A Heritage and its History (19 page)

“Naomi,” said Graham, “I wished the truth need not be told, that you and Hamish could marry. I feel I do not wish it now.”

“I saw the change. I saw and felt it from the first. Hamish thinks it will help me to forget. Of course it makes me remember. It is the change in him that will help me. And seeing it is not really a change.”

“I wish my father had lived to know,” said Hamish, looking round with the ease of confession past. “To know that his line would be continued, and to meet the woman who would do it. But I feel that perhaps he does know.”

“His very beliefs are different,” said Ralph. “He was a sceptic when he left us. The change goes right through him.”

“He is what he was,” said Naomi. “He is not a person to be always the same. He took his colour from us, and we could not know it was our own. It is we who have changed. We have come to a knowledge of him.”

“We can find no excuse for people who let us have that?” said Walter. “They would not deserve one.”

“If a thing needs excuse, it naturally cannot have it,” said Graham.

“Hamish wished your uncle had lived to know this, Simon,” said Fanny. “What do you feel yourself?”

“That I am glad he did not know.”

“I am worse than you. I am wishing he had known, and showed his feeling. And I was grateful to your mother for her speech.”

“I think you are to have further cause for gratitude.”

“We begin to follow it all, Hamish,” said Julia. “We see why you inclined to put the future above the past. It was so unlike you, that we were struck by it. I hope your wife will respect our old order. But I have no doubt she will.”

“We must not expect her to accept it, as if it were hers. She will put her own mark on things. It is what I want and ask of her.”

“And you wish your father had lived to know it?” said Julia, in a fainter tone.

“It is raining,” said Fanny, quickly. “And the children are in the garden. Miss Dolton went to the village, and left them to play outside.”

“They must come in,” said Hamish, going to the window and beckoning. “It is raining fast. Come up to the fire, both of you. I hope you are not wet?”

“Well, we are,” said Claud. “We have been out in the rain.”

“We stood by the wall,” said Emma. “It was the sensible thing to do.”

“Well, now you must get dry, and hear my news. You will not guess what it is.”

“I expect we shall,” said Claud. “We often guess. You are going to marry Naomi, after all.”

“No, but I am going to marry someone. Someone whom you will come to love. It is great news, isn't it?”

“Well, we don't mind about it. Why is it great? Why can you marry her, when you couldn't marry Naomi?”

“Well, she and I are not cousins.”

“Why do you want so much to marry? You have two people to live with.”

“He only has one now,” said Emma.

“Well, it is a thing you will want yourself one day.”

“I want it now. I want to marry Emma. But I am too young by the law.”

“Well, Emma must refuse to marry anyone else.”

“I think a father can make a girl marry anyone he likes. I know he used to be able to. And it was—it was a father, who would not let you and Naomi marry, though of course there was a reason.”

“Well, history need not repeat itself,” said Simon, smiling or giving a smile. “I will not make Emma marry anyone.”

“Nor forbid her to marry me?” said Claud, on a faintly incredulous note.

“No, I will not do that either.”

“You are very fond of Emma,” said Julia. “That is a great thing for you both.”‘

“Yes, I am dependent on her. I find her a support.”

“Yes, he does,” said Emma. “He has to lean on someone.”

“Then he is like me,” said Hamish.

“No, I don't think I am,” said Claud, at once. “When I depend on a person, I couldn't ever have anyone instead.”

“No, he couldn't,” said Emma. “He has a faithful heart. It is the only thing worth having.”

“It has stopped raining,” said Fanny, as if she felt this to be fortunate. “You may run out again.”

“We don't need to run,” said Claud, as he walked to the door. “We shall get out soon enough. We will go on with our game.”

“What are you playing at?” said Julia.

“We are Father and Uncle Walter in their old haunts. This used to be their garden. I am Uncle, and Emma is Father.”

“Why, it should be the other way round. You are the elder.”

“Yes, but only a year. And Emma takes the lead.”

“Yes, I do,” said his sister. “But I don't try to be what Father was. It must seem to us that he has never been a child.”

“So it would be no good to copy him,” said Claud.

“And we don't copy people,” said Emma. “We know where that would lead.”

“Shut the door,” called Simon after them. “No, do not shut it for them, Fanny. Let Claud do it himself.”

“I am glad to have it between them and us,” said his wife, as she achieved this.

“Tell us all you have to tell, Hamish,” said Graham. “We have hardly learned much yet.”

“You shall know it all. I hope you will soon know her. It is to be such a good friendship. I have thought of it all the time. I met her by chance. She is older than I am, but not enough to matter, if such a thing could count to me, as it could not. She is gifted and widely read, my superior in every sense. She has no parents, and is independent in means, and very independent in herself. I need not describe her. You will soon do so yourselves. I long to see her and Naomi together. It should be something that will last their lives.”

“So Hamish is providing compensation for Naomi,” said Ralph. “And in a form he might not have thought of.”

“Claud said it was not great news,” said Rhoda, in a quiet tone. “But to me it was.”

“Mother, it was the most to you. It is a thing that goes without saying.”

“The news itself did not do so.”

“We will leave you to discuss it, Rhoda,” said Simon. “It was your right to know before anyone. Hamish must render his account.”

“It seemed best to tell you all at once, Cousin Simon. And you made it easy for me. I shall not forget it.”

“There was no reason to make it hard for you,” said Simon, as they left the house.

“There was,” said Walter. “But we could not act upon it. Why is it compulsory to be so virtuous?”

“I ought not to say it,” said Julia. “But shall we
think the same of Hamish? After all he said, when he knew his first wish must be denied him?”

“Well, it was his first,” said Graham. “We can remember that.”

“I suppose he could not be expected never to marry.”

“He could for the time,” said Ralph. “It was what we did expect.”

“Never is a long word,” said Walter. “And the time since the truth was known, is short.”

“It may be best for the change to come,” said Ralph. “It saves Naomi from trying to be her old self, when things are different. But what is best and what is good are not the same.”

“It is Hamish himself who surprises us,” said Julia. “We must say it is.”

“We do no good by continuing to say it,” said Simon.

“I get great help from it,” said Walter. “And more from hearing it said. Our mothers are our best comforters. They are not ashamed of being openly what we all are underneath.”

“Their exemption from criticism gives them courage,” said Graham. “And then they get more and more exempt. No one dares to begin it. Things have gone too far.”

“Nothing has given me courage,” said Fanny. “I have never felt more without it.”

“You could hardly have it in your place as Naomi's mother,” said Simon, in a quiet tone.

“My son, I think of what you feel as her father,” said Julia.

“This is what I feel,” said Simon, putting an arm
about his daughter. “She and I suffer the same thing. We are both debarred from our place. Each of us might have had it or seen the other in it. Neither of us will do so now. We might each have had much or something. Now we simply have each other.”

“So Naomi's experience is matched by his,” muttered Ralph.

“That is what is said, when people have sustained some loss,” said Graham. “As if they had not had each other all the time! It is hard to accept it as a recompense.”

“This position that our great-uncle had!” said Ralph. “That Father and Naomi might have had. That you in your turn would have had. That Hamish actually has! It has had to go a long way. No wonder things have not gone well. I have moved on alone towards the familiar goal. I somehow feel surprised by it.”

“Then be silent about it,” said Simon. “We have all in a way retraced our steps.”

“There will be a certain zest in going forward,” said Julia. “In knowing Hamish's wife, and seeing their life together. We cannot say there will not.”

“Why should we want to say it?” said Walter. “It is the thing we have to sustain us.”

“If we were without it, we should not want it,” said Graham. “The truth creates its own need.”

Simon turned to his wife.

“I begin to feel almost glad I had to tell the truth. Hamish has become an uncertain figure. I feel I have not known him. And I think I see he has not known any of us.”

“Or he would not have made his confession at so little cost. We had to feel it was less than it might have been.”

“It is hard to forgive it,” said Walter. “I shall not even try.”

“We might say we had nothing to forgive,” said Fanny. “But it is a thing we seldom say, if it is true.”

“Hamish has betrayed himself,” said Graham. “I wonder if he knows it. His letting his mother hear the news with all of us! And the way she accepted it! It does throw its light.”

“There was no need of it on her,” said Julia. “Everything comes of the one thing. She has felt she has no right to her motherhood, no claim on him as a son. Her secret was the cause of it.”

“Do you make it explain more than is there?” said Simon.

“No,” said Fanny. “She sees what it is. My sister changed after her marriage, it may have been at that time. Up to a point it must have been.”

“Well, we are at home,” said Ralph. “In the house that is that to us, until we leave it for the other. We know it for certain now.”

“Did you mean the grave or the workhouse?” said Simon, in a changed tone. “Tell me the truth.”

“That—the grave,” said Ralph, not doing this.

Emma emerged from the bushes.

“You forgot to bring us home.”

“Oh, we did!” said Fanny. “Other things drove it from our minds. How did you get here?”

“Miss Dolton fetched us after you had gone. She
thought you might forget. You didn't even see us on the road.”

“I daresay not,” said Ralph. “We had things to talk about.”

“Well, everyone has. It was funny that seven people forgot. It was nine, if you count Aunt Rhoda and Hamish. But they were not responsible.”

“It was certainly remiss,” said Graham.

“What does that mean?”

“Neglectful of something that ought to be done.”

“Yes, it is exactly the word, isn't it?”

Claud appeared beside his sister.

“We were left in the other garden. We might almost have been orphans.”

“I wonder how you would feel, if you were,” said Simon. “You would not overlook the difference.”

“It might not be very much. We should still have Miss Dolton.”

“Not if you were orphans. There would be no home for you or her.”

“It didn't really seem as if there was.”

“You could have gone into the other house.”

“Not unless we were asked,” said Emma. “We have no claim on people, because we are children. It does not do to think along that line.”

“Hamish could have brought you home,” said Fanny.

“He didn't think of it. And we could hardly expect him to. He has become a stranger to us, hasn't he?”

“Mother, here she is!” said Hamish. “Here, where she is to be, where she and I are to be old together, where you will see us grow into our full selves! Our last, long chapter has begun.”

“And must go on,” said his wife, as she shook hands with Rhoda and glanced into her face. “And I have not had a wedding or appeared in any proper light. I have indeed not appeared at all. I am seen at once as a stranger and a son's wife.”

“I want things as they are, and her as she is,” said Hamish. “I would not have anything different.”

“But I daresay your mother would,” said his wife, looking aside, as she hurried the words she had to say. “I am eleven years older than you, and full of opinions, they say, though most of us have them, and it might be no better to have none. Anyhow she sees me, such as I am; and for myself alone I would be a thousand times more fair, but perhaps no more rich, as it would not become me to have much.”

“I am thirty-nine years older than Hamish,” said Rhoda, as the rapid, deep tones ceased. “I shall see you become your full selves. You will see me fall away from mine.”

“I am myself now. Nothing is to come. You must
take me as I am, as people say. As though that justified their being what they are, when probably nothing could!”

“This is the dining-room,” said Rhoda, leading the way across the hall. “I daresay you guessed it would be here.”

“I was wondering if it was anywhere, the hall was so wide. It has had a long history as what it is. How many people have sat here at a time?”

“Ah, many in the past. Very few sit here now. But our family from the other house will be with us tonight; Hamish's two older cousins and their mother, and the elder one's wife, who is my sister, and their sons and daughter. Then we shall be ten at the table, many for us now. But everyone is too anxious to know you to be left behind.”