“WELL, I APPROACH my relatives’ house in some trepidation,” said Anna, as she hastened in this direction. “It is an odd experience to be received as a guest, by a family you are held to have robbed. I hope it will overcome that of facing the house without Aunt Sukey. There is no more potent force than embarrassment pure and simple. I am not proud of being subdued by it, but it may have its use on this occasion. And it is no good to have a higher standard for yourself than you can manage.”
“I believe you maintain a generally higher one than you used,” said Esmond.
“Well, that is better than letting oneself go headlong downhill. And people tend to go one way or another.”
“The feeling of having riches disposes us to be worthy of them,” said Bernard. “It is the instinct to do something in return, so as to check any tendency of fate to redress the balance.”
“I am glad to be told so much about myself.”
“The instinct to be worthy of good may be a sound one,” said Benjamin. “We should contribute as well as take.”
“Yes it is as well to play fair,” said his daughter. “But I hardly think that is the light in which I am about to be seen.”
Jessica came to meet them, and greeted them in turn without distinction.
“We are more glad to see you than we have ever been. As we get to be fewer, each fills a larger place. We are trying not to be a sadder family, but we must feel a smaller one.”
“An odd effort under the circumstances,” muttered Anna to her brothers. “It would be strange if it were crowned by success.”
“Aunt Sukey will always be in this hall, for the people who saw her here,” said Bernard.
“Not for me,” said his sister, shaking her head. “I don’t get off so easily. Only the reality does for me. I am sorry to be such a material person, but so it is. It seems to me that the essence of the household is gone.”
“I want you to come and talk to me about her,” said Jessica, laying her hand on her niece’s shoulder. “Her last hour was spent with you, and I want to know how she lived it. Those minutes are always in my mind.”
“I will do what I can,” said Anna, turning to follow. “But it seems to me that I have done it several times. I can’t make the hour different from what it was, you know. I am not good at tinkering with the truth. If it tumbles out, whole and plain, I cannot be taken to account.”
“The truth is what I want,” said Jessica. “It is what I feel I must have.”
She guided her niece up the stairs and was entering her sister’s room, when Anna drew back and put both her hands before her face.
“Oh, no, no, I can’t, please; I can’t quite manage this. I am not such a tough person as you seem to think. You are a deal in advance of me, if this is your standard. I can’t quite meet you on this ground.”
Jessica drew her into the room, as if she had not heard. It was necessary to do as she did, and words were wasted. Her face had something aloof and almost empty about it, as if she were not so much indifferent to daily things, as apart from them.
“You quite bring my heart into my mouth,” said Anna, forcing an easier tone. “To make such a parade of a thing like this is ghoulish, and has something ominous about it. I don’t know what your purpose is, but does it really need this kind of foundation?”
“I want you to tell me just what happened in that last hour,” said Jessica.
“I have told you. I have given an account of it more than once. And I am all against going over the same ground again and again. It leads to unconscious fabrication. I have given you the truth and you must be content. Asking for elaboration of it is really asking for the other thing.”
“Have I had the truth?” said Jessica, in a tone that was as impersonal as if she were thinking aloud.
Anna threw up her brows and made a hopeless gesture.
“What you have told me, is not the truth to me.”
“I daresay it is not,” said Anna, with a touch of sympathy. “Not the truth as you would like to have it. But I warned you that I could not adapt it. It would never do to begin.”
“I knew my sister to the bottom of her heart. Our minds were open to each other. And she did not destroy her old will, if she was herself; and to my mind she was. Tell me what happened, Anna?”
“I do not know. How can I? It had happened before I saw her. Only the reaction remained, and I will not be led into basing imaginary scenes on that. I am going to be firm there. You show me the danger.”
“What did she say about it all? What were her exact words? I must know for my own ease of mind. I do not want anything to come of it.”
“Good heavens, what strange, suggestive speeches!” said Anna, raising her eyes full to her aunt’s. “I shall hardly know what to think. And naturally I will not respond to your questioning, if it is to lead to this. I should have thought that Aunt Sukey’s death was enough in itself, without our trying to get more out of it. I don’t feel I can dramatise the situation, Aunt Jessica. Aunt Sukey did not say that you had been the one figure in her life, or that her main feeling was gratitude to you, or anything of that kind. If that is what you want to hear, I cannot help you. You know that she was vexed and upset on that day, indeed was bitter against all of you. If I told you she was not, you would know it was a falsehood. You must not lay this stress on the truth, and then expect me to stretch it. And I am without the power of doing so; it is simply left out of me. I told you that, if you asked for the truth, you would get it. I gave you fair warning.”
“She would not have done that to me and mine,” said Jessica, looking past her niece. “It was not in her. That is how she came to make the pretence of doing it. If it had been her purpose, she would not have spoken of it.”
“Oh, I don’t understand your tortuous minds! You mean something and say nothing, or you mean one thing and say another. That is why you expect me to do it. And expect Aunt Sukey to do it too; expect that she did it, I mean, which seems to be worse. And I don’t think it was in her, to use your own phrase. And anyhow it is not in me, and you had better realise it, or we shall go on for ever. If you mean a thing, you would not speak of it! What a key to the difference between us!”
“Shall I ever know what she felt and what she suffered?”
“Well, I have done my best for you, and can do no more. I told you she felt you had failed her, or rather that your family had. Not that she ever said a word against you, yourself, Aunt Jessica. And if she meant the opposite of what” she said, you ought to take comfort.”
“You are harsh to me,” said Jessica, turning her eyes on her niece with sudden sight in them.
“And what are you to me? A pattern of flattering kindness?”
“I want the truth,” said Jessica, almost with a moan in her voice. “I feel I must have it.”
“Well you have it. You can take heart,” said Anna, with a touch of rough kindliness. “And surely things are not so bad, that they might not be worse. In a family of this kind, and with Aunt Sukey as she was, I wonder they were not worse. You have nothing on your mind, that would not be the lot of nine people out of ten. And why should anyone expect to be the tenth?”
Jessica shook her head, in rejection of the words or the essence of them, and stood as though her eyes were on something that Anna did not see.
“Well can we adjourn the meeting?” said Anna. “Or rather dissolve it, as I cannot live under the threat of its being called again.”
“Did she tell you she had burned a will?” said Jessica. “One of your brothers said something about it, but you did not mention it to me.”
“She said she had burned some papers,” said Anna, in a faintly impatient but natural tone. “And I think it was to you that I spoke of it first. It would naturally have been. I did not know what they were. How could I, as she did not say? It seemed to be a weight off her mind, as I have said. I am not going to keep saying it again. That is how distortion begins.”
“You did not see the two wills together?”
“I did not see any will, or know that there was one. How could I, as I was not told? Aunt Sukey did not take me into her confidence. I suppose I had not got as far as that with her. I wish I could feel that I had; I should like to think I knew the whole of her mind. And I might have given her better companionship in that last hour. I see she steered her way alone. But I suppose she always did, as I suppose we all do really. I daresay it isn’t anything to have on one’s mind.”
“She must have had the two wills in her hands at the same moment.”
“I should have thought it would be more natural to keep them apart, especially as she is so methodical and definite. Was, I should say; I shall never get into the way of speaking of her in the past.”
“There is no need to think of her like that,” said Jessica, in an automatic tone, her eyes looking beyond her niece.
“Well, have I done all I can? Is the matter at an end? I think I must feel that it is, before we leave it. I can’t feel that I am liable to be called up here, and worked upon at any moment. I should not dare to come to the house. It is almost too much for me, this having things probed and raked in the room where Aunt Sukey lived and died. And are not these matters personal to herself? Must we pry into them? It seems like taking advantage of her death. Or it does for me, as I was excluded from them. She had a right to keep things to herself as far as she wished; and there I would choose to leave it.”
“She must have put the wrong will back into the desk,” said Jessica, as if she had not heard the words, or had passed them over.
“Then she kept the wrong one in her hands, and put the same wrong one on the fire. Well, it was not like Aunt Sukey. That is all that can be said.”
“She might not have acted according to herself. She would hardly have been herself an hour before her death. The forces of her system would have been running down.”
“Oh, don’t,” said Anna, putting up her hands, as if to ward off a blow. “You are a strong, unshrinking person, and no mistake. I feel a kind of admiration for you. But I am not equal to it. It is beyond my limit, this probing into what we dare not think of. What I dare not think of, I suppose I should say; I must not ascribe the same weakness to you. Who would have thought that you would be the tough subject, and I the squeamish one? I should have been the last person to classify us like that.”
“It would have been an easy thing to do,” went on Jessica, still with the air of passing over Anna’s words. “And she might have put the other will on the fire without looking at it.”
“No, no, not Aunt Sukey,” said Anna, shaking her head. “She would look to see she had the right one, a dozen times. Any failure in nervous balance would come out like that. That would have been the line of her weakness.”
“In her last hours we cannot know.”
“Oh, may we not leave those last hours? She was herself when I saw her, and I have a right to that memory. There is nothing gained by tampering with it.”
“It is easy to imagine the scene,” said Jessica.
“Why should she have taken the old will out of the desk at all?”
“She took it out to copy it,” said Jessica, her eyes seeming to be fixed on the scene. “And she meant to put it back; I could tell by her voice and her eyes. She meant to destroy the other. But if only I could be quite sure!”
“That new one she had just made? What an odd purpose for it! Well, that is not what she did, as seems to me natural enough. The other thing is done, and there is no help for it. We cannot know that she was the victim of error or delusion or whatever you assume. I cannot think how you can think so, when you knew her. But don’t let us have the last hours again, if you don’t mind. I have had enough of it.” As Anna became inured to the scene, her manner was more what it was in her home.
“That is how she came to have the two wills in her hands,” said Jessica.
“She had nothing in them, when I was there. Her hands were folded in her lap. Something was on the fire, or had been on it, and the will was in the desk. Or so I was told later.”
“Sukey never folded her hands,” said Jessica, with no touch of pouncing on a weak point; simply in expression of her thought.
“Oh, well, idle in her lap. No, I don’t think she did fold them. Actually they were working on her lap, but there did not seem to be any need to press that home. They were closing and unclosing, if you must have the scene as it was. You make it quite impossible to save you anything. And how can you say so positively what she did? You did not watch her quite so faithfully, or that was not her impression. Indeed that was the root of the trouble. And if her system was running down—isn’t that what you said?”—Anna drew in her brows with a look of pain—“surely to sit without occupation was natural. And she was never a busy person.”
“I can imagine her hands working,” said Jessica, once again speaking to herself.
“Oh, she had been through the worst stage,” said Anna, with a note of encouragement. “When I reached her, it was the calm after the storm, or anyhow the stage of the last echoes of it. She was at peace at the last. You may be quite easy about that. I left her without any sort of misgiving. She had fallen asleep, as I have said. I told you that was the result of my attentions.”
“Anna,” said Jessica, in a tone that held no sudden difference, but seemed to come from gathering purpose, “if you ever wanted to tell me anything, you would not be afraid? I would not say a word, if you would rather I did not. And there need be no change in the disposal of the money; that would not be mentioned between us. I only feel that you have no mother, and that your life has had many temptations and little guidance. You would let me help you, as someone who knows that? You would impose your conditions, and trust me to keep them. You would not hesitate?”
There was a just perceptible pause.
“Indeed I should,” said Anna, almost with a laugh. “You are the last person I would face in such a situation, if I can imagine myself in one, which I cannot, as complexities and soul-subtleties are not within my range. And I believe you would almost create such a crisis. I can hardly be in your presence without feeling all kinds of uncertainties and possibilities welling up within me.” Anna stood with her eyes on her aunt’s face and a look of helpless bewilderment. “I should not know myself, if I spent much time with you. You would make anyone feel a criminal, indeed might make anyone be one. I begin to feel my mind reflecting your own. It must be ghastly to have such seething depths within one.”
Jessica looked into her niece’s face.
“I wonder if other people see me like that.”
“Well, it is not your fault, if they don’t,” said Anna, giving rein to her tongue. “You do your best to cast a cloud of gloom and guilt over everyone in your path. No one can be with you, without being the victim of it, this instinct to drag from their minds anything and everything that it is their right and their duty to keep to themselves. People’s little natural weaknesses are their own affair. Are you so free from them, yourself, that you must constitute yourself everyone else’s critic and judge? It would hardly do to probe the depths of your mind. Even if I did feel some uncertainty about Aunt Sukey’s wishes, there would be no great harm in giving myself the benefit of the doubt. Everyone would do it, as you have done it yourself. Indeed you give yourself the benefit of a doubt that does not exist. I am not going to yield to your peculiar method of coercion. It is unnatural and uncanny, and gives your opponent no chance. Anyone could use it, who would stoop so low. And to think that you are Aunt Sukey’s sister, and held in equal esteem!”
“I see few people but my own family. Do I affect them in this way?”
“Well, I have noticed a reluctance in them to be alone with you. Of course I don’t know how far they are aware of it. Terence is not a woman or a child, and gives less stimulus to the strange instincts. Oh, I know it is all unconscious, Aunt Jessica; I give you your due; though I can’t imagine your doing the same by me, if I were subject to your odd temptations.”
“What about the children?” said Jessica.
“They are too young to give a name to your influence. They just feel it, and avoid it when they can. I have noticed their instinct to elude you, and your sad, questioning eyes. They would make any child feel uneasy and guilty and oppressed. It is a shame to cloud their helpless childhood, and drag all the sweetness out of it; and a childhood too, that has no great happiness or advantage to balance the scale. Reuben may not have much of a life, but it is better than theirs. I know he has no mother, but there may not be only a dark side to that.”
“Would they be happier without me?”
“Of course they would, in so far as you exercise this influence on them. It hardly seems to be quite human. I daresay it has its origin in the past, and you cannot separate yourself from it, any more than we can from any other primitive survival in us. It is said that savages have strange powers, that survive in certain people; and I suppose this is a case of it. They are the more dangerous for being so deep-rooted.”
Jessica loked at Anna almost in wonderment, seeming to return from the world of her own thoughts.
“You said you were simple and unsophisticated,” she said.
“Oh, there it is again, your instinct to wound and pierce and condemn. The most I have said, is that I am plain and downright. People do not say those things about themselves; they hardly like to think them. I may have said that I was regarded in that way. I can’t help that, can I? I daresay any sister with three brothers hears such things. And I am more innocent than you are. I have never done harm to the helpless, and your life is spent in that miserable course.”
“A cloud would be lifted from the household, if I were gone,” said Jessica, using a tone between statement and question. “Does my husband feel that I cast this baleful influence?”
“How should I know?” said Anna, with a touch of embarrassment, as her mood filtered. “I have not constituted myself general observer and overseer of your household. And what a word; baleful! It shows that you know the exact essence of your spell. Why don’t you stop working it, Aunt Jessica, and try to be a natural, wholesome woman?”
Jessica stood with her eyes on her niece.
“You are my brother’s child. You and I are closely bound by blood. Perhaps these things are in us.”
“Oh, they are not in me,” said Anna throwing up her head. “You cannot turn the tables in that way. I do not possess your qualities, because I see them in you. They are laid bare before my eyes. I cannot help seeing them any more than your family can help it. They may not put the truth into words. It may be wiser not to do so. They may not even see it clearly enough for that. But they suffer from it—don’t make any mistake—this sinister, creeping force that poisons their lives.”
“They have not inherited these things?” said Jessica, again in the tone that was partly a question. “I have not done that to them.”
“No, they are like open, crystal streams, compared with you. That is why your muddy eddy fails to mingle with them, and there is this odd divergence between you. But I daresay you do them less harm for that. And I see you have many fine qualities, Aunt Jessica, and of a kind to strike people more readily than those I have seen. It is not my fault that you have exposed them to me; they are generally much more veiled. But you gave me such an exhibition of them, that I saw you for the moment as a monument of all that was dark and evil. And when it came to attributing them to Aunt Sukey—well, it was too much, and took the leash off my tongue. If I am to see you differently, you must give me the chance. I am quite willing to take it.”
“Have you always felt these things in me?”
“Faintly from the first. But I did not put names to them. I just felt as if some hostile emanation from you discharged itself over any innocence or happiness about you. I was first conscious of it in the form of a pity for those who lived with you and under you. But they may feel it less than I imagine. Things are more insistent, when you come from outside, and have not spent your life involved in them. And this last glimpse may have added itself to my earlier impression. It would be difficult to prevent it. Well, to think that you and Father and Aunt Sukey make up a family!”
Jessica rested her eyes on her niece.
“Now you need not look at me, as if we were bound together by some deep and hidden bond. There is no truth there, and you know it. If there were, there would be some sympathy between us, which it is needless to say there is not. Your feeling to me has been unnatural and hostile from the first. Only Aunt Sukey seemed to see me as her brother’s child. And now you want to transfer to me the worst things in yourself. Well, I do not accept them, and that is my last word.”
“We will leave the matter of the wills,” said Jessica, as if her thoughts had been elsewhere. “I do not wish to speak of it again. The money is yours, and no one will question it. But I ask you to help me to understand the harm I am doing my family. I ask it as a favour, Anna. Because I must cease to do it. I must free them by any means in my power. I must make any sacrifice, even that of sin. I will not flinch from anything that gives them freedom.”
“When you talk like that, you take all the wind out of my sails,” said Anna, looking aside. “What a sudden and utter change! It is like seeing someone alter her form before one’s eyes. It recalls those scenes in books, that we believed and disbelieved in childhood. Have you been a creature in disguise, or is this the disguise? How am I to know? How did I know what was clear to me before? How do we recognise anything? And yet we cannot ignore our own impressions.”
“Your impression was what you said it was?” said Jessica.
“I suppose so, or I should not have said it,” said Anna, with her normal awkwardness. “No doubt it just came out, as it stood in my mind. That is my accepted way, and I must be taken as I am. I can’t make selections from my thoughts. It is all or nothing with me.”
“We none of us show the whole of our minds,” said Jessica, in a quiet tone. “And there are depths in all of us, that are better left undisturbed. We avoid a wrong both to other people and ourselves.”
“There you are again, with your piercing and wounding and suggesting. Do let us stop preaching at each other. We have made known our mutual opinion, and that is surely enough. Indeed I think it should be. And are we to remain cooped up for ever in this harrowing place? It hardly seems a fit purpose for it, to be used as the background of this base and unseemly struggle. What made you choose it? I suppose some odd impulse of your own.” Anna rested her eyes in a new wonderment on her aunt. “I daresay you hardly explained it to yourself. I believe you are helpless, Aunt Jessica. You are like some dark angel, honestly and unselfishly serving the cause of evil.”
“You cannot tell me your meaning plainly?” said Jessica.
“No, I cannot. It is all vague and nameless to me. So, if you like, say I have imagined it. I am prepared to leave it like that. And I am not going to waste any more words. I see they are utterly wasted. And who am I, that I should judge another woman? If I had not been made the victim of your dark imaginings, actually dragged into this room, that had been sacrosanct to me, and used as a deliberate sacrifice, I should not have uttered a word. But the combination of horrors was too much. It broke down my defences, which are never too strong. I am not such a rocklike person at heart.”
Jessica turned to the door and spoke in her ordinary tones.
“Shall we go down to the others? They will be wondering what has kept us?”
“They will, and we shall be hard put to it to tell them. Are we to make the attempt? I am prepared to fall in with your decision. Do we take the line of complete revelation? Or are we to observe any reticence? I can accept either view.”
“Say what you will,” said Jessica. “There are things that should be kept for another time, but you can judge of them for yourself. You may tell anything to your father and brothers at home.”
“What a generous permission!” said Anna, hurrying after her. “That would indeed be an advantage to them. Do you really think they could go on meeting you, if I actually revealed the whole?”
“It would not be difficult for us to keep apart. For a short time,” said Jessica.
Anna edged forward and led the way into the room, where the families were together, and spoke without any sign of being embarrassed or oppressed.
“Aunt Jessica and I have been indulging in mutual recriminations in Aunt Sukey’s room. The setting of the scene was not my choice; I had not the advantage there. Aunt Jessica might have been in a room that she had never seen before, a startling view, even if she had not been there as often as she might. She seemed unconscious that the place had any memories. She was quite above any such weakness.” Anna hardly lowered her voice, as Jessica followed her.
“We thought you were never coming down,” said Bernard.
“Indeed I thought the same,” said his sister, sinking into a chair. “It is with a sense of surprise, that I find myself amongst you. I believe I have been standing all the time, though I did not realise it. Indeed I had other things to fill my mind. I am forbidden to reveal the matter of our discourse, but am sanctioned to do so at home. I have not made up my mind if it would be suitable hearing for you.”
“We will suffer any violence it may do us,” said Bernard.
“Well, do not preapre yourselves for anything interesting or uplifting. It is a sordid and degrading recital; at least I felt degraded by the business. Aunt Jessica held her head high above it all, but then she inaugurated it and carried it though, so I suppose she was equal to it. I did not find myself on her level.”
“My mother looks very tired,” said Terence.
“You need not worry about that,” said Anna, in a light tone. “Anyone else would be in a state of collapse. Her condition is a definite tribute to her vital powers.”
“You look very flushed,” said Terence.
“Have you any more personal observations to make?” said his cousin, putting her hands to her face. “It was a scene that would mantle anyone’s cheek, or so it struck me in my inexperience. But I am warned against describing it here; it is to be reserved for my own fireside. You will not have the advantage of my account, but no doubt you incline to the other.”
“I think the decision to postpone it was a good one,” said Jessica.
“Let us change the subject by all means. But you cannot expect me to do it. My head is too full of what you put into it. I don’t feel that I shall ever get free. It will pursue and haunt me all my days.”
“Your aunt meant what she said, my daughter,” said Benjamin.
Anna gave a laugh.
“You make me wonder what you would say to my late experience, when you speak to me as if I were a child. And talk as if Aunt Jessica’s words must point the way to the light.”
Jessica sat down and drew the two children to her side. Their surprise made them unresponsive, and her face contracted in shock and fear. Anna kept her eyes from her, and joined in the talk.
“You have been troubled, my daughter,” said Benjamin, in a low tone.
“Well, I should be an odd person if I had not,” said Anna, at her ordinary pitch. “I think I stood up to it fairly well. I congratulate myself on a reserve of strength that I did not know I possessed. I was not equal to what confronted me, but no normal woman would have been. I almost returned to the beliefs of infancy, and credited the tales of Satanic power. So Aunt Jessica has been the means of restoring my childhood’s faith, a suitable office for her, and a suitable part of the faith, if truth were known.”
Jessica rose and led the children from the room.
“You have driven Aunt Jessica away,” said Esmond. “That is an odd thing to happen in her house.”
“Not compared to the other things that happen there. They set a standard that makes the house a harbour for anything. I should feel I was talking in a strange way enough, if I were doing it anywhere else.”
“What in the world has passed between you?”
“This house is not the place to reveal it. Aunt Jessica was firm there, though she did not scruple to stage the scene in its inner shrine. But she has the right to say, and so we will leave the matter.”
“That is a relief,” said Tullia. “I was beginning to fear all sorts of revelations. If you choose to have private and unbelievable scenes, you owe it to other people to keep them to yourselves.”
“I cannot take that view of Anna’s debt to us,” said Bernard.
“It takes two to make a scene,” said Terence.
“You are mistaken. It does not. It took one,” said Anna. “You are thinking of a quarrel. This was not that.”
“Aunt Jessica thought it would pollute the ears of her children,” said Esmond.
“And she is right,” said his sister. “It would.”
“I cannot think why you revealed that you had a dispute at all,” said Tullia.
“We should have given ourselves away,” said Anna, in a resigned tone, relaxing in her chair. “Our flustered condition would have betrayed us. It was better to get in first and intercept the flood of questions. And now the matter may rest.”
“That is not the word for its working in our minds,” said Bernard.
“Aunt Jessica did not look flustered,” said Esmond.
“She looked other things,” said Anna. “I don’t think that can have escaped you.”
“They say that anticipation is the best part of anything,” said Bernard. “I find I cannot agree.”
“It may well be that in this case,” said his sister, grimly.
“Why must you give the account?” said Tullia. “I hope I may be spared it.”
“I cannot think you are sincere,” said Bernard.
“I don’t know,” said Anna, in a tone of some sympathy, resting her eyes on Tullia. “I do not see why Aunt Jessica’s children should be troubled by the matter.”
“A conclusion that you come to rather late,” said Esmond.
“Now that we have heard so much, we will hear it from my mother’s own lips,” said Terence.
“Well, no doubt you will do that,” said Anna, in a mild tone.
“I suggest that you leave the matter, my daughter,” said Benjamin. “Indeed I direct you to do so.”
“I am more than willing, if I am allowed to, Father. I keep on being dragged back to it. I should be glad enough of release.”
“You may consider yourself free,” said Esmond.
“Then pray let us talk about the weather.”
“It is worthy of comment,” said Benjamin, looking at the window. “Indeed we are bound by it for the time.”
“Oh, don’t say that,” said his daughter, sitting up with an expression of consternation. “And Aunt Jessica may return at any moment. My escape was becoming the first object in my mind.”
“You can achieve it by walking through the rain,” said Esmond.
His sister seemed to give the matter her thought.
“That would attract too much notice. I think I must grin and bear the position. Aunt Jessica will be better able to pass me over, than if I made myself conspicuous by my absence.”
“You seem to have an instinct of protection towards my mother,” said Terence.
“I believe I did have it for a moment,” said Anna, with an air of being half-startled by herself. “It was an instinct or an impulse or something; there was nothing quixotic about it. I was taken by it unawares.”
“I will take you home, if you want to go.”
“Will you?” said Anna, starting to her feet. “Then let us set off before either of your parents appears. You set an example to my unchivalrous brothers.”
“Why is your departure less conspicuous for involving that of Terence?” said Esmond.
“The absence of two makes a smaller party. That of one could yawn as an abyss,” said his sister, edging through the door, as if it were a case for furtiveness.
“Did my mother seem very unlike herself?” said Terence, as they went into the rain.
“Yes and no,” said Anna, almost pausing for consideration, in the face of the weather. “Not so unlike herself, as I know her. Very unlike, as you do, I should say.”
“Why should there be that difference? You have hardly seen her alone.”
“That was true until to-day. It is not true now. I saw her alone with a vengeance, and I somehow got the impression that she was acting according to herself.”
“You cannot mean that you know her better than I do.”
“No, I don’t suppose I mean that,” said Anna, in a manner of uncertainty. “But I rather think I do, odd thing though it seems to say.”
“You must have had a strange discourse,” said Terence.
“I am not going to give you a summary of it,” said Anna, hastening along with a spring in her step, that came from a sense of his proximity.
“Do you mind if she repeats it?”
“Of course not. Why should I?” said Anna, turning to look at him in some surprise.
“Then I am free to ask her any question?”
“I suppose so. What have I to do with it? I would hardly recommend your probing into the matter, but it is not my affair.”
“Do I run the risk of any startling revelation?”
“No, I don’t think so,” said Anna, slowly; “I can only suppose not.”
“Do you mean that my mother might not give me a true account?”
“Well, I would not in her place,” said Anna, “Not using the words, ‘in her place,’ in a full sense.”
“I have never known her say an untrue word.”
“No,” said Anna, in a still slower tone. ‘But it is easy to leave words unsaid. That would not give her the feeling of using deceit.”
“Indeed it would, if it gave a wrong impression. She would not be bound by the letter. She is not a simple person.”
“No, no, she is not,” said Anna.
“Do you mean that she might play a double part?”
“She might do anything, according to my conception of her,” said Anna, in a tone so quick and light that it almost seemed meant to elude his ears.
“My mother cannot stand scenes and arguments,” said Terence, in a sharper tone. “She is not fit for them.”
“I can hardly see her except as rather well endowed for the purpose.”
“You know she is almost a nervous invalid?”
“No, no, that is not so,” said Anna, shaking her head. “She is a person of considerable nervous reserve and power.”
“It must seem to me that I know her better than you do.”
“Yes,” said Anna, slackening her pace and looking into his face; “I suppose it must.”
“You mean that I am mistaken?”
“Well, I feel that no one can know her but me, that she has not given anyone else the opportunity.”
“She cannot have sides that she has hidden from me all my life.”
“Does not that sort of thing always happen in families?”
“At what a rate you travel!” said Terence, catching her up. “The rain is much less. Why do you use such a pace?”
“I have received a goad, and I suppose still feel its impetus.”
“You talk unlike yourself. I thought you were a person who said what came into her mind.”
“I am not the woman I was yesterday,” said Anna, between jest and earnest. “I feel like the people in history, who never smiled again.”
“So I am to regard you as a stranger?”
“Well, you had not so much of an opinion of me, had you? I suppose you liked me as your blunt, straightforward cousin.”
“I wish I could continue to like you as that.”
“No,” said Anna, shaking her head, “I am not going to be drawn. I hold to my resolve. I will not be led into disclosures.”
“My mother would not mind your saying anything that was true.”
Anna looked at her cousin with an equivocal expression.
“Well, I should not say anything that wasn’t. But I have not her sanction to reveal anything at all.”
“So she was in a position to impose conditions. That throws another light on the matter.”
“She does seem to have indicated the course to be pursued,” said Anna, as if slowly coming to this realisation. “I suppose I let her do so. She must appeal to some sort of chivalrous instinct. I believe I felt that she must be saved from herself.”
“I wish that could be done for her indeed.”
“Most of us are our own worst enemies, I suppose.”
“No, we are our own best friends. Even our criticism of ourselves is confined to the night. And fancy criticism not being more public than that! There is no reason to save people from themselves, only from other people. My mother is an exception.”
“I don’t think I have these remorseful night-time moments. And any daylight soul-searching does not show me so much to be ashamed of. Not much to be proud of either; merely a plain, cleanish, dull sheet. I don’t mean that I do not welcome any good that comes my way.”
“That shows what a friend you are to yourself. Other people hardly do that for us.”
“No, they want it all for themselves,” said Anna, in a resigned tone.
“You mean that my mother feels that she should inherit her sister’s money. But as it is her real opinion, it throws no light on her.”
“It is the opinion that throws the light, I suppose,” said Anna, seeming not to give much attention to her words.
“She is not so much concerned with the money, as with Aunt Sukey’s state of mind.”
“Yes, that must be a weight on her,” said Anna, in the same manner.
“Was Aunt Sukey in such a depressed mood?”
“Well, not so much depressed, as angry and hard and bitter. She seemed in a state of final disillusionment somehow. And that is sad in the last hours of a person’s life. It struck me as sad, though I did not suspect that the end was so near.”
“Well, if it was a final condition, any extra time could not have remedied it.”
“Not in any way that would have resulted in benefit to your family.”
“You know I did not mean that.”
“Then what did you mean?” said Anna, in a downright tone. “You were thinking of the will, as you know. Well, your mother claims the money, because Aunt Sukey might have left it to her; and I claim it because she did leave it to me. There is not a hair’s breadth between us, or we will say there is not, though some people would not agree. I should not have thought of the money, if it had not fallen to me. Indeed I did not think of it.”
“You hardly had any reason.”
“People find reasons, if their minds have that particular trend.”
“You cannot say that my mother’s has it.”
“Well, I don’t see how I am to say anything else, after my particular experience. But let us say that I know nothing about your mother. That is the best way to leave it. Now with Aunt Sukey, miles though she was above me in looks and manners and mind, I had that sense of affinity, that makes us at our best with our flesh and blood. It is a satisfying feeling; I don’t know how I shall get on without it.”
“You have plenty of people related to you. But they are not supposed to render us that kind of service.”
“Well, I am not much of a one for outsiders. I am happy enough with my outspoken, unadmiring family. If I do not appear to advantage amongst them—and I daresay I don’t; indeed I don’t think I do—I don’t break my heart over it. Father and I are good enough friends, and it was satisfying to meet his sister, and find the same sort of bond. It was a great addition to my lot. It is difficult to give it up, just as I had come to depend on it.”
Anna controlled her words and her tone, but once again quickened her pace.
“You do not feel the same with my mother?”
“I feel what she has made me feel. I am not going to expand on it. You will hear her side of the matter, and it is the one you had better hear. There could never be a stronger case of the difference between two points of view. And you must choose one and abide by it. That is what people do.”
“But I am not the same as other people. It is absurd to have to tell you quite so often.”
Anna gave a laugh as she reached her door.
“Well, thank you for coming home with me. I have no doubt that it went against the grain. It could hardly do otherwise, when I was escaping from your family. So I will not make you the poor return of asking you in.”
“It was clearly my business to give you any help I could,” said Terence.
As Anna watched him go down the drive, her eyes lighted and deepened her face, so that it almost bore a look of Jessica. Her resolve to hold to her money had its root, had her cousin known it, in her feeling to himself. The woman who relinquished it, would be less acceptable in the end than the woman who held it. Anna could look beyond the hour; no credit or success of the moment weighed with her; a sacrifice easy to accept was easy to forget, and she would have been readier to make it, if it had had less reason.
Her father and brothers returned from the Calderons’ house. They could hardly sympathise both with Anna and their aunt, and hesitated to remain under the latter’s roof. Anna looked up and spoke in an ironic manner.
“Well, did you bring me any messages from my relatives?”
“One from your aunt,” said her father. “She hopes you will go to see them as usual, and they will like to come here.”
“Well, that is heaping coals of fire upon my head! But it is a course in which I never place much faith. It either means that people feel they owe it, or that they want to put the other person into their debt. I can always dispense with an obvious rendering of good for evil.”
“I think it sits rather naturally on Aunt Jessica,” said Bernard.
“I object to afterthoughts,” said his sister. “It is the feeling of the moment that counts. We can all do pretty well with enough reflection. Second thoughts are only best in that sense. Did you meet Terence on your way?”
“He came to his gates, as we went out of them,” said Benjamin.
“Well, let us forget the other family, Father. The mere fact of being under their roof is too much.”
“Your experience went beyond that,” said Esmond. “Now we can hear your account of what took place.”
“Oh, it was only words, words, words, if you mean what passed between Aunt Jessica and me. There was her opinion that Aunt Sukey’s will should be ignored, and another imagined, against mine that it should be accepted as it was made,” said Anna, in a swift, almost careless tone, that seemed to put the matter quickly behind. “This creating of wills to meet a situation does not hold water. I could not support it. It had to end in nothing.”
“As it had done before,” said Esmond.
“The matter should have been allowed to rest,” said Benjamin. “I do not say a word about your aunt; she is not to be judged as other people. But your uncle should have ensured it.”
“Oh, I agree with you, Father. I had the most terrible hour. It was not a fair way to treat a person under their roof. And to choose Aunt Sukey’s room, by way of refining the torment! But it roused the devil within me, and defeated its purpose. I became as different a person as Aunt Jessica. I do not blame her, and did not at the moment. I even felt inclined to yield to her in a sense. But I did not submit to the method she chose. That was not the way to my compassion.”
“It was fortunate for you that she chose it,” said Esmond.
“Your words have ceased to have any meaning,” said Benjamin to his son. “You would do as well not to waste them.”
“I cannot picture Aunt Jessica taking such a course,” said Bernard.
“I feel now that I could always have imagined it,” said his sister. “But I did not have to do so. I was confronted by the stark reality. And my imagination could achieve anything with regard to her now. She stimulates that faculty to uncanny feats.”
“Forget it, my daughter,” said Benjamin. “It was a difficult passage for both of you, and it is behind.”
“No, no, Father,” said Anna, shaking her head. “The scene is indelibly engraved on my memory. That room as the background, and Aunt Jessica and I grouped in the foreground, looking each other in the eyes! Or rather I doing that, and Aunt Jessica’s eyes going anywhere and everywhere but to my face. Strange, elusive eyes they are; they don’t seem to focus anywhere. I thought I should be afraid to meet them, that they would probe into my inmost soul, a thing that no one quite likes to face; but I found myself pursuing them, so that they should have to meet mine. The setting of the scene was supposed to bring me to my knees. But it had the opposite effect. It was such an obvious misuse of poor Aunt Sukey’s corner. And I don’t like clever and mean ideas. And now. I can never enter the room again, and not only for the natural reasons, but for these contrived and nameless ones.”
“As it is to be Uncle Thomas’s study, you may not incur much pressure to do so,” said Esmond.
“I disliked that use for it at first. I thought it was a rather cold and callous way of turning Aunt Sukey’s death to account. But it has come to seem a sort of protection. It will save both it and me from worse.”
“It is but a room,” said Bernard. “Let us hear more of the human scene enacted in it.”
“I wonder if Anna knows how little she has told us,” said Esmond.
“I should have thought I had told you all kinds of things that I hardly knew, myself,” said his sister, putting her hands to her cheeks. “Anyhow I have said all I can bring myself to utter of the sorry scene. The mere discomfort of it was enough. I have never felt such a weight of anything so vague. And Aunt Jessica gave me the strangest sense of guilt, and traded on the feeling until I quite admired her ingenuity and resource. She might have been a member of the Inquisition, and I her victim. And she is such an actress, whether she knows it or not, that I found myself overcome by her pathos, and undertaking not to betray her to her family.”
“A promise that you broke on the first opportunity,” said Esmond.
“Not at all. She was not referring to her claim on the money; everyone knew about that. It was the interchange of thoughts and opinions, that she did not want revealed.”
“You do not share the feeling,” said Esmond.
“Don’t I? You told me just now how little I had told you. It would be a certain relief to put it all off my mind. It is a good deal to keep bottled up within me. But she is Aunt Sukey’s sister, after all, and I am her niece, and that can be the end of the matter.”
“It was strange to exact such a promise after such a scene,” said Benjamin.
“Yes,” said Anna, nodding towards him, as if she shared the view, “it was the most contradictory state of affairs. We might have been inmates of a madhouse. I hardly knew where I was.”
“Then it hardly mattered your being in Aunt Sukey’s room,” said Esmond.
“But she managed to suggest her wishes, and I found I had fallen in with them,” went on his sister, as if she had not heard. “It seems a weak thing to do. I am not proud of it. It was more suggestibility and reluctance to struggle with a virtual invalid, than anything better.”
“I daresay Aunt Jessica is not seeking to impute any higher motives.”
“Oh, no,” said Anna, lightly. “Even if I relinquished the money, she would not do that. She would accept it as her due, as she accepts all else that she is given.”
“She would not claim it, if she did not see it as that,” said Benjamin. “We do her that justice. She is not a stranger to us.”
“Mere justice is not at all to her mind, Father,” said Anna, shaking her head. “She is used to so much more. All her family give it to her, some of them reluctantly, I admit, and perhaps Uncle Thomas as a way of avoiding trouble. Even Aunt Sukey showed her magnanimity. She had a much scantier measure herself.”
“Except from her sister,” said Benjamin.
“Yes, Aunt Jessica came out above herself there,” said Anna in full concession. “Aunt Sukey brought out her higher side. I am the first to recognise it.”
“And did you bring out her lower?” said Esmond.
“Well, something did,” said his sister, sighing. “And as no one else was there, I suppose it was me. There is a pleasant reflection. Of course it was the money really.”
“Well, you have kept your hold of it,” said Bernard. “Through fire and water you have come, with it in your hands. And to lose it without the honour of freely relinquishing it would be too much. And that does emerge as the alternative.”
“It will be a long time before I can treat it as my own, with Aunt Jessica’s eyes fixed upon me. I can hardly imagine myself using it with a free hand. And of course we shall not have it yet. There will be death duties and other things.”
“Those are generally paid out of capital,” said Bernard.
“I think I should like to meet them out of income,” said his sister, in a considered manner. “I don’t want to reduce the legacy at the outset. I would rather keep what is virtually a gift from Aunt Sukey, whole and intact, as she left it, so that I can see it as she saw it herself, all my life.”
“It might certainly meet a different fate in the hands of Aunt Jessica,” said Esmond. “Perhaps Aunt Sukey left it to you, to save it from being dispersed. People like to feel that their hoard will survive them, as a monument of themselves. They do not want their last traces to be obliterated.”
“Well, why should they?” said Anna. “And how like you to use the word, ‘hoard’! I can understand their point of view. It is said that money is left to people who do not need it, and there may be something underlying it. I do not say there is not. ‘Money to money’ is a phrase, isn’t it? That rather bears out the view, and may throw light on Aunt Sukey’s decision.”
“Your Aunt Jessica was speaking of the funeral,” said Benjamin, his voice recalling that there was another side to the matter. “It is to be on Friday. No doubt some of us should go.”
“I suppose all of us,” said his daughter. “There does not seem to be any reason for avoiding it, though I should rather like to find one. I do not look forward to the ceremony. It seems to set the final and irrevocable seal on everything.”
“Are the rest of us supposed to anticipate it?” said Claribel, glancing at Anna’s brothers.
“Do we not realise that this particular lane has no turning?” said Esmond.
“Oh, nothing is the same to any two people,” said Anna.
“Aunt Jessica is not going,” said Reuben. “She is going to stay at home with Julius and Dora.”
“Then I think that releases me,” said Anna, looking round. “I do not see why I should face what she will not. I will remain behind with Reuben. I don’t much care for the experience for him. And I never think a funeral is in a woman’s line.”
“My first will certainly be my own,” said Claribel, “and I would stay away from that, if I could.”
“Well, that is a natural point of view,” said Bernard.
“I think it would be better for me to go,” said Reuben. “I have never seen a funeral, and if Bernard and Esmond are going, it would attract attention if the third brother stayed away.”
Anna looked from him to the others with grim humour.
“Well, my sons and I will go,” said Benjamin, his voice betraying his view of his command of this escort.
“And Jenney will go, won’t she?” said Reuben, feeling he had made a rash undertaking.
“Yes, I will go with you,” said Jenney, in a tone of giving a promise.
“And your daughter will be here to welcome you back, Father,” said Anna. “You will be glad of someone who has kept aloof, by the time you reach the climax.”
“I suppose Tullia is going,” said Bernard. “I did not hear that she was not.”
“Oh, Tullia can cast things off,” said Anna. “And she may prefer a funeral to an hour with Aunt Jessica.”
“She does not feel to her mother in that way,” said Benjamin. “You must know that she does not.”
“Oh, well, I may read into her mind what would be in my own. It is inevitable that I should do so. Aunt Jessica has made an end of things between her family and me. But I should have thought her way of making people feel at a disadvantage would hardly be in Tullia’s line.”
“It would not be in mine,” said Bernard, “but I cannot say I have felt it.”
“No,” said Anna, looking at him in unprejudiced consideration, “I don’t suppose you have. I should say it would be like that; a man would escape. Now Terence would rather be with his mother than face the funeral.”
“Is Aunt Jessica not a nice person?” said Reuben.
“She has different sides, like most of us,” said his sister.
“You do not seem to like her.”
“Well, I hardly could, considering the aspect she has shown to me. But there is no reason why you should not, if she shows you a different one. And she has been very kind to you, hasn’t she?”
“Do you think it is so very wrong to think she ought to have Aunt Sukey’s money?”
“No, I think it is quite natural. I should have thought she ought myself, if Aunt Sukey had died without a will. But there are different methods of trying to put right what you feel is wrong, and she did not choose a good or kind one. You have heard so much, that you must hear just a little more. And we should always accept wills without any question, because they are a kind of message from someone who is dead. We all want Aunt Sukey’s wishes to be carried out, don’t we?”
“Doesn’t Aunt Jessica want them to be?”
“Oh, I don’t know, I am sure,” said Anna, turning away and speaking in a voice with a sigh in it.