Life and Death of Harriett Frean Part 7

"I should think I had, sitting in this furnace."

The heat of the dining room oppressed him, but they sat on there after dinner because Prissie loved the heat. Robin's pale, blank face had a sick look, a deadly smoothness. He had to lie down on the sofa in the window.

When the clock struck nine he sighed and got up, dragging himself as if the weight of his body was more than he could bear. He stooped over Prissie, and lifted her.

"Robin--you can't. You're dropping to pieces."

"I'm all right." He heaved her up with one tremendous, irritated effort, and carried her upstairs, fast, as if he wanted to be done with it.

Through the open doors Harriett could hear Prissie's pleading whine, and Robin's voice, hard and controlled. Presently he came back to her and they went into his study. They could breathe there, he said.

They sat without speaking for a little time. The silence of Prissie's room overhead came between them.

Robin spoke first. "I'm afraid it hasn't been very gay for you with poor Prissie in this state."

"Poor Prissie? She's very happy, Robin."

He stared at her. His eyes, round and full and steady, taxed her with falsehood, with hypocrisy.

"You don't suppose _I'm_ not, do you?"

"No." There was a movement in her throat as though she swallowed something hard. "No. I want you to be happy."

"You don't. You want me to be rather miserable."

"_Robin!_" She contrived a sound like laughter. But Robin didn't laugh; his eyes, morose and cynical, held her there.

"That's what you want.... At least I hope you do. If you didn't----"

She fenced off the danger. "Do _you_ want _me_ to be miserable, then?"

At that he laughed out. "No. I don't. I don't care how happy you are."

She took the pain of it: the pain he meant to give her.

That evening he hung over Priscilla with a deliberate, exaggerated tenderness.

"Dear.... Dearest...." He spoke the words to Priscilla, but he sent out his voice to Harriett. She could feel its false precision, its intention, its repulse of her.

She was glad to be gone.

VII

Eighteen seventy-nine: it was the year her father lost his money.

Harriett was nearly thirty-five.

She remembered the day, late in November, when they heard him coming home from the office early. Her mother raised her head and said, "That's your father, Harriett. He must be ill." She always thought of seventy-nine as 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. Hanc.o.c.k should have lost money, a great deal of money, more money than Papa. He seemed determined that everybody should know it; you couldn't pa.s.s 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. Hanc.o.c.k'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. Hanc.o.c.k," 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."