Life and Death of Harriett Frean, May Sinclair [different ereaders .TXT] 📗
- Author: May Sinclair
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one continuous November.
Her father and mother were alone in the study for a long time; she
remembered Annie going in with the lamp and coming out and whispering that
they wanted her. She found them sitting in the lamplight alone, close
together, holding each other’s hands; their faces had a strange, exalted
look.
“Harriett, my dear, I’ve lost every shilling I possessed, and here’s your
mother saying she doesn’t mind.”
He began to explain in his quiet voice. “When all the creditors are paid
in full there’ll be nothing but your mother’s two hundred a year. And the
insurance money when I’m gone.”
“Oh, Papa, how terrible–-”
“Yes, Hatty.”
“I mean the insurance. It’s gambling with your life.”
“My dear, if that was all I’d gambled with–-”
It seemed that half his capital had gone in what he called “the higher
mathematics of the game.” The creditors would get the rest.
“We shall be no worse off,” her mother said, “than we were when we began.
We were very happy then.”
“We. How about Harriett?”
“Harriett isn’t going to mind.”
“You’re not—going—to mind…. We shall have to sell this house and live
in a smaller one. And I can’t take my business up again.”
“My dear, I’m glad and thankful you’ve done with that dreadful, dangerous
game.”
“I’d no business to play it…. But, after holding myself in all those
years, there was a sort of fascination.”
One of the creditors, Mr. Hichens, gave him work in his office. He was now
Mr. Hichens’s clerk. He went to Mr. Hichens as he had gone to his own
great business, upright and alert, handsome in his dark-gray overcoat with
the black velvet collar, faintly amused at himself. You would never have
known that anything had happened.
Strange that at the same time Mr. Hancock should have lost money, a great
deal of money, more money than Papa. He seemed determined that everybody
should know it; you couldn’t pass him in the road without knowing. He met
you with his swollen, red face hanging; ashamed and miserable, and angry
as if it had been your fault.
One day Harriett came in to her father and mother with the news. “Did you
know that Mr. Hancock’s sold his horses? And he’s going to give up the
house.”
Her mother signed to her to be silent, frowning and shaking her head and
glancing at her father. He got up suddenly and left the room.
“He’s worrying himself to death about Mr. Hancock,” she said.
“I didn’t know he cared for him like that, Mamma.”
“Oh, well, he’s known him thirty years, and it’s a very dreadful thing he
should have to give up his house.”
“It’s not worse for him than it is for Papa.”
“It’s ever so much worse. He isn’t like your father. He can’t be happy
without his big house and his carriages and horses. He’ll feel so small
and unimportant.”
“Well, then, it serves him right.”
“Don’t say that. It is what he cares for and he’s lost it.”
“He’s no business to behave as if it was Papa’s fault,” said Harriett. She
had no patience with the odious little man. She thought of her father’s
face, her father’s body, straight and calm, and his soul so far above that
mean trouble of Mr. Hancock’s, that vulgar shame.
Yet inside him he fretted. And, suddenly, he began to sink. He turned
faint after the least exertion and had to leave off going to Mr. Hichens.
And by the spring of eighteen eighty he was upstairs in his room, too ill
to be moved. That was just after Mr. Hichens had bought the house and
wanted to come into it. He lay, patient, in the big white bed, smiling his
faint, amused smile when he thought of Mr. Hichens.
It was awful to Harriett that her father should be ill, lying there at
their mercy. She couldn’t get over her sense of his parenthood, his
authority. When he was obstinate, and insisted on exerting himself, she
gave in. She was a bad nurse, because she couldn’t set herself against his
will. And when she had him under her hands to strip and wash him, she felt
that she was doing something outrageous and impious; she set about it with
a flaming face and fumbling hands. “Your mother does it better,” he said
gently. But she could not get her mother’s feeling of him as a helpless,
dependent thing.
Mr. Hichens called every week to inquire. “Poor man, he wants to know when
he can have his house. Why will he always come on my good days? He
isn’t giving himself a chance.”
He still had good days, days when he could be helped out of bed to sit in
his chair. “This sort of game may go on for ever,” he said. He began to
worry seriously about keeping Mr. Hichens out of his house. “It isn’t
decent of me. It isn’t decent.”
Harriett was ill with the strain of it. She had to go away for a fortnight
with Lizzie Pierce, and Sarah Barmby stayed with her mother. Mrs. Barmby
had died the year before. When Harriett got back her father was making
plans for his removal.
“Why have you all made up your minds that it’ll kill me to remove me? It
won’t. The men can take everything out but me and my bed and that chair.
And when they’ve got all the things into the other house they can come
back for the chair and me. And I can sit in the chair while they’re
bringing the bed. It’s quite simple. It only wants a little system.”
Then, while they wondered whether they might risk it, he got worse. He lay
propped up, rigid, his arms stretched out by his side, afraid to lift a
hand because of the violent movements of his heart. His face had a
patient, expectant look, as if he waited for them to do something.
They couldn’t do anything. There would be no more rallies. He might die
any day now, the doctor said.
“He may die any minute. I certainly don’t expect him to live through the
night.”
Harriett followed her mother back into the room. He was sitting up in his
attitude of rigid expectancy; no movement but the quivering of his night-shirt above his heart.
“The doctor’s been gone a long time, hasn’t he?” he said.
Harriett was silent. She didn’t understand. Her mother was looking at her
with a serene comprehension and compassion.
“Poor Hatty,” he said, “she can’t tell a lie to save my life.”
“Oh—Papa–-”
He smiled as if he was thinking of something that amused him.
“You should consider other people, my dear. Not just your own selfish
feelings…. You ought to write and tell Mr. Hichens.”
Her mother gave a short sobbing laugh. “Oh, you darling,” she said.
He lay still. Then suddenly he began pressing hard on the mattress with
both hands, bracing himself up in the bed. Her mother leaned closer
towards him. He threw himself over slantways, and with his head bent as if
it was broken, dropped into her arms.
Harriett wondered why he was making that queer grating and coughing noise.
Three times.
Her mother called softly to her—“Harriett.”
She began to tremble.
VIIIHer mother had some secret that she couldn’t share. She was wonderful in
her pure, high serenity. Surely she had some secret. She said he was
closer to her now than he had ever been. And in her correct, precise
answers to the letters of condolence Harriett wrote: “I feel that he is
closer to us now than he ever was.” But she didn’t really feel it. She
only felt that to feel it was the beautiful and proper thing. She looked
for her mother’s secret and couldn’t find it.
Meanwhile Mr. Hichens had given them six weeks. They had to decide where
they would go: into Devonshire or into a cottage at Hampstead where Sarah
Barmby lived now.
Her mother said, “Do you think you’d like to live in Sidmouth, near Aunt
Harriett?”
They had stayed one summer at Sidmouth with Aunt Harriett. She remembered
the red cliffs, the sea, and Aunt Harriett’s garden stuffed with flowers.
They had been happy there. She thought she would love that: the sea and
the red cliffs and a garden like Aunt Harriett’s.
But she was not sure whether it was what her mother really wanted. Mamma
would never say. She would have to find out somehow.
“Well—what do you think?”
“It would be leaving all your friends, Hatty.”
“My friends—yes. But–-”
Lizzie and Sarah and Connie Pennefather. She could live without them. “Oh,
there’s Mrs. Hancock.”
“Well–-” Her mother’s voice suggested that if she were put to it she
could live without Mrs. Hancock.
And Harriett thought: She does want to go to Sidmouth then.
“It would be very nice to be near Aunt Harriett.”
She was afraid to say more than that lest she should show her own wish
before she knew her mother’s.
“Aunt Harriett. Yes…. But it’s very far away, Hatty. We should be cut
off from everything. Lectures and concerts. We couldn’t afford to come up
and down.”
“No. We couldn’t.”
She could see that Mamma did not really want to live in Sidmouth; she
didn’t want to be near Aunt Harriett; she wanted the cottage at Hampstead
and all the things of their familiar, intellectual life going on and on.
After all, that was the way to keep near to Papa, to go on doing the
things they had done together.
Her mother agreed that it was the way.
“I can’t help feeling,” Harriett said, “it’s what he would have wished.”
Her mother’s face was quiet and content. She hadn’t guessed.
They left the white house with the green balcony hung out like a
birdcage at the side, and turned into the cottage at Hampstead. The
rooms were small and rather dark, and the furniture they had brought had
a squeezed-up, unhappy look. The blue egg on the marble-topped table was
conspicuous and hateful as it had never been in the Black’s Lane
drawing-room. Harriett and her mother looked at it.
“Must it stay there?”
“I think so. Fanny Hancock gave it me.”
“Mamma—you know you don’t like it.”
“No. But after all these years I couldn’t turn the poor thing away.”
Her mother was an old woman, clinging with an old, stubborn fidelity to
the little things of her past. But Harriett denied it. “She’s not old,”
she said to herself. “Not really old.”
“Harriett,” her mother said one day. “I think you ought to do the
housekeeping.”
“Oh, Mamma, why?” She hated the idea of this change.
“Because you’ll have to do it some day.”
She obeyed. But as she went her rounds and gave her orders she felt that
she was doing something not quite real, playing at being her mother as she
had played when she was a child. Then her mother had another thought.
“Harriett, I think you ought to see more of your friends, dear.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ll want them after I’m gone.”
“I shall never want anybody but you.”
And their time went as it had gone before: in sewing together, reading
together, listening to lectures and concerts together. They had told Sarah
that they didn’t want anybody to
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