Эдит Несбит: The Prophet's Mantle

'Be virtuous and you will be happy,' say the copy-books. A somewhat higher authority (Professor Huxley) thinks otherwise. 'Virtue is undoubtedly beneficent,' he says, 'but the man is to be envied to whom her ways seem in any wise playful; and though she may not talk much about suffering and self-denial, her silence on that topic may be accounted for on the principle ça va sans dire . She is an awful goddess, whose ministers are the furies, and whose highest reward is peace.'

Alice Hatfield hadn't read Huxley, but if she had she would have agreed with him in this; and now it seemed as though the furies were driving her along the streets towards that miserable home of hers, where, so far, no dove of peace had folded its wings.

It is given to all of us, at one time or another, to repent—more or less—of the evil; but many of us also know what it is to look back, with something like remorse, on what we believe to have been the good. And good and evil, get so mixed up sometimes, when we have often heard the world's 'right' skilfully controverted and made to seem wrong, by the tongue whose eloquence once made wrong seem to us right.

Alice had to collect all her energies to enable her to climb the steep dark stairs which led to her room, and when she had gained it at last, and had lighted her little benzoline lamp, she sank down on her chair bedstead, exhausted and breathless. What a hateful room it was; how cold, and cheerless, and wretched. The few poor articles of furniture did not relieve its bareness in the least. There was no fire, of course, and her little lamp quite failed to light up the dark corners. There must be something wrong with that lamp—it was going out surely—the room was growing so dark; or was it her eyes from which the power of seeing was going? The room seemed to swim before her sight, and a feeling of deadly faintness came over her, a horrible sensation of going through the floor. She staggered to her feet and drank some water, which gave her strength to go unsteadily down to the floor below, and to knock at the landlady's door.

'Oh, I am so ill—so ill! I think I'm dying,' she said, holding out both hands as the woman appeared; 'help me.'

Then she knew no more. Her troubles, her tiredness, her regrets, her very self, all were swallowed up in the horror of great darkness that overwhelmed her.

'Here's a nice set out,' grumbled Mrs Fludger, as her lodger fell at her feet; 'as if one hadn't enough troubles o' one's own—what with Jenny being out o' work, and the master on the booze since Friday. Jenny!'

'Here I am.'

Miss Jenny Fludger, a muscular young woman, with her hair in a long beaded net, responded to the call, and lent her help in carrying Alice back to her room. Then the unsympathetic hands of the two women undressed the girl and laid her in her bed. Then they looked meaningly at each other.

'If she don't soon come round I'll send Joe for the doctor,' said the mother. 'You never knows what may happen.'

Then Mrs Fludger dashed cold water in the patient's face, slapped her hands with a vigour that would have brought tears to her eyes had she been conscious, and made a horrible smell with the benzoline lamp and a pigeon's feather hastily begged from a lodger who had leanings ornithological. Alice showing no signs of being affected by the application of these generally efficacious remedies, Mrs Fludger decided that this was a case of 'going off' quite beyond her experience, and feeling the responsibility too much to be borne alone, she despatched her third son in quest of a doctor, regardless of Miss Jenny's opinion that the lodger was 'shamming.' Joe Fludger was not particularly pleased at being sent. He was busy just then shaking up a mangy kitten and a recently-acquired guinea-pig in a box, with a view of getting them to fight, which they showed no signs of doing, and he did not care to relinquish this enthralling pastime until he had compassed his end. He put his two 'pets' into one pocket, hoping that that position would urge them to fulfil their destiny and have it out, and as he met several friends, and felt it incumbent on him to exhibit his treasures to each of them, it was some time before he carried out his instructions, and brought medical science, as represented by Dr Moore, to 15 Spray's Buildings. But even when the doctor did at last stand by her bedside, Alice was still insensible.

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