“Mrs. Sales?”
“Yes, Miss Henrietta, I thought you’d know—last night. Her and Miss Caroline together.” She implied that in this journey they would be company for each other.
Henrietta found nothing to say, but above the shock of pity she felt for the woman she had disliked and the awe induced by the name of death, she was conscious of a load lifted from her mind: she had not been deserted, her charm had not failed; it was the approach of death that had held him back. She put the thought away lest it should lead to others of which she would be ashamed, yet she felt a malicious pleasure, lasting only for a second, at remembering that downstairs sat Aunt Rose calmly full of affairs, Aunt Rose for whom the love of Francis Sales had ceased too soon! And, suppressed but fermenting, was the idea that in these late events, including the failure of her escape, there was the kind hand of fate.
At that very moment Charles Batty chose to call.
“With a parcel, Miss Henrietta, and he would like to see you.”
“I can’t see him,” Henrietta said. “Tell him—tell him about Miss Caroline.” She had already drifted away from Charles. He had been so near last night, so almost dear in the troubled fog of her distress, but this morning she had drifted and between them there was a shining space of water sparkling hardly. But she spared him an instant of gratitude and softness. His part in her life was like that, to a sailor, of some lightship eagerly looked for in the darkness, of strangely diminished consequence in the clear day, still there, safely anchored, but with half its significance gone.
“I can’t see him,” she repeated.
She wanted, suddenly, to see Aunt Rose. Voices no longer came from the drawing-room. Mr. Batty, genuinely sad in the loss of an old friend, had gone; the undertaker had tiptoed off to his gloomy lair, and Henrietta went downstairs, but when she saw her aunt she dared not ask her if she knew about Christabel Sales. Rose had a look of invulnerability; perhaps she knew, but it was impossible to ask, and if she knew, it had made no difference. It seemed as though she had gone beyond the reach of feeling: she and Sophia both wore white masks, but Sophia’s was only a few hours old and Rose’s had been gradually assumed. It was not only Caroline’s death which had given her that strange, calm face: the expression had grown slowly, as though something had been a long time dying, yet she hardly had a look of loss. She seemed to be in possession of something, but Henrietta could not understand what it was and she was vaguely afraid.
It was Aunt Sophia who, in spite of her amazing courage, had an air of desolation. And there was no rouge on her cheeks: its absence made Henrietta want to cry. She did cry at intervals throughout that day and the ones that followed. It was terrible without Aunt Caroline and pitiful to see Aunt Sophia keeping up her dignity among black-clothed, black-beaded relatives who seemed to appear out of the ground like snails after rain and who might have been part of the undertaker’s permanent stock-in-trade. Henrietta hated the mournful looks of these ancient cousins, the shaking of their black beads, their sibilant whisperings, and in their presence she was dry-eyed and rather rude. Aunt Caroline would have laughed at them and their dowdy clothes that smelt of camphor, but it seemed as though no one would ever laugh again in Nelson Lodge.
And over the river, in the unsubdued country, where death was only the repayment of a loan, there was another house with lowered blinds and voices hushed. She was irritated by the thought of it, of the consolatory letters Francis would receive, of the emotions he would display, or conceal, but at the same time she was sorry that in death, as in life, Christabel should be lonely. Her large and lively family was far away, even the cat had gone, and there were only the nurse and Francis and the little dog to miss her. In a sense Henrietta missed her too, and that fair region of fields and woods which had been as though blocked by that helpless body now lay open, vast, full of possibilities, inviting exploration; and when Henrietta looked at her Aunt Rose, it was with the jealous eye of a rival adventurer. But that was absurd: there could be no rivalry between them. Henrietta was sure of that and she tried to avoid these speculations.