A few minutes later there was a shuffling of feet in the passage, and the door was softly opened. A woman came in, holding a light, and she peered curiously at the figure sitting quite still in the chair before the desk. The woman was half dressed, and she had let her splendid bronze hair flow down, her cheeks were flushed, and as she advanced into the shabby room, the lamp she carried cast quaking shadows on the mouldering paper, patched with marks of rising damp, and hanging in strips from the wet, dripping wall. The blind had not been drawn, but no light or glimmer of light filtered through the window, for a great straggling box tree that beat the rain upon the panes shut out even the night. The woman came softly, and as she bent down over Lucian an argent gleam shone from her brown eyes, and the little curls upon her neck were like golden work upon marble. She put her hand to his heart, and looked up, and beckoned to some one who was waiting by the door. “Come in, Joe,” she said. “It’s just as I thought it would be: ‘Death by misadventure’;” and she held up a little empty bottle of dark blue glass that was standing on the desk. “He would take it, and I always knew he would take a drop too much one of these days.” “What’s all those papers that he’s got there?” “Didn’t I tell you? It was crool to see him. He got it into ’is ’ead he could write a book; he’s been at it for the last six months. Look ’ere.” She spread the neat pile of manuscript broadcast over the desk, and took a sheet at haphazard. It was all covered with illegible hopeless scribblings; only here and there it was possible to recognize a word. “Why, nobody could read it, if they wanted to.” “It’s all like that. He thought it was beautiful. I used to ’ear him jabbering to himself about it, dreadful nonsense it was he used to talk. I did my best to tongue him out of it, but it wasn’t any good.” “He must have been a bit dotty. He’s left you everything.” “Yes.” “You’ll have to see about the funeral.” “There’ll be the inquest and all that first.” “You’ve got evidence to show he took the stuff.” “Yes, to be sure I have. The doctor told him he would be certain to do for himself, and he was found two or three times quite silly in the streets. They had to drag him away from a house in Halden Road. He was carrying on dreadful, shaking at the gaite, and calling out it was ’is ’ome and they wouldn’t let him in. I heard Dr. Manning myself tell ’im in this very room that he’d kill ’imself one of these days. Joe! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself. I declare you’re quite rude, and it’s almost Sunday too. Bring the light over here, can’t you?” The man took up the blazing paraffin lamp, and set it on the desk, beside the scattered heap of that terrible manuscript. The flaring light shone through the dead eyes into the dying brain, and there was a glow within, as if great furnace doors were opened. THE END Other books by Arthur Machen Novels