Page 497 - women-in-love

‘Yes,’ she said
By the bedside the children already stood in a weeping
group.
‘Oh, mother!’ cried the daughters, almost in hysterics,
weeping loudly.
But the mother went forward. The dead man lay in re-
pose, as if gently asleep, so gently, so peacefully, like a young
man sleeping in purity. He was still warm. She stood look-
ing at him in gloomy, heavy silence, for some time.
‘Ay,’ she said bitterly, at length, speaking as if to the un-
seen witnesses of the air. ‘You’re dead.’ She stood for some
minutes in silence, looking down. ‘Beautiful,’ she asserted,
‘beautiful as if life had never touched you—never touched
you. God send I look different. I hope I shall look my years,
when I am dead. Beautiful, beautiful,’ she crooned over him.
‘You can see him in his teens, with his first beard on his face.
A beautiful soul, beautiful—‘ Then there was a tearing in
her voice as she cried: ‘None of you look like this, when you
are dead! Don’t let it happen again.’ It was a strange, wild
command from out of the unknown. Her children moved
unconsciously together, in a nearer group, at the dreadful
command in her voice. The colour was flushed bright in her
cheek, she looked awful and wonderful. ‘Blame me, blame
me if you like, that he lies there like a lad in his teens, with
his first beard on his face. Blame me if you like. But you
none of you know.’ She was silent in intense silence.
Then there came, in a low, tense voice: ‘If I thought that
the children I bore would lie looking like that in death, I’d
strangle them when they were infants, yes—‘

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