TWO WOMEN DIE
It goes without saying that Alvina Houghton did not make her fortune as
a maternity nurse. Being her father’s daughter, we might almost expect
that she did not make a penny. But she did—just a few pence. She had
exactly four cases—and then no more.
The reason is obvious. Who in Woodhouse was going to afford a
two-guinea nurse, for a confinement? And who who was going to engage
Alvina Houghton, even if they were ready to stretch their
purse-strings? After all, they all knew her as _Miss_ Houghton, with a
stress on the _Miss_, and they could not conceive of her as Nurse
Houghton. Besides, there seemed something positively indecent in
technically engaging one who was so much part of themselves. They all
preferred either a simple mid-wife, or a nurse procured out of the
unknown by the doctor.
If Alvina wanted to make her fortune—or even her living—she should have
gone to a strange town. She was so advised by every one she knew. But
she never for one moment reflected on the advice. She had become a
maternity nurse in order to practise in Woodhouse, just as James
Houghton had purchased his elegancies to sell in Woodhouse. And father
and daughter alike calmly expected Woodhouse demand to rise to their
supply. So both alike were defeated in their expectations.
For a little while Alvina flaunted about in her nurse’s uniform. Then
she left it off. And as she left it off she lost her bounce, her
colour, and her flesh. Gradually she shrank back to the old, slim,
reticent pallor, with eyes a little too large for her face. And now it
seemed her face was a little too long, a little gaunt. And in her
civilian clothes she seemed a little dowdy, shabby. And altogether, she
looked older: she looked more than her age, which was only twenty-four
years. Here was the old Alvina come back, rather battered and
deteriorated, apparently. There was even a tiny touch of the trollops
in her dowdiness—so the shrewd-eyed collier-wives decided. But she was
a lady still, and unbeaten. Undeniably she was a lady. And that was
rather irritating to the well-to-do and florid daughter of W.H.
Johnson, next door but one. Undeniably a lady, and undeniably
unmastered. This last was irritating to the good-natured but
easy-coming young men in the Chapel Choir, where she resumed her seat.
These young men had the good nature of dogs that wag their tails and
expect to be patted. And Alvina did not pat them. To be sure, a pat
from such a shabbily-black-kid-gloved hand would not have been so
flattering—she need not imagine it! The way she hung back and looked at
them, the young men, as knowing as if she were a prostitute, and yet
with the well-bred indifference of a lady—well, it was almost
offensive.
As a matter of fact, Alvina was detached for the time being from her
interest in young men. Manchester House had settled down on her like a
doom. There was the quartered shop, through which one had to worm one’s
encumbered way in the gloom—unless one liked to go miles round a back
street, to the yard entry. There was James Houghton, faintly powdered
with coal-dust, flitting back and forth in a fever of nervous frenzy,
to Throttle-Ha’penny—so carried away that he never saw his daughter at
all the first time he came in, after her return. And when she reminded
him of her presence, with her—“Hello, father!”—he merely glancied
hurriedly at her, as if vexed with her interruption, and said:
“Well, Alvina, you’re back. You’re back to find us busy.” And he went
off into his ecstasy again.
Mrs. Houghton was now very weak, and so nervous in her weakness that
she could not bear the slightest sound. Her greatest horror was lest
her husband should come into the room. On his entry she became blue at
the lips immediately, so he had to hurry out again. At last he stayed
away, only hurriedly asking, each time he came into the house, “How is
Mrs. Houghton? Ha!” Then off into uninterrupted Throttle-Ha’penny
ecstasy once more.
When Alvina went up to her mother’s room, on her return, all the poor
invalid could do was to tremble into tears, and cry faintly:
“Child, you look dreadful. It isn’t you.”
This from the pathetic little figure in the bed had struck Alvina like
a blow.
“Why not, mother?” she asked.
But for her mother she had to remove her nurse’s uniform. And at the
same time, she had to constitute herself nurse. Miss Frost, and a woman
who came in, and the servant had been nursing the invalid between them.
Miss Frost was worn and rather heavy: her old buoyancy and brightness
was gone. She had become irritable also. She was very glad that Alvina
had returned to take this responsibility of nursing off her shoulders.
For her wonderful energy had ebbed and oozed away.
Alvina said nothing, but settled down to her task. She was quiet and
technical with her mother. The two loved one another, with a curious
impersonal love which had not a single word to exchange: an almost
after-death love. In these days Mrs. Houghton never talked—unless to
fret a little. So Alvina sat for many hours in the lofty, sombre
bedroom, looking out silently on the street, or hurriedly rising to
attend the sick woman. For continually came the fretful murmur:
“Vina!”
To sit still—who knows the long discipline of it, nowadays, as our
mothers and grandmothers knew. To sit still, for days, months, and
years—perforce to sit still, with some dignity of tranquil bearing.
Alvina was old-fashioned. She had the old, womanly faculty for sitting
quiet and collected—not indeed for a life-time, but for long spells
together. And so it was during these months nursing her mother. She
attended constantly on the invalid: she did a good deal of work about
the house: she took her walks and occupied her place in the choir on
Sunday mornings. And yet, from August to January, she seemed to be
seated in her chair in the bedroom, sometimes reading, but mostly quite
still, her hands quietly in her lap, her mind subdued by musing. She
did not even think, not even remember. Even such activity would have
made her presence too disturbing in the room. She sat quite still, with
all her activities in abeyance—except that strange will-to-passivity
which was by no means a relaxation, but a severe, deep,
soul-discipline.
For the moment there was a sense of prosperity—or probable prosperity,
in the house. And there was an abundance of Throttle-Ha’penny coal. It
was dirty ashy stuff. The lower bars of the grate were constantly
blanked in with white powdery ash, which it was fatal to try to poke
away. For if you poked and poked, you raised white cumulus clouds of
ash, and you were left at last with a few darkening and sulphurous
embers. But even so, by continuous application, you could keep the room
moderately warm, without feeling you were consuming the house’s meat
and drink in the grate. Which was one blessing.
The days, the months darkened past, and Alvina returned to her old
thinness and pallor. Her fore-arms were thin, they rested very still in
her lap, there was a ladylike stillness about them as she took her
walk, in her lingering, yet watchful fashion. She saw everything. Yet
she passed without attracting any attention.
Early in the year her mother died. Her father came and wept
self-conscious tears, Miss Frost cried a little, painfully. And Alvina
cried also: she did not quite know why or wherefore. Her poor mother!
Alvina had the old-fashioned wisdom to let be, and not to think. After
all, it was not for her to reconstruct her parents’ lives. She came
after them. Her day was not their day, their life was not hers.
Returning up-channel to re-discover their course was quite another
matter from flowing down-stream into the unknown, as they had done
thirty years before. This supercilious and impertinent exploration of
the generation gone by, by the present generation, is nothing to our
credit. As a matter of fact, no generation repeats the mistakes of the
generation ahead, any more than any river repeats its course. So the
young need not be so proud of their superiority over the old. The young
generation glibly makes its own mistakes: and _how_ detestable these
new mistakes are, why, only the future will be able to tell us. But be
sure they are quite as detestable, quite as full of lies and hypocrisy,
as any of the mistakes of our parents. There is no such thing as
_absolute_ wisdom.
Wisdom has reference only to the past. The future remains for ever an
infinite field for mistakes. You can’t know beforehand.
So Alvina refrained from pondering on her mother’s life and fate.
Whatever the fate of the mother, the fate of the daughter will be
otherwise. That is organically inevitable. The business of the daughter
is with her own fate, not with her mother’s.
Miss Frost however meditated bitterly on the fate of the poor dead
woman. Bitterly she brooded on the lot of woman. Here was Clariss
Houghton, married, and a mother—and dead. What a life! Who was
responsible? James Houghton. What ought James Houghton to have done
differently? Everything. In short, he should have been somebody else,
and not himself. Which is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of idealism. The
universe should be something else, and not what it is: so the nonsense
of idealistic conclusion. The cat should not catch the mouse, the mouse
should not nibble holes in the table-cloth, and so on and so on, in the
House that Jack Built.
But Miss Frost sat by the dead in grief and despair. This was the end
of another woman’s life: such an end! Poor Clariss: guilty James.
Yet why? Why was James more guilty than Clariss? Is the only aim and
end of a man’s life, to make some woman, or parcel of women, happy?
Why? Why should anybody expect to be _made happy_, and develop
heart-disease if she isn’t? Surely Clariss’ heart-disease was a more
emphatic sign of obstinate self-importance than ever James’
shop-windows were. She expected to be _made happy_. Every woman in
Europe and America expects it. On her own head then if she is made
unhappy: for her expectation is arrogant and impertinent. The be-all
and end-all of life doesn’t lie in feminine happiness—or in any
happiness. Happiness is a sort of soap-tablet—he won’t be happy till he
gets it, and when he’s got it, the precious baby, it’ll cost him his
eyes and his stomach. Could anything be more puerile than a mankind
howling because it isn’t happy: like a baby in the bath!
Poor Clariss, however, was dead—and if she had developed heart-disease
because she wasn’t happy, well, she had died of her own heart-disease,
poor thing. Wherein lies every moral that mankind can wish to draw.
Miss Frost wept in anguish, and saw nothing but another woman betrayed
to sorrow and a slow death. Sorrow and a slow death, because a man had
married her. Miss Frost wept also for herself, for her own sorrow and
slow death. Sorrow and slow death, because a man had _not_ married her.
Wretched man, what is he to do with these exigeant and
never-to-be-satisfied women? Our mothers pined because our fathers
drank and were rakes. Our wives pine because we are virtuous but
inadequate. Who is this sphinx, this woman? Where is the Oedipus that
will solve her riddle of happiness, and then strangle her?—only to
marry his own mother!
In the months that followed her mother’s death, Alvina went on the
same, in abeyance. She took over the housekeeping, and received one or
two overflow pupils from Miss Frost, young girls to whom she gave
lessons in the dark drawing-room of Manchester House. She was
busy—chiefly with housekeeping. There seemed a great deal to put in
order after her mother’s death.
She sorted all her mother’s clothes—expensive, old-fashioned clothes,
hardly worn. What was to be done with them? She gave them away, without
consulting anybody. She kept a few private things, she inherited a few
pieces of jewellery. Remarkable how little trace her mother left—hardly
a trace.
She decided to move into the big, monumental bedroom in front of the
house. She liked space, she liked the windows. She was strictly
mistress, too. So she took her place. Her mother’s little sitting-room
was cold and disused.
Then Alvina went through all the linen. There was still abundance, and
it was all sound. James had had such large ideas of setting up house,
in the beginning. And now he begrudged the household expenses,
begrudged the very soap and candles, and even would have liked to
introduce margarine instead of butter. This last degradation the women
refused. But James was above food.
The old Alvina seemed completely herself again. She was quiet, dutiful,
affectionate. She appealed in her old, childish way to Miss Frost, and
Miss Frost called her “Dear!” with all the old protective gentleness.
But there was a difference. Underneath her appearance of appeal, Alvina
was almost coldly independent. She did what she thought she would. The
old manner of intimacy persisted between her and her darling. And
perhaps neither of them knew that the intimacy itself had gone. But it
had. There was no spontaneous interchange between them. It was a kind
of deadlock. Each knew the great love she felt for the other. But now
it was a love static, inoperative. The warm flow did not run any more.
Yet each would have died for the other, would have done anything to
spare the other hurt.
Miss Frost was becoming tired, dragged looking. She would sink into a
chair as if she wished never to rise again—never to make the effort.
And Alvina quickly would attend on her, bring her tea and take away her
music, try to make everything smooth. And continually the young woman
exhorted the elder to work less, to give up her pupils. But Miss Frost
answered quickly, nervously:
“When I don’t work I shan’t live.”
“But why—?” came the long query from Alvina. And in her expostulation
there was a touch of mockery for such a creed.
Miss Frost did not answer. Her face took on a greyish tinge.
In these days Alvina struck up an odd friendship with Miss Pinnegar,
after so many years of opposition. She felt herself more in sympathy
with Miss Pinnegar—it was so easy to get on with her, she left so much
unsaid. What was left unsaid mattered more to Alvina now than anything
that was expressed. She began to hate outspokenness and direct
speaking-forth of the whole mind. It nauseated her. She wanted tacit
admission of difference, not open, wholehearted communication. And Miss
Pinnegar made this admission all along. She never made you feel for an
instant that she was one with you. She was never even near. She kept
quietly on her own ground, and left you on yours. And across the space
came her quiet commonplaces—but fraught with space.
With Miss Frost all was openness, explicit and downright. Not that Miss
Frost trespassed. She was far more well-bred than Miss Pinnegar. But
her very breeding had that Protestant, northern quality which assumes
that we have all the same high standards, really, and all the same
divine nature, intrinsically. It is a fine assumption. But willy-nilly,
it sickened Alvina at this time.
She preferred Miss Pinnegar, and admired Miss Pinnegar’s humble wisdom
with a new admiration. The two were talking of Dr. Headley, who, they
read in the newspaper, had disgraced himself finally.
“I suppose,” said Miss Pinnegar, “it takes his sort to make all sorts.”
Such bits of homely wisdom were like relief from cramp and pain, to
Alvina. “It takes his sort to make all sorts.” It took her sort too.
And it took her father’s sort—as well as her mother’s and Miss Frost’s.
It took every sort to make all sorts. Why have standards and a
regulation pattern? Why have a human criterion? There’s the point! Why,
in the name of all the free heavens, have human criteria? Why? Simply
for bullying and narrowness.
Alvina felt at her ease with Miss Pinnegar. The two women talked away
to one another, in their quiet moments: and slipped apart like
conspirators when Miss Frost came in: as if there was something to be
ashamed of. If there was, heaven knows what it might have been, for
their talk was ordinary enough. But Alvina liked to be with Miss
Pinnegar in the kitchen. Miss Pinnegar wasn’t competent and masterful
like Miss Frost: she was ordinary and uninspired, with quiet,
unobserved movements. But she was deep, and there was some secret
satisfaction in her very quality of secrecy.
So the days and weeks and months slipped by, and Alvina was hidden like
a mole in the dark chambers of Manchester House, busy with cooking and
cleaning and arranging, getting the house in her own order, and
attending to her pupils. She took her walk in the afternoon. Once and
only once she went to Throttle-Ha’penny, and, seized with sudden
curiosity, insisted on being wound down in the iron bucket to the
little workings underneath. Everything was quite tidy in the short
gang-ways down below, timbered and in sound order. The miners were
competent enough. But water dripped dismally in places, and there was a
stale feeling in the air.
Her father accompanied her, pointed her to the seam of yellow-flecked
coal, the shale and the bind, the direction of the trend. He had
already an airy-fairy kind of knowledge of the whole affair, and seemed
like some not quite trustworthy conjuror who had conjured it all up by
sleight of hand. In the background the miners stood grey and ghostly,
in the candle-light, and seemed to listen sardonically. One of them,
facile in his subordinate way as James in his authoritative, kept
chiming in:
“Ay, that’s the road it goes, Miss Huffen—yis, yo’ll see th’ roof theer
bellies down a bit—s’ loose. No, you dunna get th’ puddin’ stones i’
this pit—s’ not deep enough. Eh, they come down on you plumb, as if th’
roof had laid its egg on you. Ay, it runs a bit thin down here—six
inches. You see th’ bed’s soft, it’s a sort o’ clay-bind, it’s not
clunch such as you get deeper. Oh, it’s easy workin’—you don’t have to
knock your guts out. There’s no need for shots, Miss Huffen—we bring it
down—you see here—” And he stooped, pointing to a shallow, shelving
excavation which he was making under the coal. The working was low, you
must stoop all the time. The roof and the timbered sides of the way
seemed to press on you. It was as if she were in her tomb for ever,
like the dead and everlasting Egyptians. She was frightened, but
fascinated. The collier kept on talking to her, stretching his bare,
grey-black hairy arm across her vision, and pointing with his knotted
hand. The thick-wicked tallow candles guttered and smelled. There was a
thickness in the air, a sense of dark, fluid presence in the thick
atmosphere, the dark, fluid, viscous voice of the collier making a
broad-vowelled, clapping sound in her ear. He seemed to linger near her
as if he knew—as if he knew—what? Something for ever unknowable and
inadmissible, something that belonged purely to the underground: to the
slaves who work underground: knowledge humiliated, subjected, but
ponderous and inevitable. And still his voice went on clapping in her
ear, and still his presence edged near her, and seemed to impinge on
her—a smallish, semi-grotesque, grey-obscure figure with a naked
brandished forearm: not human: a creature of the subterranean world,
melted out like a bat, fluid. She felt herself melting out also, to
become a mere vocal ghost, a presence in the thick atmosphere. Her
lungs felt thick and slow, her mind dissolved, she felt she could cling
like a bat in the long swoon of the crannied, underworld darkness.
Cling like a bat and sway for ever swooning in the draughts of the
darkness—
When she was up on the earth again she blinked and peered at the world
in amazement. What a pretty, luminous place it was, carved in
substantial luminosity. What a strange and lovely place, bubbling
iridescent-golden on the surface of the underworld. Iridescent
golden—could anything be more fascinating! Like lovely glancing surface
on fluid pitch. But a velvet surface. A velvet surface of golden light,
velvet-pile of gold and pale luminosity, and strange beautiful
elevations of houses and trees, and depressions of fields and roads,
all golden and floating like atmospheric majolica. Never had the common
ugliness of Woodhouse seemed so entrancing. She thought she had never
seen such beauty—a lovely luminous majolica, living and palpitating,
the glossy, svelte world-surface, the exquisite face of all the
darkness. It was like a vision. Perhaps gnomes and subterranean
workers, enslaved in the era of light, see with such eyes. Perhaps that
is why they are absolutely blind to conventional ugliness. For truly
nothing could be more hideous than Woodhouse, as the miners had built
it and disposed it. And yet, the very cabbage-stumps and rotten fences
of the gardens, the very back-yards were instinct with magic, molten as
they seemed with the bubbling-up of the under-darkness, bubbling up of
majolica weight and luminosity, quite ignorant of the sky, heavy and
satisfying.
Slaves of the underworld! She watched the swing of the grey colliers
along the pavement with a new fascination, hypnotized by a new vision.
Slaves—the underground trolls and iron-workers, magic, mischievous, and
enslaved, of the ancient stories. But tall—the miners seemed to her to
loom tall and grey, in their enslaved magic. Slaves who would cause the
superimposed day-order to fall. Not because, individually, they wanted
to. But because, collectively, something bubbled up in them, the force
of darkness which had no master and no control. It would bubble and
stir in them as earthquakes stir the earth. It would be simply
disastrous, because it had no master. There was no dark master in the
world. The puerile world went on crying out for a new Jesus, another
Saviour from the sky, another heavenly superman. When what was wanted
was a Dark Master from the underworld.
So they streamed past her, home from work—grey from head to foot,
distorted in shape, cramped, with curious faces that came out pallid
from under their dirt. Their walk was heavy-footed and slurring, their
bearing stiff and grotesque. A stream they were—yet they seemed to her
to loom like strange, valid figures of fairy-lore, unrealized and as
yet unexperienced. The miners, the iron-workers, those who fashion the
stuff of the underworld.
As it always comes to its children, the nostalgia of the repulsive,
heavy-footed Midlands came over her again, even whilst she was there in
the midst. The curious, dark, inexplicable and yet insatiable
craving—as if for an earthquake. To feel the earth heave and shudder
and shatter the world from beneath. To go down in the débâcle.
And so, in spite of everything, poverty, dowdiness, obscurity, and
nothingness, she was content to stay in abeyance at home for the time.
True, she was filled with the same old, slow, dreadful craving of the
Midlands: a craving insatiable and inexplicable. But the very craving
kept her still. For at this time she did not translate it into a
desire, or need, for love. At the back of her mind somewhere was the
fixed idea, the fixed intention of finding love, a man. But as yet, at
this period, the idea was in abeyance, it did not act. The craving that
possessed her as it possesses everybody, in a greater or less degree,
in those parts, sustained her darkly and unconsciously.
A hot summer waned into autumn, the long, bewildering days drew in, the
transient nights, only a few breaths of shadow between noon and noon,
deepened and strengthened. A restlessness came over everybody. There
was another short strike among the miners. James Houghton, like an
excited beetle, scurried to and fro, feeling he was making his fortune.
Never had Woodhouse been so thronged on Fridays with purchasers and
money-spenders. The place seemed surcharged with life.
Autumn lasted beautiful till end of October. And then suddenly, cold
rain, endless cold rain, and darkness heavy, wet, ponderous. Through
the wind and rain it was a toil to move. Poor Miss Frost, who had
seemed almost to blossom again in the long hot days, regaining a free
cheerfulness that amounted almost to liveliness, and who even caused a
sort of scandal by her intimacy with a rather handsome but common
stranger, an insurance agent who had come into the place with a good,
unused tenor voice—now she wilted again. She had given the rather
florid young man tea in her room, and had laboured away at his fine,
metallic voice, correcting him and teaching him and laughing with him
and spending really a remarkable number of hours alone with him in her
room in Woodhouse—for she had given up tramping the country, and had
hired a music-room in a quiet street, where she gave her lessons. And
the young man had hung round, and had never wanted to go away. They
would prolong their tête-à-tête and their singing on till ten o’clock
at night, and Miss Frost would return to Manchester House flushed and
handsome and a little shy, while the young man, who was common, took on
a new boldness in the streets. He had auburn hair, high colouring, and
a rather challenging bearing. He took on a new boldness, his own
estimate of himself rose considerably, with Miss Frost and his trained
voice to justify him. He was a little insolent and condescending to the
natives, who disliked him. For their lives they could not imagine what
Miss Frost could find in him. They began even to dislike her, and a
pretty scandal was started about the pair, in the pleasant room where
Miss Frost had her piano, her books, and her flowers. The scandal was
as unjust as most scandals are. Yet truly, all that summer and autumn
Miss Frost had a new and slightly aggressive cheerfulness and humour.
And Manchester House saw little of her, comparatively.
And then, at the end of September, the young man was removed by his
Insurance Company to another district. And at the end of October set in
the most abominable and unbearable weather, deluges of rain and north
winds, cutting the tender, summer-unfolded people to pieces. Miss Frost
wilted at once. A silence came over her. She shuddered when she had to
leave the fire. She went in the morning to her room, and stayed there
all the day, in a hot, close atmosphere, shuddering when her pupils
brought the outside weather with them to her.
She was always subject to bronchitis. In November she had a bad
bronchitis cold. Then suddenly one morning she could not get up. Alvina
went in and found her semi-conscious.
The girl was almost mad. She flew to the rescue. She despatched her
father instantly for the doctor, she heaped the sticks in the bedroom
grate and made a bright fire, she brough hot milk and brandy.
“Thank you, dear, thank you. It’s a bronchial cold,” whispered Miss
Frost hurriedly, trying to sip the milk. She could not. She didn’t want
it.
“I’ve sent for the doctor,” said Alvina, in her cool voice, wherein
none the less there rang the old hesitancy of sheer love.
Miss Frost lifted her eyes:
“There’s no need,” she said, and she smiled winsomely at Alvina.
It was pneumonia. Useless to talk of the distracted anguish of Alvina
during the next two days. She was so swift and sensitive in her
nursing, she seemed to have second sight. She talked to nobody. In her
silence her soul was alone with the soul of her darling. The long
semi-consciousness and the tearing pain of pneumonia, the anguished
sickness.
But sometimes the grey eyes would open and smile with delicate
winsomeness at Alvina, and Alvina smiled back, with a cheery, answering
winsomeness. But that costs something.
On the evening of the second day, Miss Frost got her hand from under
the bedclothes, and laid it on Alvina’s hand. Alvina leaned down to
her.
“Everything is for you, my love,” whispered Miss Frost, looking with
strange eyes on Alvina’s face.
“Don’t talk, Miss Frost,” moaned Alvina.
“Everything is for you,” murmured the sick woman—“except—” and she
enumerated some tiny legacies which showed her generous, thoughtful
nature.
“Yes, I shall remember,” said Alvina, beyond tears now.
Miss Frost smiled with her old bright, wonderful look, that had a touch
of queenliness in it.
“Kiss me, dear,” she whispered.
Alvina kissed her, and could not suppress the whimpering of her
too-much grief.
The night passed slowly. Sometimes the grey eyes of the sick woman
rested dark, dilated, haggard on Alvina’s face, with a heavy, almost
accusing look, sinister. Then they closed again. And sometimes they
looked pathetic, with a mute, stricken appeal. Then again they
closed—only to open again tense with pain. Alvina wiped her
blood-phlegmed lips.
In the morning she died—lay there haggard, death-smeared, with her
lovely white hair smeared also, and disorderly: she who had been so
beautiful and clean always.
Alvina knew death—which is untellable. She knew that her darling
carried away a portion of her own soul into death.
But she was alone. And the agony of being alone, the agony of grief,
passionate, passionate grief for her darling who was torn into
death—the agony of self-reproach, regret; the agony of remembrance; the
agony of the looks of the dying woman, winsome, and sinisterly
accusing, and pathetically, despairingly appealing—probe after probe of
mortal agony, which throughout eternity would never lose its power to
pierce to the quick!
Alvina seemed to keep strangely calm and aloof all the days after the
death. Only when she was alone she suffered till she felt her heart
really broke.
“I shall never feel anything any more,” she said in her abrupt way to
Miss Frost’s friend, another woman of over fifty.
“Nonsense, child!” expostulated Mrs. Lawson gently.
“I shan’t! I shall never have a heart to feel anything any more,” said
Alvina, with a strange, distraught roll of the eyes.
“Not like this, child. But you’ll feel other things—”
“I haven’t the heart,” persisted Alvina.
“Not yet,” said Mrs. Lawson gently. “You can’t expect—But time—time
brings back—”
“Oh well—but I don’t believe it,” said Alvina.
People thought her rather hard. To one of her gossips Miss Pinnegar
confessed:
“I thought she’d have felt it more. She cared more for her than she did
for her own mother—and her mother knew it. Mrs. Houghton complained
bitterly, sometimes, that _she_ had _no_ love. They were everything to
one another, Miss Frost and Alvina. I should have thought she’d have
felt it more. But you never know. A good thing if she doesn’t, really.”
Miss Pinnegar herself did not care one little bit that Miss Frost was
dead. She did not feel herself implicated.
The nearest relatives came down, and everything was settled. The will
was found, just a brief line on a piece of notepaper expressing a wish
that Alvina should have everything. Alvina herself told the verbal
requests. All was quietly fulfilled.
As it might well be. For there was nothing to leave. Just sixty-three
pounds in the bank—no more: then the clothes, piano, books and music.
Miss Frost’s brother had these latter, at his own request: the books
and music, and the piano. Alvina inherited the few simple trinkets, and
about forty-five pounds in money.
“Poor Miss Frost,” cried Mrs. Lawson, weeping rather bitterly—“she
saved nothing for herself. You can see why she never wanted to grow
old, so that she couldn’t work. You can see. It’s a shame, it’s a
shame, one of the best women that ever trod earth.”
Manchester House settled down to its deeper silence, its darker gloom.
Miss Frost was irreparably gone. With her, the reality went out of the
house. It seemed to be silently waiting to disappear. And Alvina and
Miss Pinnegar might move about and talk in vain. They could never
remove the sense of waiting to finish: it was all just waiting to
finish. And the three, James and Alvina and Miss Pinnegar, waited
lingering through the months, for the house to come to an end. With
Miss Frost its spirit passed away: it was no more. Dark, empty-feeling,
it seemed all the time like a house just before a sale.