Then she died. He called one day, and
they said she was ill. After that there came a blank in his memory--a
gulf, full of blackness and redness, anguish and confusion; and then a
sort of dreadful sudden calm, when they told him she was dead.
He remembered standing in her room, after the funeral, with her
father, her mother, her sister Elizabeth. He remembered the pale
daylight that filled it, and how orderly and cold and forsaken it all
looked. And there was her bed, the bed she had died in; and there her
dressing-table, with her combs and brushes; and there her
writing-desk, her book-case. He remembered a row of medicine bottles
on the mantelpiece; he remembered the fierce anger, the hatred of
them, as if they were animate, that had welled up in his heart as he
looked at them, because they had failed to do their work.
'You will wish to have something that was hers, Richard,' her mother
said. 'What would you like?'
On her dressing-table there was a small looking-glass, in an ivory
frame. He asked if he might have that, and carried it away with him.
She had looked into it a thousand times, no doubt; she had done her
hair in it; it had reflected her, enclosed her, contained her. He
could almost persuade himself that something of her must remain in it.
To own it was like owning something of herself.
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