“Why? Why not see him? Let me pass,
Mr. Saunders.”
Well, the filly lay across him ... he had begged them
not to move her because of the pain.... Better
come away.
She pushed through them.... Yes, better perhaps
not to have seen ... all crumpled up....
Recollecting, she could feel distinctly in her knees
the creepy damp as the moisture of the marshy ground
penetrated her skirts, bending over the twisted face.
Thereafter a blank of days in which events must have
occurred but to which memory brought no lamp until
the faint crunch as the coffin touched the earth seven
feet down....
Multitudinous papers after that. Wearying, sickening
masses of documents; interminable writing of signature;
interminable making of lists. And then the word
LOT. “Lot I,” “Lot 2,”
“Lot 50,” “Lot 200”—a
hammerlike word to thump the brain at night, frightening
sleep, producing grotesque nightmares, as “Lot
12, a polished oak coffin, finished plain, brass Handles.”
No! No! That was not to be sold!—leaden
hands holding her down; stifling hands at her mouth
to stay her shouting “Stop!”
Then sudden consciousness—only a dream!
Bolt upright in bed staring into the darkness.
A dream? How much of it a dream? Was it all
a dream? The fevered brain would fetch her from
her bed, groping to Dad’s room, striking a match—no
familiar form upon the bed; a big white ticket—“Lot
56.”
Back to the hot, crumpled couch, there, tossing, to
lie attempting a grasp, a realisation of what it all
meant....
A dark little office in Dublin.... So much the
“Lots” had fetched, so much the balance
at the bank; no investments, it was to be feared; no
insurance, my dear Miss Humfray; so much the bills
and other claims on the estate.... “Don’t
wish to be bothered with figures? Of course not,
my dear.... And then we come to the balance—I’m
afraid a few pounds, practically nothing....”
On the steamer bound for Holyhead.... During
the crossing the stifling weight that had benumbed
her intellect ever since the man with the dent in
his hat came riding up the drive seemed suddenly to
lift. Whipped away perhaps by the edged wind
that rushed past her from England to Ireland sinking
in the sea—a wind to cut you to the bone;
discovering sensation in every marrow; stinging her
to clear thought.... That idyllic life with Mother
and Dad—the world to one another and none
else in the world beside—had been rather
the creation of circumstance than of design.
Dad’s people were furious when he married Mother;
in defiance of hers, Mother married Dad. Relations
on either side had shrieked their disapproval of the
match, then left the couple to their own adventures.
A thing to laugh at in those days, but bringing now
to the child that was left the realisation of not
a support in the world.
