Life and Death of Harriett Frean (5 page)

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 call. They were Hilton Frean's wife and daughter. "After our wonderful life with him," they said, "you'll understand, Sarah, that we don't want people." And if Harriett was introduced to any stranger she accounted for herself arrogantly: "My father was Hilton Frean."

They were collecting his
Remains
for publication.

Months passed, years passed, going each one a little quicker than the last. And Harriett was thirty-nine.

One evening, coming out of church, her mother fainted. That was the beginning of her illness, February, eighteen eighty-three. First came the long months of weakness; then the months and months of sickness; then the pain; the pain she had been hiding, that she couldn't hide any more.

They knew what it was now: that horrible thing that even the doctors were afraid to name. They called it "something malignant." When the friends-- Mrs. Hancock, Connie Pennefather, Lizzie, and Sarah--called to inquire, Harriett wouldn't tell them what it was; she pretended that she didn't know, that the doctors weren't sure; she covered it up from them as if it had been a secret shame. And they pretended that they didn't know. But they knew.

They were talking now about an operation. There was one chance for her in a hundred if they had Sir James Pargeter: one chance. She might die of it; she might die under the anæsthetic; she might die of shock; she was so old and weak. Still, there was that one chance, if only she would take it.

But her mother wouldn't listen. "My dear, it would cost a hundred pounds."

"How do you know what it would cost?"

"Oh," she said, "I know." She was smiling above the sheet that was tucked close up, tight under her chin, shutting it all down.

Sir James Pargeter would cost a hundred pounds. Harriett couldn't lay her hands on the money or on half of it or a quarter. "That doesn't matter if they think it'll save you."

"They
think;
they think. But I
know.
I know better than all
the doctors."

"But Mamma, darling----"

She urged the operation. Just because it would be so difficult to raise the hundred pounds she urged it. She wanted to feel that she had done everything that could be done, that she had let nothing stand in the way, that she had shrunk from no sacrifice. One chance in a hundred. What was a hundred pounds weighed against that one chance? If it had been one in a thousand she would have said the same.

"It would be no good, Hatty. I know it wouldn't. They just love to try experiments, those doctors. They're dying to get their knives into me. Don't
let
them."

Gradually, day by day, Harriett weakened. Her mother's frightened voice tore at her, broke her down. Supposing she really died under the operation? Supposing---- It was cruel to excite and upset her just for that; it made the pain worse.

Either the operation or the pain, going on and on, stabbing with sharper and sharper knives; cutting in deeper; all their care, the antiseptics, the restoratives, dragging it out, giving it more time to torture her.

When the three friends came, Harriett said, "I shall be glad and thankful when it's all over. I couldn't want to keep her with me, just for this."

Yet she did want it. She was thankful every morning that she came to her mother's bed and found her alive, lying there, looking at her with her wonderful smile. She was glad because she still had her.

And now they were giving her morphia. Under the torpor of the drug her face changed; the muscles loosened, the flesh sagged, the widened, swollen mouth hung open; only the broad beautiful forehead, the beautiful calm eyebrows were the same; the face, sallow white, half imbecile, was a mask flung aside. She couldn't bear to look at it; it wasn't her mother's face; her mother had died already under the morphia. She had a shock every time she came in and found it still there.

On the day her mother died she told herself she was glad and thankful. She met her friends with a little quiet, composed face, saying, "I'm glad and thankful she's at peace." But she wasn't thankful; she wasn't glad. She wanted her back again. And she reproached herself, one minute for having been glad, and the next for wanting her.

She consoled herself by thinking of the sacrifices she had made, how she had given up Sidmouth, and how willingly she would have paid the hundred pounds.

"I sometimes think, Hatty," said Mrs. Hancock, melancholy and condoling, "that it would have been very different if your poor mother could have had her wish."

"What--what wish?"

"Her wish to live in Sidmouth, near your Aunt Harriett."

And Sarah Barmby, sympathizing heavily, stopping short and brooding, trying to think of something to say: "If the operation had only been done three years ago when they
knew
it would save her----"

"Three years ago? But we didn't know anything about it then."