“I’ve seen many go, but none so hard as her. And yet she wasn’t what you’d call a worldly-minded woman. Take her under the shoulders, sir, if you kindly will, and, Mas’r Puttick, be ready to ketch her legs.”
The woman put her deft hands under the bedclothes and rolled the heavy legs in a plaid shawl. Then, between us, we lifted her from the malignant bed—full of the feathers of birds that she had plucked remorselessly and who would not let her go in peace now that her time had come. We stretched her decently on the floor near the clock and pulled the blanket close under her peaked chin.
“We’ve all been young,” the Vulture said confidentially to me as we jostled together down the twisting stairs. “There’s something on her mind—a slip maybe. Them things comes up at the last and won’t let us women go. The men are harder.”
Jib and Zak were still slouching in the Windsor chairs. They were helpless without their mother, great fellows of thirty-eight and forty. But she had been the mainspring. She had kept the purse-strings, kept all control. They were mechanical figures run down without her. I sat on the couch with the blue-checked cover and speculated on her secret, on some rustic story made sweet by time, some sin—a slip, as the country woman mercifully said—something which was quivering on her tied tongue and which she couldn’t give word to.
Jib and Zak went slowly back to the hayfield, Puttick to his mangels. I saw him go round the house, past the sitting-room window. He kept casting guilty glances at the window overhead with the calico blind. He had lent a hand in killing her.
But she obstinately wouldn’t die. Death was expected of her. The doctor had prophesied it; the Vulture knew it would come, by many ancient, foolish signs. The impress of her long bony body dented the swollen bed of feathers, but on the sixth day she was lying alive still on the floor on a rough couch of blankets, at the foot of the clock, whose brass face seemed to leer and twinkle at her victoriously when the western sun came in.
She would not go. The patience of the layer-out was quite exhausted.
“I must bide about the place,” she said plaintively. “It’s money out o’ pocket to me. I could be makin’ a lot in the hayfields. But I dursn’t leave. She’ll be stiff a’most as soon as the breath is out o’ her, and you can’t do nothin’ with a corpse then.”
“Sure, sure,” gurgled all the other women softly.
The room was full of women. I kept in the garden, but I could see and hear them through the open door. I could see and hear all: the sunny sitting room, with its broad window ledges, on which were pots of calceolarias, with spotted, pouch-like blossoms; the women, with children at their skirts or buried in their cotton bodices. All waiting and twittering in that house of death.