She pursued her advantage. “What am I to do?” she cried.
She turned upon him passionately. “Look what you've done!” She marked
her points with finger upheld, and gave odd suggestions in her face of
an angry coster girl. “Eva' since I met you, I've wo'shipped you. I've
been 'eady to follow you anywhe'--to do anything. Eva' since that night
when you sat so calm and dignified, and they baited you and wo'id you.
When they we' all vain and cleva, and you--you thought only of God
and 'iligion and didn't mind fo' you'self.... Up to then--I'd been
living--oh! the emptiest life...”
The tears ran. “Pe'haps I shall live it again....” She dashed her grief
away with a hand beringed with stones as big as beetles.
“I said to myself, this man knows something I don't know. He's got the
seeds of ete'nal life su'ely. I made up my mind then and the' I'd follow
you and back you and do all I could fo' you. I've lived fo' you. Eve'
since. Lived fo' you. And now when all my little plans are 'ipe, you--!
Oh!”
She made a quaint little gesture with pink fists upraised, and then
stood with her hand held up, staring at the plans and drawings that were
littered over the inlaid table. “I've planned and planned. I said, I
will build him a temple. I will be his temple se'vant.... Just a me'
se'vant....”
She could not go on.
“But it is just these temples that have confused mankind,” he said.
“Not my temple,” she said presently, now openly weeping over the gay
rejected drawings. “You could have explained....”
“Oh!” she said petulantly, and thrust them away from her so that they
went sliding one after the other on to the floor. For some long-drawn
moments there was no sound in the room but the slowly accelerated slide
and flop of one sheet of cartridge paper after another.
“We could have been so happy,” she wailed, “se'ving oua God.”
And then this disconcerting lady did a still more disconcerting thing.
She staggered a step towards Scrape, seized the lapels of his coat,
bowed her head upon his shoulder, put her black hair against his cheek,
and began sobbing and weeping.
“My dear lady!” he expostulated, trying weakly to disengage her.
“Let me k'y,” she insisted, gripping more resolutely, and following his
backward pace. “You must let me k'y. You must let me k'y.”
His resistance ceased. One hand supported her, the other patted her
shining hair. “My dear child!” he said. “My dear child! I had no idea.
That you would take it like this....”
(7)
That was but the opening of an enormous interview. Presently he had
contrived in a helpful and sympathetic manner to seat the unhappy lady
on a sofa, and when after some cramped discourse she stood up before
him, wiping her eyes with a wet wonder of lace, to deliver herself the
better, a newborn appreciation of the tactics of the situation made
him walk to the other side of the table under colour of picking up a
drawing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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