Clara Hopgood

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.