SHE came into the parlour first, where she sat down close to the fire. She shivered as she looked round, Mr. Sandford and John both standing behind looking at her. There was indeed already upon the house that air of revolution, the cold strangeness of a place which is no longer the centre of domestic life, but fit only for an ante-chamber and waiting-room for those who cannot be at the point of deepest interest. There was an unusual chill in this place which had always been so warm.
John could see now for the first time what his mother was like. She did not resemble either of her parents. Her features were marked and high; her complexion of an ivory paleness; her hair quite black in original colour, with a thread or two of grey—altogether a tragic woman whom nobody could pass without a certain interest. She showed no emotion, nothing beyond the seriousness of aspect which was evidently habitual to her. For a little time even she said nothing, but held with a shiver her hands to the fire. Her father stood beside her leaning upon the mantel-piece, looking down upon the hearth, and for some time there was not a word spoken.
‘Half-an-hour ago,’ she repeated at length, in a low voice. ‘Did she know I was on the way?’
‘For twenty hours she has scarcely taken any notice. The last was——’
‘The last must have been what she said to the boy,’—his mother spoke of him as if he were a thing and not a person—‘and that was, he says, about me, something he did not understand. I hope there was no talk about—— affairs.’
‘Emily, you are not softened, even by death.’
‘It is not in me, I suppose,’ she said, with a sigh. Then she turned round to John. ‘Why did you not tell me that she was ill? You wrote from yourself. You said nothing about her—or nothing to speak of. If you had told me she was ill, I might have been in time.’
They both turned and looked at him, his grand-father with heavy eyes and a blank aspect of exhaustion and helplessness, but, with so much expression as was left in him, reproachful too.
And all power of self-defence, of anything but submission and acquiescence, seemed taken from John.
‘I did not think of it,’ he said, giving himself up, as he was dimly conscious, to total misconstruction, but what did it matter? Nothing seemed to be of any consequence in the subtle misery which had invaded the house. John did not feel even that he was aware of the cause of it. He scarcely thought of his grandmother, dead. He knew only that where all had been so happy and full of tenderness there was nothing but a chill misery and desolation, with a fault of his somehow involved, he could not tell how.
‘Of course I should have come at once,’ she repeated, turning round again to the fire, with her hands held over it. ‘We did not always understand each other. We were not like each other. How can one help it if that is so?’
‘Children are not always like their parents,’ Mr. Sandford said.
‘Some are not.’ She half turned towards John again with a movement of her hand as if directing her father’s attention to him. ‘There are likenesses—that take away one’s breath.’
‘Ah—yes—it may be so,’ the old man said. Then, as if waking up, ‘Will you take anything? The house is upset—there is nobody to give any orders. Still,’ he said, looking round at the table where a cloth was laid, ‘there are meals all the same.’
She looked up at him with a momentary softening in her face, and put her hand on his arm.
‘Poor father,’ she said.
‘Yes—I’ll be poor, poor enough by myself. To begin—that sort of thing at my time of life—after nearly fifty years——’
‘Be thankful that you have had fifty years—without any trouble,’ she said. And then, ‘I should like to see her. No doubt she is changed, much changed, since I saw her last. Don’t stir, father—sit down and rest—you are ready to drop with fatigue. The boy will show me the way.’
‘I hope you won’t think it strange. I—I couldn’t go with you, Emily.’
‘No. I understand it all. Sit down there in your own chair.’
The old man seated himself with a sudden burst of sobbing.
‘It’s not mine, it’s her chair. I like it so. I like it so! For fifty years! and she will never sit here more.’
‘Poor father!’ she said again. Her face softened more and more as she looked at him; she stooped down and kissed his forehead. ‘Now, come,’ she said to John. To him there was no softening. She gave him a fixed look as she signed to him to lead the way—a look of recognition, of stern investigation, which stirred the boy’s being. It seemed to call his faculties together, and awake him from the torpor of consternation and grief. He forgot almost where he was going, and what he was to see.
They went together into the room, already all in order, in the chill and rigid decorum of a chamber of death. All was white and cold. The curtains laid back, the white coverlet folded, a fine embroidered handkerchief covering the spot scarcely indented in the pillow where the head lay. John went in with his light in his hand, though there were candles on the table, in a tumult of personal feeling, which for the moment swept away all the natural emotion which that scene was calculated to call forth. He did not think of what lay there, but of the stranger so near him and yet so distant, so coldly serious, without any grief, only the subdued regret of a spectator, and with that keen observation of himself underneath, like a spectator too, but a spectator almost hostile. He had never known in all his life before what it was to be judged coldly, weighed in the balances and found wanting. His very soul seemed penetrated by the look, which fixed on something, he knew not what, that was hostile in him. Her eyes, as she followed him, searched into him, and he felt nothing but those keen looks going through and through his soul.
But when he came face to face with that little waxen image which lay upon the bed, a flood of other feelings poured through the boy’s mind. For the first time he saw that which was Something awful and solemn, yet Nothing. Sometimes the dead retain the looks of life, and lie and smile upon us as if they slept; but sometimes the effect is very different, and, after a long illness, the worn-out body loses all the characteristics of identity. His mother went up to the bed, passing him by, and, without a word, lifted the handkerchief. When John saw what was underneath, he gave a great cry, a cry almost of horror; his limbs trembled under him.
‘They’ve taken her away,’ he said, hoarsely, ‘they’ve taken her away.’
The other spectator said not a word. She knew better. Death was to her no wonder. She had lived long enough to see it in all its aspects. She stood looking down upon the little body, the little, little body shrunken out of all semblance of life; the worn-out garment of long living, never big enough for the soul that had inhabited it, and cast it off as if it had never been hers.
‘No,’ she said at last; ‘they have not taken her away. This is all she has left.’
She took the candle out of John’s trembling hand, and held it so that the light fell on the small head surrounded by the white cap, and the face in which no expression lingered. The room was very strange. The white bed laid out in rigid lines, the small and solemn thing laid therein, the black, tall figure standing by throwing the light down from her hand. She was not like a woman by her mother’s bed-side, but like a solemn spectator expounding the mysteries of life and death.
‘People are as different,’ she said, ‘in their dying as in their living. She has taken everything with her she could take. She wouldn’t leave even a look for me, as if she thought I could have come, and did not. But I’ll not excuse myself here. Mother’—she stooped down, and kissed the waxen forehead—‘good-bye. You would have been a good mother to one more like yourself; she has been a good mother to you——’
John said no word in reply. He had fallen down by the bedside, with a sickening sense of loss which was more than grief. He could not speak, or even think. His young soul seemed to go out in a gasp towards the nothingness that seemed before him. He had thought she would be dear and beautiful still in her death—as people said—more dear, more beautiful than in life. But this was not as people said. His heart sank into depths unspeakable. Only last night what words she had spoken to him from that bed. And now, and now——!
‘Poor boy!’ said his mother, with her hand on his shoulder, ‘you have never seen death before! Come away; she would not like you to stay here; never come again. And forget that. For once she has not thought of other people. She has taken all she could away with her; her own look, as well as all the rest. Rise up, and come away.’
John obeyed her, scarcely knowing what he did. And so presently did all the house. She took the command of everything instantly, as if it was her right to do so. There was not much conversation, as may be supposed. She sat down by the fire, after the meal at which she eat moderately without any look of reluctance, and talked a little, in the same grave tone, to her father. But there were no tears, no words of sorrow. The old man gave a broken sort of account of his wife’s illness, subdued into a narrative of facts by the influence of that serious, but quite conventional, figure opposite to him; while John sat at the table behind, with a book before him, which he did not read, listening in a miserable way to every word, feeling a wretchedness which was beyond description, but which could not get vent in the ordinary way, because of the atmosphere about him, which was full of the new presence. He had been hungry, poor boy, but could not eat, feeling that to be able to eat at such a moment was more horrible than words can say. And his brain was giddy for want of sleep. Body and soul were in the same condition of exhaustion and misery. But still the slow exchange of those subdued voices over the fire held him like a spell.
The next days passed slowly and yet swiftly, every moment with leaden feet, yet, when they were gone, looking like a dream. And everything was done without trouble, it seemed; in perfect order and quiet, the whole house pervaded by the strong, still presence of this stranger. If there had been a confusion before between his mother and the daughter of the old people, the Emily whom he knew so well, there was no confusion now. John’s mother had disappeared into the mists from amid which her idea had never clearly developed itself. She had been swept out of his horizon altogether. He saw still very clearly in that far distant background, the father who was dead—but not her any more. And this was Emily, who had come to set everything right. It was almost a difficulty for him not to call her by that name. She was a very useful and very powerful personality in the house; but, as a matter of fact, no one knew what to call her. Her name was Sandford, like her father’s. It was on her travelling-bag and her linen, and the book or two she carried with her. E. Sandford; no more. To the servants it was a great problem how to address her. Mrs. Sandford it did not seem possible she should be; and Miss Sandford—there was something in her which seemed to contradict that title. Something of youth is associated with it, a possibility of dependence, and a secondary place. But no such ideas were compatible with the presence of this new-comer, of whom no one out of the house had ever heard before. The curate even, who was the only visitor, looked at her with a sort of diffident curiosity, and said ‘your daughter,’ when he spoke of her to the old man. She went to the funeral, supporting her father on her arm, while John walked with Mr. Cattley behind. A great many people, indeed, it might be said the whole parish, attended the funeral; and there were many tears among the crowd. But Emily shed no tear. She kept her father’s arm in hers, and encouraged and supported him. The old gentleman, who had been so strong and hale, had sunk all at once into helplessness; his heavy foot, that had been so steady, became shuffling and uncertain; sometimes he would sob feebly, like the voluntary crying of a child, without tears.
And more and more to John was this melancholy period like a dream. It all fitted in, one event with another—the meeting at the station, the pause at the door, when he thought for a moment that Emily would have turned back, and gone away without entering the house; and then that scene upstairs, the tall figure all in black, her bonnet still on, a veil drooping over her face, holding up the light over the snow-cold whiteness of the bed and the dead face on the pillow. He shuddered when he thought of that scene. It was all a dream—a dream from which he might perhaps awake to see all these sombre circumstances disappear, and the old, sweet life which was real—the only real life he could think of, with the two old faces, full of love, beaming on him—would come back. But that, John knew very well, it would never do. And what was it that lay before him?—new work, a strange place, his old grandfather left alone and desolate, his mother of whom he had once dreamed disappeared into thin air, and nothing certain in the world but Emily, who was and was not Emily, but—— But now the dream within dreams had gone. He did not believe that she was his mother. He began to think, in all seriousness, that his mother must have been a younger sister, one, perhaps, about whom there was a mystery, who had perished along with his father, who—but that seemed very confusing and wonderful to think of—might have been the subject of that secret of which his grandmother had spoken. It was all so strange, so little clear, that this solution of the matter took stronger form in John’s thoughts.
On the evening after the funeral they were all seated together once more like the old arrangement, two on different sides of the fire, the boy in the middle with his book, but, ah! so different. No kind looks exchanged across him, all meaning love to him; no interest in what he was doing; no consciousness on his part that he was the principal figure, the centre of their thoughts. John was of no importance now, and felt it. He was in the background, an insignificant unit in the group. His grandfather sat, saying nothing, limp in his chair, a little irritable, ready to watch any movement, while Emily (he could not call her anything but Emily) sat between the fire and the table with her work. Presently John awoke to the consciousness that she was talking of himself.
‘I should like you to tell me what you have arranged about the boy?’
‘The boy’ was what she called him almost always. And the words were never uttered without rousing a sense of injury in John’s heart.
‘How can I tell you,’ said Mr. Sandford, ‘about John or anything? Do you think I’m able to be troubled about that?’
‘You must,’ she said, in her steady, serious tone, ‘for in a day or two I shall have to go back, and all business should be settled before I go.’
‘Must!’ said the old man, with unwonted fire; and then he fell again into the half-whimpering tone of complaint. ‘I have never had that said to me. I’ve been master in my own house, and no one to lift their hand against me, near upon fifty years.’
‘Father, you will recognise, if you think, that I have a right to hear about the boy. You had settled to send him to an engineer? So much I know; but who is it, and where? It is far more easy to tell me than to quarrel with me about my right to ask.’
Mr. Sandford had already forgotten his moment of wrath, or perhaps the good sense of her argument had an effect upon him.
‘He has had all his schooling from the curate, Mr. Cattley. You saw him, Emily. Now, Mr. Cattley has a brother—in Liverpool.’
Her work fell from her lap.
‘In Liverpool—in Liverpool. I must be dreaming. You don’t mean that, father?’
‘I remember now,’ said the old gentleman, ‘she thought you would object. She objected herself, poor dear. But what does it matter, one place or another? It is the curate’s brother—a kind man that would look after him. He will be better there than anywhere. Mr. Cattley’s brother——’
‘He shall not go there,’ she said; her pale face coloured over a little, very little, and yet enough to make a great difference. And she looked her father steadily in the face as she spoke.
‘Shall not! Is it you or me that is the master? She tried to persuade me, as a woman may, but you, you, with your “shall not,” your “shall not!” ...’ He rose up and began in his wrath to walk about the room, recovering something of his old force. ‘I have never allowed anyone to speak to me so.’
‘Not since I left home, father. You must hear it again, for it is necessary you should. He shall not go there. No, if there was no other place for him in the world. There he shall not go.’
What further development the quarrel might have taken it is needless to speculate, for at this moment John, who had been turning aimlessly over a number of children’s books, which had been brought out of his grandfather’s room, here uttered a strange cry. What he said was, ‘Johnny May, Johnny May,’ with a mixture of trouble and satisfaction.
‘I knew that I had something to do with that name,’ he said.
The discussion stopped at once. Mr. Sandford went back tremulous to his easy chair, and Emily turned to the boy.
‘With that name—with your own name,’ she said.
‘Is it my name?—but my name is Sandford.’
‘May Sandford,’ she answered, fixing him with her steady eyes.
‘More than that, more than that,’ said John, ‘now I remember! Papa was Mr. May. I am Mr. May’s little boy. He taught me to say that. Now I remember everything. And my mother would be Mrs. May, not Mrs. Sandford. Now I know. You are not my mother. I felt sure of it from the first,’ said the boy.
Emily paled so that every shade of colour went out of her face. It had been pale before, but now it was like a stormy evening sky, of the blankest whiteness. She looked at John for a moment, with something like a quiver on her steady lip. Then she turned to her father with a singular smile and asked,