THEY drove back together alone without a word, sitting close together, not looking at each other—saying nothing. A few neighbours, out of ‘respect,’ had attended old Mr. Sandford’s funeral; and many hearts in the village were sore for John. Behind the drawn blinds in the rectory, and in many humbler houses, they spoke of the boy with great tenderness. ‘He’ll find out the difference,’ people said. ‘The old people thought there was nobody like him: but if it’s an aunt, perhaps with children of her own——’ And none of the little cortége returned with the mourners to the house. The two were left altogether alone.
The little parlour was in painful good order, the blinds drawn up, the daylight coming in as usual, the hearth so cleanly swept, the fire so bright, the two chairs standing one on each side. It was all so suggestive of the old people, as if they might have only gone out for a walk, arm in arm, in their old way, and soon would come in and sit down and look up smiling at their boy, and bid him come near the fire, for it was a cold day. This suggestion flashed to John’s heart as he came in, and might have overwhelmed him with sorrow and tears; but the presence of that tall figure in her black cloak and close bonnet effectually put a stop to any expression. She drew one of those chairs from the fire to the table, without any sense of desecration, or of disturbing any sacred image, and sat down. Her face was very grave, but without any harshness. She was always very serious, yielding to no lighter impulses. She turned to John, who stood vaguely, not knowing what he was to do, by the table.
‘Now,’ she said, not without feeling, ‘there are only us two—we must try to understand each other.’
He made no reply. The movement she had made of the chair, though perfectly simple and quite unintended, was enough to re-awaken in his mind all the resistance, the repulsion, which indeed her action throughout had never suffered to fade. For she had managed everything in a perfectly clear, unhesitating, business way, giving her orders with quiet and brief decision saving everybody trouble, but leaving no place for any consultation, for any of those faltering conversations upon what would have been most pleasant, or according to the ideas of the departed, which draw together mourners in their grief. There was no particular appearance of grief in her at all. She was serious and pale; but then, she was always so, and there had been no room for sentiment in anything she had done or said.
No creature more desolate than the boy himself at that moment ever stood by a new-filled grave. The love which had enveloped him so closely all his life had passed altogether away. He felt as if there was no longer anyone that cared for him in the world. He felt that this familiar place, which had been his home for so long, was not only to cease to be his home, but to cease altogether. The jar of the chair as it was drawn aside seemed to go through his heart. It was only a commonplace piece of furniture now, a common old chair to be put up at an auction. The place seemed to be desecrated by that simple movement. He had thought he would keep the house just as it was, like a little temple to the memory of the good guardians of his childhood. He was to be their heir, he took that for granted. He would leave everything, he thought, and from time to time come back out of the midst of the active life he had planned for himself, and always find them in imagination sitting there to meet him. No doubt John would soon have found out the impossibility of that fond imagination; but this was what he thought. He had even planned how he should put the gardener and his wife—themselves old people for whom it would make a provision—into the house to keep it for him, which he had said to himself, with tender childish pleasure, would please grandmamma. But with the jar of that chair as it was drawn aside, John’s tender imaginations went from him, leaving him with a sense of astonishment and startled waking up. He had another will to calculate with of which he had not thought.
She kept looking at him while these thoughts passed in a tumult through his mind, waiting for an answer. It was but for a very short time, yet to both of them it seemed long: and with all her seriousness she was of a disposition which could not brook waiting. She said, ‘Well!’ a little sharply, when he made no reply.
‘I did not say anything,’ John replied.
‘No, you did not say anything—you made no response. You look at me as if you wanted to make a quarrel over those graves. But you shall not make any quarrel, on that point I am resolved. We must understand each other.’
He went and leant upon the mantelpiece and stood looking down into the fire. Make a quarrel! It seemed to John that his heart would burst with the pang this misconception gave him. A quarrel, over their graves! But, though the suggestion was so abhorrent, he felt the sense of rebellion and resistance grow stronger and stronger. He would not even meet her eye. He would withdraw into that passive unyielding silence which of all things in the world is most difficult to meet and to withstand.
She turned again towards him though she could not see his face.
‘John,’ she said, ‘don’t make me feel, at a moment when I am far from wishing to feel it, how you have been spoiled by my father and mother—and how wrong I was in giving you out of my own care.’
He made a fierce gesture of denial at the first part of her sentence, and added at the last, with a sort of mocking echo, ‘Out of your own care!’
‘I have said that it is time we understood each other,’ she said, ‘I don’t know whether it was merely to wound me that you flung at me that suggestion that I was not your mother.’ Here she made a pause, and he too, his attention suspended with an excitement that took away his breath. ‘If that was the motive, it was fully successful. It did wound me. But if you had any real doubt on the subject——’
‘He had, he had!’ he said to himself, the blood throbbing in his head with a giddy sense of mounting up and up to the circles of the brain, and yet he knew very well what she was going to say, and knew also that it was true.
‘It seems strange that I should have to put such an assurance into words. Who would have borne with your alienation and your caprices, but your mother? Many women even, in the circumstances, would have said, Let him go. If nature has no voice, if there are no recollections of your childhood to move you—never mind! Say it since you feel it. But I have not been willing to do that. I have felt that the moment would come—and the moment has come—when, you would have nobody but me. I have spoken to Susie about it,’ she added, with a slight tremor in her voice.
‘Susie!’ The name brought a new sensation—something that touched his heart.
‘Your sister—your only sister—as I am your only mother, though you have so strangely misconceived me and denied me. I put that all down to the circumstances, not to you. I am not blaming you—only we must understand each other now.’
John, leaning on the mantelpiece with his face overshadowed by his hand, knew in his heart that all this was true. He made no attempt within himself to deny it. The reality of it was too much for him. It went into his heart like a stone in deep water, deep, deep to the bottom, where it lay a dead weight never to be got rid of. He could not protest or say anything, as if he were surprised by this sudden announcement. He was not surprised. He felt now that he had known it all well enough, that when he said otherwise it had only been in the impulse of the moment, with a frantic short-lived hope that perhaps that might come true. Alas! he knew very well that it was this which was true. He seemed to remember her now always silent, cold, an image of reserve and gravity in the midst of the more cheerful scenes in his memory. It was rather from the extreme occupation of his mind with these thoughts and recollections which surged through it, than from any antagonistic intention that he said nothing. But standing there with his head bent and his eyes lowered it was not wonderful that he should appear to her an impersonation of silent rebellion, a determined opponent.
‘You say nothing;’ she spoke in a tone in which a growing exasperation began to make itself felt. ‘It might have been less painful for me to let you go on in your own delusion—if delusion it was. But unfortunately you cannot be free of me and my authority; you are at an age when your life has to be settled for you, and in that as in everything else it is with me only that you have to do.’
John changed his position a little, which, in the high strain of emotion at which they were, seemed to both of them like a sort of response; so that he was almost forced to add, ‘With you only?’ faintly. He did not intend to say it. It did not mean anything. It was a mere echo, as if the air caught the words. But it had not upon her this harmless effect. Her paleness, which nothing else had touched, flushed high at these words; she made a sudden movement as if she had received a blow.
‘With me only,’ she repeated, with mingled energy and irritation, as if he had suggested a doubt. ‘Who else?—do you mean to say? do you think——?’ These questions came from her hurriedly with something quite unlike her usual gravity and calm. Then she stopped with a panting hard-drawn breath, and added after a moment, in a tone almost of derision, ‘As you are so intent on setting yourself against me, perhaps you will tell me what, left to yourself, you would do.’
John could not quite tell what this change of tone meant. He was not used to the quick interchange of argument nor was he quick to note the significance of the inflections of a voice. He had never known controversy at all, until he had embarked upon this one, and the moment he withdrew from the unintentional force of silence, in which he had at first wrapped himself, his ignorance and defencelessness became apparent. He thought however that she was withdrawing from her position, and recognising some claim in him to know and judge for himself. He left the place where he had been standing, and came to the middle of the room, throwing himself into a chair on the other side of the table.
‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that all this is mine now.’
‘What is yours?’
‘I mean: I suppose it is—all left to me? I could stay here, and—give no one any trouble.’
‘Left to you, my father’s house and all that he had! Is that what you mean? and you would stay here?’
‘I suppose so,’ said John. ‘I don’t know why. It seems natural, I thought it would always be mine. If I was wrong, I’m—I’m very sorry,’ he cried, giving a sudden bewildered glance round him, with a new and painful light of possibility breaking on his mind.
‘And you would stay here?’ she said. ‘And do—what? nothing? If you have your plans made——’
‘I have no plans made. I have not thought of anything. I supposed—that was how it could be.’ He looked at her for the first time with a bewildered appeal in his eyes. ‘If you knew what it was—to change all at once from being so—spoilt, perhaps, as you say, always understood, never found any fault with——’ in spite of himself his voice faltered, ‘to change from that to—to—— and being not very old, nor knowing very well: it makes a great difference,’ John said, feeling a sob swell upwards in his boyish throat, and breaking off that he might not betray himself. And he did not look at her again to see if there was in her any responsive feeling, but leaned his head upon his hands, shading his countenance from the light. And then there followed a moment of silence,—so silent, so long—with the clock ticking loudly through it with a sort of triumphant click-clack, as if that ceaseless measure were the master of all.
After a while she spoke again, with a softened voice.
‘I recognise,’ she said, ‘all the difference: poor boy!—it is natural you should feel it. I am a stranger—so to speak—though I—gave you birth, which is something, perhaps. But it is not your fault. Tell me—you think that all my father had to leave is yours, and that you might continue to live here, just as before—is that what you expect?’
He made a little movement with one hand, still leaning his head on the other. It was a movement that looked like assent. And yet this was not what he had expected; for he had expected nothing, nor had he any thought what he was to do.
‘To do nothing?’ she continued, ‘or to do—what? To live all alone at your age—to carry on the sort of life my father led? That was suitable enough at his time of life, but not at all for you. To keep the maid Sarah and the gardener, and doze in your chair of an afternoon? This could not be seriously what you thought.’
He started a little and cast a look at her, half indignant, half piteous, but did not reply.
‘I am not laughing at you,’ she said, quite gently; ‘you will yourself see when I put it to you that this would be quite impossible. Now I must tell you how things really are. All that my father had is divided between you and me: but you are too young to enter into possession of your share. It will accumulate for you till you are twenty-one, and in the meantime the charge of you naturally lies with me. Whatever has to be determined is between us two. This is what I told you when we came in; you have nobody but me.’
To describe what John’s feelings were while she spoke would be impossible; everything seemed to swim and dissolve around him. It was true that he had formed no definite idea to himself of what was to come; and yet there had never seemed any question about this—that he was his grandfather’s heir—his natural and lawful heir. Nothing else had occurred to him. There had been nothing said about it; but it was this arrangement which seemed inevitable to the boy. He did not think even that any will was wanted. He, John Sandford, and no one else, could succeed John Sandford. This was what he had believed; and in this inheritance a certain sense of liberty was involved. He had thought of various things he would do. That about keeping up the house for one thing, and putting in the old gardener to take care of it; and then of the measures he would take in his own person to learn his profession, and prepare himself for a larger life. But in all of these thoughts emancipation was the first article. He did not suppose that he could have much to do with Emily. He had shivered a little when he so named her in his own mind, feeling a chill shadow of doubt as to who she was. But he had never remembered that he was only seventeen, much under age, and that he might have to yield to some other will instead of doing his own. He looked at her with a sort of helpless alarm in his eyes, feeling that everything was going to pieces round him, and as if he were feeling for something to clutch at in the general whirl.
‘You are surprised,’ she said, ‘and yet it is quite true. You have been put, perhaps, in a false position, John. It is not your fault, nor anyone’s; but I cannot let it go on. You are only seventeen. Who at seventeen is fit to be his own master? The position would be absurd, if it were not worse. It is sad for us both that you have not been brought up to care for me. I never realised how it might be when I left you in my father’s and mother’s hands. I was willing that they should have you, but not that they should turn the heart of my child away from me.’
John’s voice broke forth hoarse, not as it had sounded in his own ears before, ‘It was not their fault.’
‘I do not ask whose fault it was. Mine, perhaps, for giving you up; but that is past and need not to be taken into account. The thing we have to do is to get right now.’
Right! did she call this right? Whose doing had it been that she had become Emily, the daughter of the old people, in his eyes—not herself, not his mother? And then he gave her a furtive look to see if, perhaps, she looked like his mother now, and was no longer Emily. She met his wistful look with one that was troubled too; but even this expression did not change her. And whose fault was that? He seemed to hear the old people talking of Emily with many unguarded comments. It was like her, they would say. When a letter came, or when they would ramble off into those mutual recollections with which so often, to John’s amusement, they had traced out for him, with glimpses of the half-seen landscape all around, the story of their lives, that name always came in from time to time: ‘Emily said—Emily did—this or that. How like that was to Emily! It was her way of looking at things: for Emily never would see, don’t you know—never made any allowance——’ A hundred such scenes appeared to him, like scenes out of some play suddenly becoming visible without any will of his. How could he help it, if his mind had collected out of all these unconscious portraits an image of Emily, which was more clear than anything else he knew? It was not their fault. Was it not she herself who was to blame if this was how he knew her best, as the daughter whom the old people were half afraid of, whose probable criticism alarmed them, whose thoughts were not as theirs? The fear of her which crept into his own mind was more chill, more overwhelming—for how could he make any stand against her if it was true that he was entirely at her mercy, without any defence or shield.
That little quiet parlour, the old people’s room with all its old-fashioned furniture and little prim ornaments! Had it ever beheld such a mute encounter, such a strange struggle before? The boy looked at his mother and she at him. His eyes appealed to her, yet resisted her, while hers—but he could not read what they meant. He was not capable of comprehending, in his youthful inexperienced judgment, the many things he wot not of, the recollections, the sternness, the relentings that were in his mother’s eyes. But no more was said. For just then Sarah came in, pushing open the door with the great tray in her arms to prepare for tea—which was a thing that could not be intermitted, though heaven and earth should be beginning to dissolve and drop away.