The Lost Girl. D. H. Lawrence
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Miss Frost lifted her eyes:
"There's no need," she said, and she smiled winsomely at Alvina.
It was pneumonia. Useless to talk of the distracted anguish of Alvina during the next two days. She was so swift and sensitive in her nursing, she seemed to have second sight. She talked to nobody. In her silence her soul was alone with the soul of her darling. The long semi-consciousness and the tearing pain of pneumonia, the anguished sickness.
But sometimes the grey eyes would open and smile with delicate winsomeness at Alvina, and Alvina smiled back, with a cheery, answering winsomeness. But that costs something.
On the evening of the second day, Miss Frost got her hand from under the bedclothes, and laid it on Alvina's hand. Alvina leaned down to her.
"Everything is for you, my love," whispered Miss Frost, looking with strange eyes on Alvina's face.
"Don't talk, Miss Frost," moaned Alvina.
"Everything is for you," murmured the sick woman—"except—" and she enumerated some tiny legacies which showed her generous, thoughtful nature.
"Yes, I shall remember," said Alvina, beyond tears now.
Miss Frost smiled with her old bright, wonderful look, that had a touch of queenliness in it.
"Kiss me, dear," she whispered.
Alvina kissed her, and could not suppress the whimpering of her too-much grief.
The night passed slowly. Sometimes the grey eyes of the sick woman rested dark, dilated, haggard on Alvina's face, with a heavy, almost accusing look, sinister. Then they closed again. And sometimes they looked pathetic, with a mute, stricken appeal. Then again they closed—only to open again tense with pain. Alvina wiped her blood-phlegmed lips.
In the morning she died—lay there haggard, death-smeared, with her lovely white hair smeared also, and disorderly: she who had been so beautiful and clean always.
Alvina knew death—which is untellable. She knew that her darling carried away a portion of her own soul into death.
But she was alone. And the agony of being alone, the agony of grief, passionate, passionate grief for her darling who was torn into death—the agony of self-reproach, regret; the agony of remembrance; the agony of the looks of the dying woman, winsome, and sinisterly accusing, and pathetically, despairingly appealing—probe after probe of mortal agony, which throughout eternity would never lose its power to pierce to the quick!
Alvina seemed to keep strangely calm and aloof all the days after the death. Only when she was alone she suffered till she felt her heart really broke.
"I shall never feel anything any more," she said in her abrupt way to Miss Frost's friend, another woman of over fifty.
"Nonsense, child!" expostulated Mrs. Lawson gently.
"I shan't! I shall never have a heart to feel anything any more," said Alvina, with a strange, distraught roll of the eyes.
"Not like this, child. But you'll feel other things—"
"I haven't the heart," persisted Alvina.
"Not yet," said Mrs. Lawson gently. "You can't expect—But time—time brings back—"
"Oh well—but I don't believe it," said Alvina.
People thought her rather hard. To one of her gossips Miss Pinnegar confessed:
"I thought she'd have felt it more. She cared more for her than she did for her own mother—and her mother knew it. Mrs. Houghton complained bitterly, sometimes, that she had no love. They were everything to one another, Miss Frost and Alvina. I should have thought she'd have felt it more. But you never know. A good thing if she doesn't, really."
Miss Pinnegar herself did not care one little bit that Miss Frost was dead. She did not feel herself implicated.
The nearest relatives came down, and everything was settled. The will was found, just a brief line on a piece of notepaper expressing a wish that Alvina should have everything. Alvina herself told the verbal requests. All was quietly fulfilled.
As it might well be. For there was nothing to leave. Just sixty-three pounds in the bank—no more: then the clothes, piano, books and music. Miss Frost's brother had these latter, at his own request: the books and music, and the piano. Alvina inherited the few simple trinkets, and about forty-five pounds in money.
"Poor Miss Frost," cried Mrs. Lawson, weeping rather bitterly—"she saved nothing for herself. You can see why she never wanted to grow old, so that she couldn't work. You can see. It's a shame, it's a shame, one of the best women that ever trod earth."
Manchester House settled down to its deeper silence, its darker gloom. Miss Frost was irreparably gone. With her, the reality went out of the house. It seemed to be silently waiting to disappear. And Alvina and Miss Pinnegar might move about and talk in vain. They could never remove the sense of waiting to finish: it was all just waiting to finish. And the three, James and Alvina and Miss Pinnegar, waited lingering through the months, for the house to come to an end. With Miss Frost its spirit passed away: it was no more. Dark, empty-feeling, it seemed all the time like a house just before a sale.
CHAPTER V—THE BEAU
Throttle-Ha'penny worked fitfully through the winter, and in the spring broke down. By this time James Houghton had a pathetic, childish look which touched the hearts of Alvina and Miss Pinnegar. They began to treat him with a certain feminine indulgence, as he fluttered round, agitated and bewildered. He was like a bird that has flown into a room and is exhausted, enfeebled by its attempts to fly through the false freedom of the window-glass. Sometimes he would sit moping in a corner, with his head under his wing. But Miss Pinnegar chased him forth, like the stealthy cat she was, chased him up to the work-room to consider some detail of work, chased him into the shop to turn over the old débris of the stock. At one time he showed the alarming symptom of brooding over his wife's death. Miss Pinnegar was thoroughly scared. But she was not inventive. It was left to Alvina to suggest: "Why doesn't father let the shop, and some of the house?"
Let the shop! Let the last inch of frontage on the street! James thought of it. Let the shop! Permit the name of Houghton to disappear from the list of tradesmen? Withdraw? Disappear? Become a nameless nobody, occupying obscure premises?
He thought about it. And thinking about it, became so indignant at the thought that he pulled his scattered energies together within his frail frame. And then he came out with the most original of all his schemes. Manchester House was to be fitted up as a boarding-house for the better classes, and was to make a fortune catering for the needs of these gentry, who had now nowhere to go. Yes, Manchester House should be fitted up as a sort of quiet family hotel for the better classes. The shop should be turned into an elegant hall-entrance, carpeted, with a hall-porter and a wide plate-glass door, round-arched, in the round arch of which the words: "Manchester House" should appear large and distinguished, making an arch also, whilst underneath, more refined and smaller, should show the words: "Private Hotel." James was to be proprietor and secretary, keeping the books and attending to correspondence: Miss Pinnegar was to be manageress, superintending the servants and directing the house, whilst Alvina was to occupy the equivocal position of "hostess." She was to shake hands with the guests: she was to play the piano, and she was to nurse the sick. For in the prospectus James would include: "Trained nurse always on the premises."
"Why!" cried Miss Pinnegar, for once brutally and angrily hostile to him: "You'll make it sound like a private lunatic asylum."
"Will you explain why?" answered James tartly.
For himself, he was enraptured with the scheme. He began to tot up ideas and expenses. There would be the handsome entrance