His tone was final. He meant the subject to be closed, and even Portia did not like to continue it.
Alethea listened as if she was in a dream. This was the subject upon which Nicholas’s morbid mania had always compelled a miserable silence, and here he was handling it with a lightness which was altogether unlike his usual manner. And he had said the only thing which could eradicate Hans’ suspicion that his parents really looked upon him with the same eyes as the Newsmonger writer. He was not after all a ‘disgrace to the family’, but one of its normal types. In fact Nicholas had spoken as if he were almost proud of his dwarf relations. And the easy way in which he spoke, with a smile that was slightly mocking as he looked at Portia, and that became distinctly tender when he turned to Hans, made it impossible for the boy to continue to think that he had ever been the cause of his father’s gloom. Nicholas had put the subject into its right proportions.
As they all went out of the room after luncheon, Alethea saw that Nicholas had thrown his arm across his son’s shoulders, and they were talking easily together. They had found each other.
She went upstairs to her bedroom. The weight of her long struggle had been taken off her, and yet it seemed now to come back upon her and to crush her for the first time. She lay down upon her bed and sobbed convulsively.
She lay there for a long time, and when at last Nicholas came to find her, she did not hear his footsteps till he was in the room.
He sat down on the bed beside her.
‘Do you really care so much about that stupid newspaper?’ he said, taking one of her hands and playing with its fingers.
‘No. Indeed not. But Hans minded so terribly at first, and I felt helpless. It seemed that whatever I said was magnifying it. You knew just what not to say.’
‘I have been through the mill.’
She pressed the hand which still held hers.
‘What made him so miserable was that he thought that we—you and I—must always have seen him in that way too,’ she said.
‘I almost did, in the old days; because, like the newspaper man, I never really did see him.’
‘And now you will be happy, because you do see what he is.’
‘Yes, I am tamed at last,’ said Nicholas with a laugh which covered real embarrassment. ‘And I now see what a fool I have been all this time. But I don’t think I should ever have known quite how much of a fool, if I hadn’t seen poor little Hans’ face when Portia was teasing him at luncheon. I realized then that he was feeling all that I used to feel at school; and then I knew that I had allowed my life to be made permanently miserable by what those horrid little boys had said. It made me determine that his life shouldn’t be spoilt in the same way. And directly I began to speak, I found that there was nothing so very terrible about it after all. It had become so, because I had made it into something which couldn’t possibly be spoken about. I had turned it into a disgrace by treating it as one.’
‘My poor Nicholas,’ said Alethea.
He kissed her: and with that kiss there seemed to come a reversal of their relationship, for now it was he who resolved to banish from her the haunting of the Dwarf’s Blood.
They went downstairs together, and into the Library—that room so full of memories for them both. Here, it always seemed to Nicholas that he had seen Alethea for the first time, for he had never really known what she was like till a ray of sunlight showed her to him there. Here, the horrible apparition of Mrs. Roxerby had broken in upon them, tearing them apart. Here, they had begun their life again together, after the war. Now they went there in search of Hans. The room was empty. Alethea crossed it, and stood looking into the garden, while Nicholas watched the light shining from her eyes.
‘I think I must commission Hans to paint a new picture for the ceiling of this room,’ he said, after a few minutes.
‘Why? Is the plaster cracking again?’
‘No. It’s not that. But the time has come when I want another subject than Prometheus chained to the rock.’
‘And you think that Hans can find one?’
‘I feel sure that he can.’
Copyright
First published in 1931 by Faber & Faber
This edition published 2014 by Bello
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Copyright © Edith Olivier, 1931
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