第22章

`Well, Bessy, I can't leave your children enough out o'my savings, to keep 'em from ruin.And you mustn't look to having any o' Mr Glegg's money for it's well if I don't go first - he comes of a long-lived family - and if he was to die and leave me well for my life, he'd tie all the money up to go back to his own kin.'

The sound of wheels while Mrs Glegg was speaking was an interruption highly welcome to Mrs Tulliver, who hastened out to receive sister Pullet - it must be sister Pullet because the sound was that of a four-wheel.

Mrs Glegg tossed her head and looked rather sour about the mouth at the thought of the `four-wheel.' She had a strong opinion on that subject.

Sister Pullet was in tears when the one-horse chaise stopped before Mrs Tulliver's door, and it was apparently requisite that she should shed a few more before getting out, for though her husband and Mrs Tulliver stood ready to support her, she sat still and shook her head sadly as she looked through her tears at the vague distance.

`Why, whativer is the matter, sister?' said Mrs Tulliver.She was not an imaginative woman, but it occurred to her that the large toilet glass in sister Pullet's best bedroom was possibly broken for the second time.

There was no reply but a further shake of the head, as Mrs Pullet slowly rose and got down from the chaise, not without casting a glance at Mr Pullet to see that he was guarding her handsome silk dress from injury.Mr Pullet was a small man with a high nose, small twinkling eyes and thin lips, in a fresh-looking suit of black and a white cravat that seemed to have been tied very tight on some higher principle than that of mere personal ease.

He bore about the same relation to his tall, good-looking wife, with her balloon sleeves, abundant mantle and large be-feathered and be-ribboned bonnet, as a small fishing-smack bears to a brig with all its sails spread.

It is a pathetic sight and a striking example of the com-plexity introduced into the emotions by a high state of civilisation - the sight of a fashionably drest female in grief.From the sorrow of a Hottentot to that of a woman in large buckram sleeves, with several bracelets on each arm, an architectural bonnet and delicate ribbon-strings - what a long series of gradations!

In the enlightened child of civilisation the abandonment characteristic of grief is checked and varied in the subtlest manner, so as to present an interesting problem to the analytic mind.If with a crushed heart and eyes half-blinded by the mist of tears, she were to walk with a too devious step through a door-place, she might crush her buckram sleeves too, and the deep consciousness of this possibility produces a composition of forces by which she takes a line that just clears the doorpost.Perceiving that the tears are hurrying fast, she unpins her strings and throws them languidly backward - a touching gesture, indicative, even in the deepest gloom, of the hope in future dry moments when cap-strings will once more have a charm.

As the tears subside a little and with her head leaning backward at the angle that will not injure her bonnet, she endures that terrible moment when grief which has made all things else a weariness has itself become weary, she looks down pensively at her bracelets and adjusts their clasps with that pretty studied fortuity which would be gratifying to her mind if it were once more in a calm and healthy state.

Mrs Pullet brushed each doorpost with great nicety, about the latitude of her shoulders (at that period a woman was truly ridiculous to an instructed eye if she did not measure a yard and a half across the shoulders), and having done that sent the muscles of her face in quest of fresh tears as she advanced into the parlour where Mrs Glegg was seated.

`Well, sister, you're late: what's the matter?' said Mrs Glegg, rather sharply, as they shook hands.

Mrs Pullet sat down - lifting up her mantle carefully behind before she answered, `She's gone,' unconsciously using an impressive figure of rhetoric.

`It isn't the glass this time, then,' thought Mrs Tulliver.

`Died the day before yesterday,' continued Mrs Pullet.`An' her legs was as thick as my body,' she added, with deep sadness, after a pause.

`They'd tapped her no end o'times, they say you might ha' swum in the water as came from her.'

`Well, Sophy, it's a mercy she's gone, then, whoiver she may be,' said Mrs Glegg with the promptitude and emphasis of a mind naturally clear and decided; `but I can't think who you're talking of, for my part.'

`But I know,' said Mrs Pullet, sighing and shaking her head, `and there isn't another such a dropsy in the parish.I know as it's old Mrs Sutton o' the Twentylands.'

`Well, she's no kin o' yours, nor much acquaintance as I've ever heared of,' said Mrs Glegg, who always cried just as much as was proper when anything happened to her own `kin' but not on other occasions.

`She's so much acquaintance as I've seen her legs when they was like bladders....And an old lady as had doubled her money over and over again, and kept it all in her own management to the last, and had her pocket with her keys in under her pillow constant.There isn't many old par ish'ners like her, I doubt.'

`And they say she'd took as much physic as 'ud fill a waggon,' observed Mr Pullet.

`Ah,' sighed Mrs Pullet, `she'd another complaint ever so many years before she had the dropsy, and the doctors couldn't make out what it was.

And she said to me, when I went to see her last Christmas, she said, `Mrs Pullet, if iver you have the dropsy, you'll think o' me.' She did say so,' added Mrs Pullet, beginning to cry bitterly again, `those were her very words.And she's to be buried o' Saturday, and Pullet's bid to the funeral.'