"No, mama. You've always been wonderful."
"A lot of thanks I've got for it, too. Now, Lottie, you see that I get another doctor. This man's a fool. He doesn't understand my case. Palavering young hand-holder, that's what he is."
"Don't you think you'd better try him a little longer? He hasn't had time, really."
"Time! I've been three mortal months in this bed. You're like all the rest of them. Glad if I died. Well, I'm not going to please you just yet. You'll see me up to-morrow, early."
They had heard this threat so regularly and so often that they scarcely heeded it now; or, if they did, only to say, soothingly, "We'll see how you feel by to-morrow, shall we?"
So that when, finally, she made good her threat the nurse came in early one morning from where she slept in the alcove just off the big front bedroom to find her half-lying, half-sitting in the big chair by the window. She had got up stealthily, had even fumbled about in bureau and closet for the clothes she had not worn in months. In one hand she grasped her corsets. She had actually meant to put them on as she had done every morning before her illness, regarding corsetless kimonoed women with contempt. She must have dragged herself up to the chair by an almost super-human effort of will. So they found her. A born ruler, defying them all to the last.
Charley came home for the funeral. She was not to rejoin the Krisiloff company until its arrival in Chicago for the two-weeks' engagement there. "If ever," said Henry Kemp privately to Lottie. "I don't think she's so crazy about this trouping any more. You ought to have heard her talking about the fresh eggs at breakfast this morning. I asked her what she'd been eating on the road and she said, 'Vintage oofs.'"
Mrs. Carrie Payson's funeral proved an enlightening thing. There came to it a queer hodge-podge of people; representatives of Chicago's South Side old families who had not set foot in the Prairie Avenue house in half a century; real estate men who had known her in the days of her early business career; Brosch, the carpenter and contractor, with whom she had bickered and bartered for years; some of the Polish and Italian tenants from over Eighteenth Street way; women in shawls of whom Lottie had never heard, and who owed Mrs. Payson some unnamed debt of gratitude. Lottie wondered if she had ever really understood her mother; if the indomitability that amounted almost to ruthlessness had not been, after all, a finer quality than a certain fluid element in herself, in Aunt Charlotte, in Charley, which had handicapped them all.
Aunt Charlotte mourned her sister sincerely; seemed even to miss her tart-tongued goading. No one to find fault with her clothes, her habits, her ideas, her conversation. Lottie humoured her outrageously. The household found itself buying as Mrs. Payson had bought; thinking as she had thought; regulating its hours as they had been regulated for her needs. Her personality was too powerful to fade so soon after the corporeal being had gone.
More easily than any of them Aunt Charlotte had accepted the advent of the French baby. To her the sound and sight of a baby in the old Prairie Avenue house seemed an accustomed and natural thing. She had a way of mixing names, bewilderingly. Often as not she called Claire "Lottie," or Charley "Claire." She clapped her hands at the baby and wagged her head at her tremulously, and said, "No, no, no! Auntie punish!" and "Come to Auntie Charlotte," exactly as she had done forty years before to Belle. Once she put the child down on the floor for a moment and Claire began to wriggle her way down the faded green stream of the parlor carpet river, and to poke a finger into the sails of the dim old ships and floral garlands, just as Lottie and Belle had done long ago.