“No,” cried Spinks, darting in again from the landing, “take him to my house, 45, Dalmeny Av—­” but the Beaver plucked him by the sleeve; for she thought of Muriel Maud.

“No, no, take him to mine, 87, Sussex Square,” said Rankin, and he insisted.  But in the end he suffered himself to be overruled; for he thought darkly of his wife.

“I’d give half my popularity if I could save him,” he said to Maddox.

“Half your popularity won’t save him, nor yet the whole of it,” said Maddox savagely.  In that moment they hated themselves and each other for the wrong they had done him.  Their hearts smote them as they thought of the brutalities of Sunday night.

The woman still held her ground in the centre of the room where she stood scowling at the nurse as she busied herself about the bed.

“I’d a seen to ’im ef ’e’d a let me,” she reiterated.

Maddox dealt with her.  He flicked a sovereign on to the table.  “Look here,” said he, “suppose you take that and go out quietly.”

There was a momentary glitter in her eyes, but her fingers hesitated.

“I didn’ fink ’e ’ad no frien’s wen I come in.”  It was her way of intimating that what she had done she had not done for money.

“All right, take it.”

She drew out a filthy grey flannel bag from the bosom of her gown and slipped the gold into it.  And still she hesitated.  She could not understand why so large a sum was offered for such slight services as she had rendered.  It must have been for—­Another thought stirred in her brute brain.

They were raising Rickman in his bed before taking him away.  His shoulders were supported on the nurse’s arm, his head dropped on her breast.  The posture revealed all the weakness of his slender body.  The woman turned.  And as she looked at the helpless figure she was visited by a dim sense of something strange and beautiful and pure, something (his helplessness perhaps) that was outraged by her presence, and called for vindication.

“’E never ’ad no truck with me,” she said.  It struck Maddox that the denial had a sublimity and pathos of its own.  She dropped the bag into her lean bosom and went out.

And the porters wrapped him in his blankets, and laid him on a stretcher, and carried him out; past Maddox and Rankin who turned their heads away; past Flossie who shrank a little from the blankets, but cried softly to see him go; and past the woman standing on her threshold.  And in that manner he passed Horace Jewdwine coming up the stair too late.  And all that Jewdwine could do was to stand back and let him pass.

It was Jewdwine’s fear that made him uncover, as in the presence of the dead.

CHAPTER LXXIII

When Rankin, Maddox and Jewdwine stood alone in the garret whence they had seen Rickman carried away from them, remorse drove all hope of his recovery from their hearts.  They learnt some of the truth about him from the woman in the next room, a keen observer of human nature.  Jewdwine and Rankin, when they too had paid her for her services, were glad to escape from the intolerable scene.  Maddox stayed behind, collecting what he could only think of as Rickman’s literary remains.