‘Cassie, I have told Oscar,’ said Nance. ‘It was not suitable for our first secret. I am a believer in secrets between husbands and wives, but they are better when they arise naturally after marriage.’
‘It is probably a discussion in which there is nothing to discuss,’ said Oscar. ‘So experience in making sermons may be a help.’
‘Of course there is nothing to discuss,’ said Grant. ‘As I could not live with my wife, without her money, I should not be able to live with her, with it; and I am not able.’
‘The two things are not the same. It is the difference that makes you go through this form. When the matter is once at an end, it must never arise.’
‘It is at an end. It has not really arisen.’
‘Father thinks it has,’ said Nance. ‘He believes it is on foot at the moment. He will be coming to hear the foregone conclusion. It will not occur to him that we may give up our inheritance. How can it, when he has known us from our birth? Will anyone dare to tell him? I shall not dare to hear.’ 303
Duncan entered the room in his occasional genial manner, causing Grant to grow pale.
‘Well, we are to send for Sibyl – good girl as she is to want to come back – and set off again together. We may put our stumble from our minds, unless it does one of us good to remember.’ He turned and took his son from his wife, leaving in the mind of his nephew the knowledge, that here was the thing of all he had forgiven, which he was never to forgive. ‘Well, William, you have cause to thank your sister, and will do so when you have the English. And meanwhile the rest of us have it. Someone should write to-day, and it may be the one it should be.’ He left the room after a bare moment within it.
‘I did not dare to say it,’ said Grant; ‘I shall never dare. He could not face the truth, even so small a part. He has borne enough from me, and must bear no more. He will never know that the wrong I have done him, has saved him in the end.’ His voice changed and sounded as if he were alone. ‘So it is decided in the other way. Sibyl will come back, and will be my wife; and we shall be together till we die. If I have a son, she will be his mother; if I have a daughter, a daughter who will grow to be a woman, she will be her child.’
The others were silent, as they watched him move away.
‘Well, what of it, Nance?’ said Oscar.
‘Money is the root of evil. I am glad of my inheritance, even as things are. It is the root of as much evil in me as that.’
‘Grant will have his own share and Sibyl’s. It is something on the other side.’
‘I see the evil appearing.’
‘Twelve hundred a year on that side.’
‘More and more evil!’
304‘It is a good thing he does not deprive William of his portion.’
‘As that would really be depriving Father, on the top of everything else. Eight hundred a year extra on the wrong side might have been the last straw. I should indeed hardly call it a straw.’
‘How do you feel about meeting your sister?’
‘My natural affection is asserting itself. Or I am imagining it is, because affection seems so much better than avarice. The evil probably includes self-deception.’
‘You are getting used to what you know of her. We get used to anything. That will be a help to Grant.’
‘The wrong is never the only thing a wrong-doer has done,’ said Cassie. ‘That is the pathos of criminals. No class has a greater. Grant has met other things in Sibyl, and will meet them again.’
‘We shall be feeling he has too much,’ said Nance.
‘Sibyl has been through emotional strain, in a life in which succession had loomed too large. She never had a normal moral sense, and she was not in a normal place.’
‘Grant will have her as well as all the rest.’
‘We need not be ashamed of wanting Sibyl back. It is not a good thing to cast her off, for any reason.’
‘We are not ashamed of it. We hardly have it to be ashamed of.’
‘It is natural to find a thing easier,’ said Oscar, ‘when we have compensation.’
‘Well, we are always ashamed of what is natural. We should not be ashamed of anything exacting or artificial. Nothing should help us to understand Sibyl, better than our welcome of her. We can all do something against our nature for gain. Except, of course, Father. No wonder he is set above us all. That is his place.’
305‘Your share of the gain is not much. It does not make all that difference.’
‘The difference between struggle and ease, the difference that counts to thinking people. I cannot be ranked with Father.’
‘I suppose Grant should be.’
‘He will not be by us, as he has the compensation.’
‘So has your father, in effect.’
‘Father does have things both ways. He can be a sorrowing widower and a happy husband at the same time. And he is always a martyr and a ruler.’
‘Did you expect me to come to Grant’s help? Or did you know I was afraid of your father?’
‘I know it now, as you know things about me. The moment has to come, when neither is what the other thought, and nothing can be the same again. It is better to get it over.’
‘You feel that Grant is being sacrificed to the rest of us?’
‘I can hardly help feeling that, but he is really being sacrificed to Father. And what could we expect? Think of what he has done to Father, when no one else dares to speak to turn! It is proper that his whole life should be spoiled. He felt himself that it was the only thing.’
A week later Sibyl came back.
Duncan made more account of the event, than of any within their memories. He shook off the burden of years, and showed himself as Ellen had known him. Every detail of the preparations had to pass under his eye.
‘We shall christen the boy, and return to the house,’ he said to his daughter on the day. ‘Then your sister will reach home to find her friends awaiting her.’ Duncan never spoke of a child as a brat, after the death of his reputed son.
306‘It is a very good plan for the welcome, Father.’
‘There is no plan: there will be no welcome. Your sister is not very safe. The boy is to be christened, and she returns from a visit on the occasion.’
‘That is to be it? I daresay it is best.’
‘You daresay what is best? That is to be what?’
‘The plan for the day.’
‘There is to be no plan! How does one make a thing clear?’
‘I see it is best to make nothing of it, Father.’
‘Nothing of what?’
‘Of Sibyl’s being away so soon after her marriage.’
‘You would have tried to make something of it, left to yourself?’
‘It did not occur to me that it could be passed over. But I think it is a good plan – good idea.’
‘Plan! Plan! Plan! Do you feel your engagement alters your place?’
‘I think I do, Father, though you are the first to say it.’
‘The income you owe to your sister, also puts you up?’
‘Incomes always do that at first. By the way, Grant is going to the church from his own house.’
‘He must learn that that house is his home.’
‘He has been living here these last weeks.’
‘Do you suppose I don’t know that?’
‘You spoke as if you did not.’
‘I am glad you listen to my words: I should not always think it.’
Nance tried to give a turn to the talk.
‘I shall be told by everyone to-day, that they remember me in clothes like William’s.’
‘That becomes long ago. Your parson should be coming for you.’
‘It is to be the next celebration.’
307‘What is there to celebrate in putting out a daughter late? We were better to hush it up.’
‘We have hushed enough things up,’ said Nance under her breath.
Duncan strode from the room, colliding with his wife, and passed her without a word.
‘Cassie, Father is himself to-day. It is the last occasion for his fulfilment.’
‘Keep out of his way until the guests are here. No man can be himself with guests.’
‘At last he has a wife who knows him.’
‘I wish that need not be, but it is impossible to help it. It does not seem fair, when he does not know me. What a silly thing it is, to complain of being misunderstood!’
‘Do you dread meeting Sibyl, Cassie?’
‘You know better than to say that. We are glad to have her back, and that her difference with Grant is over.’
The christening could only seem an occasion from the past, on which the same people fell into the same places. The cousins showed a rather festive aspect, maintaining a personal standard independent of Oscar’s situation. Sibyl came her last stage by carriage, to save meeting a train, and to avoid a private encounter with her husband.
‘Dear child! It was a thoughtful idea,’ said Mrs Bode.
‘Different too, from the old Sibyl, Mother. We should take it as a happy augury.’
Sibyl ran up the steps, and into her father’s arms, recalling to Nance and Cassie a moment of yet another scene. Duncan responded, and at once gave place to the husband; and the couple embraced, and stood together, before Sibyl turned aside.
308‘Where is Nance?’
‘Here, with her welcome!’ said Dulcia.
‘And how are you, Dulcia?’
‘Nothing and nowhere, while nearer and dearer wait,’ said the latter, her hand held for guidance. ‘Now so much for the sister’s embrace. Then here is another relative, waiting with her welcome, someone who will anyhow do her utmost in the part, for the reward of recognition. We see the two Mrs Edgeworths greet each other.’
‘How are you, Cassie? And how is my new brother?’
Sibyl took the child from the nurse, and Cassie started forward.
‘Look at our clear-thinking, level-headed Cassie, grudging her treasure to other arms for an instant!’ said Dulcia. ‘To think what instincts might have lain fallow, did lie fallow for too long! Well, they have their outlet while there is time.’
‘I rather grudge Cassie to a domestic life,’ said Florence.
‘Yes, do you know, so do I, Mrs Smollett,’ said Miss Burtenshaw, half laughing.
‘I think you hardly judge soundly, Mrs Smollett,’ said Dulcia, ‘clear though it is that nothing in your own life prompts the view.’ She looked at Florence’s face, and laughed. ‘You hate me, Mrs Smollett, don’t you?’
Florence did not speak.
‘Don’t you, Mrs Smollett?’ repeated Dulcia, her eyes twinkling on Florence’s face, before they moved to Nance. ‘I take silence for consent. Nance, it is good not to see you aloof amongst happy pairs, though it was aloof with head held high. Nothing could have given your dignity more of a chance, in a way. But to-day I had almost said, “If but your mother were with you”!’
309 ‘Remember what you quite said about Cassie. We are a family where you have to be careful.’
‘My dear, it is my nature to be simply myself. I hold no brief for edited personalities; and I am sure you do not. You would not wish me different.’
‘How are Almeric and Alison?’
‘Well, if you will let it again be said; and happy, if I may say that too. My parents take an interest in their grand-daughter, and one cannot in reason check them. Judgement is tempered with mercy.’
‘It seems that mercy has the upper hand.’
‘Well, as it is extended to yourself, you will be forgiving. We shall see your father a patriarch in his house. But it will lose – No one can doubt my loyalty to Cassie – much of its sense of fulfilment.’
‘He has never got over my mother’s death.’
‘It is a tribute to her, and a tribute to Cassie, and a tribute – I will say that too – to Alison. With you there is no need to give a dog a bad name and hang him.’
‘It is a tribute to my mother. No one else can help it.’
‘Dear, there is no feeling of bitterness creeping into your relation with Cassie? It has now been put to the supreme test. But you are right to smile at the idea. It is laughable.’
‘We will go home,’ said Florence, ‘and leave the united family.’
‘I think the slight constraint of reunion is often smoothed by the presence of outsiders,’ said Dulcia; ‘provided they are not outsiders in a second sense.’
‘I feel I have recovered a daughter,’ said Mr Bode, who was walking with Sibyl.
‘Yes, Father dear,’ said Dulcia, looking at him from her distance, and moving up and down on her feet, ‘that is nice and 310 welcoming, but goes a little far. There is a gulf between the two families after all, and the hint of connexion is hardly to be brought forward.’
‘You are going to settle down, Sibyl?’ said Beatrice, ‘and not run away again?’
‘I want to settle down for ever, and see all I can of all of you.’
‘And of someone else too,’ said Dulcia. ‘I think marriage has smoothed and softened our little Sibyl.’
‘I have known it a mellowing thing,’ said Miss Burtenshaw.
‘Now, do you know,’ said Dulcia, looking at the cousins, ‘I am going to do a thing I had sworn I would never do; and tell you what I would have cut my tongue out, rather than reveal. I thought – don’t look at me while I say it – that Mr Jekyll had centred his affections on one of you, and that you were, like Barkis, willin’!’
The pair looked at her in neutral inquiry.
‘One of us? But which one?’ said Miss Burtenshaw.
‘That I left to fate, or you, or Mr Jekyll, or all at once. I admit I imagined either of you in the place.’
‘But surely that was the whole point,’ said Miss Burtenshaw, looking puzzled. ‘What one it was.’
‘He could not have married both,’ said Beatrice, ‘especially as he was going to marry Nance.’
‘Oh, I was wrong! I was a dodderer; but what I am leading up to, will be my excuse. It is an ill wind, et cetera; and I want to tell you his words, when he knew the idea had detained some of us.’
‘Some of you?’ queried Miss Burtenshaw. ‘Did more than one person seek to provide him with a harem?’
‘Oh!’ said Beatrice, in amused recollection. ‘Did not Uncle have something of the same idea?’
311‘Charity begins at home,’ laughed her cousin.
‘It is a good thing he did not live in the days of the celibacy of the clergy. Poor Mr Jekyll too, who might almost have done so until lately!’
‘Hear me out, hear me out! And then judge of my words, or rather of his. His reply was, that he could not marry either, as he wanted you both for more useful purpose. Was that not a perfect answer in all its aspects? Chivalrous and unassuming, and, in view of what might have been, completely sensitive?’
‘Good as it went, but a plain negative would have done,’ said Miss Burtenshaw.
‘Do you think the baby shows any likeness to his uncle?’ said Beatrice, hardly detained by the topic.
‘I have longed to see Mr Jekyll a family man,’ said her cousin, defining any feeling that might have escaped.
‘What I long for more – Let us say it low and grave,’ said Dulcia, doing as she said, ‘is to see Nance a mother.’
‘I shall be content to see her a bride,’ said Miss Burtenshaw. ‘She it is of all my girls, whose bridehood I have looked forward to the most.’
‘You two dear ones! How wrong I have been!’
‘Why, did you think we grudged Nance the fulfilment of her natural desires?’ said Beatrice.
‘Yes, it is a simple, natural thing. Everyone should have it, who wants it,’ said her cousin.
‘It is not quite so ordinary as that, to be the choice of Mr Jekyll.’
‘It is not indeed,’ said Miss Burtenshaw, cordially. ‘It is the fulfilment and fitting of two personalities, and dear, important personalities too.’
‘We will go now, Fabian,’ said Florence.
312‘We follow, Mrs Smollett,’ said Dulcia, with a movement of clicking her heels and saluting.
‘My wife has little to wish for you, Mrs Edgeworth,’ said Mr Bode, ‘and that means there is little to be wished.’
‘Yes, that is right, parents dear; but enough; you are safe so far,’ said their daughter, marshalling them onward. ‘We cannot but be on precarious ground under this roof. I applaud your tact in making your visits few and far between.’
‘We leave you here, Mr Jekyll, a member of the family?’ said Beatrice.
‘For the moment; I am soon to add one of them to my own family.’
‘And a family just as good in its sound and simple way,’ said Dulcia, following her parents.
‘Will Sibyl and Grant be with us to-night?’ said Cassie. ‘Duncan, will you answer what I ask you?’
‘It is not I whom you should ask.’
‘Sibyl decides for herself, does she? I must get out of the way of thinking of her as a child.’
‘Do your best towards it. She has got out of the way of thinking of you as what you were.’
‘Father, why not come back with Grant and me? If you would rather not, I will stay here with you.’
‘It is time you were with your husband.’
‘Oscar is staying,’ said Nance. ‘Will one be enough for you, Father?’
‘Why should it be that one, in that case? But I am not a dotard, to be able to put sense into only one of your fellows at a time.’
‘Sibyl and I can easily go home,’ said Grant, finding the words come before he thought.
313‘You have not seemed to do that so easily.’
‘Of course you will stay,’ said Cassie. ‘We must be together this evening.’
The meal passed almost without words, Duncan’s reaction from his long strain causing him to shed from the head of the table an almost tangible gloom. Cassie and Oscar’s efforts at talk seemed weighted into the silence. The hour drew Grant and Sibyl together, as nothing else could have done. The old alliance in the face of Duncan’s oppression rose between them. Something in Duncan suggested an aversion from their numbers; and the three young people found themselves drifting to the schoolroom, as though the old conditions carried the old customs.
‘We can’t be too thankful that Mother is dead,’ said Nance, hurrying into another silence. ‘It will be enough to leave Cassie alone with Father. How difficult it would be, if people did not die! Think of the numbers who die, and all the good that is done! They never seem to die, without doing something for someone. No wonder they hate so to do it, and plan to be immortal. It is a mercy that both Aunt Maria and Oscar’s mother are dead. And think what a bad thing for us Father’s life has been!’
‘And ours for Father,’ said her sister.
‘I have been so ashamed of being alive and well, and having to be housed and clothed and fed and provided for. It really is not reasonable. No wonder phrases like “vile bodies” arise. When people have to be provided for, death is the only thing.’
‘We are not touching any real truth,’ said Sibyl.
‘It does not do to touch real truth,’ said Grant, breaking off with a flush creeping over his face.
‘The Victorians were openly ashamed of being well,’ said Nance. ‘I don’t know why we call them hypocrites.’
314‘I had no idea that Aunt Maria had left her money to me.’
‘The Victorians never talked about their wills,’ said Grant, turning fully to his wife.
‘They would not give the pleasure of anticipation, as well as the actual goods they were to give up,’ said Nance. ‘Death does sound dreadful, put like that.’
‘We did not want Mother to die,’ said Sibyl.
‘We were fond enough of her, to want her to have her life, even though it had to be lived with Father. It shows what we think of life.’
‘Why did Aunt Maria not leave her money to Uncle?’
‘She was not very fond of him. She let it out when she was ill. She thought him overbearing, and Mother too good for him.’
‘What dreadful thoughts for a deathbed!’ said Nance. ‘About Father too!’
‘I think I see how she got her impression,’ said Grant, in his natural manner.
‘But people so often forgive at the last. When they have to forgive inheritance, they can easily pass over some human weakness. That may be what brought in the custom of deathbed forgiveness.’
‘What did she think of Uncle’s later marriages?’
‘She seemed surprised that so many women accepted him,’ said Sibyl.
‘It does suggest there is something in him, one has not seen.’
‘We should really be sorry, if he died,’ said Sibyl.
‘Of course he is a rule to himself. I have heard him say so,’ said Nance. ‘Perhaps he never told Aunt Maria, and people are not observant in families.’
315‘If you please, Miss Nance,’ said Bethia, ‘the master wishes to know if you are all out of the house.’
‘Why did he send to the schoolroom to inquire? That is in the house.’
‘I came up at my own initiative, miss. Have you a message?’
‘We are in the house, and will repair to the drawing room.’
‘You are coming down. Yes, miss.’
‘You two go first. You are masters of your actions.’
‘I am not,’ said Grant. ‘I may be presuming on the past. Have I any right behind the scenes?’
‘Come along: I am not afraid of Father.’
‘That must simply be an exaggeration,’ said Nance, forgetting it was only of her father, that her sister need not be afraid.
‘Well,’ said Duncan, ‘have you made up your minds to which houses you belong? In that case consider your places in them.’
‘You are right we should be going, Uncle.’
‘Can’t you follow a simple word? Go then, for all the sense we can find in you.’
‘I am so happy to be in the place where you are, Father,’ said Sibyl.
‘You come bamboozling me, when your part is second fiddle to your husband.’
‘We shall both see you to-morrow.’
‘I don’t know why. It is time for you to stay in your house, and manage it.’
‘You would like me to come in, Cassie?’
‘Of course, women must run after each other. It passes me why it is said that they don’t incline to their own sex. It puzzles men that they should, I suppose; poor fellows, to fancy there is any use for their sense!’ 316
A silence fell, and seemed it would not break.
‘You have no liking for this man’s company, Nance?’ said Duncan, with a gesture towards Oscar. ‘You give no sign that you would pass your life in it.’
‘I wanted to be with Sibyl on her first evening, Father.’
‘What have I said? And you did what you wanted, didn’t you? Oscar, you keep a hand over her, or she will have you under hers. A masterful girl from the beginning! And her mother’s fancy for some reason, and Cassie’s too.’
‘And mine,’ said Oscar.
‘Yes, that is how it would take you. As it has better men. Well, I am here to give you a word when you need it. You are all at my hand to be taught.’