The Cottage of Delight Part 35

"What am I to do?" Lizzie asked herself. "She is sick and must be undressed. She is delirious. She must have fever. She ought to have a doctor, but who could I send at this time of night?"

She took Jane's wrist to test the pulse, but Jane s.n.a.t.c.hed it away.

"Oh, it's you, Liz!" she said, opening her eyes in a sort of inane, widening stare. "You caught me, didn't you? Well, I want it this way.

When they look at me, if any of them comes, I want them to say old Jane was a sport from start to finish. The last dance is on. Mix the drinks, boys. Eat, drink, and shake the dice, for to-morrow you may not know where you are at, and n.o.body to pay the bill. But keep the other thing to yourselves. I don't want to hear about it. You say it was in the papers. I didn't see it. Liz didn't see it, either, and you say she and I are in the same box. Murder? Who says it was the same as murder? I didn't intend it. I'd never have let it happen if I could have prevented it. Yes, the baby was left with me, and--and I might have raised her different, but I was a sport, full of h.e.l.l and out for a good time! But, O G.o.d! I wonder what the little thing thought when the crash came. Gos.h.!.+

She must have screamed! She must have choked in that awful fire! Burned to a cinder! No flowers, no sod, no nothing! Well, what's the odds? Yes, I'll let Liz find out for herself. Somebody will tell her soon enough.

Lord! how a thing like that flies and spins through the air! It is everybody's business."

"I want to undress you, Jane," Lizzie said, bewildered by the ambiguous torrent of words. "Let me unhook your frock."

"No, fool, idiot, spitfire, cat!" Jane cried, angrily. "I want to be like this--_just like this_. Get away! Leave me alone! How long will it take?--the Lord only knows. I couldn't ask the drug-clerk."

"Well, I'll leave you, then," Lizzie said, slightly offended.

Jane made no response, and Lizzie started to leave the room. She noticed the lamp and paused. "She might get up and knock it over," she thought, and, blowing her breath down the chimney, she extinguished the flame.

She was in her room, still undressed, when she heard the gate being opened. She went to the head of the stairs and listened. There was a vigorous rap. Lizzie went down the stairs and opened the door.

A man she knew to be Doctor Brackett stood on the porch, a satchel in his hand. His horse was at the gate.

"I'm just in from Atlanta," he explained, hurriedly. "I have a new clerk at my store, and in looking over his prescriptions I saw that he had sold Miss Holder quite a quant.i.ty of morphine tablets. You see, from the talk that is going on in town I was afraid she might have taken an--an overdose--you know what I mean?"

"I think something _is_ wrong with her," Lizzie cried, aghast. "Hurry!

Come! I'll light her lamp!"

Lizzie fairly ran up the steps and into Jane's room. She struck a match and lighted the lamp. The doctor followed her and bent over the sleeping woman. He opened her dress, quickly cut her corset-laces, and made an examination. Then, standing up, he turned to the bureau and began to search the littered top of it.

"Oh, here we are!" he exclaimed, in relief, as he picked up a vial containing morphine tablets and shook them between him and the light.

"She's had a close shave. She thought she was taking enough."

"You mean that she--"

"Oh yes." The doctor put the vial into his pocket. "It is a plain case.

Her mind is out of order. She actually--so my clerk heard to-night--went to the undertaker's and asked him the prices of various costly caskets.

The undertaker thought she was referring to her recent bad news. She will come out of this sleep all right. But the truth is she can't recover. It is only a question of a week or two now. In fact, she won't get up from this. She hasn't the vitality. She has literally burned herself out and been living on her energies and nerves. She couldn't stand the shock of that sad calamity. I am sorry for you, too, Mrs.

Trott. John was a fine boy. Now leave her just as she is. She will be easier handled in the morning. She is in no immediate danger."

The doctor took up his satchel and started away. In the darkened corridor Lizzie overtook him just as he had reached the head of the stairs.

"You said Jane had bad news, doctor," she began, falteringly, dreading revelations to come. "Do you mean about--about John taking her niece away?"

"Yes, Mrs. Trott, and the other--the deaths of the two in that awful wreck."

"Death? Wreck?" Lizzie leaned breathlessly against the wall. "What wreck--whose death?"

"Oh, oh, is it possible that you haven't heard?" And, standing in the slender shaft of light from Jane's partly closed door, the doctor awkwardly explained. Lizzie listened, as he thought, calmly enough. He couldn't read her face, for she kept it averted in the shadow.

"I understand it all now," she said, after a little pause. "Oh, oh, so that's it! That's what Jane meant."

She went with the doctor to the door, said good night, and locked the door after him. She stood in the dismal silence of the dark hall and heard his horse trotting down the street. She started to her room, sliding her hand on the smooth bal.u.s.trade. Her room gained, she stood in the center of it as purposeless and dazed as a sleeper waking in strange surroundings. She felt for a chair and sank into it.

"John dead!" she suddenly exclaimed. "Why, why, it can't be--and yet why not, if they all say so? John dead, Dora dead, Jane dying, and I--and I left here all alone by myself!"

She undressed in the dark, vaguely dreading the light as if it might somehow stab her anew. She reclined on the bed. For hours she lay awake.

She tried to cry, but could not summon tears to her eyes. She would have been afraid of Jane's staggering insanely about the house had the doctor not a.s.sured her that she would not stir till morning. Jane was not a ghost, but she was a would-be suicide, and that was quite as gruesome to think about.

CHAPTER XL

Finally she fell asleep, and the sun was well up when she was waked by Mandy, the negro servant.

"Yo' breakfast done raidy on de table, Mis' Trott," she said, a touch of condescension in her voice.

"Why, I thought," Lizzie humbly faltered, "that you were not coming back."

"I did say dat," Mandy answered, "en' I did intend ter keep my word, but Jake say 'twas my bounden duty ter he'p you out en' not quit yer in de lurch, now dat you los' yo' son en' de li'l girl dat way. Jake say he knowed Mr. John Trott en' dat he was er nice-appearin' young man, en'

good ter work under. Yo' coffee gittin' col', en' if I heat it ag'in it never tast' de same--de secon' b'ilin' make it bitter."

"I'll come down--I'll come down," Lizzie said. "Let it be cold. It doesn't matter. I'm not hungry. Don't wake Jane. She is asleep. She was sick last night and had the doctor."

After breakfast there was nothing to do, and Lizzie sat first in the parlor, then in the dining-room, and again on the porch. She went in to see Jane and found her still asleep. In the yellow light of day there was something weirdly uncouth in the pink-robed form, the patchwork of paint, powder, and death-tints of the face which had once been attractive and care-free. The doctor was coming again and Lizzie told herself that Jane must be undressed and put to bed properly, and yet she shrank from going about it, for she dreaded Jane's temper. But it had to be done, so, getting out a nightgown from a bureau drawer, she proceeded to wake the sleeper. It was difficult, but Jane finally opened her eyes, and, only half conscious, she submitted, falling asleep again as soon as Lizzie stopped handling her. Mandy came up the stairs and looked in at the door. She approached the bed and stared down disapprovingly at the frail, limp form.

"Dat's er dyin' 'ooman," she said, superst.i.tiously. "She got de mark of it all over 'er."

Lizzie, in a chair at the foot of the bed, nodded, but said nothing.

The doctor came, made an examination, and motioned Lizzie and the servant to follow him from the chamber. "She is sinking pretty fast," he said. "She may come to her senses before the end, and she may not. I'm doing no good and shall not call again."

The white woman and the black, standing side by side in the corridor, watched him descend the stairs.

"Well, well, what could she expect?" Mandy muttered, as she started for the kitchen. "She made 'er bed, Jake say, en' now she's on it. Well, well, I don't judge n.o.body--dat's de Lawd's job, not mine--but I'm sorry for 'er--so I am. I'm sorry fer 'er, en'--en' fer you, _too_, Mis'

Trott."

There were no male visitors that day. The news of John's and Dora's deaths somehow kept men away. However, the report that Jane had attempted to kill herself and was about to die reached some of her female a.s.sociates, and in their perfumed finery and with mincing, high-heeled steps they rustled in. With faces as vapid as faces of wax they perched around Jane's bed like birds in tinsel plumage, ready for instant flight. They knew that the end of one of their coterie was near, and yet they chatted in low tones of things pertaining to their walk of life and this and that off-color gossip. Now and then a smile slipped its frail fetters and died of its own rebuke.

Under various and startled excuses they declined Lizzie's hint that they come back after dark and sit the night through at the dying woman's bedside. So that night, when Mandy left for her home, saying that she could not possibly stay away from Jake and the children, Lizzie found herself quite marooned with Jane and certain memories which she could not combat.

Why she did it she could not have explained, but she took her lamp and went to John's old room at the end of the house, and stood looking about. Tacked to the wall were some diagrams he had drawn; and on the dusty table lay a coverless arithmetic, a dog-eared algebra, an English grammar, and pen, ink, paper, stubs of pencils, a worn tape-line, and on the wall hung a soiled s.h.i.+rt, a discarded gray vest, a pair of old trousers, and a dented derby hat. Lizzie lowered the lamp to the table and sat down in the only chair in the room. A pair of John's old shoes peeped out at her from beneath the narrow bed. Lizzie sat there for an hour or more. She was tearless, but a vast reservoir of tears seemed backed up within her, and certain inward dams threatened to burst. John no longer seemed the gawky workman of his later days, but the neglected though attractive child who used to romp noisily through the house and stare at her and her friends with such innocent and prattling blandness.

And he was dead, actually dead! Lizzie mused thus for a while, and then began to grow angry. People were saying that she had caused his death by separating his wife from him and driving him away. They were saying, too, those meddlesome fools! that he had tried to rescue a child from sheer contamination by her, and had lost his life in the attempt. John's father, if he were alive--but she mustn't think of him. No, she had given that over long ago. But to-night John's father, as a discarnate ent.i.ty of some sort, seemed to haunt the dead silence of the house to which he had brought her so hopefully. The all-pervading gloom seemed to palpitate with his demand for the restoration to life and happiness of his son. Was she losing her mind? Lizzie wondered. She never could have imagined that such an hour as this could arrive for her, an hour so fraught with twinges, pangs, and thrusts the like of which had been alien to her experience. She could bear it no longer, and she took her lamp and went back to her own room. She listened attentively to detect any sound that might come from Jane's chamber. Was it a voice, a low, querulous voice? Yes, it must be; and laggingly she went to respond to it.

Jane lay with her eyes wide open in almost infantile inquiry.

"I see it didn't work," she smiled, wanly. "I didn't take enough, eh?

Well, well, it doesn't matter, Liz. I'd rather go the regular, old-fas.h.i.+oned way, after all. I seem to have slept off that other feeling. I'm not afraid now--no, no, not a bit! I've had my day, old pal, and the richest women of the land haven't had a better time. I dreamt that all the girls were here--Ide, and Lou, High-fling Em, and--"