LITMIR.BIZ

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niver seed such a length as he is!” said the miner, and watching anxiously as he worked.

      Paul went to the bay window and looked out. The ash-tree stood monstrous and black in front of the wide darkness. It was a faintly luminous night. Paul went back to his mother.

      At ten o'clock Morel called:

      “He's here!”

      Everyone started. There was a noise of unbarring and unlocking the front door, which opened straight from the night into the room.

      “Bring another candle,” called Morel.

      Annie and Arthur went. Paul followed with his mother. He stood with his arm round her waist in the inner doorway. Down the middle of the cleared room waited six chairs, face to face. In the window, against the lace curtains, Arthur held up one candle, and by the open door, against the night, Annie stood leaning forward, her brass candlestick glittering.

      There was the noise of wheels. Outside in the darkness of the street below Paul could see horses and a black vehicle, one lamp, and a few pale faces; then some men, miners, all in their shirt-sleeves, seemed to struggle in the obscurity. Presently two men appeared, bowed beneath a great weight. It was Morel and his neighbour.

      “Steady!” called Morel, out of breath.

      He and his fellow mounted the steep garden step, heaved into the candlelight with their gleaming coffin-end. Limbs of other men were seen struggling behind. Morel and Burns, in front, staggered; the great dark weight swayed.

      “Steady, steady!” cried Morel, as if in pain.

      All the six bearers were up in the small garden, holding the great coffin aloft. There were three more steps to the door. The yellow lamp of the carriage shone alone down the black road.

      “Now then!” said Morel.

      The coffin swayed, the men began to mount the three steps with their load. Annie's candle flickered, and she whimpered as the first men appeared, and the limbs and bowed heads of six men struggled to climb into the room, bearing the coffin that rode like sorrow on their living flesh.

      “Oh, my son—my son!” Mrs. Morel sang softly, and each time the coffin swung to the unequal climbing of the men: “Oh, my son—my son—my son!”

      “Mother!” Paul whimpered, his hand round her waist.

      She did not hear.

      “Oh, my son—my son!” she repeated.

      Paul saw drops of sweat fall from his father's brow. Six men were in the room—six coatless men, with yielding, struggling limbs, filling the room and knocking against the furniture. The coffin veered, and was gently lowered on to the chairs. The sweat fell from Morel's face on its boards.

      “My word, he's a weight!” said a man, and the five miners sighed, bowed, and, trembling with the struggle, descended the steps again, closing the door behind them.

      The family was alone in the parlour with the great polished box. William, when laid out, was six feet four inches long. Like a monument lay the bright brown, ponderous coffin. Paul thought it would never be got out of the room again. His mother was stroking the polished wood.

      They buried him on the Monday in the little cemetery on the hillside that looks over the fields at the big church and the houses. It was sunny, and the white chrysanthemums frilled themselves in the warmth.

      Mrs. Morel could not be persuaded, after this, to talk and take her old bright interest in life. She remained shut off. All the way home in the train she had said to herself: “If only it could have been me!”

      When Paul came home at night he found his mother sitting, her day's work done, with hands folded in her lap upon her coarse apron. She always used to have changed her dress and put on a black apron, before. Now Annie set his supper, and his mother sat looking blankly in front of her, her mouth shut tight. Then he beat his brains for news to tell her.

      “Mother, Miss Jordan was down to-day, and she said my sketch of a colliery at work was beautiful.”

      But Mrs. Morel took no notice. Night after night he forced himself to tell her things, although she did not listen. It drove him almost insane to have her thus. At last:

      “What's a-matter, mother?” he asked.

      She did not hear.

      “What's a-matter?” he persisted. “Mother, what's a-matter?”

      “You know what's the matter,” she said irritably, turning away.

      The lad—he was sixteen years old—went to bed drearily. He was cut off and wretched through October, November and December. His mother tried, but she could not rouse herself. She could only brood on her dead son; he had been let to die so cruelly.

      At last, on December 23, with his five shillings Christmas-box in his pocket, Paul wandered blindly home. His mother looked at him, and her heart stood still.

      “What's the matter?” she asked.

      “I'm badly, mother!” he replied. “Mr. Jordan gave me five shillings for a Christmas-box!”

      He handed it to her with trembling hands. She put it on the table.

      “You aren't glad!” he reproached her; but he trembled violently.

      “Where hurts you?” she said, unbuttoning his overcoat.

      It was the old question.

      “I feel badly, mother.”

      She undressed him and put him to bed. He had pneumonia dangerously, the doctor said.

      “Might he never have had it if I'd kept him at home, not let him go to Nottingham?” was one of the first things she asked.

      “He might not have been so bad,” said the doctor.

      Mrs. Morel stood condemned on her own ground.

      “I should have watched the living, not the dead,” she told herself.

      Paul was very ill. His mother lay in bed at nights with him; they could not afford a nurse. He grew worse, and the crisis approached. One night he tossed into consciousness in the ghastly, sickly feeling of dissolution, when all the cells in the body seem in intense irritability to be breaking down, and consciousness makes a last flare of struggle, like madness.

      “I s'll die, mother!” he cried, heaving for breath on the pillow.

      She lifted him up, crying in a small voice:

      “Oh, my son—my son!”

      That brought him to. He realised her. His whole will rose up and arrested him. He put his head on her breast, and took ease of her for love.

      “For some things,” said his aunt, “it was a good thing Paul was ill that Christmas. I believe it saved his mother.”

      Paul was in bed for seven weeks. He got up white and fragile. His father had bought him a pot of scarlet and gold tulips. They used to flame in the window in the March sunshine as he sat on the sofa chattering to his mother. The two knitted together in perfect intimacy. Mrs. Morel's life now rooted itself in Paul.

      William had been a prophet. Mrs. Morel had a little present and a letter from Lily at Christmas. Mrs. Morel's sister had a letter at the New Year.

      “I was at a ball last night. Some delightful people were there, and I enjoyed myself thoroughly,” said the letter. “I had every dance—did not sit out one.”

      Mrs. Morel never heard any more of her.

      Morel and his wife were gentle with each other for some time after the death of their son. He would go into a kind of daze, staring wide-eyed and blank across the room. Then he got up suddenly and hurried out to the Three Spots, returning in his normal state. But never in his life would he go for a walk up Shepstone, past the office where his son had worked, and he always avoided the cemetery.

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