‘Of course she is, as we did not bring her with us,’ said Matty, with her little laugh. ‘Couldn’t you show her where the things are, as you have just unpacked them?’
‘She put everything together - I put it all together - we have not sorted them yet. She is just finding what she can.’
‘I should have put all the things in their places as I took them out. I should not have thought of any other way.’
‘We couldn’t do that. The men were waiting to take the cases. We had to put them all down anywhere.’
‘I should have known where anywhere was. I often wish I were able-bodied, for everyone’s sake.’
‘We wish you were, child, but for your own,’ said Oliver.
‘I think Miss Griffin has managed wonders from the look of the house,’ said Blanche.
‘We have all done that today,’ said her sister. ‘I almost think I have managed the most, in keeping still through all the stir and turmoil. I hope we shall never have such a day again. I can’t help hoping it.’
‘I know I shall not,’ said her father.
‘I remember so well the day when you came to us, Miss Griffin,’ said Blanche. ‘It was thirty-one years ago, a few days before my wedding. And you were so kind in helping me to pack and put the last touches to my clothes. I wish I was taking you with me.’
‘I remember thinking that you were using my companion as your own,’ said Matty, smiling from one to the other.
Miss Griffin turned her face aside, finding it unsteadied by ordinary kindness.
‘Sit down, Miss Griffin, and rest until dinner,’ said Matty. ‘There is no need to stand more than you must, though I often wish I could do a little of it. That may make me think other people more fortunate than they are.’
Miss Griffin sat down in the sudden, limp way of someone who would soon have had to do so.
‘There is Edgar,’ said Blanche. ‘He will come in and say a word, and then we will leave you all to rest.’
‘Why, Edgar, this is nice,’ said Matty, rising from her seat as she had not done for her sister, and showing that she stood tall and straight, in spite of disabled lower limbs. ‘I did not think you would forget us on our first night. We had not forgotten you. No, you have been in our minds and on our lips. Now what do you say to our settling at your very gates?’
‘That it is - that I hope it is the best place for you to be,’ said Edgar, putting out all his effort and accordingly unable to say more.
‘And your brother! I am never quite sure what to call him,’ said Matty, putting round her head to look at Dudley. ‘Come in and let us hear your voice. We have been cheered by it so many times.’
‘I am glad you have. I have always meant you to be. I am in my element in a chat. My strong point is those little things which are more important than big ones, because they make up life. It seems that big ones do not do that, and I daresay it is fortunate.’
‘Yes, it is indeed. We have been involved in the latter today, and we see that we could not manage too many. Now it is so good to hear you talk again. We see we have not given up our home for nothing.’
‘Indeed you have not. You have left it to make a new one with all of us,’ said Blanche, relieved by the turn of the talk and not disturbed that she had been unable to produce it.
‘Such a lot of happiness, such a lot of affection and kindness,’ said Matty, in a tone charged with sweetness and excitement. ‘It is so good to know that we are welcome.’
‘It is indeed,’ said Oliver; ‘for a moment since I should have thought that we could not be.’
‘How are you, sir?’ said Edgar and Dudley, speaking at one moment, but obliged to shake hands in turn.
‘I am well, I thank you, and I hope that both of you are better by thirty-odd years, as you should be.’
Oliver put a chair for his son-in-law and settled down to talk. He gave his feeling to his daughters but he liked to talk with men.
‘How are you, Miss Griffin?’ said Dudley, turning from the pair. ‘I hope you are not hiding feelings of your own on the occasion.’
‘No, I am not; it all makes a change,’ said Miss Griffin, admitting more feeling than she knew into the last word. ‘And we did not want that large house for so few people. It is better to be in a little one, where there is less work and more comfort. And I don’t mind the small rooms. I rather like to be snug and compact.’
‘Now I would not claim that that is just my taste. I confess to a certain disposition towards the opposite,’ said Matty, in a clear tone. ‘It is not of my own will that I have changed my scale of life. I admit that I felt more at home with the other. It is all a matter of what fits our different personalities, I suppose.’
‘I hope I do not make cosy corners wherever I go,’ said Dudley. ‘I don’t want too many merely lovable qualities. They are better for other people than for oneself.’
‘Well, there will always be such a corner for you here. I shall be grateful if you will help me to make one, as it is rather outside my experience and scope. But once made, it will be always hospitable and always ready. If we can’t have one thing we will have another, or anyhow I will. I am not a person to give up because I can’t have just what I should choose, just what fits me, shall we say?’
‘I don’t know why we should say it, child,’ said Oliver. ‘And anyhow you should not.’
‘I wish my parents were not dead,’ said Dudley. ‘I should like to be called “child” by someone. It would prove that there were people about who were a generation older than me, and it will soon want proof.’
‘Welcome, welcome to your new hom! said Justine’s voice. ‘Welcome to your new life. I know I am one too many; I know you are tired out; I know your room is full. I know it all. But I simply had to come to wish you happiness, and say to you, Welcome, well come.’
‘So you had, dear, and it gives us such pleasure to hear it,’ said Matty, raising her face from her chair. ‘I did hope that some of you would feel that and come to tell us so. It seemed to me that you would, and I see I was not wrong. One, two, three, four dear faces! Only three left at home. It is such a help to us in starting again, and it is a thing which does need help. You don’t know that yet, and may it be long before you do.’
‘Well, I judged it, Aunt Matty, and that is why I am here. Of course, you must need courage. You can’t start again without a good deal of looking back. That must be part of it. And I did feel a wish to say a word to help you to look forward.’
Blanche looked at her daughter in simple appreciation; Edgar threw her a glance and withdrew it; and Oliver surveyed the scene as if it were not his concern.
‘You help us, dear, indeed,’ said Matty. ‘It was a kind and loving wish, and as such we accept it and will try to let it do its work.’
‘I know you will, Aunt Matty dear; I know your inexhaustible fund of courage. You know, I am of those who remember you of old, straight and tall and proud, as you appeared to my childish eyes. My feeling for you has its ineradicable root in the past.’
The words brought a silence, and Justine, fair in all her dealings, broke it herself.
‘How are you, Miss Griffin?’ she said, shaking hands with great cordiality, and then sitting down and seeming to render the room at once completely full. ‘Now this is a snug little cottage parlour. Now, how do you take to it, Aunt Matty?’
‘We shall be content in it, dear. We mean to be. And where there is a will there is a way. And it should not be difficult to come to like it, our little cottage parlour. Those are good and pretty words for it. They give the idea without any adding to it or taking away.’
‘It is not a cottage, dear,’ said Blanche, looking at her daughter.
‘Isn’t it, Mother? Well, no, we know it strictly is not. But it gives all the idea of one somehow. And I mean nothing disparaging; I like a roomy cottage. When I am a middle-aged woman and Mark is supreme in the home, I shall like nothing better than to have perhaps this very little place, and reign in it, and do all I can
for people outside. Now does not that strike you all as an alluring prospect?’
‘Yes, it sounds very nice,’ said Miss Griffin, who thought that it did, and who was perhaps the natural person to reply, as the arrangement involved the death of most of the other people present.
‘I don’t think it gives the idea of a cottage at all,’ said Blanche, looking round with contracting eyes. ‘The rooms are so high and the windows so broad. One could almost imagine oneself anywhere.’
‘But not quite,’ said her sister, bending her head and looking up at the men from under it. ‘We can’t, for example, imagine ourselves where we used to be.’
‘Well, no, not there, dear. We must both of us leave that. It was my old home too, as you seem to forget.’
‘No, dear. You do at times, I think. That is natural. You have put too much over it. Other things have overlaid the memory. I chose to keep it clear and by itself. There is the difference.’
‘Well, it is natural, Aunt Matty,’ said Justine. ‘I don’t think Mother must be blamed for it. There is a difference.’
‘Yes, dear, and so you will not blame her. I have said that I do not. And is the old aunt already making herself tiresome? She must be so bright and easy as an invalid in a strange place?’
‘Come, Aunt Matty, invalid is not the word. You are disabled, we know, and we do not underrate the handicap, but your invalidism begins and ends there. Now I am not going to countenance any repining. You are in your virtual prime; you have health and looks and brains; and we are going to expect a good deal from you.’
‘My dear, did Aunt Matty ask you to sum up her position?’ said Blanche, a faint note of triumphant pride underlying her reproof.
‘No, Mother, you know she did not, so why put the question? I did not wait to be asked; it is rather my way not to. You need not put on a disapproving face. I have to be taken as I am. I do not regret what I said, and Aunt Matty will not when she thinks it over.’
‘Or forgets it,’ said her aunt. ‘Yes, I think that is what Aunt Matty had better do. She has not the will or the energy to think it over at this juncture of her life. And forgetting it will be better, so that is the effort she must make.’
‘Now I am in disgrace, but I do not regard it. I have had my say and I always find that enough,’ said Justine, who was wise in this attitude, as she would seldom have been advised to go further.
‘How very unlike Edgar and Justine are, dear!’ said Matty to her sister. ‘They have not a touch of each other, and they say that daughters are like their fathers. They are both indeed themselves.’
‘Well, that is as well,’ said Justine. ‘Father would not like me to be a copy of him. He would not feel the attraction of opposites.’
‘Opposite. Yes, that is almost the word,’ said her aunt.
Miss Griffin gave the sudden, sharp breath of someone awaking from a minute’s sleep, and looked about with bewildered eyes.
‘Poor Miss Griffin, you are tired out,’ said Blanche.
‘I am so glad you got off for a minute, Miss Griffin,’ said Justine.
‘I did not know where I was; I must have dropped off with all the voices round me,’ said Miss Griffin, with a view of the talk which she would hardly have taken if she had heard it. ‘I don’t know why I did, I am sure.’
‘Being overtired is quite enough reason,’ said Justine.
‘So Miss Griffin is the first of us to make it one,’ said Matty in an easy tone.
‘It is a stronger reason in her case.’
‘Is it, dear?’ said Matty, so lightly that she hardly seemed to enunciate the words.
‘Why, Aunt Matty, she must have done twice as much as you - as anyone else. You know that.’
‘Twice as much as I have, dear? Many times as much, I daresay; I have been able to do hardly anything. And of course I know it.’ Matty gave her little laugh. ‘But what we have mostly done today, is sitting in the train, and we have done it together.’
‘Yes, but the preparations before and the unpacking afterwards! It must have been overwhelming. The time in the train must have been quite a respite.’
‘Yes, that is what I meant, dear.’
‘But it was only one day, only part of one. The work must have begun directly you reached this house. I can see how much has been achieved. You can’t possibly grasp it, sitting in a chair.’
‘So sitting in a chair has become an advantage, has it?’
‘Poor, dear Aunt Matty!’ said Justine, sitting on the arm of the chair, as if to share for the moment her aunt’s lot. ‘But it cannot contribute to the actual weariness, you know. That is a thing by itself.’
‘So there is only one kind of weariness,’ said Matty, putting her hand on her niece’s and speaking in a tone of gentle tolerance towards her unknowing youth.
‘Dear Aunt Matty! There must be times when to be hustled and driven seems the most enviable thing in the world. You are more unfortunate than anyone,’ said Justine, indicating and accepting her aunt’s lot and Miss Griffin’s.
Miss Griffin rose and went to the door with an explanatory look at Matty. Dudley opened it and followed her.
‘How do people feel on a first night in a new place? I have never had the experience. I have lived in the same house all my life.’
Miss Griffin lifted her eyes with a look he had not expected, almost of consternation.
‘It does make you feel uncertain about things. But I expect you soon get used to it. I was in the last house thirty-one years. Miss Seaton had never lived in any other.’
‘And are you sorry to come away from it?’
‘No, not very. It makes a change. We shall see different people. And it will be nice for Miss Seaton to have her sister and her family. It was the wisest plan.’
‘The best plan, not the wisest. It was very unwise. But a great many of the best things are that.’
Miss Griffin looked at him with a hint of a smile.
‘You agree with me, do you not?’
Miss Griffin checked her smile and looked aside.
‘You and I must be very much alike. We both live in other people’s houses; we are both very kind; and I am very good at playing second fiddle, and I believe you are too.’
‘Oh, I never mind doing that,’ said Miss Griffin in a full tone.
‘I have minded in my weaker moments, but I have conquered my worse self. You have no worse self, have you?’
‘No,’ said Miss Griffin, speaking the truth before she thought. ‘Well, I don’t know. Perhaps everyone has.’
‘You have to think of other people’s. So I see that you have not. And as I have suppressed mine, it is another point we have in common.’
Miss Griffin stood with a cheered expression.
‘Has Miss Seaton a better self?’ said Dudley.
Miss Griffin gave him a half smile which turned to a look of reproach.
‘Yes, of course she has. Everyone has.’
‘So it was her worse self we saw this evening?’
‘I did not mean that she had a worse self. You know I did not. She was very tired. It must be so dreadful not to be able to get about.’ Miss Griffin’s voice died away on a note of pure pity.
‘Well good night, Miss Griffin; we shall often meet.’
‘Good night, Mr Dudley,’ said Miss Griffin, turning towards the kitchen with a lighter step.
Dudley returned to the parlour to find the family dispersing. Matty was on her feet, talking with the lively affection which followed her difficult moods, and which she believed to efface their memory.
‘Good-bye, dearest; good-bye, my Justine; you will often come in to see the cross old aunt who loves you. Good-bye, Dudley; where have you been wandering? It was clever to find enough space to lose yourself. Good-bye, Edgar; my father has so enjoyed his masculine talk. It is a thing that does him so much good.’
‘And how have you enjoyed your feminine one?’ said Oliver, who had caught snatches of this dialogue. ‘Upon my word, I daresay a good deal.
You look the better for it.’
‘Good-bye, Aunt Matty dear,’ said Justine. ‘I have seemed a brute, but I have meant it for your good, and you are large enough to take it as it was meant.’
‘Good-bye,’ said Edgar at once. ‘We shall often meet; I hope we shall meet very often.’
‘Well, of course, people are only human,’ said Dudley to his brother, as they walked to the house behind the women. ‘But it really does not seem much for them to be.’
‘Yes, we must do what we can in our new life,’ said Edgar, as if in reply. ‘I think we may call it that. It may be a better life for Blanche. I think - I trust it may.’
‘Is her present life so bad?’
‘She may be lonely without knowing it. I fear it may have been the case. I feel - I fear I have little to be proud of in my family life.’
‘It is I who have the cause for pride. It is wonderful, the way in which I have put myself aside and kept your affection and won your wife’s. But I think the things we suffer without knowing are the best, as we are born to suffer. It is not as if Blanche had suspected her loneliness. And she can’t be with her sister and be unconscious of it.’
‘Neither can any of us,’ said Edgar, with the short, broken laugh which was chiefly heard by his brother. ‘I could see – I saw that she realized it today.’
‘I saw that Justine did too. The sight became too much for me and I had to escape.’
‘What were you doing all that time?’
‘Why do people say that they do not like having to account for their every action? I do like it. I like telling everything about myself and feeling that people take an interest. I was saying a kind word to Miss Griffin. They say that a kind word may work wonders; and I saw that something had to work wonders for her; and so I said the word and it did.’
‘Poor Miss Griffin! I mean that we cannot judge of other people’s lives.’
‘Of course we can. We all have lives and know about them. No one will have it said that he has no knowledge of life; and it could not be true.’
‘She has been with Matty and her father for a long time. I am not sure how long.’
A Family and a Fortune Page 5
