CHAPTER XVI
IN January Cecily found her hands extremely full.
Ellen had an unexpected call to take care of a sick relative—she did not tell Cecily that it was Mrs. Horton—on whom tragedy in the form of cancer had descended. She would not consent to an operation and Ellen’s duty was partly to take care of her, partly to reassure her, partly to keep her from answering patent medicine advertisements which “guaranteed to cure without the use of a knife.” Mr. Horton had come for Ellen, not daring to risk the telephone in his wife’s presence and at sight of the helplessness of the sagged figure at the kitchen door Ellen was bound to help. She said she would come for a month and by that time they could find a nurse. It was obvious enough that the sick woman was more important than Cecily’s household, but Ellen was none the less distressed. She left a sour-faced Swedish woman and an increasingly pert Jenny to take care of the Harrisons and went on her errand of mercy, pulled backward and forward. Cecily had tried to be as kind as possible, but she had urged Ellen to come back as soon as she could.
“After a bit no doubt they’ll get a nurse,” said Ellen. “It’s just at the start that a relation is easiest for the poor woman.”
“Can they afford a nurse?” asked Cecily.
“There’s a rich daughter.”
“Then why doesn’t she take care——”
“She couldn’t. She’s young and I suppose her husband needs her.”
Fliss had indeed offered to do everything except give personal care to her mother. Matthew was the only person to whom she could give personal service, and even for him there was not too much, but she had arranged for specialists to examine and recommend; she had tried to make her mother have a trained nurse; tried everything that money could buy. That she shrank from the sight and thought of the corruption of the body was only that she was Fliss.
Matthew had been told of the identity of Ellen as her cousin, with one slight change in the facts. It was Ellen’s proud request that the relationship be kept from the Harrisons, according to Fliss. So he was not surprised to see Ellen take up her place in the Horton household. Matthew was far more appreciative of and able to understand Fliss’s parents than she was herself. Ordinary people with cramped minds and petty satisfactions were not out of the range of his philosophy as they were with her. He did not see the Hortons often, but once in a while he and Fliss went there for an evening or Fliss invited them to her house and undoubtedly the event, mostly taken up with small gossip and cribbage playing, did not irritate him as it did his wife.