Elders and Betters (28 page)

“I cannot picture Aunt Jessica taking such a course,” said Bernard.

“I feel now that I could always have imagined it,” said his sister. “But I did not have to do so. I was confronted by the stark reality. And my imagination could achieve anything with regard to her now. She stimulates that faculty to uncanny feats.”

“Forget it, my daughter,” said Benjamin. “It was a difficult passage for both of you, and it is behind.”

“No, no, Father,” said Anna, shaking her head. “The scene is indelibly engraved on my memory. That room as the background, and Aunt Jessica and I grouped in the foreground, looking each other in the eyes! Or rather I
doing that, and Aunt Jessica's eyes going anywhere and everywhere but to my face. Strange, elusive eyes they are; they don't seem to focus anywhere. I thought I should be afraid to meet them, that they would probe into my inmost soul, a thing that no one quite likes to face; but I found myself pursuing them, so that they should have to meet mine. The setting of the scene was supposed to bring me to my knees. But it had the opposite effect. It was such an obvious misuse of poor Aunt Sukey's corner. And I don't like clever and mean ideas. And now. I can never enter the room again, and not only for the natural reasons, but for these contrived and nameless ones.”

“As it is to be Uncle Thomas's study, you may not incur much pressure to do so,” said Esmond.

“I disliked that use for it at first. I thought it was a rather cold and callous way of turning Aunt Sukey's death to account. But it has come to seem a sort of protection. It will save both it and me from worse.”

“It is but a room,” said Bernard. “Let us hear more of the human scene enacted in it.”

“I wonder if Anna knows how little she has told us,” said Esmond.

“I should have thought I had told you all kinds of things that I hardly knew, myself,” said his sister, putting her hands to her cheeks. “Anyhow I have said all I can bring myself to utter of the sorry scene. The mere discomfort of it was enough. I have never felt such a weight of anything so vague. And Aunt Jessica gave me the strangest sense of guilt, and traded on the feeling until I quite admired her ingenuity and resource. She might have been a member of the Inquisition, and I her victim. And she is such an actress, whether she knows it or not, that I found myself overcome by her pathos, and undertaking not to betray her to her family.”

“A promise that you broke on the first opportunity,” said Esmond.

“Not at all. She was not referring to her claim on the
money; everyone knew about that. It was the interchange of thoughts and opinions, that she did not want revealed.”

“You do not share the feeling,” said Esmond.

“Don't I? You told me just now how little I had told you. It would be a certain relief to put it all off my mind. It is a good deal to keep bottled up within me. But she is Aunt Sukey's sister, after all, and I am her niece, and that can be the end of the matter.”

“It was strange to exact such a promise after such a scene,” said Benjamin.

“Yes,” said Anna, nodding towards him, as if she shared the view, “it was the most contradictory state of affairs. We might have been inmates of a madhouse. I hardly knew where I was.”

“Then it hardly mattered your being in Aunt Sukey's room,” said Esmond.

“But she managed to suggest her wishes, and I found I had fallen in with them,” went on his sister, as if she had not heard. “It seems a weak thing to do. I am not proud of it. It was more suggestibility and reluctance to struggle with a virtual invalid, than anything better.”

“I daresay Aunt Jessica is not seeking to impute any higher motives.”

“Oh, no,” said Anna, lightly. “Even if I relinquished the money, she would not do that. She would accept it as her due, as she accepts all else that she is given.”

“She would not claim it, if she did not see it as that,” said Benjamin. “We do her that justice. She is not a stranger to us.”

“Mere justice is not at all to her mind, Father,” said Anna, shaking her head. “She is used to so much more. All her family give it to her, some of them reluctantly, I admit, and perhaps Uncle Thomas as a way of avoiding trouble. Even Aunt Sukey showed her magnanimity. She had a much scantier measure herself.”

“Except from her sister,” said Benjamin.

“Yes, Aunt Jessica came out above herself there,” said
Anna in full concession. “Aunt Sukey brought out her higher side. I am the first to recognise it.”

“And did you bring out her lower?” said Esmond.

“Well, something did,” said his sister, sighing. “And as no one else was there, I suppose it was me. There is a pleasant reflection. Of course it was the money really.”

“Well, you have kept your hold of it,” said Bernard. “Through fire and water you have come, with it in your hands. And to lose it without the honour of freely relinquishing it would be too much. And that does emerge as the alternative.”

“It will be a long time before I can treat it as my own, with Aunt Jessica's eyes fixed upon me. I can hardly imagine myself using it with a free hand. And of course we shall not have it yet. There will be death duties and other things.”

“Those are generally paid out of capital,” said Bernard.

“I think I should like to meet them out of income,” said his sister, in a considered manner. “I don't want to reduce the legacy at the outset. I would rather keep what is virtually a gift from Aunt Sukey, whole and intact, as she left it, so that I can see it as she saw it herself, all my life.”

“It might certainly meet a different fate in the hands of Aunt Jessica,” said Esmond. “Perhaps Aunt Sukey left it to you, to save it from being dispersed. People like to feel that their hoard will survive them, as a monument of themselves. They do not want their last traces to be obliterated.”

“Well, why should they?” said Anna. “And how like you to use the word, ‘hoard'! I can understand their point of view. It is said that money is left to people who do not need it, and there may be something underlying it. I do not say there is not. ‘Money to money' is a phrase, isn't it? That rather bears out the view, and may throw light on Aunt Sukey's decision.”

“Your Aunt Jessica was speaking of the funeral,” said Benjamin, his voice recalling that there was another side to the matter. “It is to be on Friday. No doubt some of us should go.”

“I suppose all of us,” said his daughter. “There does not seem to be any reason for avoiding it, though I should rather like to find one. I do not look forward to the ceremony. It seems to set the final and irrevocable seal on everything.”

“Are the rest of us supposed to anticipate it?” said Claribel, glancing at Anna's brothers.

“Do we not realise that this particular lane has no turning?” said Esmond.

“Oh, nothing is the same to any two people,” said Anna.

“Aunt Jessica is not going,” said Reuben. “She is going to stay at home with Julius and Dora.”

“Then I think that releases me,” said Anna, looking round. “I do not see why I should face what she will not. I will remain behind with Reuben. I don't much care for the experience for him. And I never think a funeral is in a woman's line.”

“My first will certainly be my own,” said Claribel, “and I would stay away from that, if I could.”

“Well, that is a natural point of view,” said Bernard.

“I think it would be better for me to go,” said Reuben. “I have never seen a funeral, and if Bernard and Esmond are going, it would attract attention if the third brother stayed away.”

Anna looked from him to the others with grim humour.

“Well, my sons and I will go,” said Benjamin, his voice betraying his view of his command of this escort.

“And Jenney will go, won't she?” said Reuben, feeling he had made a rash undertaking.

“Yes, I will go with you,” said Jenney, in a tone of giving a promise.

“And your daughter will be here to welcome you back, Father,” said Anna. “You will be glad of someone who has kept aloof, by the time you reach the climax.”

“I suppose Tullia is going,” said Bernard. “I did not hear that she was not.”

“Oh, Tullia can cast things off,” said Anna. “And she may prefer a funeral to an hour with Aunt Jessica.”

“She does not feel to her mother in that way,” said Benjamin. “You must know that she does not.”

“Oh, well, I may read into her mind what would be in my own. It is inevitable that I should do so. Aunt Jessica has made an end of things between her family and me. But I should have thought her way of making people feel at a disadvantage would hardly be in Tullia's line.”

“It would not be in mine,” said Bernard, “but I cannot say I have felt it.”

“No,” said Anna, looking at him in unprejudiced consideration, “I don't suppose you have. I should say it would be like that; a man would escape. Now Terence would rather be with his mother than face the funeral.”

“Is Aunt Jessica not a nice person?” said Reuben.

“She has different sides, like most of us,” said his sister.

“You do not seem to like her.”

“Well, I hardly could, considering the aspect she has shown to me. But there is no reason why you should not, if she shows you a different one. And she has been very kind to you, hasn't she?”

“Do you think it is so very wrong to think she ought to have Aunt Sukey's money?”

“No, I think it is quite natural. I should have thought she ought myself, if Aunt Sukey had died without a will. But there are different methods of trying to put right what you feel is wrong, and she did not choose a good or kind one. You have heard so much, that you must hear just a little more. And we should always accept wills without any question, because they are a kind of message from someone who is dead. We all want Aunt Sukey's wishes to be carried out, don't we?”

“Doesn't Aunt Jessica want them to be?”

“Oh, I don't know, I am sure,” said Anna, turning away and speaking in a voice with a sigh in it.

“CAN I SPEAK to you, Miss Jennings?” Said Ethel.

“Yes, if you have anything to say, and have really thought about it,” said Jenney, implying that she must withhold her ear from rash decisions.

“I hardly know how to break it to you, Miss Jennings.”

“You make me feel quite nervous,” said Jenney, pleasantly and with truth, giving a shake to her needlework.

“It is the worst,” said Ethel, in a warning manner.

Jenney felt that Ethel's estimate of her own value was more true than becoming, perhaps could hardly be both.

“There has not been an accident?” she said, as if this was the natural interpretation of the words.

“No one in this house, Miss Jennings.”

“What is the trouble?” said Bernard from the sofa.

“It is Mrs. Calderon,” said Ethel.

“Who has had an accident?”

“It may have been that, sir.”

“Oh, what has happened?” said Jenney.

“The worst, Miss Jennings. I can say no more.”

“Do you mean that she is dead?”

“You had the preparation,” said Ethel, with a note of reproach.

“Oh!” said Jenney, folding her work in a form suitable for resumption, as she would not have done, if the trouble had been in the house. “Oh, what has happened? Anything is better than suspense.”

“I hardly liked to say that,” said Bernard. “I always wonder that people admit it.”

“She was found,” said Ethel, in a deeper tone, urged to
the point, as Bernard had intended, by the threat of digression from it.

“By whom?” said Jenney. “What had happened?”

“Poor Miss Tullia!” said Ethel.

“Do you mean that she found her?”

“It seems to be fated, when it was she who came on Miss Donne.”

There was a silence.

“It may be her father next, if these things go in threes,” said Ethel. “It was doing something for him, that took her to the room. They were making it into his study.”

There was a pause.

“You would think they would relinquish that project now,” said Ethel.

“And how did she find Mrs. Calderon?” said Bernard.

“It confronted her, sir, as she crossed the threshold.”

“Was she lying on the ground?”

“It was the selfsame chair, sir, where Miss Donne breathed her last.”

There was another silence.

“You would hardly think they would use that chair now,” said Ethel. “Or use the room at all. You would think they would shut it away from approach.”

“Have they any idea of the cause of death?” said Bernard.

“Suppose one of the children had gone in,” said Ethel. “Poor little Miss Dora!”

“It might have meant being transfixed,” said Cook. “Come in, Cook,” said Bernard.

Cook came forward with a movement that would hardly have been detectable, if it had not resulted in an advance.

“These are times,” she said, in the tones that gave people a sense of surprise that they had heard them. “Death upon death.”

“And there may be the third,” said Ethel.

“But what was the cause of this?” said Bernard. “Is it known or not?”

“We do not speak evil of the dead,” said Ethel. “Not a word will pass my lips.”

Cook supported the silence.

“But it will have to be known,” said Jenney. “And someone must have told you.”

“We are never spared bad news,” said Ethel.

“We cannot say the same,” said Bernard, “and so must ask your help.”

“If it is that,” said Ethel.

“A strange word,” murmured Cook.

“There may have been every excuse,” said Ethel. “I am the last to deny it.”

“We might all fall,” said Cook.

“We will make all the excuses we can, when we are in a position to do so,” said Bernard. “You are preventing them from being made. That hardly seems a proper thing.”