“Eh, missis!” breathed Mrs. Tams.  “What’s this?”

Rachel gave a nervous laugh.

“I was up.  Mr. Fores was asleep, and I had to do something, so I thought—­”

“Has he had a good night, ma’am?”

“Fair.  Yes, pretty good.  I must run up and see if he is awake.”

Mrs. Tams saw the stains on Rachel’s cheeks, but she could not mention them.  Rachel had an impulse to fall on Mrs. Tams’ enormous breast and weep.  But the conventions of domesticity were far too strong for her also.  Mrs. Tams was the general servant; what Louis occasionally called “the esteemed skivvy.”  Once Mrs. Tams had been wife, mother, grandmother, victim, slave, diplomatist, serpent, heroine.  Once she had bent from morn till night under the terrific weight of a million perils and responsibilities.  Once she could never be sure of her next meal, or the roof over her head, or her skin, or even her bones.  Once she had been the last resource and refuge not merely of a house, but of half a street, and she had had a remedy for every ill, a balm for every wound.  But now she was safe, out of harm’s way.  She had no responsibilities worth a rap.  She had everything an old woman ought to desire.  And yet the silly old woman felt a lack, as she impotently watched Rachel leave the kitchen.  Perhaps she wanted her eye blacked, or the menace of a policeman, or a child down with diphtheria, to remind her that the world revolved.

CHAPTER XIII

DEAD-LOCK

I

Louis had wakened up a few minutes before Rachel returned to the bedroom from that most wonderfully conscientious spell of silver-cleaning.  He was relieved to find himself alone.  He was ill, perhaps very ill, but he felt unquestionably better than in the night.  He was delivered from the appalling fear of death which had tortured and frightened him, and his thankfulness was intense; and yet at the same time he was aware of a sort of heroical sentimental regret that he was not, after all, dead; he would almost have preferred to die with grandeur, young, unfortunate, wept for by an inconsolable wife doomed to everlasting widowhood.  He was ashamed of his bodily improvement, which rendered him uncomfortably self-conscious, for he had behaved as though dying when, as the event proved, he was not dying.

When Rachel came in, this self-consciousness grew terrible.  And in his weakness, his constraint, his febrile perturbation which completely destroyed presence of mind, he feebly remarked—­

“Did any one call yesterday to ask how I was?”

As soon as he had said it he knew that it was inept, and quite unsuitable to the role which he ought to play.

Rachel had gone straight to the dressing-table, apparently ignoring him, though she could not possibly have failed to notice that he was awake.  She turned sharply and gazed at him with a look of inimical contempt that aggrieved and scarified him very acutely.  Making no answer to his query, content solely to condemn it with her eyes as egotistic and vain, she said—­