“Well, that is heaping coals of fire upon my head! But it is a course in which I never place much faith. It either means that people feel they owe it, or that they want to put the other person into their debt. I can always dispense with an obvious rendering of good for evil.”
“I think it sits rather naturally on Aunt Jessica,” said Bernard.
“I object to afterthoughts,” said his sister. “It is the feeling of the moment that counts. We can all do pretty well with enough reflection. Second thoughts are only best in that sense. Did you meet Terence on your way?”
“He came to his gates, as we went out of them,” said Benjamin.
“Well, let us forget the other family, Father. The mere fact of being under their roof is too much.”
“Your experience went beyond that,” said Esmond. “Now we can hear your account of what took place.”
“Oh, it was only words, words, words, if you mean what passed between Aunt Jessica and me. There was her opinion that Aunt Sukey’s will should be ignored, and another imagined, against mine that it should be accepted as it was made,” said Anna, in a swift, almost careless tone, that seemed to put the matter quickly behind. “This creating of wills to meet a situation does not hold water. I could not support it. It had to end in nothing.”
“As it had done before,” said Esmond.
“The matter should have been allowed to rest,” said Benjamin. “I do not say a word about your aunt; she is not to be judged as other people. But your uncle should have ensured it.”
“Oh, I agree with you, Father. I had the most terrible hour. It was not a fair way to treat a person under their roof. And to choose Aunt Sukey’s room, by way of refining the torment! But it roused the devil within me, and defeated its purpose. I became as different a person as Aunt Jessica. I do not blame her, and did not at the moment. I even felt inclined to yield to her in a sense. But I did not submit to the method she chose. That was not the way to my compassion.”
“It was fortunate for you that she chose it,” said Esmond.
“Your words have ceased to have any meaning,” said Benjamin to his son. “You would do as well not to waste them.”
“I cannot picture Aunt Jessica taking such a course,” said Bernard.
“I feel now that I could always have imagined it,” said his sister. “But I did not have to do so. I was confronted by the stark reality. And my imagination could achieve anything with regard to her now. She stimulates that faculty to uncanny feats.”
“Forget it, my daughter,” said Benjamin. “It was a difficult passage for both of you, and it is behind.”
“No, no, Father,” said Anna, shaking her head. “The scene is indelibly engraved on my memory. That room as the background, and Aunt Jessica and I grouped in the foreground, looking each other in the eyes! Or rather I doing that, and Aunt Jessica’s eyes going anywhere and everywhere but to my face. Strange, elusive eyes they are; they don’t seem to focus anywhere. I thought I should be afraid to meet them, that they would probe into my inmost soul, a thing that no one quite likes to face; but I found myself pursuing them, so that they should have to meet mine. The setting of the scene was supposed to bring me to my knees. But it had the opposite effect. It was such an obvious misuse of poor Aunt Sukey’s corner. And I don’t like clever and mean ideas. And now. I can never enter the room again, and not only for the natural reasons, but for these contrived and nameless ones.”
“As it is to be Uncle Thomas’s study, you may not incur much pressure to do so,” said Esmond.
“I disliked that use for it at first. I thought it was a rather cold and callous way of turning Aunt Sukey’s death to account. But it has come to seem a sort of protection. It will save both it and me from worse.”
“It is but a room,” said Bernard. “Let us hear more of the human scene enacted in it.”
“I wonder if Anna knows how little she has told us,” said Esmond.
“I should have thought I had told you all kinds of things that I hardly knew, myself,” said his sister, putting her hands to her cheeks. “Anyhow I have said all I can bring myself to utter of the sorry scene. The mere discomfort of it was enough. I have never felt such a weight of anything so vague. And Aunt Jessica gave me the strangest sense of guilt, and traded on the feeling until I quite admired her ingenuity and resource. She might have been a member of the Inquisition, and I her victim. And she is such an actress, whether she knows it or not, that I found myself overcome by her pathos, and undertaking not to betray her to her family.”
“A promise that you broke on the first opportunity,” said Esmond.
“Not at all. She was not referring to her claim on the money; everyone knew about that. It was the interchange of thoughts and opinions, that she did not want revealed.”
“You do not share the feeling,” said Esmond.
“Don’t I? You told me just now how little I had told you. It would be a certain relief to put it all off my mind. It is a good deal to keep bottled up within me. But she is Aunt Sukey’s sister, after all, and I am her niece, and that can be the end of the matter.”
“It was strange to exact such a promise after such a scene,” said Benjamin.
“Yes,” said Anna, nodding towards him, as if she shared the view, “it was the most contradictory state of affairs. We might have been inmates of a madhouse. I hardly knew where I was.”
“Then it hardly mattered your being in Aunt Sukey’s room,” said Esmond.
“But she managed to suggest her wishes, and I found I had fallen in with them,” went on his sister, as if she had not heard. “It seems a weak thing to do. I am not proud of it. It was more suggestibility and reluctance to struggle with a virtual invalid, than anything better.”
“I daresay Aunt Jessica is not seeking to impute any higher motives.”
“Oh, no,” said Anna, lightly. “Even if I relinquished the money, she would not do that. She would accept it as her due, as she accepts all else that she is given.”
“She would not claim it, if she did not see it as that,” said Benjamin. “We do her that justice. She is not a stranger to us.”
“Mere justice is not at all to her mind, Father,” said Anna, shaking her head. “She is used to so much more. All her family give it to her, some of them reluctantly, I admit, and perhaps Uncle Thomas as a way of avoiding trouble. Even Aunt Sukey showed her magnanimity. She had a much scantier measure herself.”
“Except from her sister,” said Benjamin.
“Yes, Aunt Jessica came out above herself there,” said Anna in full concession. “Aunt Sukey brought out her higher side. I am the first to recognise it.”
“And did you bring out her lower?” said Esmond.
“Well, something did,” said his sister, sighing. “And as no one else was there, I suppose it was me. There is a pleasant reflection. Of course it was the money really.”
“Well, you have kept your hold of it,” said Bernard. “Through fire and water you have come, with it in your hands. And to lose it without the honour of freely relinquishing it would be too much. And that does emerge as the alternative.”
“It will be a long time before I can treat it as my own, with Aunt Jessica’s eyes fixed upon me. I can hardly imagine myself using it with a free hand. And of course we shall not have it yet. There will be death duties and other things.”
“Those are generally paid out of capital,” said Bernard.
“I think I should like to meet them out of income,” said his sister, in a considered manner. “I don’t want to reduce the legacy at the outset. I would rather keep what is virtually a gift from Aunt Sukey, whole and intact, as she left it, so that I can see it as she saw it herself, all my life.”