“I thought you had better see it.”
He picked the envelope up, his brows drawn very close and black above his deep-set eyes. He got the letter out, frowned even more darkly, and read it through. When he had come to the end he turned back and read it a second time. Then, glancing up, he said sharply,
“Any idea who wrote it?”
“Absolutely none.”
He dropped it on the blotting-pad.
“Cheap paper, bad writing. What’s it all about?”
“I don’t know.”
He leaned back, swinging his chair round so that he faced her.
“A cheap, nasty letter. But why was it written?”
She said again, “I don’t know.”
His voice was suddenly sharp.
“It means there’s been talk! About Mirrie and about you! People have been talking! Why? Something must have been going on to make this talk about you! Why haven’t I been told?”
“There wasn’t anything to tell.”
He brought his hand down hard upon the letter.
“There’s no smoke without some fire! No one writes a letter like this unless there’s been talk! Talk and feeling! If you weren’t getting on with Mirrie you ought to have told me! You might know she wouldn’t say anything. She is always thinking about what she can do to please you. I suppose that ought to have opened my eyes. I can’t think why it didn’t. She hasn’t ever felt secure-she hasn’t felt sure of herself or of you.”
Georgina went back a step.
“Uncle Jonathan!”
“I thought you would be glad to have her here-as glad as I was. She is so grateful for everything-so anxious to please. I can’t understand why you should have taken this prejudice.”
“Why do you say that I have taken a prejudice?”
He had always been quick to anger, but not against her. She was not afraid, but she felt herself vulnerable. The whole thing was so sudden, so much a denial of what their relationship had always been. His hand beat on the table and on the letter that lay there.
“I don’t understand this about the clothes-giving her old things to wear. It would be very humiliating-very humiliating indeed. For her-and for me, since it seems it has been noticed. I can’t think how you came to do such a thing!”
Georgina ’s eyes had not left his face. She saw it hard and altered. She steadied her voice and said,
“You haven’t waited to ask me whether I did do it.”
“Well, I am asking you now.”
She came a step nearer and rested her hand on the edge of the table.
“Will you let me tell you just what happened? You brought Mirrie here, and she had nothing. You said she had come on a visit. You didn’t say for how long. You didn’t say that you meant to make yourself responsible for her.”
“I hadn’t made any plans.”
“Uncle Jonathan, she really hadn’t got anything. I took one or two things of my own over to Mrs. Bell at Deeping. She is very clever about alterations, and she took them in and made them fit. If Mirrie minded she didn’t say so. She seemed to be terribly pleased. She said she had never had anything so nice before, and I suppose she hadn’t. They were very good things.”
His face was closed against her. He said,
“You shouldn’t have done it. It was putting her in a wrong position. You should have come to me.”
“I didn’t like to.”
She couldn’t say-it wasn’t in her to say-that there had been an instinct to protect the stray kitten of a creature that he had brought home with him. There had been a trunk full of what was literally rubbish-old musty clothes, chiefly black -old tattered books-and a frightful mangy eiderdown pushed in on the top to keep the other things steady. There wasn’t anything that could have been worn at Field End. There wasn’t anything at all. She couldn’t tell him that Mirrie hadn’t a change of underclothes, or a nightgown to sleep in, or practically anything except the cheap shoddy dress she stood up in and the cheap shoddy coat which covered it.
Jonathan echoed her last words.
“You didn’t like to? Why?”
Georgina had an appalled feeling that they were sliding rapidly down a steep place to disaster. She had known him for too many years to mistake what was happening. She had seen him involved in too many breaches, controversies, and quarrels, starting often from some infinitesimal seed and ending in bitter estrangement. And always whilst the process was going on he would be impervious to argument or reason. But this was the first time it had happened with her. She had been seventeen years under his roof, and it was the very first time. She couldn’t believe that he had gone too far away for her to reach him. She only knew that she had to try. She said,
“It’s difficult-”
“I asked you why you didn’t come to me. Well, why didn’t you?”
“I didn’t know what you wanted-what you meant to do. I really didn’t like to let you, to let anyone, know how little she had. I didn’t know you meant her to stay. Don’t you see I wanted to be nice to her? I thought it would be just a thing between us-between two girls. It’s the sort of thing that is happening in families all the time, girls passing things on because they’ve grown out of them, or because they’ve got tired of them and think they would like to have a change.”
Jonathan broke in on a hard sarcastic note.
“Yes-now we’re getting there! You were tired of the things and you wanted a change. They weren’t good enough for you, but they were all right for Mirrie. And she was so innocent and inexperienced she didn’t see that she was being humiliated. Do you know what she said to me the other day? I thought it was one of the most pathetic things I had ever heard. I had given her a cheque to fit herself out, and she came in here before dinner to show me her dress. She looked like a picture, and she held up a bit of the skirt and said, ‘Do you know, this is the first bought dress of my own I’ve ever had.’ Cast-offs, that was all she’d had all her life- other people’s cast-offs. Charity parcels! And then after I brought her here, when you might think she had got away from all that, she runs into it again. You pick out some old clothes you don’t want any more, let the village dressmaker botch them up, and get the poor child to believe you are doing her a kindness in foisting them on her!”
They had got a long way from the anonymous letter, and a long way from reason and from the likelihood that he could be got to listen to her and to understand. She couldn’t get near him, she couldn’t reach him at all. The letter lay where he had dropped it on his blotting-pad. She came round to stand beside him and leaned to pick it up. As she turned away with it in her hand, he said,
“Wait! There is something I have been going to say to you.”
He pushed his own chair back and sat there tapping on the arm until she had done as he said. Then he looked over to her and spoke briefly.
“It’s about my will.”
She was pale above the pale primrose of her jumper and cardigan. The dark grey eyes looked all the darker for it. When he said, “It’s about my will,” a little colour came up momentarily and then was gone again.
“Uncle Jonathan-”
He lifted a hand from his knee.
“I am speaking. What I want you to do is to listen. I suppose like everyone else you have taken it for granted that whatever I have will come to you?”
“Uncle Jonathan, please-”
He rapped out, “I have told you that I am speaking! All I want you to do is to listen! There is nothing more offensive than the intrusion of emotion into matters of business. This is a matter of business. It concerns my will. I don’t wish you to be under any misapprehension as to its terms. I have never embarrassed you or myself by discussing them with you, but since I have recently decided to make certain alterations, I feel that you should be informed. I don’t want you to think that my decision has been made in a hurry, or because of any indignation which I may be feeling at the moment. I came to the conclusion some time ago that my present will no longer expressed my wishes. I am therefore proposing to make certain alterations. In the main the legacies to the household staff and to charities will remain as they are, but there will be important changes in some other directions. I intend to make provision for Mirrie.”