“How long would you have thought it? You would have seen and heard. You are not a person who does not do both. And I did not break it off. I should not have done so. I would not let anyone think it. Least of all would I let you. What would you think of me? What should I think of myself?”
“Yes, I see I had to know. And the knowledge in itself is nothing. It is the mystery and meaning that smother it. But I shall do my part. It is an easier one than yours.”
“Hamish and I have ended our feeling,” said Naomi. “The sense of our relationship helped us. It is true that we needed help.”
“And I thought I had little in my life,” said Hamish, looking from one to the other. “Now I have both of you, I feel it is so much.”
“I wish I had less,” said Marcia, smiling. “All this that surrounds me, and all these relations who are something else! It stretches over the future.”
“And we seem a fated family,” said Ralph. “Claud is resolved to marry Emma. And we must admit it is on our line.”
“I am sorry for such talk,” said Simon. “I should have thought my son would know better.”
“You surely had not such a hope of me, sir.”
“It is true that I am hardly given it.”
“I wish you had never had to leave this house,” said Marcia to Simon. “I wish it could have been different. It seems it might have been. Hamish could not be your son, and yet had to be, when his life denied it. It is a hard, sad thing. And it came from so little.”
“The last word is a true and kind one.”
“It is the only one. How often you have said it!”
“We must not say it again. The truth is not to be thought or said. It is as if it had not been.”
“You know it is not. It will never be. It might be so more, if we were not all here together, if Hamish and I were somewhere else. It is Hamish who forces it to the surface, so that it follows us with all that must be hidden. And the cloud is lasting. It will never lift.”
“It all seems to settle into something we accept and do not question. We learn to live with it.”
“Because for you there is no escape. You are bound to this place, that shadows you with a dead past and a threatened future. But as I am added to your other women, I suffer something more than they. I can never send my roots down here, only move on the surface, uneasy and aloof. It is so much less than they have given.”
“It is a good deal from you,” said Simon. “It would come to be more. And Hamish promised his father to take his place.”
“He had made an earlier promise. That claim is the first.”
“I could not accept it. I waited for it to be withdrawn. I was glad when it was.”
“You were glad to allow it to be, to do what you owed to yourself, feeling you owed more, because of the one betrayal. That is not gladness.”
“It was the kind I could have. The other was not for me. I have only the right to forget it. Here are the children come to greet you, before they go to bed. Come and say ‘how-do-you-do?’ to Cousin Marcia.”
“Is she really our cousin?” said Claud.
“She is your cousin by marriage. That is what you will call her.”
“I don’t expect we shall call her anything,” said Emma. “You can speak to people without a name.”
“I shall know whom you mean,” said Marcia. “Am I what you thought I should be?”
“Well, you are older,” said Claud. “And taller and not like Naomi. When you are really instead of her, it is strange for you to be so different.”
“It might seem that Hamish couldn’t like both of you,” said Emma. “But of course we know he did.”
“No one is instead of anyone else,” said Julia. “Everyone has his own place.”
“Don’t you mean her place?” said Claud. “There was really only one for both of them. Unless one of them was a concubine, and we know they weren’t that. Then he might have had hundreds.”
“I don’t think he might,” said Emma. “Solomon was a king.”
“Are you glad that Hamish has given you this house?” said Claud. “He was going to give it to Naomi. But as she didn’t marry him, there is nothing unfair.”
“I think it is too large and old a house for me.”
“It is not what you are used to,” said Emma, in sympathy. “We never want to stay in it. Though it is better than an orphanage would be.”
“Well, you may leave it,” said Simon. “And your nurse is waiting. So say good-night and run away.”
“Why do people say ‘run’, when they don’t mean it?” said Claud. “Must we say good-night to everyone at the table?”
“No, only to Cousin Marcia and Grandma and Mother.”
“Shan’t we say it to Uncle Walter? He is getting old.”
“Well, you can say it to him, though he is younger than I am.”
“But you are giving the directions,” said Emma. “So you would not say anything was due to yourself.”
“Why were they thinking of an orphanage?” said Marcia.
“We all have to think of an alternative shelter,” said Ralph. “We are not to depend on our present one.”
“Oh, it corresponds to the workhouse at their age.”
“These are boyish young men,” said Simon, as they rose from the table.
“They scarcely seem so,” said Marcia. “The thought of the workhouse has come soon. In youth it is an end for other people.”
“Not in our youth,” said Ralph.
Marcia glanced at Simon’s face and said no more.
“You see it all,” said Hamish, moving to her. “My birth dispossessed Cousin Simon and broke up his future. And my promise to withdraw on my father’s death changed things and gave it back to him. But he accepted my later word to my father, and wished me to keep it, indeed looked for the change. And he knows he caused his displacement himself, and has no grievance.”
“So it means so much to him?” said Marcia. “Does Graham feel the same?”
“He might, if he allowed himself to. But he sees things as they are.”
“Your cousin does too, and cannot bear the sight. You do not love the place as they do?”
“Not as much. My mother did not help me. She has hardly felt at home in the house, or felt it to be her home. She found it as you do, oppressive to a stranger. But you will cease to be so. Cousin Simon will help you. I think he has begun.”
Marcia looked at Simon’s tall, set figure, dark, grave eyes and firm, controlled face, and looked again about her.
“This is his place,” she said. “It is time he had it. And it is not for him. That is his tragedy. That is the reason of the talk of the workhouse and the orphanage, and the jests that have something behind them. His family is not where it should be, or should have been; he is not there.”
Walter came up to Marcia.
“Do you like sitting in your place at table, and displacing Hamish’s mother? I ask because I want to know. It is not petty curiosity. Petty is the last word. It is great and deep.”
“I like it no more than she does. I daresay less. I don’t want to be there, or anywhere under this roof. I wonder how anyone comes to rest beneath it. What is your feeling?”
“To me it is my background. Coming here is coming home. I see my brother as the head, and Hamish as a herald of the future, come to it out of due time.”
“I see it as you do, and Hamish as you see him. This home in the past has no meaning for me. I want to have one I can hold and help to grow. The time for it had come, and I let it pass. And Hamish in his heart is with me. I am doing him no service.”
“Your position here will give you something of its own.”
“Perhaps it will, but I would choose something else. I am not proud of being the mistress here. I see no cause for pride. I see Hamish’s mother unseated, and know I may be myself one day. I have no roots here, no rights here, only the right of occupation and service until my use is past. Hamish himself has nothing here except on a life tenure. It is not enough for us, just as it is too much. And his father would be in his place, fulfilled and useful, ready to yield it in his time in the way the past has sanctified. Which is the better thing?”