I never saw the “young gentlemen” again. I suppose most men are cowards
about calamities of that sort, the irremediable kind that have to be
faced anew every morning. It takes a woman to shoulder such a lasting
tragedy, and hug it to her ... as I had seen Catherine doing; as I saw
Mrs. Durant yearning to do....
It was about that very matter that I interviewed the old housekeeper the
day after the funeral. Among the papers which the police found on poor
Cranch’s desk was a letter addressed to me. Like his message to Mrs.
Durant it was of the briefest. “I have appointed no one to care for my
sons; I expected to outlive them. Their mother would have wished
Catherine to stay with them. Will you try to settle all this mercifully?
There is plenty of money, but my brain won’t work. Good-bye.”
It was a matter, first of all, for the law; but before we entered on
that phase I wanted to have a talk with old Catherine. She came to me,
very decent in her new black; I hadn’t the heart to go to that dreadful
house again, and I think perhaps it was easier for her to speak out
under another roof. At any rate, I soon saw that, after all the years of
silence, speech was a relief; as it might have been to him too, poor
fellow, if only he had dared! But he couldn’t; there was that pride of
his, his “Spanish pride” as she called it....
“Not but what he would have hated me to say so, sir; for the Spanish
blood in him, and all that went with it, was what he most abominated....
But there it was, closer to him than his marrow.... Oh, what that old
woman done to us! He told me why, once, long ago—it was about the time
when he began to understand that our little boys were never going to
grow up like other young gentlemen. ‘It’s her doing, the devil,’ he said
to me; and then he told me how she’d been a great Spanish heiress, a
rich merchant’s daughter, and had been promised, in that foreign way
they have, to a young nobleman who’d never set eyes on her; and when the
bridegroom came to the city where she lived, and saw her sitting in her
father’s box across the theatre, he turned about and mounted his horse
and rode off the same night; and never a word came from him—the shame of
it! It nigh killed her, I believe, and she swore then and there she’d
marry a foreigner and leave Spain; and that was how she took up with
young Mr. Cranch that was in her father’s bank; and the old gentleman
put a big sum into the Cranch shipping business, and packed off the
young couple to Harpledon.... But the poor misbuilt thing, it seems,
couldn’t ever rightly get over the hurt to her pride, nor get used to
the cold climate, and the snow and the strange faces; she would go about
pining for the orange-flowers and the sunshine; and though she brought
her husband a son, I do believe she hated him, and was glad to die and
get out of Harpledon.... That was my Mr. Cranch’s story....
“Well, sir, he despised his great-grandfather more than he hated the
Spanish woman. ‘Marry that twisted stick for her money, and put her
poisoned blood in us!’ He used to put it that way, sir, in his bad
moments. And when he was twenty-one, and travelling abroad, he met the
young English lady I was maid to, the loveliest soundest young creature
you ever set eyes on. They loved and married, and the next year—oh, the
pity—the next year she brought him our young gentlemen ... twins, they
were.... When she died, a few weeks after, he was desperate ... more
desperate than I’ve ever seen him till the other day. But as the years
passed, and he began to understand about our little boys—well, then he
was thankful she was gone. And that thankfulness was the bitterest part
of his grief.
“It was when they was about nine or ten that _he_ first saw it; though
I’d been certain long before that. We were living in Italy then. And one
day—oh, what a day, sir!—he got a letter, Mr. Cranch did, from a
circus-man who’d heard somehow of our poor little children.... Oh,
sir!... Then it was that he decided to leave Europe, and come back to
Harpledon to live. It was a lonely lost place at that time; and there
was all the big wing for our little gentlemen. We were happy in the old
house, in our way; but it was a solitary life for so young a man as Mr.
Cranch was then, and when the summer folk began to settle here I was
glad of it, and I said to him: ‘You go out, sir, now, and make friends,
and invite your friends here. I’ll see to it that our secret is kept.’
And so I did, sir, so I did ... and he always trusted me. He needed life
and company himself; but he would never separate himself from the little
boys. He was so proud—and yet so soft-hearted! And where could he have
put the little things? They never grew past their toys—there’s the worst
of it. Heaps and heaps of them he brought home to them, year after year.
Pets he tried too ... but animals were afraid of them—just as I expect
you were, sir, when you saw them,” she added suddenly, “but with no
reason; there were never gentler beings. Little Waldo especially—it’s as
if they were trying to make up for being a burden.... Oh, for pity’s
sake, let them stay on in their father’s house, and me with them, won’t
you, sir?”
As she wished it, so it was. The legal side of the matter did not take
long to settle, for the Cranches were almost extinct; there were only
some distant cousins, long since gone from Harpledon. Old Catherine was
suffered to remain on with her charges in the Cranch house, and one of
the guardians appointed by the courts was Mrs. Durant.
Would you have believed it? She wanted it—the horror, the responsibility
and all. After that she lived all the year round at Harpledon; I believe
she saw Cranch’s sons every day. I never went back there; but she used
sometimes to come up and see me in Boston. The first time she
appeared—it must have been about a year after the events I have
related—I scarcely knew her when she walked into my library. She was an
old bent woman; her white hair now seemed an attribute of age, not a
form of coquetry. After that, each time I saw her she seemed older and
more bowed. But she told me once she was not unhappy—“not as unhappy as
I used to be,” she added, qualifying the phrase.
On the same occasion—it was only a few months ago—she also told me that
one of the twins was ill. She did not think he would last long, she
said; and old Catherine did not think so either. “It’s little Waldo; he
was the one who felt his father’s death the most; the dark one; I really
think he understands. And when he goes, Donald won’t last long either.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “Presently I shall be alone again,” she
added.
I asked her then how old they were; and she thought for a moment,
murmuring the years over slowly under her breath. “Only forty-one,” she
said at length—as if she had said “Only four.”
Women are strange. I am their other guardian; and I have never yet had
the courage to go down to Harpledon and see them.