‘So you had, dear, and it gives us such pleasure to hear it,’ said Matty, raising her face from her chair. ‘I did hope that some of you would feel that and come to tell us so. It seemed to me that you would, and I see I was not wrong. One, two, three, four dear faces! Only three left at home. It is such a help to us in starting again, and it is a thing which does need help. You don’t know that yet, and may it be long before you do.’
‘Well, I judged it, Aunt Matty, and that is why I am here. Of course, you must need courage. You can’t start again without a good deal of looking back. That must be part of it. And I did feel a wish to say a word to help you to look forward.’
Blanche looked at her daughter in simple appreciation; Edgar threw her a glance and withdrew it; and Oliver surveyed the scene as if it were not his concern.
‘You help us, dear, indeed,’ said Matty. ‘It was a kind and loving wish, and as such we accept it and will try to let it do its work.’
‘I know you will, Aunt Matty dear; I know your inexhaustible fund of courage. You know, I am of those who remember you of old, straight and tall and proud, as you appeared to my childish eyes. My feeling for you has its ineradicable root in the past.’
The words brought a silence, and Justine, fair in all her dealings, broke it herself.
‘How are you, Miss Griffin?’ she said, shaking hands with great cordiality, and then sitting down and seeming to render the room at once completely full. ‘Now this is a snug little cottage parlour. Now, how do you take to it, Aunt Matty?’
‘We shall be content in it, dear. We mean to be. And where there is a will there is a way. And it should not be difficult to come to like it, our little cottage parlour. Those are good and pretty words for it. They give the idea without any adding to it or taking away.’
‘It is not a cottage, dear,’ said Blanche, looking at her daughter.
‘Isn’t it, Mother? Well, no, we know it strictly is not. But it gives all the idea of one somehow. And I mean nothing disparaging; I like a roomy cottage. When I am a middle-aged woman and Mark is supreme in the home, I shall like nothing better than to have perhaps this very little place, and reign in it, and do all I can for people outside. Now does not that strike you all as an alluring prospect?’
‘Yes, it sounds very nice,’ said Miss Griffin, who thought that it did, and who was perhaps the natural person to reply, as the arrangement involved the death of most of the other people present.
‘I don’t think it gives the idea of a cottage at all,’ said Blanche, looking round with contracting eyes. ‘The rooms are so high and the windows so broad. One could almost imagine oneself anywhere.’
‘But not quite,’ said her sister, bending her head and looking up at the men from under it. ‘We can’t, for example, imagine ourselves where we used to be.’
‘Well, no, not there, dear. We must both of us leave that. It was my old home too, as you seem to forget.’
‘No, dear. You do at times, I think. That is natural. You have put too much over it. Other things have overlaid the memory. I chose to keep it clear and by itself. There is the difference.’
‘Well, it is natural, Aunt Matty,’ said Justine. ‘I don’t think Mother must be blamed for it. There is a difference.’
‘Yes, dear, and so you will not blame her. I have said that I do not. And is the old aunt already making herself tiresome? She must be so bright and easy as an invalid in a strange place?’
‘Come, Aunt Matty, invalid is not the word. You are disabled, we know, and we do not underrate the handicap, but your invalidism begins and ends there. Now I am not going to countenance any repining. You are in your virtual prime; you have health and looks and brains; and we are going to expect a good deal from you.’
‘My dear, did Aunt Matty ask you to sum up her position?’ said Blanche, a faint note of triumphant pride underlying her reproof.
‘No, Mother, you know she did not, so why put the question? I did not wait to be asked; it is rather my way not to. You need not put on a disapproving face. I have to be taken as I am. I do not regret what I said, and Aunt Matty will not when she thinks it over.’
‘Or forgets it,’ said her aunt. ‘Yes, I think that is what Aunt Matty had better do. She has not the will or the energy to think it over at this juncture of her life. And forgetting it will be better, so that is the effort she must make.’
‘Now I am in disgrace, but I do not regard it. I have had my say and I always find that enough,’ said Justine, who was wise in this attitude, as she would seldom have been advised to go further.
‘How very unlike Edgar and Justine are, dear!’ said Matty to her sister. ‘They have not a touch of each other, and they say that daughters are like their fathers. They are both indeed themselves.’
‘Well, that is as well,’ said Justine. ‘Father would not like me to be a copy of him. He would not feel the attraction of opposites.’
‘Opposite. Yes, that is almost the word,’ said her aunt.
Miss Griffin gave the sudden, sharp breath of someone awaking from a minute’s sleep, and looked about with bewildered eyes.
‘Poor Miss Griffin, you are tired out,’ said Blanche.
‘I am so glad you got off for a minute, Miss Griffin,’ said Justine.
‘I did not know where I was; I must have dropped off with all the voices round me,’ said Miss Griffin, with a view of the talk which she would hardly have taken if she had heard it. ‘I don’t know why I did, I am sure.’
‘Being overtired is quite enough reason,’ said Justine.
‘So Miss Griffin is the first of us to make it one,’ said Matty in an easy tone.
‘It is a stronger reason in her case.’
‘Is it, dear?’ said Matty, so lightly that she hardly seemed to enunciate the words.
‘Why, Aunt Matty, she must have done twice as much as you — as anyone else. You know that.’
‘Twice as much as I have, dear? Many times as much, I daresay; I have been able to do hardly anything. And of course I know it.’ Matty gave her little laugh. ‘But what we have mostly done today, is sitting in the train, and we have done it together.’
‘Yes, but the preparations before and the unpacking afterwards! It must have been overwhelming. The time in the train must have been quite a respite.’
‘Yes, that is what I meant, dear.’
‘But it was only one day, only part of one. The work must have begun directly you reached this house. I can see how much has been achieved. You can’t possibly grasp it, sitting in a chair.’
‘So sitting in a chair has become an advantage, has it?’
‘Poor, dear Aunt Matty!’ said Justine, sitting on the arm of the chair, as if to share for the moment her aunt’s lot. ‘But it cannot contribute to the actual weariness, you know. That is a thing by itself.’
‘So there is only one kind of weariness,’ said Matty, putting her hand on her niece’s and speaking in a tone of gentle tolerance towards her unknowing youth.
‘Dear Aunt Matty! There must be times when to be hustled and driven seems the most enviable thing in the world. You are more unfortunate than anyone,’ said Justine, indicating and accepting her aunt’s lot and Miss Griffin’s.
Miss Griffin rose and went to the door with an explanatory look at Matty. Dudley opened it and followed her.
‘How do people feel on a first night in a new place? I have never had the experience. I have lived in the same house all my life.’
Miss Griffin lifted her eyes with a look he had not expected, almost of consternation.
‘It does make you feel uncertain about things. But I expect you soon get used to it. I was in the last house thirty-one years. Miss Seaton had never lived in any other.’