She said these things very quietly with drooping eyelids, like one who describes a dream.  “We are going to manage all these things better now,” I said, feeling a strange resentment at this pitiful little story her faded, matter-of-fact voice was telling me.

“She talked,” my mother went on.  “She talked for her age wonderfully. . . .  Hippopotamus.”

“Eh?” I said.

“Hippopotamus, dear—­quite plainly one day, when her father was showing her pictures. . .  And her little prayers.  ’Now I lay me. . . . down to sleep.’ . . .  I made her little socks.  Knitted they was, dear, and the heel most difficult.”

Her eyes were closed now.  She spoke no longer to me but to herself.  She whispered other vague things, little sentences, ghosts of long dead moments. . . .  Her words grew less distinct.

Presently she was asleep and I got up and went out of the room, but my mind was queerly obsessed by the thought of that little life that had been glad and hopeful only to pass so inexplicably out of hope again into nonentity, this sister of whom I had never heard before. . . .

And presently I was in a black rage at all the irrecoverable sorrows of the past, of that great ocean of avoidable suffering of which this was but one luminous and quivering red drop.  I walked in the garden and the garden was too small for me; I went out to wander on the moors.  “The past is past,” I cried, and all the while across the gulf of five and twenty years I could hear my poor mother’s heart-wrung weeping for that daughter baby who had suffered and died.  Indeed that old spirit of rebellion has not altogether died in me, for all the transformation of the new time. . . .  I quieted down at last to a thin and austere comfort in thinking that the whole is not told to us, that it cannot perhaps be told to such minds as ours; and anyhow, and what was far more sustaining, that now we have strength and courage and this new gift of wise love, whatever cruel and sad things marred the past, none of these sorrowful things that made the very warp and woof of the old life, need now go on happening.  We could foresee, we could prevent and save.  “The past is past,” I said, between sighing and resolve, as I came into view again on my homeward way of the hundred sunset-lit windows of old Lowchester House.  “Those sorrows are sorrows no more.”

But I could not altogether cheat that common sadness of the new time, that memory, and insoluble riddle of the countless lives that had stumbled and failed in pain and darkness before our air grew clear.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

BELTANE AND NEW YEAR’S EVE

Section 1

In the end my mother died rather suddenly, and her death came as a shock to me.  Diagnosis was still very inadequate at that time.  The doctors were, of course, fully alive to the incredible defects of their common training and were doing all they could to supply its deficiencies, but they were still extraordinarily ignorant.  Some unintelligently observed factor of her illness came into play with her, and she became feverish and sank and died very quickly.  I do not know what remedial measures were attempted.  I hardly knew what was happening until the whole thing was over.