Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/315

Rh one.' Then she continued resignedly and remarkably: 'And now they can die.'

'Mr. and Mrs. Dedrick?' I pricked up my ears. 'Are they dying?'

'Not quite, but the old lady, it appears, is failing, steadily weakening; less, as I understand it, from any definite ailment than because she just feels her work done and her little sum of passion, as Marmaduke calls it, spent. Fancy, with her convictions, all her reasons for wanting to die! And if she goes, he says, Mr. Dedrick won't long linger. It will be quite "John Anderson my jo."'

'Keeping her company down the hill, to lie beside her at the foot?'

'Yes, having settled all things.'

I turned these things over as we walked away, and how they had settled them—for Maud-Evelyn's dignity and Marmaduke's high advantage; and before we parted that afternoon—we had taken a cab in the Bayswater road and she had come home with me—I remember saying to her: 'Well, then, when they die won't he be free?'

She seemed scarce to understand. 'Free?'

'To do what he likes.'

She wondered. 'But he does what he likes now.'

'Well, then, what you like!'

'Oh, you know what I like!'

Ah, I closed her mouth! 'You like to tell horrid fibs—yes, I know it!'

What she had then put before me, however, came in time to pass: I heard in the course of the next year of Mrs. Dedrick's extinction, and some months later, without, during the interval, having seen a sign of Marmaduke, wholly taken up with his bereaved patron, learned that her husband had touchingly followed her. I was out of England at the time; we had had to put into practice great economies and let our little place; so that, spending three winters successively in Italy, I