Free My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather Page B

loved each other, and make himself believe it was all like that. It wasn’t. I was always a grasping, worldly woman; I was never satisfied. All the same, in age, when the flowers are so few, it’s a great unkindness to destroy any that are left in a man’s heart.” The tears rolled down her cheeks, she leaned back, looking up at the ceiling. She had stopped speaking because her voice broke. Presently she began again resolutely. “But I’m made so. People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know. We were.… A man and woman draw apart from that long embrace, and see what they have done to each other. Perhaps I can’t forgive him for the harm I did him. Perhaps that’s it. When there are children, that feeling, goes through natural changes. But when it remains so personal … something gives way in one. In age we lose everything; even the power to love.”
    “He hasn’t,” I suggested.
    “He has asked you to speak for him, my dear? Then we have destroyed each other indeed!”
    “Certainly he hasn’t, Mrs. Myra! But you are hard on him, you know, and when there are so many hard things, it seems a pity.”
    “Yes, it’s a great pity.” She drew herself up in her chair. “And I’d rather you didn’t come any more for the time being, Nellie. I’ve been thinking the tea made me nervous.” She was smiling, but her mouth curledlike a little snake, as I had seen it do long ago. “Will you be pleased to take your things and go, Mrs. Casey?” She said it with a laugh, but a very meaning one.
    As I rose I watched for some sign of relenting, and I said humbly enough: “Forgive me, if I’ve said anything I shouldn’t. You know I love you very dearly.”
    She mockingly bowed her tyrant’s head. “It’s owing to me infirmities, dear Mrs. Casey, that I’ll not be able to go as far as me door wid ye.”

   FIVE   
    F or days after that episode I did not see Mrs. Henshawe at all. I saw Oswald at dinner in the restaurant every night, and he reported her condition to me as if nothing had happened. The short-haired newspaper girl often came to our table, and the three of us talked together. I could see that he got great refreshment from her. Her questions woke pleasant trains of recollection, and her straightforward affection was dear to him. Once Myra, in telling me that it was a pleasure to him to have me come into their lives again thus, had remarked: “He was always a man to feel women, you know, in every way.” It was true. That crude little girl made all the difference in the world to him. He was generous enough to become quite light-hearted in directing her inexperience and her groping hunger for life. He even read her poor little “specials” and showed her what was worst in them and what was good. She took correction well, he told me.
    Early in June Mrs. Henshawe began to grow worse. Her doctors told us a malignant growth in her body had taken hold of a vital organ, and that she would hardly live through the month. She suffered intense pain from pressure on the nerves in her back, and theygave her opiates freely. At first we had two nurses, but Myra hated the night nurse so intensely that we dismissed her, and, as my school was closed for the summer, I took turns with Oswald in watching over her at night. She needed little attention except renewed doses of codeine. She slept deeply for a few hours, and the rest of the night lay awake, murmuring to herself long passages from her old poets.
    Myra kept beside her now an ebony crucifix with an ivory Christ. It used to hang on the wall, and I had supposed she carried it about because some friend had given it to her. I felt now that she had it by her for a different reason. Once when I picked it up from her bed to straighten her sheet, she put out her hand quickly and said: “Give it to me. It means nothing to people who haven’t suffered.”
    She talked very little after this last stage of her illness began; she no longer complained or