Norah will suffer most, but it will be only for a
little while. She'll take another sweetheart--a real sweetheart this
time, and she'll marry, and give birth to babies; and it will be to
her as if I had died a hundred years ago, as if I had never lived at
all, as if I'd been somebody she'd read of in a story-book, or
somebody she'd dreamed about in one of those silly nasty sort of
dreams which young girls can't help having, but are ashamed to
remember and always try to forget."
Mavis, however, would wish to remember him, and be sorry when she
found his image fading. She would struggle to keep it bright and
fresh. She would grieve long and sincerely--and then she would be
quite happy. She wouldn't marry again; she wouldn't do anything
foolish. "No," he thought, "she'll just devote herself to the bairns,
working for them late and early, and managing the business as well as
I have managed it myself. She'll be cheated a bit here and there, as a
woman always is--but, all said and done, she'll do very well without
me. Customers will support her--the word will go round. 'Don't let's
turn our backs on the widow of that poor fellow Dale.'"
And he thought, with a bitterness of heart that almost made him sick,
that perhaps after his death many people might speak well of him; that
certainly in the little world of Vine-Pits Farm and the Cross Road
cottages there would be a natural inclination to exaggerate his few
good qualities and be gentle to his innumerable faults; so that a
sort of legend of virtue would weave itself about his memory, making
him a humble, insignificant, but local saint--to be placed at a
respectful distance and yet not too far from the shrine of that great
and illustrious saint the late Mr.
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