EMILY.
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,
‘Will you send him to Liverpool now?’