A Sheaf of Corn Part 45

"I have kep' these apartments respectable and comf'table, and not a week unlet, these seventeen year, come Michaelmas," she sobbed. "And never have I had a death in 'em before."

Dan recoiled before the word. "Death?" he said.

And she repeated the word. "Poor Mr Gunton, he have had one of his throats, and he was took worse yesterday morning. He kep' askin' for you, sir, and no one could say where you was; and now he have sent me to fetch you, whatever happen, and to say as he's a-dyin'!"

"It's one of his jokes," Dan said; but he had grown grey about the lips, and his mouth fell open.

He pushed open the bedroom door, half expecting to be greeted by a smothered laugh from Gunton, and a whispered account of the last trick he'd played the old woman.

But Gunton, poor fellow, who had laughed and played his foolish jests, and got into mischief industriously all through his short life, had laid his mirth aside to-day. He had done but indifferently well the few tasks allotted him, s.h.i.+rking them when he could; the business he had now on hand was a very serious one, and there was no slipping out of it. He had to die.

He told his friend so in so many words. "What's o'clock now?" he asked.

"Eleven? By two I shall be dead."

Dan tried not to believe. "I'll go for the doctor--I'll fetch a nurse!"

he said.

The other stayed him with his difficult speech. "Don't waste time. It's no good," he said. "I've seen men die like this. I know. Owen was here till ten minutes ago. I told him last night it was all up. You know what an old a.s.s it is--he wouldn't listen. He listens now. He's wired for ----" (naming a man locally celebrated in the profession). "He's driven, himself, to Fakenham for a nurse. I shall be dead before they get here. I told him so--the old a.s.s! He's wired for my mother--she'll be too late. You can say I sent my love, Dan----"

All this in a hoa.r.s.e, broken voice, interrupted by loud and painful breathing, and now and again by a short, rough cough.

"I didn't know you were seedy, old man! I'd have come at once," Dan said. "I've been on the spree again, for a day or so. It's the end. I'm not going to play the fool that fas.h.i.+on any more!"

"The end of my sprees!" poor Gunton said. "We've had one or two together, Dan. Don't look at me. I ain't pleasant to watch. Sorry. It won't be for long. Dan--my watch and studs, and a chain I never wore--they're"--he lifted a cold hand and tried to point to a little heap of trinkets lying on the drawers at the foot of the bed--"they're for you. Take them, will you? Take them now."

Dan nodded. "I'll take 'em, thank you, old man," he said, and sobbed suddenly. "Don't worry, Ted. Don't try to talk, dear old boy."

"I've got to. You know about Kitty. I was going to marry her next week.

I took her away from the shop--made her give up her living. She's bought things to marry me. She can't pay for them. You--you----"

A struggle here, upon which Dan, in spite of himself, turned his back.

"I know," he said, brokenly. "I'll pay for them. I'll see to her. It'll be all right, Ted."

"No! My mother," the dying boy said; "tell her. She won't be pleased.

Ask her to give Kitty a hundred pounds from me--with my love.

Promise--promise."

"I promise," Dan said. "Anything--anything, dear old man. I know what you'll want done--don't, for G.o.d's sake, talk any more."

But for another hour of misery, of battling for breath, hideous to suffer and heart-breaking to witness, he would attempt to talk, irrationally at times, but now and again with a startling coherence.

His mind ran on that gift of a hundred pounds. He sent message after message to the little shop-girl for whom, with the senseless prodigality of such youth, he had proposed to fling away his future.

Again and again he adjured his friend to tell his mother what a good little girl Kitty was, how she had stuck to him and been a brick.

They said he was a clever fellow in his profession, the long-haired, long-legged young doctor, with his harum-scarum ways and his ready laugh. He had made a true diagnosis of his own case. Before doctors and nurses could be got to him he was dead.

"Don't look at me," was the last he said. "Pull the sheet over my face--don't look."

And so, with the thoughtfulness for others which had proclaimed him Gentleman in that inferior society where it had pleased him to move, he hid his suffering from the man who sat weeping like a woman beside him, and died.

It was Dan, his face blurred and swollen by crying, his usually darkened and subdued red hair proclaiming its curly nature in all the fierceness of its roseate hue--Dan, who at that moment would rather have been in any other place on earth--who received the bereaved mother, led her to the door of the death-chamber, and retired in miserable solitude to await the interview, to avoid which he would gladly have blown out his brains.

She came to him at last, a long, lean woman who had bent a stubborn back to many sorrows. A meek, unsubdued woman. The lankiness of limb, and the lankness of feature and hair, sufficiently pleasing in poor Ted, stretched forth at his long length yonder, were not such agreeable characteristics in the mother. Narrow face--narrow nature. In the thin features, contracted nostrils, close, small mouth, Dan might have read poor hope for Kitty.

"I have taken his jewellery," she said in her toneless voice. "I thought it best not to leave it about in a lodging-house. I miss a ring--a ring I gave him on his last birthday. Can you tell me where it is?"

She spread the watch, the chain, the sleeve-links, a certain pearl stud which Dan had noticed once or twice in his s.h.i.+rt when poor Gunton wore dress clothes, upon the table--all the poor, invaluable trifles which had lain on the drawers in that pathetic little heap bequeathed to the dead man's friend. "The ring is missing, you see," she said. She tied up the articles in a spare white handkerchief and slipped them into the pocket of her dress.

"Everything of his has become doubly precious to me," she said.

"Perhaps you will be so good as to make inquiries about the ring."

Dan roused himself. Here was his opportunity. "I think the ring----" he began. "I think he gave the ring to Kitty, you know--the girl he was engaged to," he got out.

"Engaged?" the lady repeated. "My boy engaged--and without my knowledge!"

"We don't tell our mothers everything, I'm afraid," Dan said. He made a ghastly attempt to smile, to get back to his habitual easy manner which had forsaken him. "'Twouldn't be for our mothers' peace of mind----"

She interrupted him with cold dislike. "I know nothing of you and your mother," she said. "I know that there was perfect confidence between my son and me."

It was hard, after that, to tell her the story, but he told it, and saw her narrow face change from its frozen grieving to a still more frozen anger. She would not believe, or she affected not to believe, the story. A girl out of a little country shop to _marry_--her boy!

"You have no right to take away his character so, and he not here to defend himself!" she said. "He--I perceive that he has consorted with low company since he has been here; but he is a gentleman--my son, by birth and education."

"He _was_ a gentleman," Dan said gently. Was--was? Ted _was_! Ted, who had been so alive, so "in it" in the jovial sense always--was! The word choked poor Dan, but he stumbled on, and told of the poor fellow's last charge to him, his last request to his mother.

Sometimes, in his confidential moments, Ted had spoken of this mother of his. "She is a good woman," he had said; "I suppose she never did, or said, or thought a wicked thing in her life."

She might be good, but she had now a heart as hard as the nether millstone. She did not choose to credit the story. She would not do her dear son's memory such an insult as to believe it. She looked with suspicion as well as dislike upon the poor friend with the rumpled red hair, with the fair skin, blurred and mottled, as such fair skins are wont to be, by his weeping. It was quite possible, she told herself in her miserable little wisdom, that he had made up the tale for his own ends. The hundred pounds was for himself, or at least he would share it. She would not believe; and presently she would hear no more.

"I must now really ask you to leave me alone," she said. "Your good feeling will show you that I have enough to bear."

"And you refuse to do this last thing poor Ted asked of you?" Dan said to her.

"I have no proof that he asked it," she answered.

And with that insult ringing in his ears, Dan went.

He pulled the door to upon him with a muttered oath on his lips; but he was not so enraged as another man would have been in his place. The "old girl" wasn't behaving well; but in Dan's experience, so many people did not behave well; and as it happened, the thing could be put right. If it had been yesterday, how helpless he would have been in the emergency! But old Playford's death had come just in the nick of time.

As for himself and his chance--his last chance--well! He looked across at that other door behind which Ted lay. Ted and he had stuck together through ill report and good, had helped each other out of many a sc.r.a.pe, had had such good times!

Dan looked for a moment at the closed door, then stepped across the yard of matting and opened it.

Many a time he had run in without waiting for admission to his friend's lodgings, had pushed open the door to call a word to the young doctor, already gone to bed or not yet got up, perhaps. So, once more he opened the door far enough to admit his red head, and looked in. Ted was dead, he knew; but it takes time to reconcile us to the fact that the dead are also deaf, senseless, past grieving or comfort.

"It's all right, old man; don't you worry. I'll see to it," Dan said.