His stertorous breathing could be heard through the house. Except for this, he might have been dead . . . behind the snow-white dimity and muslin hangings which she had put up in honour of those strangers who would now never cross the threshold. For Bowes-Smith, the well-known Melbourne physician whom she had called in on the advice of Dr. Barker — yes! with Richard lying senseless at her feet she had forgotten everything but his need, and had sent Bridget flying for the old man whom she had borne so bitter a grudge; and he had come at once, and been kindness itself. So active, too: it was hard to believe that he was between twenty and thirty years Richard’s senior — oh, how DID some people manage to live so long and be so healthy! But in spite of his consoling words, she could see that he took a very grave view of Richard’s case. And Bowes-Smith and he had had a sheerly endless consultation — from which, of course, they shut her out — after which the former had broken it to her that, even if he recovered from the present fit, Richard would remain more or less of a sick man for the rest of his life.
The utmost care was essential; an entire absence of excitement. “For I cannot conceal from you that such apoplectiform attacks, which — as in this case — differ little or not at all from true apoplexy, will be liable to recur.”
He stood on the dining-room hearthrug, tall, lugubrious, sandy-whiskered, holding his gold-rimmed pince-nez in his hand, and tapping the air with it while he cast about for words, which came laboriously. They had known him well in the old days, and she remembered this habit; it had always made him seem something of a bore. Now it maddened her. For she was keyed up to hear the truth, learn the worst; and to be obliged to sit there, listening to him stumbling and fumbling! He was so bland, too, so non-committal; how differently he would have talked to Richard had she lain ill. But she was only a woman; and, doctors being what they were . . . oh, she knew something about them from the inside. Usen’t Richard to say that it was etiquette in the profession to treat a patient’s relatives, and particularly his womenfolk, as so many cretins?
Ignoring her blunt question: “But if it isn’t true apoplexy, then what is it?” Bowes-Smith proceeded deliberately to catechise her.
“I don’t know, Mrs. Mahony, whether you are . . . h’m . . . whether it is . . . er . . . news to you that I saw your husband some two or three months back? He . . . er . . . consulted me, at the time, with regard to . . . h’m . . . to an attack . . . nay, to recurring attacks of vertigo. I found him then under no . . . h’m . . . no delusion as to his own state. He said nothing to you? Did not take you into his confidence?”
“No, nothing,” said Mary dully: and inconsequently remembered the letter she had had from Richard when she was trying to induce him to settle in Narrong. She hadn’t known then what to believe; more than half suspected him of writing as he did to further his own ends.
“And you have not noticed anything . . . h’m . . . out of the way? There has been no marked change in his habits? No . . . er . . . oddness, or eccentricity?” The questions lumbered along, she sitting the while fiercely knotting her fingers.
“Nothing,” she said again. Adding, though, in spite of herself: “But then he has always been so peculiar. If he did seem a little odder of late, I merely put it down to his growing old.”
“Quite so . . . er . . . most natural.” (She was keeping things back, of course; wives always did. He remembered her well: a handsome creature she had been when last he saw her. The eyes were still very striking.) “And now . . . er . . . with regard to the present attack. Are you aware of anything having happened to . . . er . . . cause him undue excitement . . . or agitation?”
“No,” said Mary staunchly. How could it matter now, what had brought the fit on? Wild horses would not have dragged from her any allusion to their bitter quarrel of the night before. That would have meant turning out, to this stranger, the dark side of their married life. However, she again glossed over the bluntness of her denial with: “But he was always one to work himself up over trifles.”
“Well, well! My colleague here . . . and if, at any time, you would care to see me again, I am entirely at your disposal.” (No need to trouble the poor creature with more, at present. Yes, truly, a magnificent pair of optics!) “Do not be . . . h’m . . . alarmed at any slight . . . er . . . stiffness or rigidity of the limbs that may ensue. That will pass.”
And I a doctor’s wife! thought Mary hotly. Aloud she said: “Oh, I’m not afraid — of paralysis or anything — as long as he is spared.” And while the two men confabbed anew, she went to the bedroom and stood looking down at Richard. Her own husband . . . and she could not even be told frankly what was the matter with him. For twenty-five years and more she had had him at her side, to give the truth if she asked for it. She had never known till now how much this meant to her.
Meanwhile she spilt no jot of her strength in brooding or repining: every act, every thought was concentrated on him alone. And not till the first signs of betterment appeared: when the dreadful snoring ceased and his temperature fell to normal; when his eyes began to follow her about the room; when he was able to move one hand to point to what he wanted: not till then did she sit down, cold and grim, to face the future.
“My God! what’s to become of us?”
A pitiful forty-odd pounds standing to his credit in a Melbourne Bank, and her own poor remnant of Tilly’s loan, was literally all they had in the world. In that last mad holocaust everything else had gone: deeds and mortgages, letters and securities, down to the last atom of scrip. He had piled and burnt till the dispatch-box was empty. (Who would now be able to prove what shares he had held? Or how much had been paid off on the mortgage?) The house at Barambogie was still on their hands; and almost the whole of their lease at Shortlands had still to run. How were these rents to be met? . . . and what would happen if they weren’t? She would need expert advice, probably have to employ a lawyer — a thought that made her shiver. For she had the natural woman’s fear of the law and its followers: thought of these only in terms of bills of costs . . . and sharp, dishonest practices.
But that must all come later. The burning question was, where to turn for ready money. The little she had would go nowhere: Richard’s illness . . . presents to the doctors, the servant’s wages — nor could they live on air. Boarders were out of the question now: for Richard’s sake. WHAT could she do? What did other women do who were left in her plight, with little children dependent on them? Driving her mind back, she saw that as a rule these “widows and things” were content to live at somebody else’s expense, to become the limpets known as “poor relations,” leaving the education of their children to a male relative. But she had not been Richard’s wife for nothing. At the mere thought of such a thing, her back stiffened. Never! Not as long as she had a leg to stand on . . . mere woman though she was.
IT’S NOT MONEY I WANT THIS TIME, TILLY, she wrote: and Tilly was but one of many who, the news of Richard’s breakdown having spread abroad as on an invisible telegraph, came forward with offers of help. IT’S WORK. I DON’T CARE WHAT; IF ONLY I CAN EARN ENOUGH TO KEEP US TOGETHER. But here even Tilly’s ingenuity failed her: women of Mary’s standing (let alone her advanced age, her inexperience) did not turn out of their sheltered homes and come to grips with the world. Impossible, utterly impossible, was to be read between the lines of her reply.
And, as day after day went by without enlightenment, it began to look as if Tilly was right. Beat her brains as she would, Mary would find no way out.
To old Mrs. Spence, who in this crisis had proved a friend indeed, she finally made a clean breast of her despair.
“There seems literally nothing a woman CAN do. Except teach — and I’m too old for that. Nor have I the brains. I was married so young. And had so little schooling myself. No, the plain truth is, I’m fit for nothing. Really there come moments when I can see us all ending in the Benevolent Asylum.”
It was here that Mrs. Spence, nodding her sage, white-capped head in sympathy, made the tentative suggestion: “I wonder, my dear . . . has it never occurred to you to try to enter Government service?”
Mary winced . . . she hoped not too perceptibly. “Oh, I’m afraid that again would need more brains than I’ve got.” It was well meant, of course, but . . . SO to cut oneself adrift!
Undaunted the old lady went on. “Plenty of women before you have done it. As a postmistress, you would have a house rent-free, with free lighting and firing, all sorts of perquisites, and a fixed salary. And I think, my dear, with the many friends you have at court, it would be easy for you to skip preliminaries. My son, I know, would be only too happy to help you in any way he could.”
“You’re very kind. But I feel sure I’m too old . . . and too stupid.”
But that night, as she tossed wakeful on the hard little bed she had set up beside Richard’s, her friend’s words came back to her, and rang in her ears till they had effectually chased away all chance of sleep: so spurred and pricked her, in fact, that she sat up in bed and, hunching her knees, propped her elbows on them and dug her clenched fists into her chin. A house rent-free.. . nothing to pay for light and firing . . . a fixed salary — she didn’t know how much, of course, but it would need to be enough to support a family on, so many postmasters being married men. It would also mean that she could keep Richard and the children with her; and the fear of having to part from them was the worst she knew. And then those rents, those dreadful rents, which hung round her neck like millstones . . . might she not perhaps . . . But, oh! the come-down . . . the indignity . . . the PUBLICITY of the thing — in this colony where she had been so well known. A postmistress . . . she, a postmistress! . . . forced to step out into the open, become a kind of public woman. To see her name — RICHARD’S name — in printed lists, in official communications. (She might even have to tell her age.) Men — strange men — would be over her, she their subordinate, answerable to them for what she did. Worse still, she herself would have men under her, young men of a class with which she had never come in contact. What would her friends and acquaintances say, to see her sink like this in the social scale? (At which her native plain-dealing jogged her elbow with the reflection that it would soon shew who were true friends, and who not.) Oh, it was easy to SAY you didn’t mind what you turned your hand to. But when it came to doing it! — And then, too, suppose she wasn’t equal to the work? As she had said, and truly, she had no faith in her own abilities. Directly it came to book or head-learning, she thought of herself as dull and slow. Though here, oddly enough, the thought perked up and declined to be quenched that, if Richard had only let her have a say, however small, in the management of his affairs, these might never have got into the muddle they had. Figures didn’t come hard to her.
Thus was she tossed and torn, between a womanly repugnance, her innate self-distrust, and her sound common sense. And she got up in the morning still having failed to reconcile the combatants. It was the sight of Richard that determined her. When she saw him sitting propped up among his pillows, his lower jaw on the shake; when she heard his pitiful attempts to say what he wanted — like a little child he was having to be taught the names of things all over again — when she looked at this wreck, every other consideration fell away. What did she matter? . . . what did anything or anybody matter? — if only she could restore to health and contrive to keep, in something of the comfort he had been used to, this poor old comrade of the years.
Henry Ocock held office in the present ministry; and it was to Mr. Henry she turned; for they had a common bond in the memory of poor Agnes. She wrote, without hedging, of Richard’s utter physical collapse; of the loss — through fire — of his papers and securities; the urgent necessity she was under of finding employment. It had been suggested to her that she might try to enter Government service. Would he, for the sake of their old friendship, do her the great kindness to use his influence, on her behalf, with the present Postmaster General? Mr. Spence, in charge ............