“Well, there were three of us to break it to. That accounts for our coming early on the list,” said Geraldine.
“Ah, yes. Poor Mr. Spong!” said Agatha, shaking her work.
“Do put away that sewing, and give the whole of your mind to the talk,” said Gregory. “I hate you to be only half attending.”
Agatha laid the work aside, it seemed with some pleasure in submission to Gregory, drew off her glasses and faced her audience.
“Only last week I spent an hour with her. We had tea together on Thursday, just she and I. We had a very long talk. I am very glad I had it. I was very fond of her. Poor Lucy Spong! Yes, it is a terrible change for her husband. If anyone knows what that blank means, it is I.”
She made as if to resume her work, but folded her hands as if finding unemployment in tune with her mood.
“It is said that these things fall to our lot,” said Geraldine.
“Not everything to everyone,” said Kate; “not this to us, not just this. Some of us may be better without the best and worst. We avoid one with the other.”
“Yes, I think that is very true,” said Agatha in a cordial tone. “We are all built for different parts of the scheme.”
“You think an easy emotional life is the best, Kate?” said Gregory.
“Not perhaps the best, but the most fitting for some of us,” said Kate.
“I did not know we any of us ever had it,” said Geraldine, glancing over the back of her chair. “We can never leave the other side with nothing to compensate. There must be both sides to all these emotional experiences.”
“I am going to ask you all to excuse me, while I turn my back on you for a minute and write a word to Mr. Spong,” said Agatha, who had considerately concealed that she was preoccupied. “I should not like him not to hear from me as promptly as he wrote. Then I will ask you to post it, Gregory.”
She sat down at her desk, and took paper and pen, seeming conscious of eyes upon her. “It is a difficult letter to write on the spur of the moment. I don’t know how one can avoid saying something that will jar. One can only do one’s best.” She wrote with a rapid hand, fastened the letter without glancing at it again, and handed it to her guest. “I have done as well as I could in a minute, and without any preparation. Thank you, Gregory.”
“Ought we all three of us to write?” said Geraldine, leaning back.
“No. We will let Agatha represent. The easiest again,” said Kate.
“I think it must always fall to one member of a family to act on certain occasions,” said Agatha.
“The pains and privileges of the eldest!” said Geraldine.
“Poor Mr. Spong!” said Agatha, holding an open letter in her hand. “He is sadly cut up, I am afraid. I feel so much for him. He knew I should, I think. I gather he guessed that, from his way of expressing himself.” She turned the letter over. “‘I know I can rely on an old friend’s heart being with me.’ ‘My dear Mrs. Calkin’”—the impulse conquered that had hardly commended itself— “’My beloved wife passed peacefully away this evening at nine o’clock. I am writing first of all to you; and I know I can rely upon an old friend’s heart being with me. I am a broken man. Yours in grief, and I am sure in gratitude, Dominic Spong.’ Yes, poor Dominic Spong! Poor Dominic! I think of him by his name now he is in this trouble. I remember him as a boy, before he became the experienced lawyer he is now. Only forty-five and a widower! Well, it is not for us to interpret these things.”
“I don’t know whether he meant the letter for public recitation!” said Geraldine in an amused confidence to Gregory.
“Dominic Spong ought to be more than forty-five. He ought not to be a year younger than I am,” said Kate.
“When you are so emphatically the baby of a household,” said Geraldine.
“Ah, he will age quickly now,” said Agatha, as though granting a tribute. “There are some things that do not leave us our youth.”
“Some of us ought to be perennially young,” said Kate.
“Well, I think you are younger,” said Agatha, with definite concession. “That is one advantage that you have.”
“I ought to be going back to Mother,” said Gregory. “She has not heard about Mrs. Spong, and will want to write. Spong relies less on us than he does on you.”
“It was simply in his mind that I have had the same loss,” said Agatha.
“Have you read anything interesting lately, Gregory?” said Geraldine.
“No. No improper books have come my way. And I am too young to read anything suitable for me. If I don’t have to hide my books from my mother, I can’t take any interest in them.”
“That is what you say,” said Agatha, smiling into his face as she shook his hand. “I don’t think you keep anything much from your mother. I don’t see sons doing that, the sort I have any experience of. I don’t fancy so.”
Chapter IV
“Well, My Dear Matthew, you have come back to your father!” said Godfrey, greeting his son after his absence of eight hours. “Now I am never the same man without my Matthew, never quite myself with my firstborn away from me. How has your day gone, my boy?”
“It has been very interesting, thank you, Father.”
“It has been to your mind, has it? That is good news to me. Your research and all of it has been successful, has been what you call satisfactory? Because you don’t set out to discover anything as a general thing. That is not exactly your purpose for your day?”
“No, Father,” said Matthew, with his rough, deep laugh.
“Ah, now you’re laughing at your father. That is what you do when I come out with one of my speeches. Well, I don’t grudge you your crow over me. I am a proud man when I think of you and Jermyn. I don’t regret that you took after your mother. You made the right choice.”
“I am not so sure,” said Matthew.
Godfrey, with a rather pathetic flush creeping over his face, strode on with his arm in his son’s.
“Well, and what do you think of your mother lately, Matthew?”
“I don’t think she is any better, Father.”
“Not any better? You mean you regard her as ill? I have been intending to ask your serious opinion for a long time, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to it. You think she is ill, my son?”
“I think she is threatened with mental illness. She might avoid it if she tried. But I cannot imagine her trying.”
“Do you think she could try?” said Godfrey.
“That is at the bottom of things. You are on the point, Father.”
“Ah, you see, I don’t miss as much as you think. I am not blind where your mother is concerned, whatever else doesn’t strike me as calling for notice. People are not always on the point about me. Whatever hint of a change comes over her, I am alive to it. In a moment my life is dark or light as the case may be. I speak the simple truth.” Godfrey, though speaking what he said, came to as sudden a pause as if it were falsehood, as Harriet came from her garden into his sight.
“Pray don’t stop, Godfrey. Don’t pull yourself up as if you were doing something wrong in walking on the path with Matthew. Whatever is the harm in that? I hope if it were anything to be ashamed of, you would not do it.”
“Oh, now, Harriet! Why, I have hardly seen you since the morning, and this is how I am greeted! You scarcely spoke a word to me at luncheon. Now, now, come, my dear girl.”
Harriet stood with her face under a cloud.
“Well, Mother, you have spent a day out of doors?” said Matthew.
“Yes, my boy,” said Harriet, raising her hands to his shoulders. “I have been feeling more my old self, and relied rather rashly on it, and let myself get over-tired. Have you had a satisfying day’s work?”