“It would have been an easy thing to do,” went on Jessica, still with the air of passing over Anna’s words. “And she might have put the other will on the fire without looking at it.”
“No, no, not Aunt Sukey,” said Anna, shaking her head. “She would look to see she had the right one, a dozen times. Any failure in nervous balance would come out like that. That would have been the line of her weakness.”
“In her last hours we cannot know.”
“Oh, may we not leave those last hours? She was herself when I saw her, and I have a right to that memory. There is nothing gained by tampering with it.”
“It is easy to imagine the scene,” said Jessica.
“Why should she have taken the old will out of the desk at all?”
“She took it out to copy it,” said Jessica, her eyes seeming to be fixed on the scene. “And she meant to put it back; I could tell by her voice and her eyes. She meant to destroy the other. But if only I could be quite sure!”
“That new one she had just made? What an odd purpose for it! Well, that is not what she did, as seems to me natural enough. The other thing is done, and there is no help for it. We cannot know that she was the victim of error or delusion or whatever you assume. I cannot think how you can think so, when you knew her. But don’t let us have the last hours again, if you don’t mind. I have had enough of it.” As Anna became inured to the scene, her manner was more what it was in her home.
“That is how she came to have the two wills in her hands,” said Jessica.
“She had nothing in them, when I was there. Her hands were folded in her lap. Something was on the fire, or had been on it, and the will was in the desk. Or so I was told later.”
“Sukey never folded her hands,” said Jessica, with no touch of pouncing on a weak point; simply in expression of her thought.
“Oh, well, idle in her lap. No, I don’t think she did fold them. Actually they were working on her lap, but there did not seem to be any need to press that home. They were closing and unclosing, if you must have the scene as it was. You make it quite impossible to save you anything. And how can you say so positively what she did? You did not watch her quite so faithfully, or that was not her impression. Indeed that was the root of the trouble. And if her system was running down — isn’t that what you said?”—Anna drew in her brows with a look of pain—“surely to sit without occupation was natural. And she was never a busy person.”
“I can imagine her hands working,” said Jessica, once again speaking to herself.
“Oh, she had been through the worst stage,” said Anna, with a note of encouragement. “When I reached her, it was the calm after the storm, or anyhow the stage of the last echoes of it. She was at peace at the last. You may be quite easy about that. I left her without any sort of misgiving. She had fallen asleep, as I have said. I told you that was the result of my attentions.”
“Anna,” said Jessica, in a tone that held no sudden difference, but seemed to come from gathering purpose, “if you ever wanted to tell me anything, you would not be afraid? I would not say a word, if you would rather I did not. And there need be no change in the disposal of the money; that would not be mentioned between us. I only feel that you have no mother, and that your life has had many temptations and little guidance. You would let me help you, as someone who knows that? You would impose your conditions, and trust me to keep them. You would not hesitate?”
There was a just perceptible pause.
“Indeed I should,” said Anna, almost with a laugh. “You are the last person I would face in such a situation, if I can imagine myself in one, which I cannot, as complexities and soul-subtleties are not within my range. And I believe you would almost create such a crisis. I can hardly be in your presence without feeling all kinds of uncertainties and possibilities welling up within me.” Anna stood with her eyes on her aunt’s face and a look of helpless bewilderment. “I should not know myself, if I spent much time with you. You would make anyone feel a criminal, indeed might make anyone be one. I begin to feel my mind reflecting your own. It must be ghastly to have such seething depths within one.”
Jessica looked into her niece’s face.
“I wonder if other people see me like that.”
“Well, it is not your fault, if they don’t,” said Anna, giving rein to her tongue. “You do your best to cast a cloud of gloom and guilt over everyone in your path. No one can be with you, without being the victim of it, this instinct to drag from their minds anything and everything that it is their right and their duty to keep to themselves. People’s little natural weaknesses are their own affair. Are you so free from them, yourself, that you must constitute yourself everyone else’s critic and judge? It would hardly do to probe the depths of your mind. Even if I did feel some uncertainty about Aunt Sukey’s wishes, there would be no great harm in giving myself the benefit of the doubt. Everyone would do it, as you have done it yourself. Indeed you give yourself the benefit of a doubt that does not exist. I am not going to yield to your peculiar method of coercion. It is unnatural and uncanny, and gives your opponent no chance. Anyone could use it, who would stoop so low. And to think that you are Aunt Sukey’s sister, and held in equal esteem!”
“I see few people but my own family. Do I affect them in this way?”
“Well, I have noticed a reluctance in them to be alone with you. Of course I don’t know how far they are aware of it. Terence is not a woman or a child, and gives less stimulus to the strange instincts. Oh, I know it is all unconscious, Aunt Jessica; I give you your due; though I can’t imagine your doing the same by me, if I were subject to your odd temptations.”
“What about the children?” said Jessica.
“They are too young to give a name to your influence. They just feel it, and avoid it when they can. I have noticed their instinct to elude you, and your sad, questioning eyes. They would make any child feel uneasy and guilty and oppressed. It is a shame to cloud their helpless childhood, and drag all the sweetness out of it; and a childhood too, that has no great happiness or advantage to balance the scale. Reuben may not have much of a life, but it is better than theirs. I know he has no mother, but there may not be only a dark side to that.”
“Would they be happier without me?”
“Of course they would, in so far as you exercise this influence on them. It hardly seems to be quite human. I daresay it has its origin in the past, and you cannot separate yourself from it, any more than we can from any other primitive survival in us. It is said that savages have strange powers, that survive in certain people; and I suppose this is a case of it. They are the more dangerous for being so deep-rooted.”
Jessica loked at Anna almost in wonderment, seeming to return from the world of her own thoughts.
“You said you were simple and unsophisticated,” she said.
“Oh, there it is again, your instinct to wound and pierce and condemn. The most I have said, is that I am plain and downright. People do not say those things about themselves; they hardly like to think them. I may have said that I was regarded in that way. I can’t help that, can I? I daresay any sister with three brothers hears such things. And I am more innocent than you are. I have never done harm to the helpless, and your life is spent in that miserable course.”
“A cloud would be lifted from the household, if I were gone,” said Jessica, using a tone between statement and question. “Does my husband feel that I cast this baleful influence?”
“How should I know?” said Anna, with a touch of embarrassment, as her mood filtered. “I have not constituted myself general observer and overseer of your household. And what a word; baleful! It shows that you know the exact essence of your spell. Why don’t you stop working it, Aunt Jessica, and try to be a natural, wholesome woman?”