Any emotion brought on a violent fit of coughing, which exhausted her to the verge of faintness, so that in the end she would have to be put to bed, where Joan would try to distract her by reading aloud. But Milly's attention was wont to wander, and looking up from the book Joan would find her sister's eyes turned longingly to the open window, and would think unhappily: "She's just like a thrush in a cage, poor Milly!"
Mrs. Ogden grew much more affectionate to her younger daughter, and caressed her frequently; but these caresses irritated rather than soothed, and sometimes Milly shrank perceptibly. When this happened Mrs. Ogden's eyes would fill with tears, and her working face would instinctively turn in Joan's direction for sympathy. "Oh, my God!" Joan once caught herself thinking, "will neither of them ever stop crying!" But this thought brought a swift retribution, for she was tormented for the rest of the day over what she felt to have been her heartlessness.
The maidservant left, as maids always did in moments of stress at Leaside; and once again Joan found herself submerged in housework. After her, as she swept and dusted, dragged Milly; always close at her heels, too ill to help, too unhappy to stay alone.
It took a long time to find a new servant, for Mrs. Ogden's nagging proclivities were becoming fairly well known, but at last a victim was secured and Joan breathed a sigh of relief. They scraped together enough money to hire a bath chair for Milly; it was the same bath chair that Colonel Ogden had used, only now a younger man tugged at the handle. This man was cheerful and familiar, possibly because Milly was so light a passenger and looked so young and ineffectual. He joked and spat at frequent intervals—the latter with an astounding dexterity of aim—and Milly hated him.
"I can't bear his spitting," she complained irritably to Joan. "It's simply disgusting!"
It was history repeating itself, for Mrs. Ogden accompanied the bath chair but seldom, and when she did so she managed to get on the patient's nerves. The daily task fell, therefore, to Joan, as it had to a great extent in her father's lifetime.
4
At this period Joan's hardest cross lay in the fact that she was never alone. She had grown accustomed to having her bedroom to herself during term time, but now there was no term time for Milly, and, moreover, Joan had moved into her mother's room. Milly complained that if Joan was there she lay awake trying not to cough, and that this choked her. She said, truthfully enough, that she had had a room to herself at Alexandra House for so long now that anyone in the next bed made her nervous, because she couldn't help listening to their breathing.
This change was not for the better so far as Joan was concerned, for Mrs. Ogden had become abnormally pervading in her bedroom since her husband's death. During his lifetime he had been the one to dominate this apartment as he had dominated the rest of the house; but now that James was corporeally absent there remained only his memory, which took up very little room; all the rest of the space was purely Mrs. Ogden, and she filled it to overflowing.
Joan did not realize to what an extent her mother had spread until they came to share a room. There was literally not an available inch for her things anywhere. The drawers were full, the cupboards were full; on the washstand was a fearsome array of medicine bottles which, together with a quantity of unneeded trifles, overflowed on to the dressing-table. And what was so disheartening was that Mrs. Ogden seemed incapable of making the necessary adjustments. She was far from resenting Joan's invasion; on the contrary, she liked having her daughter to sleep with her, and yet each new suggestion that necessitated the scrapping or the putting away of some of the odds and ends was met with resistance. "Oh! not that, darling; that was given to me when I was a girl in India"; or, "Joan, please don't move that lacquer box; I thought you knew that it came from the drawing-room at Chesham."