They had stared at it for quite a long time before they had dared to touch it, and Tibbie had cried a little and laughed as well. It was a chair of character, she had said, and it knew its mind. It had been made for her as a child, and would serve no other, not even her own. And all the time that she had stared at the determined, absurd little chair, Stevie had stared at herself with his immutably sad eyes....
But again it was not this particular Tibbie who was present to Mrs. Clapham while she sat and wept. Her mind rejected that Tibbie, just as the chair had rejected her, and as it rejected her even now. Lobsided, battered and old, it yet refused to evoke any picture but that of the spring-flower of a child. It spoke of Tibbie as clothes speak of their wearers after they are gone; it looked like Tibbie—it was Tibbie, because of that picture of her which it kept alive.... Mrs. Clapham wept and wept, dropping her head on her arms; looked at the chair that was Tibbie and wept ... looked away and wept ... looked back and wept ... and wept, and wept, and wept, and wept....
Presently, after she had been crying for ever and ever, as it seemed, but in reality barely for half an hour, there came the same birdlike tap at the door that had startled her in the morning. Now, however, she scarcely noticed it, and that part of her brain which did chance to take it in wiped it out again instantly as some sign from a lost world. The door opened gently at last as she did not answer, and Mrs. Tanner advanced with brave if birdlike movements into the room.
She went straight to the weeping woman, and stood beside her at the table, now laying a soft little touch on a flung-out arm, now patting and soothing and smoothing the bent head. Her actions, light and neat as those of a wren, worried Mrs. Clapham no more than if they had been the hoppings of the bird itself. They gave her, indeed, something of the same feeling of friendly warmth, of unasking companionship, of brisk life that knew nothing of death; and presently, as she wept and wept, crying aloud on her dead child, turning to stare at the chair that was Tibbie, and yet emphatically was not—she had the impression that a bird was actually in the room. Even the little sympathetic sounds which Mrs. Tanner uttered from time to time seemed to her almost like twitters and chirps from some delicate feathered throat.
“My Tibbie! My little lass!...” The sleeves of the black gown were soaked through and through with tears, as well as the white front which Tibbie had fashioned with such pride.
“Poor mother—poor soul!” Mrs. Tanner, as she chirped, was gently undoing the strings of the old woman’s bonnet, pulling out the pin that was supposed to be holding it in place, and setting both of them on a side-table. The bonnet would do well enough for the funeral, she was saying to herself, and so would the black gown, with a bit of crêpe for that touch of white....
“I can’t believe it.... ’Tisn’t likely! ’Tain’t true.... My bonny Tibbie!”
“Poor soul! Poor dear!”
“What ha’ they gone and done to her? What’s been wrong? What ha’ they done to her when I wasn’t there?”
“Poor dear! Poor soul!”