“Well, if you did all you could! It is known that no one can do more.”
“Well, it is in the past. Our way is clear. My heart sings at the thought. It leaps for them and for ourselves. Let us celebrate it, Joanna. This renews the days when our yoke was easy and our burden light.”
The pair moved together and executed movements reminiscent of these days, while Galleon’s large, pale eyes surveyed them from his large, pale face, his large, pale, skilful hands perhaps more usefully employed.
Sir Michael and his wife were both grey-haired and dark-eyed, tall and upright and active for their age. They were distant cousins, and a likeness was sometimes discerned in them. Sir Michael’s broad features had a look of having failed to mature, while Joanna’s, of similar type, were strongly formed and marked with lines of mirth. His hands, inert and solid and somehow kind, seemed a part of himself; and hers, spare and active and also kind, had a life of their own. Their common age of sixty was acknowledged by Joanna openly, and would not have been owned by Sir Michael at all, if his wife could have been depended on.
“Well, here is a scene,” said their daughter’s voice. “Shall we find ourselves equal to it? We have put away childish things.”
“Come, it is too soon for such a pose. Come and join your mother and me. Try to be as young as we are. We are celebrating good news. Good for ourselves and others; that is the happy part. Joy for ourselves is not true joy for us. This is the real thing.”
“Say what has happened,” said Zillah to her mother, as though taking the shortest line to the truth.
“Some money has fallen in. Some land is sold. We could pay what we owe, if the money was not capital. Or if capital was money, as your father thinks it is. He feels so kindly to creditors. And people so seldom do. I never speak of them myself. It might sound as if we were in debt.”
Zillah Egerton was shorter than her mother, and seemed to be darker, as she was not grey-haired. She had Joanna’s definite features, but not Sir Michael’s look of ease. She gave an impression of controlled energy, as Hereward gave one of effort to keep his under control. The gravity and perception of her face seemed the complement of the force in his. At thirty-two and thirty-four they had the air and poise of middle age.
“The land by the river!” said Hereward, guided to the letter by a sign from Galleon. “Of course the money is capital. It must be invested. It is an appreciable part of the estate. Debts must be paid out of income. They were contracted in the ordinary course. They would be incurred again, if this method of payment were followed. You suggested that we should be as young as you are. It is a good thing we are not.”
“Now come, think again,” said Sir Michael. “Let your thought go below the surface; let it go a little deep, pass beyond ourselves. The money is not ours to invest. Others have the prior claim. Money that is owed belongs to the people it is owed to. We must be just to them, before we are generous to ourselves and our own ideas.”
“Papa, you deceive no one,” said Zillah. “I suppose you don’t really deceive yourself.”
“I really try to,” said Joanna. “I don’t understand money matters, and I keep my eyes from them, in case they are really easy to understand. It is best not to listen to Hereward, when clever people make everything clear in a few words.”
“I hardly seem to do so,” said her son. “But I must ask my father to hear me. He cannot keep his eyes from the truth. I have no choice but to force it upon him. He is not a woman.”
“Force it upon me! There is a way to talk. Am I or am I not your father? And not a woman! Why should I be one? Are you a woman yourself?”
“Neither of us is a child. And you are not an old man. You may have a future before you. And you are on a road that has no turning. You must simply retrace your steps.”
“I will have no trouble for your mother,” said Sir Michael, in a warning tone. “If anything you mean involves that, leave it unsaid. If other people suffer, she suffers with them. That is a thing I will not have, and there is an end of it.”
“There is an end of it all,” said Hereward, after a pause. “There need have been no beginning. I will not waste my words. It is a waste of what is behind them, and that would mean another end. I will let you have the money, and replace it from what I earn. I can’t see the place bled to death.”
“Well, no, we can’t. I feel it as much as you do. There is the future to consider. We have to think of other lives. There may be descendants in the end. Of course we feel there will be. You are a good son, Hereward. We have reason to be grateful to you. We are not afraid of the word.”
“It is the natural one,” said Zillah. “I wonder if you know how little you should be afraid of it.”
“I don’t dare to know,” said Joanna. “I shut my eyes to the truth. It does seem that we are eating our cake and having it. And I should have thought we were, if it was not known to be impossible.”
“It is, unless someone supplies another cake.”
“Yes, well, that is true,” said Sir Michael, on a rueful note. “Yes, well, that is what it is. And we must be thankful for it. And thankful that the money comes in. It is strange that it should come just from writing books like novels. It seems such a light sort of thing. But of course people do earn by it, even more than by serious books they say. Well, if it is so, we are the better for it.”
“It is one of the most exacting of the arts,” said Zillah. “Few people can go far in it.”
“Is it? Is that so? Well, you know best. But I always feel I could write a novel, if I tried. But I am a bad person for trying, and that is the truth.”
“You may be a bad person for achieving. Anyone can try.”
“Is that really true?” said Joanna. “Could we all settle down and make an effort? Then I will just forget it.”
“Well, so will I,” said her husband. “I don’t know what I could have done, if I had been able for that. I often feel possibilities welling up within me. But it is late for them to get out. The time is past.”
“You are both talking of what you don’t understand.”
“Well, otherwise should we not talk too little?” said Joanna. “And not to either of you at all?”
“Well, I think I can understand a novel,” said Sir Michael. “It would be odd if I couldn’t manage that. It is not as if it had thought or learning in it. It is just about ordinary experiences that anyone might have. There is no question of not understanding.”
“They are imaginary,” said Zillah. “And imagination is the highest kind of thought.”
“Well, writers must imagine something, if they haven’t any knowledge. They must put something into a book. And they put in actual events and people; even the great ones; it seems to be accepted. I never know why they are great myself. It seems an easy thing to do. And it can’t be called imagination, whatever kind of thought it is.”
“We can mistake Hereward’s silence. It is his way of being patient,” said Zillah, showing she had found no way herself.
“Patient, is he? Well, I think other people have to be that. Why, he can’t be approached about anything, and is put out, if his door is opened twice in a day. He can’t have a room without a door, and it has to be put to its natural use. He says it drives things out of his head. But he can think of something else. It can’t be so hard, or he could not write all those books. Long ones too; I give him credit there. The mere writing must be a task, even if there isn’t much more to it. But I wonder he did not work on a man’s line, while he was about it.”
“What do you do on what you call a man’s line yourself?”