Although Mrs Marshall had made up her mind that husbands and wives
could not be as contented with one another in the big city as they
would be in a village, a suspicion crossed her mind one day that,
even in London, the relationship might be different from her own.
She was returning from Great Oakhurst after a visit to her mother.
She had stayed there for about a month after her child's death, and
she travelled back to town with a Letherhead woman, who had married a
journeyman tanner, who formerly worked in the Letherhead tan-yard,
and had now moved to Bermondsey, a horrid hole, worse than Great
Ormond Street. Both Marshall and the tanner were at the 'Swan with
Two Necks' to meet the covered van, and the tanner's wife jumped out
first.
'Hullo, old gal, here you are,' cried the tanner, and clasped her in
his brown, bark-stained arms, giving her, nothing loth, two or three
hearty kisses. They were so much excited at meeting one another,
that they forgot their friends, and marched off without bidding them
good-bye. Mrs Marshall was welcomed in quieter fashion.
'Ah!' she thought to herself. 'Red Tom,' as the tanner was called,
'is not used to London ways. They are, perhaps, correct for London,
but Marshall might now and then remember that I have not been brought
up to them.'
To return, however, to the Hopgoods. Before the afternoon they were
in their new quarters, happily for them, for Mrs Hopgood became
worse. On the morrow she was seriously ill, inflammation of the
lungs appeared, and in a week she was dead. What Clara and Madge
suffered cannot be told here. Whenever anybody whom we love dies, we
discover that although death is commonplace it is terribly original.
We may have thought about it all our lives, but if it comes close to
us, it is quite a new, strange thing to us, for which we are entirely
unprepared. It may, perhaps, not be the bare loss so much as the
strength of the bond which is broken that is the surprise, and we are
debtors in a way to death for revealing something in us which
ordinary life disguises. Long after the first madness of their grief
had passed, Clara and Madge were astonished to find how dependent
they had been on their mother. They were grown-up women accustomed
to act for themselves, but they felt unsteady, and as if deprived of
customary support. The reference to her had been constant, although
it was often silent, and they were not conscious of it. A defence
from the outside waste desert had been broken down, their mother had
always seemed to intervene between them and the world, and now they
were exposed and shelterless.