. Ye're having Maggie's room."

"Oh no, Auntie!"

"Yes, you are. I've told her." The faint voice became harshly obstinate. "Turn the gas up a bit, Edwin, so that I can see you. Well, this is an honour. Did Maggie give ye a proper tea?"

"Oh yes, thanks. Splendid."

He raised the gas. Auntie Hamps blinked.

"You want something to shade this gas," said Edwin. "I'll fix ye something."

The gas-bracket was a little to the right of the fireplace, over the dressing-table, and nearly opposite the bed. Auntie Hamps nodded.

Having glanced about, Edwin put a bonnet-box on the dressing-table and on that, upright and open, the Hamps family Bible from the ottoman. The infirm creation was just lofty enough to come between the light and the old woman's eyes.

"That'll be better," said he. "You're not at all well, I hear, Auntie."

He endeavoured to be tactful.

She slowly shook her head as it lay on the pillow.

"This is one of my bad days.... But I shall pick up.... Then has Hilda taken George to London?"

Edwin nodded.

"Eh, I do hope and pray it'll be all right. I've had such good eyesight myself, I'm all the more afraid for others. What a blessing it's been to me! ... Eh, what a good mother dear Hilda is!" She added after a pause: "I daresay there never was such a mother as Hilda, unless it's Clara."

"Has Clara been in to-day?" Edwin demanded, to change the subject of conversation.

"No, she hasn't. But she will, as soon as she has a moment. She'll be popping in. They're such a tie on her, those children are--and how she looks after them! ... Edwin!" She called him, as though he were receding.

"Yes?"

The frail voice continued, articulating with great carefulness, and achieving each sentence as though it were a miracle, as indeed it was:

"I think no one ever had such nephews and nieces as I have. I've never had children of my own--that was not to be!--but I must say the Lord has made it up to me in my nephews and nieces. You and Hilda ... and Clara and Albert ... and the little chicks!" Tears stood in her eyes.

"You're forgetting Maggie," said Edwin, lightly.

"Yes," Auntie Hamps agreed, but in a quite different tone, reluctant and critical. "I'm sure Maggie does her best. Oh! I'm sure she does ...

Edwin!" Again she called him.

He approached the tumbled bed, and even sat on the edge of it, his hands in his pockets. Auntie Hamps, though breathing now more rapidly and with more difficulty, seemed to have revitalised herself at some mysterious source of energy. She was still preoccupied by the mental concentration and the effort of volition required for the smallest physical acts incident to her continued existence; but she had acc.u.mulated power for the furtherance of greater ends.

"D'ye want anything?" Edwin suggested, indicating the contents of the night-table.

She moved her head to signify a negative. Her pink-clad arms did not stir. And her whole being seemed to be suspended while she prepared for an exertion.

"I'm so relieved you've come," she said at length, slowly and painfully.

"You can't think what a relief it is to me. I've really no one but you.... It's about that girl."

"What girl?"

"Minnie."

"The servant?"