The children received the caress with as much consciousness as could have resulted from any dramatic gift. Miss Petticott followed Maria to the staircase and engaged her in talk, bringing her pencil down at intervals on some papers in her hand. Her eyes remained on the papers as she retraced her steps, so that a figure that flashed from behind the sofa to the stairs, escaped her notice.
“Well, you are a nice pair,” she said to her pupils. “Keeping your artistic efforts for when I am away, instead of giving me the benefit of them! I shall not expect such scurvy treatment another time. I feel I have deserved better at your hands.” The pupils had something of the same feeling. “And I should not act any more tonight. Miss Clemence is flushed, Adela, and Sefton is pale, and you are rather pale yourself. I recommend a rest to you all, before you go to bed. And I expect my advice to be followed.”
Chapter II
“I Have Come to offer you myself,” said Lesbia Firebrace, as she mounted the Shelleys’ steps. “Because I have nothing else to offer. When people say that, they are content with their offering and expect other people to be.”
“This is, indeed, a pleasure, Lesbia,” said Sir Roderick, with a simple air of welcome.
“It is good of you to find it so, Roderick,” said Miss Firebrace, her simplicity so well-matched as almost to suggest something else.
“My dear, you are welcome, welcome,” said Mr. Firebrace, pressing forward and displacing the host, indeed seeming to assume the character. “You are in your father’s home again. I wish it were that to you, but things must be as they are. I have been looking to this day; I can do that under any roof.”
Miss Firebrace’s filial greeting seemed hardly to accord with her grey head and experienced face. She was a small, odd-looking woman of sixty, with small, clear, grey eyes contrasting with a sallow skin, features that, like the rest of her, seemed to conform to some standard of her own, and sparse, iron-grey hair worn short at a time when the fashion carried some meaning. In her case it was an outcome of illness, that she had not troubled to rectify, but she accepted any significance read into it as an enhancement to her personality. This was a thing to which she gave attention, though she had not created it, merely rendered it its due.
Her sister was a plainer, feminine counterpart of her father and nephew. She followed with the air of the secondary character, that she clearly fulfilled in her family and in her father’s sight. He greeted her with equal affection, but without any touch of deference, a distinction that had become established. She had an air of being clever, complacent and dissatisfied, and was all these things and would have denied none. Her complacence, like all her qualities, was real, and as deeply rooted in her as in the rest of her family. Oliver’s mother had been between the two sisters in age, and had been the dearest to her father, or been rendered so by death, a state less grudging of advantages than of the opportunity to enjoy them. Her sisters accepted this view of her life, seeing it as mild compensation for losing it.
Juliet’s husband followed her, tall and upright and a person apart, and also evincing the slight humility of mien. He had a Grecian profile, thin, silver hair, and ice-blue eyes so honest that they seemed to hold some menace. His name of Cassidy seemed to have arisen out of himself.
Mr. Firebrace gathered them about him, put his arms about the women, marshalled his grandson to the front of the group, and fulfilled his part as a patriarch ordering his family. The pathos of his life was clear at the moment of its passing.
“I feel I am a guest in my own house at these times,” said Maria to her husband.
“Well, they are guests in other people’s, and that is not so good. And it is the old man’s moment. He was once in this house in a different place.”
“It must bring it all back to you, Roderick. I can see you are living in the past.”
“I live in the past and in the present, as all reasonable people must. The past is in us, and the present with us,” said Sir Roderick, with his not infrequent sense of surprise at himself.
“If you are not the host, you are nothing in your own home.”
“Well, that is easy, and I am equal to it. We should all be able to be nothing there. More is asked of people who are something anywhere else.”
“Here is scope for you, Maria,” said Oliver. “It is a great position. You can show all the deep and subtle qualities that generally escape notice. I wish I had such an opportunity.”
“You might make use of it, and so miss it,” said Lesbia.
“Perhaps I should. It is that touch of the actor about me.”
“We cannot have passed over our hostess in making our greetings,” said Lesbia, coming towards Maria. “That is not a possible thing, and it is fortunate that it is not.”
“Maria gives you a real welcome,” said Sir Roderick.
“Lesbia, Juliet, Lucius, Mr. Firebrace, Roderick, Oliver,” said Maria, handing the teacups as she filled them.
“We are too many,” said Lesbia. “It neutralises the inconvenience of a large party, for someone to say they are too many.”
“I am not at my ease,” said her sister, “shocking thing though that is. It is not that I cannot take kindness; I am rather fond of taking it. But I have not the grace that can accept. Neither has Lucius, but people assume that he has. I appear to take everything for granted.”
“I hope you do so in this house,” said Sir Roderick.
“But I do not. I am trembling with gratitude and a sense of presuming on the past.”
“I always feel that my family and I ought not to be here at these times,” said Maria.
“Well, neither ought you,” said Lesbia, in her soft, almost mysterious tones. “It was all complete without you, even to the blank caused by death. You have added to the finished picture, which is known to be a mistake. But the addition is always worth while in itself.”
“That is why the temptation to make it is never resisted,” said Oliver.
“I was not a conscious artist in the matter,” said Maria.
“Well, art is instinctive,” said Lesbia.
“The impulse in matters of this kind commonly is,” said Mr. Fire-brace to his grandson.
“Father seems to have forgotten how to speak to anyone but Oliver,” said Juliet.
“Well, that is no wonder, my dear. My memory in the matter has not had an easy time.”
“My children must feel superfluous in their own home,” said Maria.
“What harm does that do?” said her stepson. “Whatever it is, I have always suffered it.”
“We had your letters about them, Lesbia,” said Sir Roderick.
“I have no doubt you did. People always have letters. They never really go astray. But I was not thinking of your children at the moment; I was thinking of myself, improper though it is.”
“I am sure you meant the advice for the best,” said Sir Roderick, not concealing the tendency of his own thought.
“Yes, Roderick, we did,” said Lesbia, in a sudden, impressive tone. “We were thinking of the children’s welfare. And who is more qualified to do that? Children’s welfare is the object of our lives.”
“My children’s welfare has that place in mine. It is simply a more concentrated feeling.”
“Clemence has had no experience outside her own home. This house is the bound of her universe.”
“And long may it be so,” said the father.
“Of course we are not asking for pupils,” said Juliet. “It is not conceivable, and that is a good thing. People might form the conception.”
“Are you thinking of yourself or of Clemence, Roderick?” said Lesbia, in a neutral manner.