Life and Death of Harriett Frean Part 3

"How do you know you couldn't?"

"Because I haven't. I--I oughtn't to have gone on staying here. My father's ill. They wanted me to go to them and I wouldn't go."

"Oh, Prissie----"

"There, you see. But I couldn't. I couldn't. I was so happy here with you. I couldn't give it up."

"If your father had been like Papa you would have."

"Yes. I'd do anything for _him_, because he's your father. It's you I couldn't give up."

"You'll have to some day."

"When--when?"

"When somebody else comes. When you're married."

"I shall never marry. Never. I shall never want anybody but you. If we could always be together.... I can't think _why_ people marry, Hatty."

"Still," Hatty said, "they do."

"It's because they haven't ever cared as you and me care.... Hatty, if I don't marry anybody, _you_ won't, will you?"

"I'm not thinking of marrying anybody."

"No. But promise, promise on your honor you won't ever."

"I'd rather not _promise_. You see, I might. I shall love you all the same, Priscilla, all my life."

"No, you won't. It'll all be different. I love you more than you love me. But I shall love you all my life and it won't be different. I shall never marry."

"Perhaps I shan't, either," Harriett said.

They exchanged gifts. Harriett gave Priscilla a rosewood writing desk inlaid with mother-o'-pearl, and Priscilla gave Harriett a pocket-handkerchief case she had made herself of fine gray canvas embroidered with blue flowers like a sampler and lined with blue and white plaid silk. On the top part you read "Pocket handkerchiefs" in blue lettering, and on the bottom "Harriett Frean," and, tucked away in one corner, "Priscilla Heaven: September, 1861."

IV

She remembered the conversation. Her father sitting, straight and slender, in his chair, talking in that quiet voice of his that never went sharp or deep or quavering, that paused now and then on an amused inflection, his long lips straightening between the perpendicular grooves of his smile. She loved his straight, slender face, clean-shaven, the straight, slightly jutting jaw, the dark-blue flattish eyes under the black eyebrows, the silver-grizzled hair that fitted close like a cap, curling in a silver brim above his ears.

He was talking about his business as if more than anything it amused him.

"There's nothing gross and material about stock-broking. It's like pure mathematics. You're dealing in abstractions, ideal values, all the time.

You calculate--in curves." His hand, holding the unlit cigar, drew a curve, a long graceful one, in mid-air. "You know what's going to happen all the time.

"... The excitement begins when you don't quite know and you risk it; when it's getting dangerous.

"... The higher mathematics of the game. If you can afford them; if you haven't a wife and family--I can see the fascination...."

He sat holding his cigar in one hand, looking at it without seeing it, seeing the fascination and smiling at it, amused and secure.

And her mother, bending over her bead-work, smiled too, out of their happiness, their security.

He would lean back, smoking his cigar and looking at them out of contented, half-shut eyes, as they st.i.tched, one at each end of the long canvas fender stool. He was waiting, he said, for the moment when their heads would come b.u.mping together in the middle.

Sometimes they would sit like that, not exchanging ideas, exchanging only the sense of each other's presence, a secure, profound satisfaction that belonged as much to their bodies as their minds; it rippled on their faces with their quiet smiling, it breathed with their breath.

Sometimes she or her mother read aloud, Mrs. Browning or Charles d.i.c.kens; or the biography of some Great Man, sitting there in the velvet-curtained room or out on the lawn under the cedar tree. A motionless communion broken by walks in the sweet-smelling fields and deep, elm-screened lanes. And there were short journeys into London to a lecture or a concert, and now and then the surprise and excitement of the play.

One day her mother smoothed out her long, hanging curls and tucked them away under a net. Harriett had a little shock of dismay and resentment, hating change.

And the long, long Sundays s.p.a.ced the weeks and the months, hushed and sweet and rather enervating, yet with a sort of thrill in them as if somewhere the music of the church organ went on vibrating. Her mother had some secret: some happy sense of G.o.d that she gave to you and you took from her as you took food and clothing, but not quite knowing what it was, feeling that there was something more in it, some hidden gladness, some perfection that you missed.

Her father had his secret too. She felt that it was harder, somehow, darker and dangerous. He read dangerous books: Darwin and Huxley and Herbert Spencer. Sometimes he talked about them.

"There's a sort of fascination in seeing how far you can go.... The fascination of truth might be just that--the risk that, after all, it mayn't be true, that you may have to go farther and farther, perhaps never come back."

Her mother looked up with her bright, still eyes.

"I trust the truth. I know that, however far you go, you'll come back some day."

"I believe you see all of them--Darwin and Huxley and Herbert Spencer--coming back," he said.

"Yes, I do."

His eyes smiled, loving her. But you could see it amused him, too, to think of them, all those reckless, courageous thinkers, coming back, to share her secret. His thinking was just a dangerous game he played.

She looked at her father with a kind of awe as he sat there, reading his book, in danger and yet safe.

She wanted to know what that fascination was. She took down Herbert Spencer and tried to read him. She made a point of finishing every book she had begun, for her pride couldn't bear being beaten. Her head grew hot and heavy: she read the same sentences over and over again; they had no meaning; she couldn't understand a single word of Herbert Spencer.

He had beaten her. As she put the book back in its place she said to herself: "I mustn't. If I go on, if I get to the interesting part I may lose my faith." And soon she made herself believe that this was really the reason why she had given it up.

Besides Connie Hanc.o.c.k there were Lizzie Pierce and Sarah Barmby.

Exquisite pleasure to walk with Lizzie Pierce. Lizzie's walk was a sliding, swooping dance of little pointed feet, always as if she were going out to meet somebody, her sharp, black-eyed face darting and turning.

"My _dear_, he kept on doing _this_" (Lizzie did it) "as if he was trying to sit on himself to keep him from flying off into s.p.a.ce like a cork. Fancy proposing on three tumblers of soda water! I might have been Mrs. Pennefather but for that."

Lizzie went about laughing, laughing at everybody, looking for something to laugh at everywhere. Now and then she would stop suddenly to contemplate the vision she had created.

"If Connie didn't wear a bustle--or, oh my dear, if Mr. Hanc.o.c.k did----"

"Mr. _Hanc.o.c.k!_" Clear, firm laughter, chiming and tinkling.

"Goodness! To think how many ridiculous people there are in the world!"