The service concluded with the Lord’s Prayer, in which the household spoke for themselves, Godfrey’s tones being apparently designed to suppress the sudden arbitrariness. Buttermere’s voice on the words, “as we forgive those who trespass against us,” suggested the suppliant’s general frame of mind.
“Well, now, breakfast!” said Godfrey, receiving his world on secular terms. “Now a good breakfast to make up for the bad night, Harriet. Don’t stand about loafing, you two boys. Good-morning, all of you. How is Father’s girl to-day?”
“Quite well,” said Griselda, giving him a startled smile, and leaning towards her mother.
“Mother, how did you sleep?”
“Not at all, my sweet one. Never mind, as long as you slept well.”
Griselda held her eyes down, and Jermyn strolled to the table.
“Well, bad news of the night?” he said with a deliberate ease.
“There is no news, dear, but not in the sense that no news is good news. It must certainly be no news to you by now, and you speak as if you were reconciled to it.”
“Oh, now, Harriet, now you are making a mistake,” said her husband in a manner of making a last effort before yielding to fate. “We keep all our sympathy for you, but, as you say, it is not news to us now. Nor is it to you, my poor girl. Gregory, don’t stand there, kicking your feet like a child.”
Gregory took his place by his mother, and looked into her face with simple affection.
“Well, how did you employ the night watches, since you had them at your disposal?”
“In pacing up and down the corridors, my son,” said his mother in a soothed and gentle tone, and with almost a light of humour in her eye over words ominous to any other ear. “I knew I shouldn’t wake any of you. You all sleep so soundly.” Even this was not a reproach to Gregory. “I don’t feel so wrought up as I generally do after a night without sleep.”
“Oh, come, come, that is a good word, Harriet. Come, that is a brave speech,” cried Godfrey. “Now we shall have a better day. You will have a better day. You will be able to amuse yourself a little.”
“Amuse myself? Shall I, Godfrey? It has taken all my effort for years to get through the day, and to face the night, the night!” Harriet dropped her voice and bent her head as much in suffering as in the acting of exasperation, and Jermyn rose to the demand.
“What an offensive thing to say, Father! What worse insult than to be accused of amusing oneself? Amusing oneself, when life is but toil and duty!”
“I wish it were that for you, my son,” said Harriet. “And for me, how I wish it were just that, just toil and duty!”
“That sounds to your credit. We are proud of you,” said Griselda.
“Proud of her? Yes, we are,” said Godfrey loudly. “We are proud of her for the high mettle that keeps her up and doing as if she had the toughness the rest of us have. Ah, we have cause for pride.”
Harriet raised her eyes to her husband’s in mingled affection and despair.
“Who is proud of whom?” said the eldest son of the house, a gaunt young man of twenty-eight, as much like his mother as was allowed by age and sex and human difference. “Good-morning to you all.”
“Ah, good-morning, my dear boy,” said Godfrey, leaning back with eyes full of affection, as his son disregarded the summons of Harriet’s glance and went straight to his seat. “We wish you a good-morning indeed.”
“Matthew,” said his mother, “I don’t know if it is anything to you that you add to my burden; that you leave me morning by morning to feel you have had no part in our common preparation for our day?”
“Oh, prayers!” said Matthew. “They hardly seem to serve their purpose. I am not struck by the signs of preparation.”
“No, that is how it must seem,” said Harriet, turning her head. “I am a torment to you all, and a burden on your hours that you never escape! But I am as much of a burden on my own, ten thousand times more of a burden. Griselda, my darling, don’t look distressed; don’t waste a thought on your harrowing old mother. Don’t think of me. Be happy.”
Griselda gave a response with her lips that did not develop into sound, and Matthew looked at her in gloomy compassion.
“How can her life be her own, when she is told that it is? The two things are not compatible. None of our lives are our own.”
“Some of them are more your own than I can feel they should be,” said his mother in a different tone.
“You are speaking against me, and not to my face, Mother,” said Jermyn. “That is a mean and unmannerly thing to do.”
“I will say it to your face, my son. It is a sorrow to me that you and Matthew deal with your talents as if they were given you for your own use. I fear that may be your way of hiding them in the earth.”
Harriet’s ambition for Jermyn was a fellowship at Cambridge, his own that he should write original verse. Her desire for Matthew was a London practice in medicine, in which he was qualified, his aim for himself scientific research. Harriet’s ambitions for her children were so confused with her religious zeal, that her natural sense of values hardly emerged. She was a slave to her feeling that ultimate good depended on effort for others and sacrifice of self. Moreover she alone in the house knew the common fate of such hopes of youth.
“We have a lot of beautiful things in the family,” said Gregory in his dulcet tones. “Poetry and science and Griselda’s looks and Father’s seat on a horse. I hope I shall be generously proud. It is all wonderful.”
“My darlings, it is,” said Harriet in a deep, vibrant voice. “I should be a happy and grateful mother, and I am. How I should try to remember what I have! How I will try, if my weakness does not overtake me! I wonder if any of you can see me through it.”
Buttermere opened the door and cut through his master’s prompt and arduous words.
“Dr. Dufferin, Mr. Matthew!”
“Well, Doctor, how are you?” said Godfrey, who addressed and alluded to his friends according to their callings. “It is good of you to take us on your early ride. You will have some coffee with us before you drag this boy to his work. The young rascal is only just down.”
“I have finished, thank you, Father,” said Matthew, rising to accompany his friend.
“Now, now, don’t mouth at me and argue,” said Godfrey, in an easier tone than was warranted by his words. “Your mother wants a talk with the doctor, and if she wants it, she shall have it. The house is not yours. And if the talk is to be about you, be thankful that anyone wants to talk about you, that there are people who take an interest in you. Because you don’t take much interest in anyone else.”
Godfrey raised his voice to penetrate the door, and relapsed into mirth at the perception that half his speech was lost.
“Well, now, Doctor, here is my poor wife clucking on the bank, with her ducklings gone to water! Matthew is not starting on his profession, and Jermyn is not writing his what-do-you-call-it for his fellowship. They are deep in science and poetry and I don’t know what. How should I know? I never did any of these things. It is not because of me that they do them.”
“No, that is a just claim,” said the guest. “Harriet must know that she is at the bottom of it. That makes her feel the responsibility.”
Antony Dufferin was a dark, vigorous man of thirty-eight, with a broad, humorous nose, a covert quickness of eye, and to those who saw, a strong undercurrent of nervous and productive power. His career as a London physician had been broken by a marriage ending in scandal and divorce. He had not troubled to expose the truth, had given up his work with an easy heart, and settled in his native county near to the Haslams’ place, to give his life to a corner of medical research. Matthew had chosen to work under him, rather than accept from his parents a London practice as a gift.