Marm Lisa

The child started, and, pushing back the shawl, looked out from under its cover, her head raised, her eyes brightening.

Mary chanced all on that one electrical moment of recognition, and, with a mien half commanding and half appealing, she stretched out both her arms and called again, while the crowd held its breath:

‘Come to me, darling!  Jump, little sister! now!’

Not one second did Marm Lisa hesitate.  She would have sprung into the fire at that dear mandate, and, closing her eyes, she leaped into the air as the roof above her head fell in with a crash.

Just then the beating of hoofs and jangling of bells in the distance announced the coming of the belated firemen; not so long belated actually, for all the emotions, heart-beats, terrors, and despairs that go to make up tragedy can be lived through in a few brief moments.

In that sudden plunge from window to earth Marm Lisa seemed to die consciously.  The grey world, the sad world, vanished, ‘and the immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed, million-coloured,’ beamed on her darkness.  She kept on falling, falling, falling, till she reached the abysmal depths of space—then she knew no more: and Mary, though prone on the earth, kept falling, falling, falling with her into so deep a swoon that she woke only to find herself on a friendly bed, with Rhoda and Lisa herself, weeping over her.

At five o’clock, Mrs. Grubb, forcibly torn from a meeting and acquainted with the afternoon’s proceedings, hurried into a lower room in the tenement house, where Mary, Rhoda, and the three children were gathered for a time.  There were still a hundred people in the street, but they showed their respect by keeping four or five feet away from the windows.

The twins sat on a sofa, more quiet than anything save death itself.  They had been rocked to the very centre of their being, and looked like nothing so much as a couple of faded photographs of themselves.  Lisa lay on a cot, sleeping restlessly; Mary looked pale and wan, and there were dark circles under her eyes.

As Mrs. Grubb opened the door softly, Mary rose to meet her.

‘Have you heard all?’ she asked.

‘Yes, everything!’ faltered Mrs. Grubb with quivering lips and downcast eyelids.

Mary turned towards Lisa’s bed.  ‘Mrs. Grubb,’ she said, looking straight into that lady’s clear, shallow eyes, ‘I think Lisa has earned her freedom, and the right to ask a Christmas gift of you.  Stand on the other side of the cot and put your hand in mine.  I ask you for the last time, will you give this unfinished, imperfect life into my keeping, if I promise to be faithful to it unto the end, whatever it may be?’

I suppose that every human creature, be he ever so paltry, has his hour of effulgence, an hour when the mortal veil grows thin and the divine image stands revealed, endowing him, for a brief space at least with a kind of awful beauty and majesty.

It was Mistress Mary’s hour.  Her pure, unswerving spirit shone with a white and steady radiance that illuminated Mrs. Grubb’s soul to its very depths, showing her in a flash the feeble flickerings and waverings of her own trivial purposes.  At that moment her eye was fitted with a new lens, through which the road to the summit of the Tehachapi Mountains and Mahatmadom suddenly looked long, weary, and profitless, and by means of which the twins were transferred from the comfortable middle distance they had previously occupied to the immediate foreground of duty.  The lens might slip, but while it was in place she saw as clearly as another woman.

‘Will you?’ repeated Mistress Mary, wondering at her silence.

Mrs. Grubb gave one last glance at the still reproach of Lisa’s face, and one more at the twins, who seemed to loom more formidably each time she regarded them; then drawing a deep breath she said, ‘Yes, I will; I will, no matter what happens; but it isn’t enough to give up, and you needn’t suppose I think it is.’  And taking a passive twin by either hand, she passed out of the door into the crowded thoroughfare, and disappeared in the narrow streets that led to Eden Place.