“He may not be the first to go. I had a premonition—I don’t know what else you’d call it—the other day. I tell you what—it may not be long now—” Her eyes bleared with pity—shaking her puckered mouth, she wept at her own funeral.
“Good heavens, mama!” Helen burst out furiously. “There’s nothing wrong with you. Papa’s a sick man! Don’t you realize that?”
She didn’t.
“Pshaw!” she said. “There’s nothing much wrong with him. McGuire told me two men out of three have it after they’re fifty.”
His body as it sickened distilled a green bile of hatred against her crescent health. It made him mad to see her stand so strong. Murderous impotent, baffled—a maniacal anger against her groped for an outlet in him, sometimes exploding in a wild inchoate scream.
He yielded weakly to invalidism, he became tyrannous of attention, jealous of service. Her indifference to his health maddened him, created a morbid hunger for pity and tears. At times he got insanely drunk and tried to frighten her by feigning death, one time so successfully that Ben, bending over his rigid form in the hallway, was whitened with conviction.
“I can’t feel his heart, mama,” he said, with a nervous whicker of his lips.
“Well,” she said, picking her language with deliberate choosiness, “the pitcher went to the well once too often. I knew it would happen sooner or later.”
Through a slotted eye he glared murderously at her. Judicially, with placid folded hands, she studied him. Her calm eye caught the slow movement of a stealthy inhalation.
“You get his purse, son, and any papers he may have,” she directed. “I’ll call the undertaker.”
With an infuriate scream the dead awakened.
“I thought that would bring you to,” she said complacently.
He scrambled to his feet.
“You hell-hound!” he yelled. “You would drink my heart’s blood. You are without mercy and without pity—inhuman and bloody monster that you are.”
