“Well, now, I think we ought to be getting on with our work,” said Agatha, spacing her words. “This is a working party, and I don’t see why I should countenance its being used for anything else. Now settle down, all of you, and make up for lost time. And if you two men don’t want to make yourselves useful, you can just go away. We don’t want you here if you are going to be idle.”
“I am not going to be. I am going to keep handing Kate her scissors,” said Bellamy. “I know a great deal about ladies’ sewing, and handing scissors saves a surprising amount of time. Needles and cotton are less elusive.”
“Oh, we shall always be handed things now!” said Geraldine. “We shall have a man in the family.”
“That sounds kind and hospitable,” said Bellamy. “But I hope you will not try to make a man of me, Geraldine. Kate will explain to you that I have to be a clergyman.”
“I have no particular partiality for manly men,” said Geraldine. “They are rather crude creatures, I always think.”
“Yes, so they are,” said Bellamy, “more so than womanly women. Everyone is best in between.”
“That is what I have always been accused of being,” said Geraldine.
“Then there is already a family likeness between us,” said Bellamy. “I am quite settled in my mind about you. But now there is a dreadful thing before me. There is a cause and just impediment. I shall have to call Mrs. Calkin Agatha.”
“We will not expect you to come to that all at once,” said Agatha, smiling at him as if from above. “I am a great many years older than you. I am not going to take up a position of being anything else. I shall expect you to regard me only as a very maternal sister-in-law.”
“Agatha is said to be candid,” said Mellicent, “but I wonder if she knows how candid she is.”
“He will have to rise on the stepping-stone of me to higher things,” said Geraldine. “He got as far as me quite easily. He is making the most remarkable progress.”
“Mellicent, my dear, why have you stopped working for the poor?” said Rachel.
“Jermyn has come to call for me; I saw him out of the window.”
“Jermyn, take her away before she leaves me anything more to alter,” said Rachel. “Really this is not fit for the poor. I don’t see how any unfortunate person could wear it, not anyone already unfortunate.”
“It is plain and strong,” said Mellicent.
“I hardly liked to put it into words, but it is, isn’t it? We must not call the poor thriftless, and then treat them as if they were not. What is the good of knowing about them?”
“What do you think, Mellicent?” said Jermyn, accompanying her along the road.
“I thought the verses very interesting, some of them, especially those with the definite signs of early youth. Something seems to go in the later ones.”
“Well, perhaps those are more in my real manner. What do you think of their quality?”
“I think they are by no means without a worth of their own.”
“You think me a fool to have published?”
“No, I think you are fortunate. My father is poorer than yours. That is the difference between us there.”
“Mellicent, I hope that some day I shall have the right to publish your work. I am helpless until my own can struggle into the light of itself.”
“And shall I not also be at that stage by then?”
“You did not misunderstand me.”
“No, you made yourself clear. Would you like it except in the way you have planned?”
“You can’t think I should not be overjoyed if you were to get rapid success. We can never tell what work will come most promptly into its first, facile credit.”
“You hold to your plan,” said Mellicent. “Would you like a wife who was better than yourself on your own line?”
“Yes, if she really were better. But married people can’t continue on the same line. To a man and a woman there must in the end be a man and a woman’s life.”
“Now I have not refused you,” said Mellicent. “You have refused me.”
“You have not written much lately, have you?” said Jermyn after a silence. “I should like to see the poems I have not seen.”
“You have not seen most of them. I can send them if you like.”
“I should like it indeed. But I must make it clear, that as you don’t want men and women distinctions in these things, I must not see it a case for chivalry. If you don’t want my opinion, don’t ask for it.”
“I have not asked for it,” said Mellicent, laughing. “It is you who ask to form it. Of course it is not a case for chivalry. I shouldn’t expect it from a man who had refused me.”
“Well, you will send the poems to-night,” said Jermyn, waving a farewell.
“What will you do, my dear?” said Rachel, coming out of Agatha’s gate, where the two had parted.
“Send my poems to Jermyn.”
“Has it been as bad as that? Must you really? Being cruel to be kind is such dreadful cruelty. Being cruel to be cruel is better.”
“I think Jermyn takes it for that.”
“Well, it might have been worse. You are still friends, then?”
“Yes,” said Mellicent, smiling to herself.
“You refused his offer?” said her stepmother.
“No, he withdrew it.”
“Oh yes, the poems,” said Rachel. “Must you really be a spinster, even though people will never understand it?”
“People like you will understand it.”
“But do you realise how uncommon I am? There are no people like me.”
“I think I am like you in one small way. Your happiest years were your single ones.”
“Well, a selfish life is lovely, darling,” said Rachel. “It is awful to be of use.”
Chapter XXVII
“My Dear Boy, my heart aches at seeing you set off. I don’t know when I have had a moment that gave me a lump in my throat like this. I could set the waterworks on like a woman, if I let go of myself. I don’t make any bones about it.”
“You don’t, Father,” said Matthew.
“You take your father’s blessing with you,” Godfrey continued, bringing his hand down on his son’s shoulder, and appearing to be deterred by convention from embracing him. “And I don’t need to say that your mother’s goes with it. I am as convinced of that as that I am standing here. I can say no more.”
“Matthew knows that if there was anything more, you would say it,” said Griselda.
“You have gone the full length, Father,” said Matthew.
“You will have to go over it all again when I set off to Cambridge,” said Jermyn. “I can’t be put off with a lesser portion.”
“Oh, my dear boy, that is not quite the same,” said Godfrey, with a lighter hand for his second son. “Matthew and I have been through so much together that it has made a bond between us. There is that between Matthew and his father. And Matthew was the first born to me and his mother.”
“We are not disputing it, Father,” said Matthew, going a step further.
“Ah, Matthew, the future before you; an old man myself,” said Sir Percy. “I don’t want you to think of an old man. I shall be thinking of you; you need not give a thought to it.”
“Ah, thank you, my dear old friend,” said Godfrey, just avoiding monotony in gesture. “Matthew’s heart is too full for words this morning.”
“Matthew comes in for more and more credit, and deserves it,” said Jermyn.
“The rest of us might make a suitable response,” said Gregory.
“If you think, he has always been the silent one,” said Griselda.
“Good-bye, Grisel; good-bye, Father; good-bye, all. Thanks very much,” said Matthew, passing to the carriage.
“Ah, good-bye, my dear boy!” said Godfrey, standing with his hand over his eyes. “Yes, there he goes, our eldest son. His mother’s eyes are on him and all of us at the moment of our parting.”