Life and Death of Harriett Frean Part 14

"Then it wasn't even your own idea. You sacrificed him to somebody else's. You made three people miserable just for that. Four, if you count Aunt Beatie."

"There was Prissie. I did it for her."

"What did you do for her? You insulted Aunt Prissie."

"Insulted her? My dear Mona!"

"It was an insult, handing her over to a man who couldn't love her even with his body. Aunt Prissie was the miserablest of the lot. Do you suppose he didn't take it out of her?"

"He never let her know."

"Oh, didn't he! She knew all right. That's how she got her illness. And it's how he got his. And he'll kill Aunt Beatie. He's taking it out of _her_ now. Look at the awful suffering. And you can go on sentimentalizing about it."

The young girl rose, flinging her scarf over her shoulders with a violent gesture.

"There's no common sense in it."

"No _common_ sense, perhaps."

"It's a jolly sight better than sentiment when it comes to marrying."

They kissed. Mona turned at the doorway.

"I say--did he go on caring for you?"

"Sometimes I think he did. Sometimes I think he hated me."

"Of course he hated you, after what you'd let him in for." She paused.

"You don't _mind_ my telling you the truth, do you?"

... Harriett sat a long time, her hands folded on her lap, her eyes staring into the room, trying to see the truth. She saw the girl, Robin's niece, in her young indignation, her tender brilliance suddenly hard, suddenly cruel, flashing out the truth. Was it true that she had sacrificed Robin and Priscilla and Beatrice to her parents' idea of moral beauty? Was it true that this idea had been all wrong? That she might have married Robin and been happy and been right?

"I don't care. If it was to be done again to-morrow I'd do it."

But the beauty of that unique act no longer appeared to her as it once was, uplifting, consoling, incorruptible.

The years pa.s.sed. They went with an incredible rapidity, and Harriett was now fifty.

The feeling of insecurity had grown on her. It had something to do with Mona, with Maggie and Maggie's baby. She had no clear illumination, only a mournful acquiescence in her own futility, an almost physical sense of shrinkage, the crumbling away, bit by bit, of her beautiful and honorable self, dying with the objects of its three profound affections: her father, her mother, Robin. Gradually the image of the middle-aged Robin had effaced his youth.

She read more and more novels from the circulating libraries, of a kind demanding less and less effort of attention. And always her inability to concentrate appeared to her as a just demand for clarity: "The man has no _business_ to write so that I can't understand him."

She laid in a weekly stock of opinions from _The Spectator_, and by this means contrived a semblance of intellectual life.

She was appeased more and more by the rhythm of the seasons, of the weeks, of day and night, by the first coming up of the pink and wine-brown velvet primulas, by the pungent, burnt smell of her morning coffee, the smell of a midday stew, of hot cakes baking for tea time; by the lighting of the lamp, the lighting of autumn fires, the round of her visits. She waited with a strained, expectant desire for the moment when it would be time to see Lizzie or Sarah or Connie Pennefather again.

Seeing them was a habit she couldn't get over. But it no longer gave her keen pleasure. She told herself that her three friends were deteriorating in their middle age. Lizzie's sharp face darted malice; her tongue was whipcord; she knew where to flick; the small gleam of her eyes, the snap of her nutcracker jaws irritated Harriett. Sarah was slow; slow. She took no care of her face and figure. As Lizzie put it, Sarah's appearance was an outrage on her contemporaries. "She makes us feel so old."

And Connie--the very rucking of Connie's coat about her broad hips irritated Harriett. She had a way of staring over her fat cheeks at Harriett's old suits, mistaking them for new ones, and saying the same exasperating thing. "You're lucky to be able to afford it. _I_ can't."

Harriett's irritation mounted up and up.

And one day she quarreled with Connie.

Connie had been telling one of her stories; leaning a little sideways, her skirt stretched tight between her fat, parted knees, the broad roll of her smile sliding greasily. She had "grown out of it" in her young womanhood, and now in her middle age she had come back to it again. She was just like her father.

"Connie, how can you be so coa.r.s.e?"

"I beg pardon. I forgot you were always better than everybody else."

"I'm not better than everybody else. I've only been brought up better than some people. My father would have died rather than have told a story like that."

"I suppose that's a dig at my parents."

"I never said anything about your parents."

"I know the things you think about my father."

"Well--I daresay he thinks things about me."

"He thinks you were always an incurable old maid, my dear."

"Did he think my father was an old maid?"

"I never heard him say one unkind word about your father."

"I should hope not, indeed."

"Unkind things were said. Not by him. Though he might have been forgiven----"

"I don't know what you mean. But all my father's creditors were paid in full. You know that."

"I didn't know it."

"You know it now. Was your father one of them?"

"No. It was as bad for him as if he had been, though."

"How do you make that out?"

"Well, my dear, if he hadn't taken your father's advice he might have been a rich man now instead of a poor one.... He invested all his money as he told him."

"In my father's things?"

"In things he was interested in. And he lost it."

"It shows how he must have trusted him."