Mother and Son (15 page)

“It seems we might ask you to stay with us, Miss Wolsey,” said Julius; “and manage the house and have
your eye on us all. Would you be prepared to think of it?”

“Father, may I second the request? A home is an unsteady bark without a woman at the helm.”

“I will stay indeed and do my best for you. I see there are things I can do. I am as interested in the young as in the old. And I am glad not to go again among strangers. I am not very fitted for my new life.”

“The demand on our own courage should help us to realise that on yours,” said Rosebery. “May we be as equal to it as you are.”

“It is not a very vigorous quality in me.”

“Miss Wolsey, it has not failed you.”

“It has threatened to at times. Often it has nearly turned tail and fled. But I have managed to recall it.”

“Then we may depend on you?” said Julius. “We are glad to be guided by someone chosen by my wife.”

“Father, I have felt it too deeply to say it,” said Rosebery, as though the sentiment should have been his.

“So you understand,” said Julius to the children. “Miss Wolsey takes your aunt's place, as far as anyone can.”

“And that is not at all,” said Hester. “She takes her own place, that of housekeeper and manager; and she will be an adviser when she may be.”

“I hope we know how to honour the attitude,” said Rosebery.

“It is really the same as Uncle said,” said Adrian.

“It is exactly the same as he meant,” said Hester.

“Miss Wolsey,” said Rosebery, “we have to thank you
for another service, that of rendering this occasion possible to us. Without you it had been a dark hour. It had crossed my mind that I could not face it.”

“We have no choice but to go on,” said Julius.

Adrian looked at him with his eyes filling with tears.

“Ah, Adrian, I could wish that my years did not preclude that form of relief,” said Rosebery. “It is, after all, the natural and time-honoured one. We are debarred from it by convention.”

“Adrian must envy him,” murmured Alice. “He has nothing to debar him.”

“Well, it had to come, and it is over,” said Hester. “We all felt inclined to do the same.”

“I cannot help feeling, Father,” said Rosebery, “that it is befitting that some tears should be shed, and sympathising with the one of us most entitled to shed them. I feel my mother would look with a compassionate eye on the weakness, if such it be.”

The people actually doing this were Adrian's brother and sister.

“We should most of us look kindly on the emotion caused by our death.”

“Father, you strike your own note. To-day is to be no exception. You go through it as yourself. But we are not deceived.”

“I wish Rosebery did not do the same,” murmured Alice.

“Come upstairs and have your supper in the schoolroom,” said Bates over Adrian's shoulder.

“Poor child!” said Hester, as he rose and disappeared.

“Miss Wolsey, I could fancy I heard a voice saying
those words of me,” said Rosebery. “I cannot overcome a feeling that I have just emerged from childhood.”

“Why does he think he has done so?” said Francis to his sister.

“It is a good thing Adrian is not here.”

“It was far from my thoughts,” said Rosebery, not looking at anyone, “to work on the emotions or to make a bid for pity. I was simply uttering a thought to a possibly receptive ear.”

“Miss Wolsey finds us indeed dependent on her,” said Julius.

“I think, Father, that a tendency to be overwrought must be a feature of the occasion. We have to bear with each other.”

“I think we may say that we do so.”

“I have never been afraid to put my thoughts into words, if that is what you mean. I think to be ashamed of voicing our feelings has something in common with being ashamed of the feelings themselves.”

“It is not the accepted view,” said Francis. “It is still waters that are said to run deep.”

“I was not talking of the accepted view. I was egoistic enough to be speaking of my own.”

“We are not supposed to wear our hearts on our sleeves, though I see no harm in it.”

“There is such a thing as not having a heart to wear.”

“There can, of course, be no proof but an outward one,” said Julius.

“Rosebery thinks that Francis and I are without hearts,” said Alice.

“I think quite a different thing. I think, nay, I know, that your feeling for my mother was not a jot or a tittle of what mine was,” said Rosebery, breathing heavily.

“Why should it have been?” said Julius.

“Father, you are right. There was no reason. If I gave much, much was given.”

“Shall we have to go to the funeral?” said Francis.

“You will not have to,” said Rosebery. “The question is whether your feeling will suggest it.”

“Francis can come with you and me,” said Julius. “Adrian is too young, and I should not take a girl.”

“I think you are right that it should be a masculine prerogative. If that is the word; and in the sense of privilege it is. Miss Wolsey, may we hope to have you with us? Do your qualities put you above the feminine level in such things?”

“They will put me with the children. The feminine level is sometimes the one to be observed.”

“I shall be glad for them not to be alone,” said Julius.

“I had not thought of it, Father, being one of those who are now always alone.”

“You identify your cousins too much with yourself.”

“You are wrong. I am far from doing so.”

“Your feeling would not be what it is, if everyone shared it,” said Francis.

“That is true. But I might be glad not to walk in utter solitude. Not that I have done so hitherto. Even a few hours seem to have been too much for me.”

“They have not been good hours,” said Julius.

“Not for anyone, Father? I do not claim a monopoly of feeling.”

“Only of the deepest feeling. I have my different trouble.”

“Father, you have, and a more complex one than mine,” said Rosebery, in a tone of recollection at once sudden and guarded. “Mine is a simple sorrow, un-confused; I had almost said, unsullied. It does not fit me to follow yours.”

“We seldom meet on common ground.”

“I am trying your forbearance. I am used to having an ear, and I am not of a reticent nature. As I have said, silence does not seem to me an indication of much, or a proof of anything.”

“I have noticed you do not observe it.”

“Father, I have tried you indeed. I think there was nothing in my words to warrant that tone. Ah, it is a strange irony. I need my mother's comfort for the loss of her. But I will make a demand on no one. I will ask for the touch of no hand, the sound of no voice. My memories must be enough.”

“You are not the only person who has a grief.”

“Father,” said Rosebery leaning forward, “am I the only person?”

“To your own mind it is clear that you are.”

“And to her who dwells with us, though veiled from our sight, what is the answer?”

“You two children may go now,” said Julius, not looking at his son. “I will come and see you later. Go upstairs and be companions for each other. We have to talk of things outside your range.”

“Miss Wolsey, those words do not apply to you,” said Rosebery, as Hester also rose. “Your scope is surely wider.”

“We will not ask her to include our family matters in it. Perhaps she will go to the schoolroom.”

“There is no perhaps about it. That is where I am going. There are things there indeed that are within my range. I am not going to let them be outside it.”

There was a silence between the men when they were alone.

“Father, things are going ill between us, and in this hour of all others of our lives. I find the new knowledge makes them harder for me. Hitherto, whatever I have been to you, I have been your only child. Now I am the least of your children. And I have to know I have long been that. It is a great change.”

“You are what you have thought you were. There is to be no word on this between us. You must know what other men know. Everything has an ear.”

“I must say the word once, Father.”

“You must not. It is unsaid.”

“I think I will have an hour alone; or an hour with my feeling that I am not alone; and perhaps in a sense to learn to be alone. Do not let me disturb you. I will go to my mother's room.”

“You can go to the library. I am going upstairs. And when we meet again, we will meet on our usual ground.”

As Julius reached the schoolroom, he heard the young voices through the door.

“Are we ungrateful people?” said Adrian.

“Yes,” said his brother.

“I don't want to be ungrateful.”

“Neither do we,” said Alice. “We are.”

“Would it be possible to be glad that someone was dead?”

“All things are possible, as you know,” said Francis.

“Well, as he knows now,” said Alice.

“It is possible to wish that someone was alive and a little different,” said Hester.

“You will be good to Rosebery,” said Julius, opening the door. “I find it hard to be so. And I cannot tell myself the reason. It may be that he took so much of his mother's feeling. The bad reason would be the true one.”

“It is not in this case,” said Hester, rising. “I cannot help breaking in. I already know you well enough to say it.”

“I should have been a better father. We resent a person we have wronged.”

“You have wronged no one. I am a judge of people, and I know it. I cannot help saying what I know.”

“Other creatures stop caring for their children, when they are full-grown,” said Adrian.

“I have not done that,” said Julius, smiling. “I have never cared for him enough. He has a lifelong grievance. I ought to know it must lie between us. You are kind to me, Miss Wolsey. And it is kind of you to be here.”

“Aunt Miranda chose Miss Wolsey,” said Adrian.

“And chose her for herself,” said Francis. “And that is a judgement to follow.”

“We shall go on following her judgement,” said
Hester. “We are a clan with our head gone. I feel I have become a member of it.”

“There is one of us sitting alone,” said Julius. “I cannot do anything for him. If I go to him, I shall do him harm. I have done it on the day of his mother's death.”

The door opened and Rosebery entered with a rueful smile.

“My resolve to be alone has failed me, Father. I found I could not realise the companionship I knew was there. The fault lay in my own feebleness. I felt I must have recourse to ordinary human fellowship. I went to the drawing-room to join Miss Wolsey, but remembered she had sought the same relief.”

“You are complete without me now,” said Hester. “I will leave you to each other.”

“You will not take my appearance as the token for your signal departure? The step might be open to dubious interpretation. And your presence helps to veil the fact that we are not complete.”

“It cannot do enough in that way to make a difference.”

“Miss Wolsey,” said Rosebery, in a low, startled tone, “you did not misinterpret me? You did not take me to suggest that anything could compensate—could be a substitute—take me to mean what could not be meant? If you did, I do not wonder you felt inclined to rise and go.”

“Miss Wolsey meant what she said,” said Julius. “And you appear to mean the same.”

“Can Aunt Miranda see us now?” said Adrian, with his eyes wide.

“I hope not, if you make that grimace,” said Francis. “Anyhow I hope she is not looking.”

There was some mirth, during which Rosebery kept his eyes on the window.

“I think such a time as this may tend to easy emotions,” he said, bringing them slowly back again. “We must take it as true that they may be one at bottom. But I do not see it as an occasion for deliberate jest.”

“I meant what I said,” said Francis.

“Do men ever marry someone else, when their wives die?” said Adrian.

“You must know they do,” said Hester, gently. “You have heard of second marriages.”

“But Uncle would not do it?”

“That is enough, Adrian,” said Rosebery, with contracting brows.

But Adrian had lost his hold on himself.

“Would he be allowed to marry Miss Wolsey?”

“He would be allowed to by law,” said Alice.

“That is the way to put it, Alice,” said Rosebery. “We know what it is, that would not allow it. And Miss Wolsey does not misunderstand me.”

“And if she had wanted to marry, she would have married before,” said Adrian.

“Yes, yes, no doubt she would,” said Hester, in a low, repressive tone.

“Can Aunt Miranda hear what we say?”

“I hope not, if you talk like that,” said Francis. “Anyhow I hope she is not listening.”

“Does she mind being dead?”

“If she can mind, she cannot be dead,” said Alice.

“But does she mind not being here?”

“How can I know? It seems as if she must.”

“It does, Alice,” said Rosebery. “It does seem that her mind must linger on the scenes and faces of what we call her life. We have not the imagination to follow her. We are limited to our sphere.”

“Is it better to be dead?” said Adrian.

“To be what we call dead? It is probably better.”

“Do people really think it is? If they did, they would be glad to die.”

“It is the imagination that fails,” said Rosebery.

“Everything fails in me,” said Francis.

“And you say it with a note of complacence. A lack of belief strikes many as a ground for such a feeling. It is a strange and pathetic thing.”

“It is the freedom from credulity that strikes them in that way.”