Life and Death of Harriett Frean (6 page)

"
She
did.... Don't you remember? It was when I stayed with her.... Oh, Hatty, didn't she tell you?"

"She never said a word."

"Oh, well, she wouldn't hear of it, even then when they didn't give her two years to live."

Three years? She had had it three years ago. She had known about it all that time. Three years ago the operation would have saved her; she would have been here now. Why had she refused it when she knew it would save her?

She had been thinking of the hundred pounds.

To have known about it three years and said nothing--to have gone believing she hadn't two years to live----

That
was her secret. That was why she had been so calm when Papa died. She had known she would have him again so soon. Not two years----

"If I'd been them," Lizzie was saying, "I'd have bitten my tongue out before I told you. It's no use worrying, Hatty. You did everything that could be done."

"I know. I know."

She held up her face against them; but to herself she said that everything had not been done. Her mother had never had her wish. And she had died in agony, so that she, Harriett, might keep her hundred pounds.

In all her previsions of the event she had seen herself surviving as the same Harriett Frean with the addition of an overwhelming grief. She was horrified at this image of herself persisting beside her mother's place empty in space and time.

But she was not there. Through her absorption in her mother, some large, essential part of herself had gone. It had not been so when her father died; what he had absorbed was given back to her, transferred to her mother. All her memories of her mother were joined to the memory of this now irrecoverable self.

She tried to reinstate herself through grief; she sheltered behind her bereavement, affecting a more profound seclusion, abhorring strangers; she was more than ever the reserved, fastidious daughter of Hilton Frean. She had always thought of herself as different from Connie and Sarah, living with a superior, intellectual life. She turned to the books she had read with her mother, Dante, Browning, Carlyle, and Ruskin, the biographies of Great Men, trying to retrace the footsteps of her lost self, to revive the forgotten thrill. But it was no use. One day she found herself reading the Dedication of
The Ring and the Book
over and over again, without taking in its meaning, without any remembrance of its poignant secret. "'And all a wonder and a wild desire'--Mamma loved that." She thought she loved it too; but what she loved was the dark-green book she had seen in her mother's long, white hands, and the sound of her mother's voice reading. She had followed her mother's mind with strained attention and anxiety, smiling when she smiled, but with no delight and no admiration of her own.

If only she could have remembered. It was only through memory that she could reinstate herself.

She had a horror of the empty house. Her friends advised her to leave it, but she had a horror of removal, of change. She loved the rooms that had held her mother, the chair she had sat on, the white, fluted cup she had drunk from in her illness. She clung to the image of her mother; and always beside it, shadowy and pathetic, she discerned the image of her lost self.

When the horror of emptiness came over her, she dressed herself in her black, with delicate care and precision, and visited her friends. Even in moments of no intention she would find herself knocking at Lizzie's door or Sarah's or Connie Pennefather's. If they were not in she would call again and again, till she found them. She would sit for hours, talking, spinning out the time.

She began to look forward to these visits.

Wonderful. The sweet peas she had planted had come up.

Hitherto Harriett had looked on the house and garden as parts of the space that contained her without belonging to her. She had had no sense of possession. This morning she was arrested by the thought that the plot she had planted was hers. The house and garden were hers. She began to take an interest in them. She found that by a system of punctual movements she could give to her existence the reasonable appearance of an aim.

Next spring, a year after her mother's death, she felt the vague stirring of her individual soul. She was free to choose her own vicar; she left her mother's Dr. Braithwaite, who was broad and twice married, and went to Canon Wrench, who was unmarried and high. There was something stimulating in the short, happy service, the rich music, the incense, and the processions. She made new covers for the drawing-room, in cretonne, a gay pattern of pomegranate and blue-green leaves. And as she had always had the cutlets broiled plain because her mother liked them that way, now she had them breaded.

And Mrs. Hancock wanted to know
why
Harriett had forsaken her dear mother's church; and when Connie Pennefather saw the covers she told Harriett she was lucky to be able to afford new cretonne. It was more than
she
could; she seemed to think Harriett had no business to afford it. As for the breaded cutlets, Hannah opened her eyes and said, "That was how the mistress always had them, ma'am, when you was away."

One day she took the blue egg out of the drawing-room and stuck it on the chimney-piece in the spare room. When she remembered how she used to love it she felt that she had done something cruel and iniquitous, but necessary to the soul.

She was taking out novels from the circulating library now. Not, she explained, for her serious reading. Her serious reading, her Dante, her Browning, her Great Man, lay always on the table ready to her hand (beside a copy of
The Social Order
and the
Remains
of Hilton Frean) while secretly and half-ashamed she played with some frivolous tale. She was satisfied with anything that ended happily and had nothing in it that was unpleasant, or difficult, demanding thought. She exalted her preferences into high canons. A novel
ought
to conform to her requirements. A novelist (she thought of him with some asperity) had no right to be obscure, or depressing, or to add needless unpleasantness to the unpleasantness that had to be. The Great Men didn't
do
it.

She spoke of George Eliot and Dickens and Mr. Thackeray.

Lizzie Pierce had a provoking way of smiling at Harriett, as if she found her ridiculous. And Harriett had no patience with Lizzie's affectation in wanting to be modern, her vanity in trying to be young, her middle-aged raptures over the work--often unpleasant--of writers too young to be worth serious consideration. They had long arguments in which Harriett, beaten, retired behind
The Social Order
and the
Remains
.

"It's silly," Lizzie said, "not to be able to look at a new thing because it's new. That's the way you grow old."

"It's sillier," Harriett said, "to be always running after new things because you think that's the way to look young. I've no wish to appear younger than I am."

"I've no wish to appear suffering from senile decay."

"There
is
a standard." Harriett lifted her obstinate and arrogant chin. "You forget that I'm Hilton Frean's daughter."

"I'm William Pierce's, but that hasn't prevented my being myself."

Lizzie's mind had grown keener in her sharp middle age. As it played about her, Harriett cowered; it was like being exposed, naked, to a cutting wind. Her mind ran back to her father and mother, longing, like a child, for their shelter and support, for the blessed assurance of herself.

At her worst she could still think with pleasure of the beauty of the act which had given Robin to Priscilla.

"My dear Harriett: Thank you for your kind letter of sympathy. Although we had expected the end for many weeks poor Prissie's death came to us as a great shock. But for her it was a blessed release, and we can only be thankful. You who knew her will realize the depth and extent of my bereavement. I have lost the dearest and most loving wife man ever had...."

Poor little Prissie. She couldn't bear to think she would never see her
again.

Six months later Robin wrote again, from Sidmouth.

"Dear Harriett: Priscilla left you this locket in her will as a remembrance. I would have sent it before but that I couldn't bear to part with her things all at once.

"I take this opportunity of telling you that I am going to be married
again----"

Her heart heaved and closed. She could never have believed she could have felt such a pang.

"The lady is Miss Beatrice Walker, the devoted nurse who was with my dear wife all through her last illness. This step may seem strange and precipitate, coming so soon after her death; but I am urged to do it by the precarious state of my own health and by the knowledge that we are fulfilling poor Prissie's dying wish...."

Poor Prissie's dying wish. After what she had done for Prissie, if she
had
a dying wish--But neither of them had thought of her. Robin had forgotten her.... Forgotten.... Forgotten.

But no. Priscilla had remembered. She had left her the locket with his hair in it. She had remembered and she had been afraid; jealous of her. She couldn't bear to think that Robin might marry her, even after she was dead. She had made him marry this Walker woman so that he shouldn't----

Oh, but he wouldn't. Not after twenty years.

"I didn't really think he would."

She was forty-five, her face was lined and pitted and her hair was dust color, streaked with gray: and she could only think of Robin as she had last seen him, young: a young face; a young body; young, shining eyes. He would want to marry a young woman. He had been in love with this Walker woman, and Prissie had known it. She could see Prissie lying in her bed, helpless, looking at them over the edge of the white sheet. She had known that as soon as she was dead, before the sods closed over her grave, they would marry. Nothing could stop them. And she had tried to make herself believe it was her wish, her doing, not theirs. Poor little Prissie.

She understood that Robin had been staying in Sidmouth for his health.

A year later, Harriett, run down, was ordered to the seaside. She went to Sidmouth. She told herself that she wanted to see the place where she had been so happy with her mother, where poor Aunt Harriett had died.

Looking through the local paper she found in the list of residents:
Sidcote--Mr. and Mrs. Robert Lethbridge and Miss Walker. She wrote to
Robin and asked if she might call on his wife.

A mile of hot road through the town and inland brought her to a door in a lane and a thatched cottage with a little lawn behind it. From the doorstep she could see two figures, a man and a woman, lying back in garden chairs. Inside the house she heard the persistent, energetic sound of hammering. The woman got up and came to her. She was young, pink-faced and golden-haired, and she said she was Miss Walker, Mrs. Lethbridge's sister.

A tall, lean, gray man rose from the garden chair, slowly, dragging himself with an invalid air. His eyes stared, groping, blurred films that trembled between the pouch and droop of the lids; long cheeks, deep grooved, dropped to the infirm mouth that sagged under the limp mustache. That was Robin.

He became agitated when he saw her. "Poor Robin," she thought. "All these years, and it's too much for him, seeing me." Presently he dragged himself from the lawn to the house and disappeared through the French window where the hammering came from.

"Have I frightened him away?" she said.

"Oh, no, he's always like that when he sees strange faces."

"My face isn't exactly strange."

"Well, he must have thought it was."

A sudden chill crept through her.

"He'll be all right when he gets used to you," Miss Walker said.

The strange face of Miss Walker chilled her. A strange young woman, living close to Robin, protecting him, explaining Robin's ways.

The sound of hammering ceased. Through the long, open window she saw a woman rise up from the floor and shed a white apron. She came down the lawn to them, with raised arms, patting disordered hair; large, a full, firm figure clipped in blue linen. A full-blown face, bluish pink; thick gray eyes slightly protruding; a thick mouth, solid and firm and kind. That was Robin's wife. Her sister was slighter, fresher, a good ten years younger, Harriett thought.

"Excuse me, we're only just settling in. I was nailing down the carpet in
Robin's study."

Her lips were so thick that they moved stiffly when she spoke or smiled. She panted a little as if from extreme exertion.

When they were all seated Mrs. Lethbridge addressed her sister. "Robin was quite right. It looks
much
better turned the other way."

"Do you mean to say he made you take it all up and put it down again?
Well----"

"What's the use?... Miss Frean, you don't know what it is to have a husband who
will
have things just so."

"She had to mow the lawn this morning because Robin can't bear to see one blade of grass higher than another."

"Is he as particular as all that?"

"I assure you, Miss Frean, he is," Miss Walker informed her.

"He wasn't when I knew him," Harriett said.

"Ah--my sister spoils him."

Mrs. Lethbridge wondered why he hadn't come out again.

"I think," Harriett said, "perhaps he'll come if I go."

"Oh, you mustn't go. It's good for him to see people. Takes him out of
himself."

"He'll turn up all right," Miss Walker said, "when he hears the teacups."

And at four o'clock when the teacups came, Robin turned up, dragging himself slowly from the house to the lawn. He blinked and quivered with agitation; Harriett saw he was annoyed, not with her, and not with Miss Walker, but with his wife.

"Beatrice, what have you done with my new bottle of medicine?"

"Nothing, dear."

"You've done nothing, when you know you poured out my last dose at
twelve?"

"Why, hasn't it come?"

"No. It hasn't."

"But Cissy ordered it this morning."

"I didn't," Cissy said. "I forgot."

"Oh, Cissy----"

"You needn't blame Cissy. You ought to have seen to it yourself.... She was a good nurse, Harriett, before she was my wife."