A Heritage and its History (20 page)

“It is the daughter, whom Hamish would have married, if he could? I wonder if she does want to meet me. I want to meet her, though I shall have to feel humble in her eyes.”

“Marcia knows everything, Mother,” said Hamish. “I had nothing in my life to hide. And I did not make a mystery of this one thing, that was not my fault. It would have been a precarious secret. And the truth does all that needs to be done.”

“I would not have spoken of it,” said Marcia, keeping her eyes from Rhoda's face, “except to let you know that I knew. It seemed you had to know.”

Rhoda answered at once.

“It has been so much to follow from so little. That is how I must see it. It is all I can say.”

“It is the thing to be said,” said Marcia, turning her eyes about the room. “It seems as if nothing had ever been altered here. I suppose nothing has.”

“Do you want to alter anything?” said Hamish.

“I could not think of it. Nothing could be different. It would be like changing something unearthed after ages. The time for it is past.”

“Don't you like it as it is?”

“I like it in itself, but hardly for me. It does not offer me anything.”

“You will grow into it and become a part of it,” said Rhoda. “That is what our women do.”

“It will draw me into itself. I felt it would.”

“You would like something modern?” said Hamish.

“No, but something lighter and more on my level. And I don't mean the level is low, or that I shall think of it. I am answering your questions.”

“When I was a boy, I felt as you do, or should have, if I had thought it possible. But I have learned to like it and live with it. You will do the same.”

“You have a long start. And time is longer in youth.”

“I am part of the lesson Hamish has learned,” said Rhoda. “I hope you can do as well as he.”

“I am glad to have someone to balance his youth and cover my lack of it. I feel less of a husk, with everything worn away.” Marcia glanced round the room, as though finding her words in tune with it.

“Hamish will show you the house. He feels it is his to give to you.”

“She does not want it,” said Hamish, looking at his
wife. “She is as yet a stranger to it. But she will come to share it with me.”

“You may have the whole. I shall not see any part as mine. I will deal with it as something to pass on, as it came into my hands. Neither better nor worse; it would be wrong for it to be either. As we change, it will not change with us. It is like some fossilised thing, that has come to withstand time. That is what it is.”

“You will soon see living people here, my aunts and my cousins of two generations. You know we call them what they are thought to be.”

“Do you feel they are seen as that?” said Marcia, as they went upstairs.

“If they are not, we shall never know. We do not mean ever to know. The truth is to be covered by silence, and gradually by time. That is what my father used to say.”

“No wonder you were tempted to say it. I hope it will be as good as it sounds. It seems the way to speak in this house. And it is right that it should have a secret. It is not such a sinister one. Did your cousin mind his disinheritance, when you were born?”

“More than he has said, or thought I knew. More than I knew anyone could mind anything, that was not a grief. I suppose that is what it was. He loves the place more than I do, more than my father did, more than my mother has come to. He has cared for it better than I could. I am wise to leave it in his hands.”

“Your mother does not mind your marrying. You have not been everything to each other.”

“No, not as you mean it. There has been a lack of emotion in our life. You know enough to understand.”

“I am glad not to exact a sacrifice. That sounds of more advantage than it is. Of course we don't have the chance to get used to it. I daresay it is a taste we could acquire.”

“This is to be our room,” said Hamish. “It is the one my father had. My mother has never slept here. She has the one that was his brother's.”

“I ought to be different,” said Marcia, turning to the glass, to see her tall, spare figure, low, wide brow, deep-set, grey eyes and straight, unyouthful features as strangers would see them. “I am older and plainer and less poor than I ought to be. Someone younger and more dependent would fit the part. And the house would have more welcome for her.”

“My mother likes you, I can see,” said Hamish.

“And do you see that I like her? How well do you know me? It is not the people I am afraid of here, but the place. I shall be glad to feel it is inhabited by human beings like myself, though they might not so describe themselves. I feel that you and I and your mother might be immured here and forgotten.”

“There is no lack of family life. I hope it will not be too much.”

“Better that than too little, anyhow better than nothing. We must have something more than emptiness.”

The hour came when the other family entered the house. Marcia faced the seven pairs of eyes with their
interest and question of the future, and responded, as she did everything, according to herself. When she had glanced once from Hamish's face to Simon's, she did not do so again.

“This is a new day for us,” said Fanny. “The history of our house unfolds. It is a thing that is serious to us. My sister and I have learned it.”

“I am learning,” said Marcia. “I have already gone a little way. It is hard to look at the future of a place with so much behind. It seems that such a long history must be near its end. I shall need help.”

“You shall have it,” said Simon. “And you will not want it long. It is a grateful house, kind to its inmates, sad to lose them. When I left it, I felt its sympathy, and I still feel it.”

“I knew it was human. I must simply resist its hold. I cannot be bound and burdened. I must be free and travel light. I shall live in it, an alien, in the end I daresay a slave, but never drawn into it, always apart in myself.”

“I could be away from it for fifty years and never be apart.”

“I could be in it for as long, and always be. My hope is to fear and serve it, and hand it on to people who love the bond. I could never join them.”

“The wives of our family have done so. It has gone on through the centuries.”

“As everything has here,” said Marcia, as they went in to dinner. “Nothing belongs to the present, and it is in the present that we live. Otherwise we live in what is not there, in what is in our minds and nowhere else.

I must go forward and not back. We know what is behind. What is before us is enough.”

“What is behind is a part of us, rooted in our being. We have grown from it. Something deep in us remembers it. In a sense nothing is forgotten.”

“In another sense everything is. And nothing in me remembers this. Everything warns me that I am to take nothing from it, and give it myself. Well, it has taken better people, and will take more.”

“Different people, we will say,” said Simon.

“Another institution is to receive us in the end,” said Ralph. “We are glad to feel we can rely on it.”

“The workhouse?” said Marcia, smiling at once. “It is far removed from this one. But I believe the past rules there as well. So you may in a way be prepared for it.”

“This subject already!” said Simon. “You must forgive my son. He has no other.”

“It was my father who introduced it. And he has not provided a second.”

“Hamish's birth upset a great deal,” said Marcia to Simon, and paused.

“It was a natural change. One that often happens,” said Simon, and also paused.

“You must not think we did not welcome Hamish,” said Julia, from her place.

“No one could have welcomed me,” said Hamish to his wife. “Certainly the house did not. Of course my mother did in time. Yes, I am to sit opposite Cousin Simon, on your other side. Graham is taking my place. I am to have my own way tonight.”

Marcia lowered her tone.

“Hamish, I wish you had not told me. I wish I did not know. No one can speak or be spoken to, without saying or hearing too much. How is it all to go on, and how to end?”

“I had to tell you. You had to know about Naomi. You would have seen in time.”

“I could have thought you had broken things off in some other way. It is a common thing.”

“How long would you have thought it? You would have seen and heard. You are not a person who does not do both. And I did not break it off. I should not have done so. I would not let anyone think it. Least of all would I let you. What would you think of me? What should I think of myself?”

“Yes, I see I had to know. And the knowledge in itself is nothing. It is the mystery and meaning that smother it. But I shall do my part. It is an easier one than yours.”

“Hamish and I have ended our feeling,” said Naomi. “The sense of our relationship helped us. It is true that we needed help.”

“And I thought I had little in my life,” said Hamish, looking from one to the other. “Now I have both of you, I feel it is so much.”

“I wish I had less,” said Marcia, smiling. “All this that surrounds me, and all these relations who are something else! It stretches over the future.”

“And we seem a fated family,” said Ralph. “Claud is resolved to marry Emma. And we must admit it is on our line.”

“I am sorry for such talk,” said Simon. “I should have thought my son would know better.”

“You surely had not such a hope of me, sir.”

“It is true that I am hardly given it.”

“I wish you had never had to leave this house,” said Marcia to Simon. “I wish it could have been different. It seems it might have been. Hamish could not be your son, and yet had to be, when his life denied it. It is a hard, sad thing. And it came from so little.”

“The last word is a true and kind one.”

“It is the only one. How often you have said it!”

“We must not say it again. The truth is not to be thought or said. It is as if it had not been.”

“You know it is not. It will never be. It might be so more, if we were not all here together, if Hamish and I were somewhere else. It is Hamish who forces it to the surface, so that it follows us with all that must be hidden. And the cloud is lasting. It will never lift.”

“It all seems to settle into something we accept and do not question. We learn to live with it.”

“Because for you there is no escape. You are bound to this place, that shadows you with a dead past and a threatened future. But as I am added to your other women, I suffer something more than they. I can never send my roots down here, only move on the surface, uneasy and aloof. It is so much less than they have given.”

“It is a good deal from you,” said Simon. “It would come to be more. And Hamish promised his father to take his place.”

“He had made an earlier promise. That claim is the first.”

“I could not accept it. I waited for it to be withdrawn. I was glad when it was.”

“You were glad to allow it to be, to do what you owed to yourself, feeling you owed more, because of the one betrayal. That is not gladness.”

“It was the kind I could have. The other was not for me. I have only the right to forget it. Here are the children come to greet you, before they go to bed. Come and say ‘how-do-you-do?' to Cousin Marcia.”

“Is she really our cousin?” said Claud.

“She is your cousin by marriage. That is what you will call her.”

“I don't expect we shall call her anything,” said Emma. “You can speak to people without a name.”

“I shall know whom you mean,” said Marcia. “Am I what you thought I should be?”

“Well, you are older,” said Claud. “And taller and not like Naomi. When you are really instead of her, it is strange for you to be so different.”

“It might seem that Hamish couldn't like both of you,” said Emma. “But of course we know he did.”

“No one is instead of anyone else,” said Julia. “Everyone has his own place.”

“Don't you mean
her
place?” said Claud. “There was really only one for both of them. Unless one of them was a concubine, and we know they weren't that. Then he might have had hundreds.”

“I don't think he might,” said Emma. “Solomon was a king.”

“Are you glad that Hamish has given you this house?” said Claud. “He was going to give it to Naomi. But as she didn't marry him, there is nothing unfair.”

“I think it is too large and old a house for me.”

“It is not what you are used to,” said Emma, in sympathy. “We never want to stay in it. Though it is better than an orphanage would be.”

“Well, you may leave it,” said Simon. “And your nurse is waiting. So say good-night and run away.”

“Why do people say ‘run', when they don't mean it?” said Claud. “Must we say good-night to everyone at the table?”

“No, only to Cousin Marcia and Grandma and Mother.”

“Shan't we say it to Uncle Walter? He is getting old.”

“Well, you can say it to him, though he is younger than I am.”

“But you are giving the directions,” said Emma. “So you would not say anything was due to yourself.”

“Why were they thinking of an orphanage?” said Marcia.

“We all have to think of an alternative shelter,” said Ralph. “We are not to depend on our present one.”

“Oh, it corresponds to the workhouse at their age.”

“These are boyish young men,” said Simon, as they rose from the table.

“They scarcely seem so,” said Marcia. “The thought of the workhouse has come soon. In youth it is an end for other people.”

“Not in our youth,” said Ralph.

Marcia glanced at Simon's face and said no more.

“You see it all,” said Hamish, moving to her. “My birth dispossessed Cousin Simon and broke up his future. And my promise to withdraw on my father's death changed things and gave it back to him. But he accepted my later word to my father, and wished me to keep it, indeed looked for the change. And he knows he caused his displacement himself, and has no grievance.”