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he said, “if you don't believe me, what she's like, would you believe she has been confirmed three times?”
“Nonsense!” laughed Mrs. Morel.
“Nonsense or not, she HAS! That's what confirmation means for her—a bit of a theatrical show where she can cut a figure.”
“I haven't, Mrs. Morel!” cried the girl—“I haven't! it is not true!”
“What!” he cried, flashing round on her. “Once in Bromley, once in Beckenham, and once somewhere else.”
“Nowhere else!” she said, in tears—“nowhere else!”
“It WAS! And if it wasn't why were you confirmed TWICE?”
“Once I was only fourteen, Mrs. Morel,” she pleaded, tears in her eyes.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Morel; “I can quite understand it, child. Take no notice of him. You ought to be ashamed, William, saying such things.”
“But it's true. She's religious—she had blue velvet Prayer-Books—and she's not as much religion, or anything else, in her than that table-leg. Gets confirmed three times for show, to show herself off, and that's how she is in EVERYTHING—EVERYTHING!”
The girl sat on the sofa, crying. She was not strong.
“As for LOVE!” he cried, “you might as well ask a fly to love you! It'll love settling on you—”
“Now, say no more,” commanded Mrs. Morel. “If you want to say these things, you must find another place than this. I am ashamed of you, William! Why don't you be more manly. To do nothing but find fault with a girl, and then pretend you're engaged to her!”
Mrs. Morel subsided in wrath and indignation.
William was silent, and later he repented, kissed and comforted the girl. Yet it was true, what he had said. He hated her.
When they were going away, Mrs. Morel accompanied them as far as Nottingham. It was a long way to Keston station.
“You know, mother,” he said to her, “Gyp's shallow. Nothing goes deep with her.”
“William, I WISH you wouldn't say these things,” said Mrs. Morel, very uncomfortable for the girl who walked beside her.
“But it doesn't, mother. She's very much in love with me now, but if I died she'd have forgotten me in three months.”
Mrs. Morel was afraid. Her heart beat furiously, hearing the quiet bitterness of her son's last speech.
“How do you know?” she replied. “You DON'T know, and therefore you've no right to say such a thing.”
“He's always saying these things!” cried the girl.
“In three months after I was buried you'd have somebody else, and I should be forgotten,” he said. “And that's your love!”
Mrs. Morel saw them into the train in Nottingham, then she returned home.
“There's one comfort,” she said to Paul—“he'll never have any money to marry on, that I AM sure of. And so she'll save him that way.”
So she took cheer. Matters were not yet very desperate. She firmly believed William would never marry his Gipsy. She waited, and she kept Paul near to her.
All summer long William's letters had a feverish tone; he seemed unnatural and intense. Sometimes he was exaggeratedly jolly, usually he was flat and bitter in his letter.
“Ah,” his mother said, “I'm afraid he's ruining himself against that creature, who isn't worthy of his love—no, no more than a rag doll.”
He wanted to come home. The midsummer holiday was gone; it was a long while to Christmas. He wrote in wild excitement, saying he could come for Saturday and Sunday at Goose Fair, the first week in October.
“You are not well, my boy,” said his mother, when she saw him. She was almost in tears at having him to herself again.
“No, I've not been well,” he said. “I've seemed to have a dragging cold all the last month, but it's going, I think.”
It was sunny October weather. He seemed wild with joy, like a schoolboy escaped; then again he was silent and reserved. He was more gaunt than ever, and there was a haggard look in his eyes.
“You are doing too much,” said his mother to him.
He was doing extra work, trying to make some money to marry on, he said. He only talked to his mother once on the Saturday night; then he was sad and tender about his beloved.
“And yet, you know, mother, for all that, if I died she'd be broken-hearted for two months, and then she'd start to forget me. You'd see, she'd never come home here to look at my grave, not even once.”
“Why, William,” said his mother, “you're not going to die, so why talk about it?”
“But whether or not—” he replied.
“And she can't help it. She is like that, and if you choose her—well, you can't grumble,” said his mother.
On the Sunday morning, as he was putting his collar on:
“Look,” he said to his mother, holding up his chin, “what a rash my collar's made under my chin!”
Just at the junction of chin and throat was a big red inflammation.
“It ought not to do that,” said his mother. “Here, put a bit of this soothing ointment on. You should wear different collars.”
He went away on Sunday midnight, seeming better and more solid for his two days at home.
On Tuesday morning came a telegram from London that he was ill. Mrs. Morel got off her knees from washing the floor, read the telegram, called a neighbour, went to her landlady and borrowed a sovereign, put on her things, and set off. She hurried to Keston, caught an express for London in Nottingham. She had to wait in Nottingham nearly an hour. A small figure in her black bonnet, she was anxiously asking the porters if they knew how to get to Elmers End. The journey was three hours. She sat in her corner in a kind of stupor, never moving. At King's Cross still no one could tell her how to get to Elmers End. Carrying her string bag, that contained her nightdress, a comb and brush, she went from person to person. At last they sent her underground to Cannon Street.
It was six o'clock when she arrived at William's lodging. The blinds were not down.
“How is he?” she asked.
“No better,” said the landlady.
She followed the woman upstairs. William lay on the bed, with bloodshot eyes, his face rather discoloured. The clothes were tossed about, there was no fire in the room, a glass of milk stood on the stand at his bedside. No one had been with him.
“Why, my son!” said the mother bravely.
He did not answer. He looked at her, but did not see her. Then he began to say, in a dull voice, as if repeating a letter from dictation: “Owing to a leakage in the hold of this vessel, the sugar had set, and become converted into rock. It needed hacking—”
He was quite unconscious. It had been his business to examine some such cargo of sugar in the Port of London.
“How long has he been like this?” the mother asked the landlady.
“He got home at six o'clock on Monday morning, and he seemed to sleep all day; then in the night we heard him talking, and this morning he asked for you. So I wired, and we fetched the doctor.”
“Will you have a fire made?”
Mrs. Morel tried to soothe her son, to keep him still.
The doctor came. It was pneumonia, and, he said, a peculiar erysipelas, which had started under the chin where the collar chafed, and was spreading over the face. He hoped it would not get to the brain.
Mrs.