Life and Death of Harriett Frean by May Sinclair (reading women TXT) 📕

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.

Her 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