“I couldn’t help it. I was so glad to have you there, and you looked so young. I don’t know what we should do without you, poor Sophia and I. Oh, do put on my dressing-gown!”
“Yes, dear, yes, put on the dressing-gown.” It was Sophia who spoke. Her face was very calm; she actually looked younger, as though the greatness of her sorrow had removed all other signs, like a fall of snow hiding the scars of a hillside.
“Oh, Aunt Sophia!” Henrietta went forward and pressed her cheek against the other’s.
“Yes, dear, but you must go and dress. Breakfast is ready.”
Henrietta was a little shocked that Aunt Sophia, who was naturally sentimental, should be less emotional on this occasion than Aunt Rose, but she was also awed by this control. She remembered how, when her own mother died, Mrs. Banks had refused to take solid food for a whole day, and the recollection braced her for her cold bath, for fresh linen, for emulation of Aunt Sophia, for everything unlike the slovenly weeping of Mrs. Banks, sitting in the neglected kitchen with a grimy pocket-handkerchief on her lap and the teapot at her elbow; but she knew that the Banksian manner was really natural to her, and the Mallett control, the acceptance, the same eating of breakfast, were a pose, a falseness oddly better than her sincerity.
At table no one referred to Caroline; they were practical and composed and afterwards, when Sophia and Rose were closeted together, making arrangements, writing letters to relatives of whom Henrietta had never heard, interviewing Mr. Batty and a husky personage in black, Henrietta stole upstairs past Caroline’s death chamber and into her own room.
She was glad to find the pretty housemaid there, tidying the hearth and dusting the furniture. She wanted to talk to somebody and the pretty housemaid was sympathetic and discreet. She told Henrietta, inevitably, of deaths in her own family, and Henrietta was interested to hear how the housemaid’s grandmother had died, actually while she was saying her prayers.
“And you couldn’t have a better end than that, could you, Miss Henrietta?”
“I suppose not,” Henrietta said, “but it might depend on what you were praying for.”
“Oh, she would be saying the usual things, Miss Henrietta, just daily bread and forgive our trespasses. There was no harm in my grandmother. It was her husband who broke his neck picking apples. His own apples,” she said hastily, “And now poor Mrs. Sales has gone.”