Chapter X
IN WHICH LOVEDAY DOES NOT ATTEND A FUNERAL
"A couple of months too soon her pains took her," said Madgy; "she has been fretting and wisht these weeks past, with her husband always after some young faggot up country and herself sick with envy at the girls that could still dance with the chaps. She had no woman's heart in her, poor soul, to carry her woman's burden. Ah! many's the strange things in women I see at my trade," and Madgy wrung out a cloth and mumbled to herself—her old mouth folded inwards, as though she perpetually turned all the secrets that she knew over and over within it.
"Your mother died because she'd set her heart on death," she added, to Loveday, "but this one died because she dedn' know how to catch hold on life. She'd a weak hand on everything she touched, because she never wanted nawthen enough."
"Wanting's not getting, however hard you want," said Loveday.
"Ah! isn't it? It's getting, though you may have sorrow packed along wi' it. Out of my way, maid; I must be busy overstairs." And old Madgy went to ply the second part of her trade, for she washed the dead as well as the newly-born; she laid coins on the eyes of the old and flannels on the limbs of the young with the same smile between her rheumy lids and on her folded mouth.
Loveday stayed awhile and helped Mrs. Lear, by milking the puzzled, lowing cows and pouring the milk into the pans, but all the time they worked the dead girl's name was never mentioned between them. It was as though Loveday were making amends for the ill words that had been between them by refraining her tongue from everything but her first few accents of pity and amaze.
That pity was shared by all the neighbourhood, gentle and simple. Time was, just before her marriage, when Primrose was accounted a foolish and sinful maid enough, but married she had been, and into a highly-respected family, for the Lears' graves had lain in the next best position to those of the gentry for many generations, and, for their sakes more than for hers, tributes flowed in to the funeral.
This poor, pale Primrose, who had died so young, though not unmarried, was laid to rest, with babe on arm, only a few days before the Flora dance, and her friend Cherry, who would none the less foot it gaily on that occasion, attended, with a length of black crape round her buxom waist and her eyes swollen by the easy tears of an easy nature.