Terence took her arm, but Tullia lightly shook her head and laid her hand on a book. The mother preferred to be alone with her son, and the daughter would not waste her companionship. Another demand for it came almost at once.
“Well, Tulliola, will you take your father round the garden?”
Tullia accepted her father’s arm and went out of the house at his side. She passed the other pair without a glance, though Thomas smiled at his wife, and Jessica kept her eyes on him until she found herself looking back.
Thomas Calderon was a large, solid man of sixty-two; with a broad, lively face, deep, greenish eyes like those of his younger children, rough-hewn features inherited by Julius, and in a better form by Dora; solid, active hands, a deep ringing voice, and an expression that told of joviality and cynicism, sentiment and emotion. He carried his family burdens to the best of his power, never evading or bending beneath them, sustained his wife, sheltered her sister, and did his day’s work with little complaint of the demands upon him. It was said that he took things lightly, and it might have been said that he took them well. He had a great love for his daughter, a tried and anxious affection for his wife, and somewhat to his surprise a liking for his son. He was a journalist, critic and writer, which was enough to explain his regret that Terence was nothing, but would have preferred to be only the last. He had suffered the fate of the younger son, and found himself a poor man after a prosperous youth. His earnings were slight in proportion to his effort; his personal means were small; and he was glad of his wife’s portion and of her sister’s help to his household. Thomas hated shift and straitness, and loved the formal and complete, and betrayed himself more than he knew, when he said, as he often did, that to him his house was home.
“Is your mother well to-day, my dear, and your aunt as usual, and Terence doing what he can?”
Tullia went into her light mirth.
“That is how it all is. It is a fair summing-up of the situation.”
“You must throw off the troubles that are not yours, my child. It is not fair that you should carry them. Your own will come in time.”
Tullia did not say, perhaps hardly knew, that this was her natural method.
“Such a line is not appreciated in the eldest daughter.”
“It is wrong to assign certain burdens to certain places.”
“I did not mean that I could not steer my own course. I only meant that it was marked and silently condemned.”
“Well, repay silence with silence,” said Thomas. “It is a thing that seldom merits anything else. And I hope great things of the coming reunion. The brother and sisters are so bound up in each other, that even their children seem apart. They should have been able to reproduce like some lower forms of life, by means of pieces broken off themselves.”
“I am glad I am not made only of Donne material. The best of two people is better than the whole of one, and there is always a chance of it.”
“The chance worked out well for me, my Tullia, and in a life that would have gone ill without it. I am not saying that I would go back and turn its course, but a life sentence is a solemn thing. I talked of the lower forms of life, but I was thinking of the higher. Some of us develop too far, and do not find a place. They turn to others of their kind or back on themselves.”
“We are all subject to the failings of over-civilisation,” said Tullia, willing to share in these. “Unless the two children are an exception.”
“Bless them both,” said Thomas, in an emotional tone; “They should not suffer from themselves. A little from others they are already suffering. That is why I let them go their own way. It is not that I feel that children should be left alone, as much as I feel that these should. Supervision would mean too much watching, too much searching, too much love. So far no problems arise.”
“And the poor parent is so used to problems, that he can hardly manage without them,” said Tullia, with the readiness to leave the depths, that her mother found unsatisfying, and her father a rest and charm. “We must find some for him, and I don’t suppose we shall have far to seek. Indeed some seem to be approaching at the moment.”
These were doing so in the person of Susan Donne, who was coming from the house with the aid of a stick and the arm of her brother. She was taller and fairer and more statuesque than her sister, and the enforced caution of her movements rendered her easy to observe at a glance. She was the youngest and the comeliest and the most regarded of the Donnes, and her tendency to autocracy and self-esteem had been fostered and responded to the treatment. An affection of the heart that defied cure, increased and excused these qualities, and the life of her sister’s house was not easier for her presence. She saw her material help as more important than it was, felt it justified more than it did, and felt that her personal tragedy justified anything. So it came about that she walked alone in the valley of the shadow, as she often described herself as doing, though without knowing that she spoke the truth. This force and feebleness in her personality laid their spell on other people and threw her up on her own plane, and they lifted their eyes to a creature immune and apart. But through it all there ran the current of her human kindness, a force that needed no stimulus and asked no gratitude. Sukey, who placed herself so high, placed nobody low, while her sister, claiming a low place, could see that others held a lower. And some who gave affection and esteem to Jessica, gave Sukey their love.
Tullia spoke in a conscious tone produced by her uncle’s presence.
“Well, Aunt Sukey, so you allow Uncle Benjamin out of your personal control.”
“He made his own choice of companion,” said Sukey, in a musical, suffering voice with its own ring in it.
“So we meet again after many days,” said Benjamin, embracing his niece. “I might have found them longer, if I had known what was in store. We need not always regret the hand of time.”
“I am glad I am not too much of a shock to you,’’ said Tullia.
Sukey smiled on them both in sympathy, caring too much for beauty in a woman, to have any other feeling for it.
“How do you think your sister is looking?” said Thomas to Benjamin.
“Sukey is always my Sukey, and to me herself and the same.”
“This is the sight that moves me,” said Thomas, as Jessica and Terence approached, and he disengaged his wife from her son and placed her by her sister. “What a thing to meet in one’s daily life! I can only feel myself a blot on the picture.”
“I will stand in front of you and hide you from view,” said his daughter, doing as she said, and adding to the group a third tall figure and lightly poised head. “I cannot help it, if you obtrude on either side.”
“Come and stand by me and see what I see,” said Thomas.
“Yes,” said Tullia, moving closer to him, as if to suggest another comparison, and allowing her eyes to grow large in admiration. “I wonder which should have the palm. I suppose it is Aunt Sukey.”
“That has always been recognised,” said Jessica.
“I ought to be grateful, oughtn’t I?” said Sukey. “And I should be thinking of some pretty things to say of other people, and I am sure I know a great many.”
“All this about such a small matter as looks!” said Jessica.
“Is it so small, Mother?” said Tullia. “People have to look at us. I don’t see why they should be put to continual pain.”
“It is best to assume that they are looking at something else,” said Jessica, who felt there was a snare in any kind of vanity. “And we might be looking at them.”
“Of course we might, and often are. That is how we know they are doing the same to us.”
“Is my nephew not going to say a word?” said Benjamin.
“I did not like to say that my appearance is better on a second glance,” said Terence.