CHAPTER IV
TWO WOMEN DIE
It goes without saying that Alvina Houghton did not make her fortuneas a maternity nurse. Being her father's daughter, we might almostexpect 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 atwo-guinea nurse, for a confinement? And who who was going to engageAlvina Houghton, even if they were ready to stretch theirpurse-strings? After all, they all knew her as _Miss_ Houghton, witha stress on the _Miss_, and they could not conceive of her as NurseHoughton. Besides, there seemed something positively indecent intechnically engaging one who was so much part of themselves. Theyall preferred either a simple mid-wife, or a nurse procured out ofthe unknown by the doctor.
If Alvina wanted to make her fortune--or even her living--she shouldhave gone to a strange town. She was so advised by every one sheknew. But she never for one moment reflected on the advice. She hadbecome a maternity nurse in order to practise in Woodhouse, just asJames Houghton had purchased his elegancies to sell in Woodhouse.And father and daughter alike calmly expected Woodhouse demand torise to their supply. So both alike were defeated in theirexpectations.
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. Andaltogether, she looked older: she looked more than her age, whichwas only twenty-four years. Here was the old Alvina come back, ratherbattered and deteriorated, apparently. There was even a tiny touch ofthe trollops in her dowdiness--so the shrewd-eyed collier-wivesdecided. But she was a lady still, and unbeaten. Undeniably she was alady. And that was rather irritating to the well-to-do and floriddaughter of W.H. Johnson, next door but one. Undeniably a lady, andundeniably unmastered. This last was irritating to the good-naturedbut easy-coming young men in the Chapel Choir, where she resumed herseat. These young men had the good nature of dogs that wag their tailsand expect to be patted. And Alvina did not pat them. To be sure, apat from such a shabbily-black-kid-gloved hand would not have been soflattering--she need not imagine it! The way she hung back and lookedat them, the young men, as knowing as if she were a prostitute, andyet with the well-bred indifference of a lady--well, it was almostoffensive.
As a matter of fact, Alvina was detached for the time being from herinterest in young men. Manchester House had settled down on her likea doom. There was the quartered shop, through which one had to wormone's encumbered way in the gloom--unless one liked to go milesround a back street, to the yard entry. There was James Houghton,faintly powdered with coal-dust, flitting back and forth in a feverof nervous frenzy, to Throttle-Ha'penny--so carried away that henever saw his daughter at all the first time he came in, after herreturn. And when she reminded him of her presence, with her--"Hello,father!"--he merely glancied hurriedly at her, as if vexed with herinterruption, and said:
"Well, Alvina, you're back. You're back to find us busy." And hewent off into his ecstasy again.
Mrs. Houghton was now very weak, and so nervous in her weakness thatshe could not bear the slightest sound. Her greatest horror was lesther husband should come into the room. On his entry she became blueat the lips immediately, so he had to hurry out again. At last hestayed away, only hurriedly asking, each time he came into thehouse, "How is Mrs. Houghton? Ha!" Then off into uninterruptedThrottle-Ha'penny ecstasy once more.
When Alvina went up to her mother's room, on her return, all thepoor 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 Alvinalike a blow.
"Why not, mother?" she asked.
But for her mother she had to remove her nurse's uniform. And at thesame time, she had to constitute herself nurse. Miss Frost, and awoman who came in, and the servant had been nursing the invalidbetween them. Miss Frost was worn and rather heavy: her old buoyancyand brightness was gone. She had become irritable also. She was veryglad that Alvina had returned to take this responsibility of nursingoff her shoulders. For her wonderful energy had ebbed and oozedaway.
Alvina said nothing, but settled down to her task. She was quiet andtechnical with her mother. The two loved one another, with a curiousimpersonal love which had not a single word to exchange: an almostafter-death love. In these days Mrs. Houghton never talked--unlessto fret a little. So Alvina sat for many hours in the lofty, sombrebedroom, looking out silently on the street, or hurriedly rising toattend the sick woman. For continually came the fretful murmur:
"Vina!"
To sit still--who knows the long discipline of it, nowadays, as ourmothers and grandmothers knew. To sit still, for days, months, andyears--perforce to sit still, with some dignity of tranquil bearing.Alvina was old-fashioned. She had the old, womanly faculty forsitting quiet and collected--not indeed for a life-time, but forlong spells together. And so it was during these months nursing hermother. She attended constantly on the invalid: she did a good dealof work about the house: she took her walks and occupied her placein the choir on Sunday mornings. And yet, from August to January,she seemed to be seated in her chair in the bedroom, sometimesreading, but mostly quite still, her hands quietly in her lap, hermind subdued by musing. She did not even think, not even remember.Even such activity would have made her presence too disturbing inthe room. She sat quite still, with all her activities inabeyance--except that strange will-to-passivity which was by nomeans a relaxation, but a severe, deep, soul-discipline.
For the moment there was a sense of prosperity--or probableprosperity, in the house. And there was an abundance ofThrottle-Ha'penny coal. It was dirty ashy stuff. The lower bars ofthe grate were constantly blanked in with white powdery ash, whichit was fatal to try to poke away. For if you poked and poked, youraised white cumulus clouds of ash, and you were left at last with afew darkening and sulphurous embers. But even so, by continuousapplication, you could keep the room moderately warm, withoutfeeling 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 oldthinness and pallor. Her fore-arms were thin, they rested very stillin her lap, there was a ladylike stillness about them as she tookher walk, in her lingering, yet watchful fashion. She saweverything. Yet she passed without attracting any attention.
Early in the year her mother died. Her father came and weptself-conscious tears, Miss Frost cried a little, painfully. AndAlvina cried also: she did not quite know why or wherefore. Her poormother! Alvina had the old-fashioned wisdom to let be, and not tothink. After all, it was not for her to reconstruct her parents'lives. She came after them. Her day was not their day, their lifewas not hers. Returning up-channel to re-discover their course wasquite another matter from flowing down-stream into the unknown, asthey had done thirty years before. This supercilious and impertinentexploration of the generation gone by, by the present generation, isnothing to our credit. As a matter of fact, no generation repeatsthe mistakes of the generation ahead, any more than any riverrepeats its course. So the young need not be so proud of theirsuperiority over the old. The young generation glibly makes its ownmistakes: and _how_ detestable these new mistakes are, why, only thefuture will be able to tell us. But be sure they are quite asdetestable, quite as full of lies and hypocrisy, as any of themistakes of our parents. There is no such thing as _absolute_wisdom.
Wisdom has reference only to the past. The future remains for everan 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 beotherwise. That is organically inevitable. The business of thedaughter is with her own fat
e, not with her mother's.
Miss Frost however meditated bitterly on the fate of the poor deadwoman. Bitterly she brooded on the lot of woman. Here was ClarissHoughton, married, and a mother--and dead. What a life! Who wasresponsible? James Houghton. What ought James Houghton to have donedifferently? Everything. In short, he should have been somebodyelse, and not himself. Which is the _reductio ad absurdum_ ofidealism. The universe should be something else, and not what it is:so the nonsense of idealistic conclusion. The cat should not catchthe mouse, the mouse should not nibble holes in the table-cloth, andso on and so on, in the House that Jack Built.
But Miss Frost sat by the dead in grief and despair. This was theend of another woman's life: such an end! Poor Clariss: guiltyJames.
Yet why? Why was James more guilty than Clariss? Is the only aim andend of a man's life, to make some woman, or parcel of women, happy?Why? Why should anybody expect to be _made happy_, and developheart-disease if she isn't? Surely Clariss' heart-disease was a moreemphatic sign of obstinate self-importance than ever James'shop-windows were. She expected to be _made happy_. Every woman inEurope and America expects it. On her own head then if she is madeunhappy: for her expectation is arrogant and impertinent. The be-alland end-all of life doesn't lie in feminine happiness--or in anyhappiness. Happiness is a sort of soap-tablet--he won't be happytill he gets it, and when he's got it, the precious baby, it'll costhim his eyes and his stomach. Could anything be more puerile than amankind howling because it isn't happy: like a baby in the bath!
Poor Clariss, however, was dead--and if she had developedheart-disease because she wasn't happy, well, she had died of herown heart-disease, poor thing. Wherein lies every moral that mankindcan wish to draw.
Miss Frost wept in anguish, and saw nothing but another womanbetrayed to sorrow and a slow death. Sorrow and a slow death,because a man had married her. Miss Frost wept also for herself, forher own sorrow and slow death. Sorrow and slow death, because a manhad _not_ married her. Wretched man, what is he to do with theseexigeant and never-to-be-satisfied women? Our mothers pined becauseour fathers drank and were rakes. Our wives pine because we arevirtuous but inadequate. Who is this sphinx, this woman? Where isthe Oedipus that will solve her riddle of happiness, and thenstrangle her?--only to marry his own mother!
In the months that followed her mother's death, Alvina went on thesame, in abeyance. She took over the housekeeping, and received oneor two overflow pupils from Miss Frost, young girls to whom she gavelessons in the dark drawing-room of Manchester House. She wasbusy--chiefly with housekeeping. There seemed a great deal to put inorder after her mother's death.
She sorted all her mother's clothes--expensive, old-fashionedclothes, hardly worn. What was to be done with them? She gave themaway, without consulting anybody. She kept a few private things, sheinherited a few pieces of jewellery. Remarkable how little trace hermother left--hardly a trace.
She decided to move into the big, monumental bedroom in front of thehouse. She liked space, she liked the windows. She was strictlymistress, too. So she took her place. Her mother's littlesitting-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 uphouse, in the beginning. And now he begrudged the householdexpenses, begrudged the very soap and candles, and even would haveliked to introduce margarine instead of butter. This lastdegradation 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 MissFrost, and Miss Frost called her "Dear!" with all the old protectivegentleness. But there was a difference. Underneath her appearance ofappeal, Alvina was almost coldly independent. She did what shethought she would. The old manner of intimacy persisted between herand her darling. And perhaps neither of them knew that the intimacyitself had gone. But it had. There was no spontaneous interchangebetween them. It was a kind of deadlock. Each knew the great loveshe 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 theother, would have done anything to spare the other hurt.
Miss Frost was becoming tired, dragged looking. She would sink intoa chair as if she wished never to rise again--never to make theeffort. And Alvina quickly would attend on her, bring her tea andtake away her music, try to make everything smooth. And continuallythe young woman exhorted the elder to work less, to give up herpupils. 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 herexpostulation 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 sympathywith Miss Pinnegar--it was so easy to get on with her, she left somuch unsaid. What was left unsaid mattered more to Alvina now thananything that was expressed. She began to hate outspokenness anddirect speaking-forth of the whole mind. It nauseated her. Shewanted tacit admission of difference, not open, wholeheartedcommunication. And Miss Pinnegar made this admission all along. Shenever made you feel for an instant that she was one with you. Shewas never even near. She kept quietly on her own ground, and leftyou on yours. And across the space came her quiet commonplaces--butfraught with space.
With Miss Frost all was openness, explicit and downright. Not thatMiss Frost trespassed. She was far more well-bred than MissPinnegar. But her very breeding had that Protestant, northernquality which assumes that we have all the same high standards,really, and all the same divine nature, intrinsically. It is a fineassumption. But willy-nilly, it sickened Alvina at this time.
She preferred Miss Pinnegar, and admired Miss Pinnegar's humblewisdom 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 allsorts."
Such bits of homely wisdom were like relief from cramp and pain, toAlvina. "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 MissFrost's. It took every sort to make all sorts. Why have standardsand a regulation pattern? Why have a human criterion? There's thepoint! Why, in the name of all the free heavens, have humancriteria? Why? Simply for bullying and narrowness.
Alvina felt at her ease with Miss Pinnegar. The two women talkedaway to one another, in their quiet moments: and slipped apart likeconspirators when Miss Frost came in: as if there was something tobe ashamed of. If there was, heaven knows what it might have been,for their talk was ordinary enough. But Alvina liked to be with MissPinnegar in the kitchen. Miss Pinnegar wasn't competent andmasterful like Miss Frost: she was ordinary and uninspired, withquiet, unobserved movements. But she was deep, and there was somesecret satisfaction in her very quality of secrecy.
So the days and weeks and months slipped by, and Alvina was hiddenlike a mole in the dark chambers of Manchester House, busy withcooking and cleaning and arranging, getting the house in her ownorder, and attending to her pupils. She took her walk in theafternoon. Once and only once she went to Throttle-Ha'penny, and,seized with sudden curiosity, insisted on being wound down in theiron bucket to the little workings underneath. Everything was quitetidy in the short gang-ways down below, timbered and in sound order.The miners were competent enough. But water dripped dismally inplaces, and there was a stale feeling in the air.
Her father accompanied her, pointed her to the seam ofyellow-flecked coal, the shale and the bind, the direction of thetrend. He had already an airy-fairy kind of knowledge of the wholeaffair, and seemed like some not quite trustworthy conjuror who hadconjured it all up by sleight of hand. In the background the minersstood grey and ghostly, in the candle-light, and seemed to listensardonically. One of them, facile in his subordinate way as James inhis authorita
tive, kept chiming in:
"Ay, that's the road it goes, Miss Huffen--yis, yo'll see th' rooftheer 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 youplumb, as if th' roof had laid its egg on you. Ay, it runs a bitthin 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 easyworkin'--you don't have to knock your guts out. There's no need forshots, Miss Huffen--we bring it down--you see here--" And hestooped, pointing to a shallow, shelving excavation which he wasmaking under the coal. The working was low, you must stoop all thetime. The roof and the timbered sides of the way seemed to press onyou. It was as if she were in her tomb for ever, like the dead andeverlasting Egyptians. She was frightened, but fascinated. Thecollier kept on talking to her, stretching his bare, grey-blackhairy arm across her vision, and pointing with his knotted hand. Thethick-wicked tallow candles guttered and smelled. There was athickness in the air, a sense of dark, fluid presence in the thickatmosphere, the dark, fluid, viscous voice of the collier making abroad-vowelled, clapping sound in her ear. He seemed to linger nearher as if he knew--as if he knew--what? Something for everunknowable and inadmissible, something that belonged purely to theunderground: to the slaves who work underground: knowledgehumiliated, subjected, but ponderous and inevitable. And still hisvoice went on clapping in her ear, and still his presence edged nearher, and seemed to impinge on her--a smallish, semi-grotesque,grey-obscure figure with a naked brandished forearm: not human: acreature of the subterranean world, melted out like a bat, fluid.She felt herself melting out also, to become a mere vocal ghost, apresence in the thick atmosphere. Her lungs felt thick and slow, hermind dissolved, she felt she could cling like a bat in the longswoon of the crannied, underworld darkness. Cling like a bat andsway for ever swooning in the draughts of the darkness--
When she was up on the earth again she blinked and peered at theworld in amazement. What a pretty, luminous place it was, carved insubstantial luminosity. What a strange and lovely place, bubblingiridescent-golden on the surface of the underworld. Iridescentgolden--could anything be more fascinating! Like lovely glancingsurface on fluid pitch. But a velvet surface. A velvet surface ofgolden light, velvet-pile of gold and pale luminosity, and strangebeautiful elevations of houses and trees, and depressions of fieldsand roads, all golden and floating like atmospheric majolica. Neverhad the common ugliness of Woodhouse seemed so entrancing. Shethought she had never seen such beauty--a lovely luminous majolica,living and palpitating, the glossy, svelte world-surface, theexquisite face of all the darkness. It was like a vision. Perhapsgnomes and subterranean workers, enslaved in the era of light, seewith such eyes. Perhaps that is why they are absolutely blind toconventional ugliness. For truly nothing could be more hideous thanWoodhouse, as the miners had built it and disposed it. And yet, thevery cabbage-stumps and rotten fences of the gardens, the veryback-yards were instinct with magic, molten as they seemed with thebubbling-up of the under-darkness, bubbling up of majolica weightand luminosity, quite ignorant of the sky, heavy and satisfying.
Slaves of the underworld! She watched the swing of the grey colliersalong the pavement with a new fascination, hypnotized by a newvision. Slaves--the underground trolls and iron-workers, magic,mischievous, and enslaved, of the ancient stories. But tall--theminers seemed to her to loom tall and grey, in their enslaved magic.Slaves who would cause the superimposed day-order to fall. Notbecause, individually, they wanted to. But because, collectively,something bubbled up in them, the force of darkness which had nomaster and no control. It would bubble and stir in them asearthquakes stir the earth. It would be simply disastrous, becauseit had no master. There was no dark master in the world. The puerileworld went on crying out for a new Jesus, another Saviour from thesky, another heavenly superman. When what was wanted was a DarkMaster 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 pallidfrom under their dirt. Their walk was heavy-footed and slurring,their bearing stiff and grotesque. A stream they were--yet theyseemed 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 wasthere in the midst. The curious, dark, inexplicable and yetinsatiable craving--as if for an earthquake. To feel the earth heaveand shudder and shatter the world from beneath. To go down in thedebacle.
And so, in spite of everything, poverty, dowdiness, obscurity, andnothingness, she was content to stay in abeyance at home for thetime. True, she was filled with the same old, slow, dreadful cravingof the Midlands: a craving insatiable and inexplicable. But the verycraving kept her still. For at this time she did not translate itinto a desire, or need, for love. At the back of her mind somewherewas the fixed idea, the fixed intention of finding love, a man. Butas yet, at this period, the idea was in abeyance, it did not act.The craving that possessed her as it possesses everybody, in agreater or less degree, in those parts, sustained her darkly andunconsciously.
A hot summer waned into autumn, the long, bewildering days drew in,the transient nights, only a few breaths of shadow between noon andnoon, 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 makinghis fortune. Never had Woodhouse been so thronged on Fridays withpurchasers and money-spenders. The place seemed surcharged withlife.
Autumn lasted beautiful till end of October. And then suddenly, coldrain, endless cold rain, and darkness heavy, wet, ponderous. Throughthe wind and rain it was a toil to move. Poor Miss Frost, who hadseemed almost to blossom again in the long hot days, regaining afree cheerfulness that amounted almost to liveliness, and who evencaused a sort of scandal by her intimacy with a rather handsome butcommon stranger, an insurance agent who had come into the place witha good, unused tenor voice--now she wilted again. She had given therather florid young man tea in her room, and had laboured away athis fine, metallic voice, correcting him and teaching him andlaughing with him and spending really a remarkable number of hoursalone with him in her room in Woodhouse--for she had given uptramping the country, and had hired a music-room in a quiet street,where she gave her lessons. And the young man had hung round, andhad never wanted to go away. They would prolong their tete-a-teteand their singing on till ten o'clock at night, and Miss Frost wouldreturn to Manchester House flushed and handsome and a little shy,while the young man, who was common, took on a new boldness in thestreets. He had auburn hair, high colouring, and a ratherchallenging bearing. He took on a new boldness, his own estimate ofhimself rose considerably, with Miss Frost and his trained voice tojustify him. He was a little insolent and condescending to thenatives, who disliked him. For their lives they could not imaginewhat Miss Frost could find in him. They began even to dislike her,and a pretty scandal was started about the pair, in the pleasantroom where Miss Frost had her piano, her books, and her flowers. Thescandal was as unjust as most scandals are. Yet truly, all thatsummer and autumn Miss Frost had a new and slightly aggressivecheerfulness and humour. And Manchester House saw little of her,comparatively.
And then, at the end of September, the young man was removed by hisInsurance Company to another district. And at the end of October setin the most abominable and unbearable weather, deluges of rain andnorth winds, cutting the tender, summer-unfolded people to pieces.Miss Frost wilted at once. A silence came over her. She shudderedwhen 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, shudderingwhen her pupils brought the outside weather with them to her.
She was always subject to bronchitis. In November she had a badbronchitis 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 herfather instantly for the doctor, she heaped the sticks in thebedroom grate and made a bright fire, she brough hot milk andbrandy.
"Thank you, dear, thank you. It's a bronchial cold," whispered MissFrost hurriedly, trying to sip the milk. She could not. She didn'twant it.
"I've sent for the doctor," said Alvina, in her cool voice, whereinnone 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 ofAlvina during the next two days. She was so swift and sensitive inher nursing, she seemed to have second sight. She talked to nobody.In her silence her soul was alone with the soul of her darling. Thelong semi-consciousness and the tearing pain of pneumonia, theanguished sickness.
But sometimes the grey eyes would open and smile with delicatewinsomeness 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 underthe bedclothes, and laid it on Alvina's hand. Alvina leaned down toher.
"Everything is for you, my love," whispered Miss Frost, looking withstrange eyes on Alvina's face.
"Don't talk, Miss Frost," moaned Alvina.
"Everything is for you," murmured the sick woman--"except--" and sheenumerated some tiny legacies which showed her generous, thoughtfulnature.
"Yes, I shall remember," said Alvina, beyond tears now.
Miss Frost smiled with her old bright, wonderful look, that had atouch of queenliness in it.
"Kiss me, dear," she whispered.
Alvina kissed her, and could not suppress the whimpering of hertoo-much grief.
The night passed slowly. Sometimes the grey eyes of the sick womanrested dark, dilated, haggard on Alvina's face, with a heavy, almostaccusing look, sinister. Then they closed again. And sometimes theylooked pathetic, with a mute, stricken appeal. Then again theyclosed--only to open again tense with pain. Alvina wiped herblood-phlegmed lips.
In the morning she died--lay there haggard, death-smeared, with herlovely white hair smeared also, and disorderly: she who had been sobeautiful and clean always.
Alvina knew death--which is untellable. She knew that her darlingcarried 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 intodeath--the agony of self-reproach, regret; the agony of remembrance;the agony of the looks of the dying woman, winsome, and sinisterlyaccusing, and pathetically, despairingly appealing--probe afterprobe of mortal agony, which throughout eternity would never loseits power to pierce to the quick!
Alvina seemed to keep strangely calm and aloof all the days afterthe death. Only when she was alone she suffered till she felt herheart really broke.
"I shall never feel anything any more," she said in her abrupt wayto 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--Buttime--time brings back--"
"Oh well--but I don't believe it," said Alvina.
People thought her rather hard. To one of her gossips Miss Pinnegarconfessed:
"I thought she'd have felt it more. She cared more for her than shedid for her own mother--and her mother knew it. Mrs. Houghtoncomplained bitterly, sometimes, that _she_ had _no_ love. They wereeverything to one another, Miss Frost and Alvina. I should havethought she'd have felt it more. But you never know. A good thing ifshe doesn't, really."
Miss Pinnegar herself did not care one little bit that Miss Frostwas dead. She did not feel herself implicated.
The nearest relatives came down, and everything was settled. Thewill was found, just a brief line on a piece of notepaper expressinga wish that Alvina should have everything. Alvina herself told theverbal requests. All was quietly fulfilled.
As it might well be. For there was nothing to leave. Justsixty-three pounds in the bank--no more: then the clothes, piano,books and music. Miss Frost's brother had these latter, at his ownrequest: the books and music, and the piano. Alvina inherited thefew simple trinkets, and about forty-five pounds in money.
"Poor Miss Frost," cried Mrs. Lawson, weeping rather bitterly--"shesaved nothing for herself. You can see why she never wanted to growold, so that she couldn't work. You can see. It's a shame, it's ashame, one of the best women that ever trod earth."
Manchester House settled down to its deeper silence, its darkergloom. Miss Frost was irreparably gone. With her, the reality wentout of the house. It seemed to be silently waiting to disappear. AndAlvina and Miss Pinnegar might move about and talk in vain. Theycould never remove the sense of waiting to finish: it was all justwaiting to finish. And the three, James and Alvina and MissPinnegar, waited lingering through the months, for the house to cometo 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 beforea sale.
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