The Shoulders of Atlas | Page 8

Nobody except himself had ever known it, but he, although much younger, had had his dreams about the beautiful Abrahama White. He remembered them as he looked at her, old and dead and majestic, with something like the light of her lost beauty in her still face. It was like a rose which has fallen in such a windless atmosphere that its petals retain the places which they have held around its heart.
Henry loved his wife, but this before him was associated with something beyond love, which tended to increase rather than diminish it. When at last they left the room he did what was very unusual with him. He was reticent, like the ordinary middle-aged New-Englander. He took his wife's little, thin, veinous hand and clasped it tenderly. Her bony fingers clung gratefully to his.
When they were all out in the south room Flora Barnes spoke again. "I have never seen a more beautiful corpse," said she, in exactly the same voice which she had used before. She began taking off her large, white apron. Something peculiar in her motion arrested Sylvia's attention. She made a wiry spring at her.
"Let me see that apron," said she, in a voice which corresponded with her action.
Flora recoiled. She turned pale, then she flushed. "What for?"
"Because I want to."
"It's just my apron. I--"
But Sylvia had the apron. Out of its folds dropped a thin roll of black silk. Flora stood before Sylvia. Beads of sweat showed on her flat forehead. She twitched like one about to have convulsions. She was very tall, but Sylvia seemed to fairly loom over her. She held the black silk out stiffly, like a bayonet.
"What is this?" she demanded, in her tense voice.
Flora twitched.
"What is it? I want to know."
"The back breadth," replied Flora in a small, scared voice, like the squeak of a mouse.
"Whose back breadth?"
"Her back breadth."
"Her back breadth?"
"Yes."
"Robbing the dead!" said Sylvia, pitilessly. Her tense voice was terrible.
Flora tried to make a stand. "She hadn't any use for it," she squeaked, plaintively.
"Robbing the dead! Its bad enough to rob the living."
"She couldn't have worn that dress without any back breadth while she was living," argued Flora, "but now it don't make any odds. It don't show."
"What were you going to do with it?"
Flora was scared into a storm of injured confession. "You 'ain't any call to talk to me so, Mrs. Whitman," she said. "I've worked hard, and I 'ain't had a decent black silk dress for ten years."
"How can you have a dress made out of a back breadth, I'd like to know?"
"It's just the same quality that Mrs. Hiram Adams's was, and--" Flora hesitated.
"Flora Barnes, you don't mean to say that you're robbing the dead of back breadths till you get enough to make you a whole dress?"
Flora whimpered. "Business has been awful poor lately," she said. "It's been so healthy here we've hardly been able to earn the salt to our porridge. Father won't join the trust, either, and lots of times the undertaker from Alford has got our jobs."
"Business!" cried Sylvia, in horror.
"I can't help it if you do look at it that way," Flora replied, and now she was almost defiant. "Our business is to get our living out of folks' dying. There's no use mincing matters. It's our business, just as working in a shoe-shop is your husband's business. Folks have to have shoes and walk when they're alive, and be laid out nice and buried when they're dead. Our business has been poor. Either Dr. Wallace gives awful strong medicine or East Westland is too healthy. We haven't earned but precious little lately, and I need a whole black silk dress and they don't."
Sylvia eyed her in withering scorn. "Need or not," said she, "the one that owns this back breadth is going to have it. I rather think she ain't going to be laid away without a back breadth to her dress."
With that Sylvia crossed the room and the hall, and entered the parlor. She closed the door behind her. When she came out a few minutes later she was pale but triumphant. "There," said she, "it's back with her, and I've got just this much to say, and no more, Flora Barnes. When you get home you gather up all the back breadths you've got, and you do them up in a bundle, and you put them in that barrel the Ladies' Sewing Society is going to send to the missionaries next week, and don't you ever touch a back breadth again, or I'll tell it right and left, and you'll see how much business you'll have left here, I don't care how sickly it gets."
"If father would--only have joined the trust I never would have thought of such a thing, anyway," muttered Flora. She