Life and Death of Harriett Frean Part 2

"Disobedience."

"More than that. Breaking trust. Meanness. It was mean and dishonorable of you when you knew you wouldn't be punished."

"Isn't there to be a punishment?"

"No. People are punished to make them remember. We want you to forget."

His arm tightened, drawing her closer. And the kind, secret voice went on. "Forget ugly things. Understand, Hatty, nothing is forbidden.

We don't forbid, because we trust you to do what we wish. To behave beautifully.... There, there."

She hid her face on his breast against his tickly coat, and cried.

She would always have to do what they wanted; the unhappiness of not doing it was more than she could bear. All very well to say there would be no punishment; _their_ unhappiness was the punishment.

It hurt more than anything. It kept on hurting when she thought about it.

The first minute of to-morrow she would begin behaving beautifully; as beautifully as she could. They wanted you to; they wanted it more than anything because they were so beautiful. So good. So wise.

But three years went before Harriett understood how wise they had been, and why her mother took her again and again into Black's Lane to pick red campion, so that it was always the red campion she remembered. They must have known all the time about Black's Lane; Annie, the housemaid, used to say it was a bad place; something had happened to a little girl there. Annie hushed and reddened and wouldn't tell you what it was.

Then one day, when she was thirteen, standing by the apple tree, Connie Hanc.o.c.k told her. A secret... Behind the dirty blue palings... She shut her eyes, squeezing the lids down, frightened. But when she thought of the lane she could see nothing but the green banks, the three tall elms, and the red campion p.r.i.c.king through the white froth of the cow's parsley; her mother stood on the garden walk in her wide, swinging gown; she was holding the red and white flowers up to her face and saying, "Look, how _beautiful_ they are."

She saw her all the time while Connie was telling her the secret. She wanted to get up and go to her. Connie knew what it meant when you stiffened suddenly and made yourself tall and cold and silent. The cold silence would frighten her and she would go away. Then, Harriett thought, she could get back to her mother and Longfellow.

Every afternoon, through the hours before her father came home, she sat in the cool, green-lighted drawing-room reading _Evangeline_ aloud to her mother. When they came to the beautiful places they looked at each other and smiled.

She pa.s.sed through her fourteenth year sedately, to the sound of _Evangeline_. Her upright body, her lifted, delicately obstinate, rather wistful face expressed her small, conscious determination to be good.

She was silent with emotion when Mrs. Hanc.o.c.k told her she was growing like her mother.

III

Connie Hanc.o.c.k was her friend.

She had once been a slender, wide-mouthed child, top-heavy with her damp clumps of hair. Now she was squaring and thickening and looking horrid, like Mr. Hanc.o.c.k. Beside her Harriett felt tall and elegant and slender.

Mamma didn't know what Connie was really like; it was one of those things you couldn't tell her. She said Connie would grow out of it.

Meanwhile you could see _he_ wouldn't. Mr. Hanc.o.c.k had red whiskers, and his face squatted down in his collar, instead of rising n.o.bly up out of it like Papa's. It looked as if it was thinking things that made its eyes bulge and its mouth curl over and slide like a drawn loop. When you talked about Mr. Hanc.o.c.k, Papa gave a funny laugh as if he was something improper. He said Connie ought to have red whiskers.

Mrs. Hanc.o.c.k, Connie's mother, was Mamma's dearest friend. That was why there had always been Connie. She could remember her, squirming and spluttering in her high nursery chair. And there had always been Mrs.

Hanc.o.c.k, refined and mournful, looking at you with gentle, disappointed eyes.

She was glad that Connie hadn't been sent to her boarding-school, so that nothing could come between her and Priscilla Heaven.

Priscilla was her real friend.

It had begun in her third term, when Priscilla first came to the school, unhappy and shy, afraid of the new faces. Harriett took her to her room.

She was thin, thin, in her shabby black velvet jacket. She stood looking at herself in the greenish gla.s.s over the yellow-painted chest of drawers. Her heavy black hair had dragged the net and broken it. She put up her thin arms, helpless.

"They'll never keep me," she said. "I'm so untidy."

"It wants more pins," said Harriett. "Ever so many more pins. If you put them in head downwards they'll fall out. I'll show you."

Priscilla trembled with joy when Harriett asked her to walk with her; she had been afraid of her at first because she behaved so beautifully.

Soon they were always together. They sat side by side at the dinner table and in school, black head and golden brown leaning to each other over the same book; they walked side by side in the packed procession, going two by two. They slept in the same room, the two white beds drawn close together; a white dimity curtain hung between; they drew it back so that they could see each other lying there in the summer dusk and in the clear mornings when they waked.

Harriett loved Priscilla's odd, dusk-white face; her long hound's nose, seeking; her wide mouth, restless between her shallow, fragile jaws; her eyes, black, cleared with spots of jade gray, prominent, showing white rims when she was startled. She started at sudden noises; she quivered and stared when you caught her dreaming; she cried when the organ burst out triumphantly in church. You had to take care every minute that you didn't hurt her.

She cried when term ended and she had to go home. Priscilla's home was horrible. Her father drank, her mother fretted; they were poor; a rich aunt paid for her schooling.

When the last midsummer holidays came she spent them with Harriett.

"Oh-h-h!" Prissie drew in her breath when she heard they were to sleep together in the big bed in the spare room. She went about looking at things, curious, touching them softly as if they were sacred. She loved the two rough-coated china lambs on the chimney-piece, and "Oh--the dear little china boxes with the flowers sitting up on them."

But when the bell rang she stood quivering in the doorway.

"I'm afraid of your father and mother, Hatty. They won't like me. I _know_ they won't like me."

"They will. They'll love you," Hatty said.

And they did. They were sorry for the little white-faced, palpitating thing.

It was their last night. Priscilla wasn't going back to school again.

Her aunt, she said, was only paying for a year. They lay together in the big bed, dim, face to face, talking.

"Hatty--if you wanted to do something most awfully, more than anything else in the world, and it was wrong, would you be able not to do it?"

"I hope so. I _think_ I would, because I'd know if I did it would make Papa and Mamma unhappy."

"Yes, but suppose it was giving up something you wanted, something you loved more than them--could you?"

"Yes. If it was wrong for me to have it. And I couldn't love anything more than them."

"But if you did, you'd give it up."

"I'd have to."

"Hatty--I couldn't."

"Oh, yes, _you_ could if _I_ could."

"No. No...."