THE FATAL KNIFE

Mynheer Mopius was slowly dying. He amused himself with playing the part and schooling Harriet, little realizing that her willingness to accept the fiction found its source in her certitude of the fact.

“Harriet has become quite docile,” reflected JacÓbus; “she will make an excellent wife for my old age. I had always a gift for managing women. Look at Sarah, my first, whose character was fundamentally selfish. Love, based upon obedience, that is the secret of wedded bliss. But it would never do to let the women know it. When a woman knows a secret there’s no secret left to know.”

Mynheer Mopius spent much of his time in bed, especially the daytime. At night he would gasp for breath and have to be helped to an easy-chair, and Harriet nursed him, carefully balancing her strength.

“Two invalids are no use to any one,” she said, when stipulating for repose in an adjoining apartment.

“My first wife—” began Mopius, but Harriet stopped him.

“That subject’s tabooed,” she said. “Why, JacÓbus, it is months since you mentioned her. Your first wife died. What would you do if, at this moment, I were to die?”

“Marry again,” replied JacÓbus, coughing against his pillows, and looking exceedingly yellow and bilious and unwholesome.

“It takes two to do that,” said Harriet, coloring, as she spoke, under the reproach of her own acceptance.

“Does it?” answered Mopius, clinking his medicine-bottles.

“JacÓbus, we have never quarrelled. Don’t let us begin now. There is only one question I should like to ask you without requiring an answer. How many people did you propose to when left a widower before you got down to me?” She left the room abruptly, and in the passage she struck her white hand across her face.

Not very hard.

JacÓbus sat up and adjusted his nightcap. “Ah, you see, she ran away,” he said. “A year ago she’d have braved it out. I shall still make something of Harriet.”

She came back presently with a bundle of papers. It was part of her daily task to read aloud all the official documents connected with the government of Drum, which were sent to the caged Town Councillor. JacÓbus fretted incessantly at the thought how everything was going wrong.

“The people in the streets look just as usual,” said Harriet; but that consideration afforded her husband no comfort. She yawned patiently over endless statistics regarding gas and drains. It was her ignorance which caused her to wonder whether the town would not have been governed far better without a council, and especially without an official printing-press.

“It is time for my medicine,” said Mopius, who, by saying this five minutes too early, constantly succeeded in suggesting an omission on Harriet’s part. “Well, what says the Burgomaster concerning the market dues? He is a fool, that Burgomaster. And so are the aldermen. Heigho! I wonder what will become of this poor town when I am gone! It is strange how greatly I have attached myself to it. Almost as much as if it had been my birthplace. But I had always ‘une nature attachante.’ It is a great mistake.”

“Not necessarily,” said Harriet.

“Yes, yes. Life is too short: here to-day, gone to-morrow. Ah, well! Is that idiot going to lower the rent for market stands?”

“I don’t know,” said Harriet, wearily, turning over her pile of documents; “I’ll read you the whole lot; you can see for yourself.” And she did read, monotonously, for an hour and a half, Mopius following everything with eager interest, interrupting, gesticulating, nodding approval or, more frequently, dissent.

“Right, right,” said JacÓbus, in high good-humor over somebody’s opposition to the powers that be in Drum. “Give it them well. I never approved of knuckling under to grandees. You gain nothing but kicks by bowing to ‘My Lord.’ Ah, they’ll miss me when I’m dead, Harriet, and so will you.”

“Yes, I shall miss you,” replied his wife. “Dear me, JacÓbus, what shall I do with my time all day?”

“First you will cry,” said JacÓbus, with ghastly enjoyment of a far-off possibility; “and then you will get tired of crying.” He waited a little ruefully for a disclaimer. “And then you will begin to enjoy your money.”

“By-the-bye, that is a subject we have never spoken about since the marriage settlement,” said Harriet, holding one of the stiff yellow papers against her cheek. “At least, I have never spoken about it. Of course, you tell me twenty times in a week that you will leave me a lot of money; but that counts for nothing. I believe you used to say the same thing to Ursula. Seriously, JacÓbus, have you ever made a will?”

“I have,” said JacÓbus, enjoying his importance.

“I thought people who had been notaries always died intestate. If you had died intestate, JacÓbus, I suppose Ursula would have had all your money?”

“Ursula and that foolish Josine. Ursula, Baroness van Helmont, of Horstwyk and the Horst. This conversation appears to me unpleasing, Harriet.”

“Unavoidable conversations almost always are.” Harriett’s face was entirely hid by the “Report on Sewage.” “Has this will of yours really appointed me your heir?”

Mynheer Mopius fell back and gasped. “Can you not wait a little longer?” he said—“a very little longer?”

“JacÓbus, I am only repeating what you have told me over and over again. I want to know, if you please, whether you have really left your whole fortune to me.”

She drew near to the bed.

Mynheer Mopius sat up again, and looked askance at his wife anxiously. “I’m getting better,” he said. “I feel a great deal better to-day.”

“I’m so glad. You look better. And now, JacÓbus, answer my question, on your honor.”

“Harriet, I do believe you want me to die. I don’t think I shall last much longer; still, don’t reckon too much on my speedy demise. I heard the other day of a man who was buried and resuscitated, and lived forty years afterwards.”

“Nonsense,” replied Harriet, unsympathetically. “If you were buried, I should hardly be asking about your will. Now tell me.”

“What if I don’t?”

Harriet shrugged her handsome shoulders. “I suppose the truth is you have left me nothing,” she said, walking away, “and you don’t want to avow your life-long lies. One can never trust your boastings. Perhaps there isn’t so much to leave.”

“You will be a rich woman, Harriet,” answered Mynheer Mopius, solemnly, “a very rich woman. Yes, I have left you all, on condition that you never marry again.”

“A foolish condition,” said Harriet, once more applying the “Report.” “Should the question present itself, I would certainly not be influenced by considerations of that kind.”

“Hum!” said JacÓbus. “Well, now I have told you. So let’s talk of something else. I wish you would give me my jelly.”

She got it for him. “And if I marry, everything goes to Ursula, I suppose,” she persisted. “Well, so much the better for Ursula.”

A sudden jealousy flashed into his orange-green eyes. “I believe, if I died, you would marry the doctor,” he said.

Her face flushed protest; her heart thumped assent. “You have no right to say that, or anything like it,” she cried. “I have been a faithful wife to you, JacÓbus. Keep your dirty money.”

Her rising violence always cowed him. “Tut, tut,” he said; “so I shall. For many a long year, perhaps, and after that you may have it.”

“Not on those conditions.” She turned away from him altogether. “Make your will over again,” she said. “Do you hear me? And leave your money to Ursula, whose, in fact, it is by right. I am content with my settlement, as I told you at the time. You will remember that I told you to leave your money to Ursula. Money, with me, is not the one thing worth living for and talking about. But I wanted, in honesty, to warn you. You had better send for the lawyer to-night.”

“What nonsense!” he cried, angrily. “To hear you talk, one would think I hadn’t a week left to live. Is that what the doctor thinks, pray? The wish is father to the thought.”

Harriet controlled herself forcibly. She came close to the bed. “You needn’t make it to-night,” she said, softly. “But you had better make it soon.”

About a fortnight later Mynheer JacÓbus Mopius was buried with all the pomp he had himself prescribed. All his virtues and dignities were engraved upon his tombstone, so that his first wife’s adjoining one looked very bare by comparison. His last words had been, in a tremulous, squeaky sing-song: