“I’d a seen to you afore ef you’d let me,” she said.  “You tyke it from me, young man, wot you wants is a good hot lining to your belly.  I’d ’ave given it to you ef you’d a let me.  I’m a lydy as tykes her dinner reg’ler, I am.  No, you don’t—­” This, as he turned away his head in protest.  She however secured it firmly with one filthy hand, while with the other she held the reeking cup to his lips.  She had put it to her own first to test the heat and quality of the brew.  Yet he was grateful.  He had some difficulty in swallowing; and from time to time she wiped his mouth with her villainous apron; and he was grateful still, having passed beyond disgust.

She perceived the gratitude.  “Garn,” said she, “wot’s a cup er tea?  I’d a seen to yer afore ef you’d a let me.”

She continued her ministrations; she brought coal in her own scuttle and after immense pains she lighted a fire in the wretched grate.  Then she smoothed his bed-clothes till they were covered with her smutty trail.  She would have gone for a doctor then and there, but difficulty arose.  For doctors meant hospitals, and the man below threatened to sell his lodger’s “sticks” if rent were not forthcoming.  She cast her eyes about in search of pawnable articles.  They fell upon his clothes.  She took up his shirt and examined it carefully, appraising the sleeve links and the studs.  But when she touched the coat, the coat that had Lucia’s letter in the breast-pocket, Rickman turned in his bed and made agonizing signs, struggling with the voice that perished in his burning throat.

“Wot’s the good,” said she, “of a suit when yer can’t wear it?  As I telled you wot you wa—­No, the’s no sorter use your making fyces at me.  And you keep your ——­y legs in, or I’ll—­” The propositions that followed were murmured in a hoarse but crooning tone such as a mother might have used to soothe a fractious child.  She went away, carrying the clothes with her, and turned out the pockets in her den.

On her return she sent the man below to fetch the doctor.  But the man below fell in with boon companions on the way, and no doctor came.  All that night the woman watched by Rickman’s bedside, heedless of her luck.  She kept life in him by feeding him with warm milk and gin, a teaspoonful at a time.  Rickman, aware of footsteps in the room, fancied himself back again in Rankin’s dressing-room.  The whole scene of that evening floated before him all night long.  He had a sense of presences hostile and offended, of being irretrievably disgraced.  In the recurring nightmare he saw Lucia Harden instead of Mrs. Rankin.  So persistently did he see her that when he woke he could not shake off the impression that she had been actually, if unaccountably, present, a spectator of his uttermost disgrace.  He could never look her in the face again.  No, for he was disgraced; absolutely, irredeemably, atrociously disgraced.  Beyond all possibility of explanation and defence; though he sometimes caught himself explaining and pleading against those offended phantoms of his brain.  Why should he suffer so?  Just because of his inability to deal with Rankin’s never-ending dinner, or to pay a debt of millions, many millions of figures that climbed up the wall.  He was not sure which of these two obligations was laid upon him.