And they were insignificant compared with the moment of her dying.
She lay dozing in her white bed under the black crucifix with the ivory Christ. The basins and medicine bottles had been cleared from the table by her pillow; it was spread for the last rites. The priest moved quietly about the room, arranging the candles, the Prayer Book and the Holy Sacrament. Then he drew a chair to her bedside and watched with her, waiting for her to come up out of her doze.
She woke suddenly. Her eyes were fixed upon him. She had a flash of lucidity. She was dying, and her dying made her supremely important to Clement Fanner.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
“Not yet. I think I’m afraid. Make me not afraid.”
He rose and lit the two candles on the altar. He took down the crucifix from the wall and stood it against the foot-rail of the bed.
She sighed. That was not what she had wanted.
“You will not be afraid now,” he said.
“I’m not afraid of the hereafter. I suppose you get used to it. Only it may be terrible just at first.”
“Our first state will depend very much on what we are thinking of at our last hour.”
“There’ll be my—confession,” she said.
“And after it you will receive the Sacrament. Then you will have your mind fixed firmly upon God and your Redeemer. … Do you feel able to make your confession now, Sister? Everything is ready.”
Her mind went back over her past and found Oscar Wade there. She wondered: Should she confess to him about Oscar Wade? One moment she thought it was possible; the next she knew that she couldn’t. She could not. It wasn’t necessary. For twenty years he had not been part of her life. No. She wouldn’t confess about Oscar Wade. She had been guilty of other sins.
She made a careful selection.
“I have cared too much for the beauty of this world. … I have failed in charity to my poor girls. Because of my intense repugnance to their sin. … I have thought, often, about—people I love, when I should have been thinking about God.”
After that she received the Sacrament.
“Now,” he said, “there is nothing to be afraid of.”
“I won’t be afraid if—if you would hold my hand.”
He held it. And she lay still a long time, with her eyes shut. Then he heard her murmuring something. He stooped close.
“This—is—dying. I thought it would be horrible. And it’s bliss. … Bliss.”
The priest’s hand slackened, as if at the bidding of some wonder. She gave a weak cry.
“Oh—don’t let me go.”
His grasp tightened.
“Try,” he said, “to think about God. Keep on looking at the crucifix.”
“If I look,” she whispered, “you won’t let go my hand?”
“I will not let you go.”
He held it till it was wrenched from him in the last agony.
She lingered for some hours in the room where these things had happened.
Its aspect was familiar and yet unfamiliar, and slightly repugnant to her. The altar, the crucifix, the lighted candles, suggested some tremendous and awful experience the details of which she was not able to recall. She seemed to remember that they had been connected in some way with the sheeted body on the bed; but the nature of the connection was not clear; and she did not associate the dead body with herself. When the nurse came in and laid it out, she saw that it was the body of a middle-aged woman. Her own living body was that of a young woman of about thirty-two.
Her mind had no past and no future, no sharp-edged, coherent memories, and no idea of anything to be done next.
Then, suddenly, the room began to come apart before her eyes, to split into shafts of floor and furniture and ceiling that shifted and were thrown by their commotion into different planes. They leaned slanting at every possible angle; they crossed and overlaid each other with a transparent mingling of dislocated perspectives, like reflections fallen on an interior seen behind glass.
The bed and the sheeted body slid away somewhere out of sight. She was standing by the door that still remained in position.
She opened it and found herself in the street, outside a building of yellowish-grey brick and freestone, with a tall slated spire. Her mind came together with a palpable click of recognition. This object was the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Maida Vale. She could hear the droning of the organ. She opened the door and slipped in.
Then, suddenly the room began to come apart …
She had gone back into a definite space and time, and recovered a certain limited section of coherent memory. She remembered the rows of pitch-pine benches, with their Gothic peaks and mouldings; the stone-coloured walls and pillars with their chocolate stencilling; the hanging rings of lights along the aisles of the nave; the high altar with its lighted candles, and the polished brass cross, twinkling. These things were somehow permanent and real, adjusted to the image that now took possession of her.
She knew what she had come there for. The service was over. The choir had gone from the chancel; the sacristan moved before the altar, putting out the candles. She walked up the middle aisle to a seat that she knew under the pulpit. She knelt down and covered her face with her hands. Peeping sideways through her fingers, she could see the door of the vestry on her left at the end of the north aisle. She watched it steadily.
Up in the organ loft the organist drew out the Recessional, slowly and softly, to its end in the two solemn, vibrating chords.
The vestry door opened and Clement Farmer came out, dressed in his black cassock. He passed before her, close, close outside the bench where she knelt. He paused at the opening. He was waiting for her. There was something he had to say.
She stood up and went towards him. He still waited. He didn’t move to make way for her. She came close, closer than she had ever come to him, so close that his features grew indistinct. She bent her head back, peering, short-sightedly, and found herself looking into Oscar Wade’s face.
He stood still, horribly still, and close, barring her passage.
She drew back; his heaving shoulders followed her. He leaned forward, covering her with his eyes. She opened her mouth to scream and no sound came.
She was afraid to move lest he should move with her. The heaving of his shoulders terrified her.
One by one the lights in the side aisles were going out. The lights in the middle aisle would go next. They had gone. If she didn’t get away she would be shut up with him there, in the appalling darkness.
She turned and moved towards the north aisle, groping, steadying herself by the book ledge.
When she looked back, Oscar Wade was not there.
Then she remembered that Oscar Wade was dead. Therefore, what she had seen was not Oscar; it was his ghost. He was dead; dead seventeen years ago. She was safe from him for ever.
When she came out on to the steps of the church she saw that the road it stood in had changed. It was not the road she remembered. The pavement on this side was raised slightly and covered in. It ran under a succession of arches. It was a long gallery walled with glittering shop windows on one side; on the other a line of tall grey columns divided it from the street.
She was going along the arcades of the rue de Rivoli. Ahead of her she could see the edge of