The Lost Girl (Feminist Classic). D. H. Lawrence
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I shall remember,” sad 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.
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