Poor Relations Part 49

"At this solemn moment, Harold, when we should all of us be dumb with grief, you should not persist. Your poor grandmother would be pained to hear you being persistent like this."

Harold seemed to think he had tricked his uncle into answering the question, for he relapsed into a satisfied silence; Edith's eyes flashed gladly through her tears to welcome the return of her husband's truant orthodoxy. All managed to abstain while they were eating from any more conspicuous intrusion of the flesh than was inevitable; but there was a painful scene after supper, because Frida insisted that she was frightened to sleep alone, and refused to be comforted by the offer of Viola for company. The terrible increase of Grandmama's powers of hearing and seeing might extend to new powers of locomotion in the middle of the night, in which case Viola would be no protection.

"But Grandmama is in Heaven, darling," her mother urged.

"I want to sleep with you. I'm frightened. I want to sleep with you,"

she wailed.

"Laurence!" murmured Edith, appealingly.

"Death is a great leveler," he intoned. Grateful to the chance of being able to make this observation, he agreed to occupy his daughter's room and thereby allow her to sleep with her mother.

"You're looking sad, Bertram," John observed, kindly, to his favorite nephew. "You mustn't take this too much to heart."

"No, Uncle John, I'm not. Only I keep wishing Grandmama had lived a little longer."

"We all wish that, old man."

"Yes, but I only meant a very little longer, so that I needn't have gone back for the first week of term."

John nervously hurried his nephew up to bed beyond the scorching of Laurence's rekindled flames of belief. Downstairs, he tried to extract from the att.i.tude of the grown-up members of the family the att.i.tude he would have liked to detect in himself. If a few months ago John had been told that his mother's death would affect him so little he would have been horrified by the suggestion; even now he was seriously shocked at himself. Yet, try as he might, he could not achieve the apotheosis of the old lady that he would have been so content to achieve. Undoubtedly a few months ago he would have been able without being conscious of self-deception to pretend that he believed not only in the reality of his own grief, but also in that of the others. He would have taken his part in the utterance of plat.i.tudes about life and death, separation and reunion. His own plat.i.tudes would have been disguised with poetic tropes, and he might have thought to himself how well such and such a phrase was put; but he would quickly have a.s.sured himself that it was well put because it was the just expression of a deep emotion. Now he could not make a single contribution to the woeful reflections of those round him. He believed neither in himself nor in them. He knew that George was faintly anxious about his top-hat, that Hilda was agitated at the prospect of having to explain to James and Beatrice her unintentional slight, that Laurence was unable to resist the opportunity of taking the lead at this sorrowful time by reverting to his priestly office. And Hugh, for whom the old lady had always possessed a fond unreasoning affection, did his countenance express more than a hardly concealed relief that it was all over? Did he not give the impression that he was stretching his legs after sitting still in one position for too long? Edith, to be sure, was feeling some kind of emotion that required an endless flow of tears, but it seemed to John that she was weeping more for the coming of death than for the going of her mother.

And the children, how could they be expected to feel the loss of the old lady? There under the lamp like a cenotaph recording the slow hours of age stood her patience-cards in their red morocco case; there they would be allowed to stand for a while to satisfy the brief craving for reverence, and then one of the children realizing that Grandmama had no more need of playing would take possession of them; they would become grubby and dog-eared in younger hands; they would disappear one by one, and the memory of that placid presence would hardly outlive them.

"It's so nice to think that her little annuity died with her," sighed Edith. She spoke of the annuity as if it were a favorite pug that had died out of sympathy with its mistress. "I should hate to feel I was benefiting from the death of somebody I loved," she explained presently.

John shivered; that remark of his sister's was like a ghostly footstep upon his own grave, and from a few years hence, perhaps much less, he seemed to hear the family lawyer cough before he settled himself down to read the last will and testament of John Touchwood.

"Of course, poor Mama had been dreadfully worried these last weeks,"

Hilda said. "She felt very much the prospect of Hugh's going abroad--and other things."

John regarded his elder sister, and was on the point of asking what she meant to insinuate by other things, when a lament from upstairs startled the a.s.sembled family.

"Come to bed, mother, come to bed, I want you," Frida was shrieking over the bal.u.s.trade. "The door of Grandmama's room made a noise just now."

"You had better go," said Laurence in answer to his wife's unvoiced appeal; and Edith went off gratefully.

"It will always be a consolation to me," said Laurence, "that Mama was able to hear _Thomas_ read to her. Yes, yes, she was so well upon that memorable evening. So very well. By the way, John, I shall arrange with the Vicar to read the burial service myself. It will add the last touch to the intimacy of our common grief."

In his own room that night John tried hard not to criticize anybody except himself. It was he who was cynical, he who was hard, he who was unnatural, not they. He tried to evoke from the past early memories of his mother, but he could not recall one that might bring a tear to his eye. He remembered that once she had smacked him for something George had done, that she had never realized what a success he had made of his life's work, that she was--but he tore the unfilial thoughts from his brain and reminded himself how much of her personality endured in his own. George, Edith, and himself resembled her: James, Hilda, and Hugh resembled their father. John's brothers and sisters haunted the darkness; and he knew that deep down in himself he blamed his father and mother for bringing them all into the world; he could not help feeling that he ought to have been an only child.

"I do resent their existence," John thought. "I'm a heartless egotist.

And Miss Hamilton thinks I'm an egotist. Her manner towards me lately has been distant, even contemptuous. Could that suggestion of Hilda's have had any truth in it? Was Mama worried to death by Hugh's going abroad? Did James complain to her about my taking the portraits and the silver? Is it from any standpoint conceivable that my own behavior did hasten her end?"

John's self-reproaches were magnified in the darkness, and he spent a restless and unhappy night, trying to think that the family was more important than the individual.

"You feel it terribly, don't you, dear Johnnie?" Edith asked him next morning with an affectionate pressure upon his arm. "You're looking quite worn out."

"We all feel it terribly," he sighed.

During the three days before the funeral John managed to work himself up into a condition of sentimentality which he flattered himself was outwardly at any rate affecting. Continuous reminders of his mother's existence culminating in the arrival of a new cap she had ordered just before her last swift illness seemed to induce in him the illusion of sorrow; and without the least idea of what he intended to do with them afterwards he collected a quant.i.ty of small relics like spectacle-cases and caps and mittens, which he arranged upon his dressing-table and brooded over with br.i.m.m.i.n.g eyes. He indulged Harold's theories about the psychical state of his grandmother; he practiced swinging a golf club, but he never once took out a ball; he treated everybody to magnificent wreaths, and presented the servants as well as his nephews and nieces with mourning; he ordered black-edged note-paper; he composed an epitaph in the manner of Sir Thomas Browne with cadences and subtle alliterations. Then came the funeral, which ruined the last few romantic notions of grief that he had been able to preserve.

To begin with, Beatrice arrived in what could only be described as a towering rage: no less commonplace epithet would have done justice to the vulgarity of her indignation. That James the eldest son and she his wife should not have been notified of the dangerous condition of Mama, but should have been summoned to the obsequies like mere friends of the family had outraged her soul, or, as Beatrice herself put it, had knocked her down like a feather. Oh yes, she had always been considered beneath the Touchwood standard of gentility, but poor Mama had not thought the worse of her for that; poor Mama had many times gone out of her way to be specially gracious towards her; poor Mama must have "laid"

there wondering why her eldest daughter-in-law did not come to give her the last and longest farewell. She had not been lucky enough to be blessed with children, but poor Mama had sometimes congratulated her upon that fact; poor Mama had realized only too well that children were not always a source of happiness. She knew that the undeserved poverty which had always dogged poor old Jimmie's footsteps had lately caused to be exacted from him the family portraits and the family silver pressed upon him by poor Mama herself; but was that a reason for excluding him from his mother's death-bed? She would not say whom she blamed, but she had her own ideas, and though Hilda might protest it was her fault, she knew better; Hilda was incapable of such barbarity. No, she would _not_ walk beside James as wife of the chief mourner; she would follow in the rear of the funeral procession and hope that at any rate she was not grudged that humble place. If some people resented her having bought the largest wreath from a very expensive flower-shop, she was not too proud to carry the wreath herself; she had carried it all the way from town first-cla.s.s to avoid its being crushed by heedless third-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers.

"And when I die," sobbed Beatrice, "I hope that James will remember we weren't allowed to see poor Mama before she went to Heaven, and will let me die quite alone. I'm sure I don't want my death to interfere with other people's amus.e.m.e.nts."

The funeral party gathered round the open grave; Laurence read the service so slowly and the wind was so raw that grief was depicted upon every countenance; the sniffing of many noses, above which rose Beatrice's sobs of mortification and rage, mingled with the sighing of the yews and the s.e.xton's asthma in a suitably lachrymose symphony.

"Now that poor Mama has gone," said Hilda to her brother that afternoon, "I dare say you're anxious for me to be gone too."

"I really don't think you are ent.i.tled to ascribe to me such unnatural sentiments," John expostulated. "Why should I want you to die?"

He could indeed ask this, for such an event would inevitably connote his adoption of Harold.

"I didn't mean you wanted me to die," said Hilda, crossly. "I meant you would like me to leave Ambles."

"Not at all. I'm delighted for you to stay here so long as it suits your convenience. And that applies equally to Edith. Also I may say to George," he added with a glance at Eleanor, who had taken the opportunity of mourning to equip herself with a new set of black bearskin furs. Eleanor shook herself like a large animal emerging from the stream.

"And to me?" she asked with a challenge in her eyes.

"You must judge for yourself, Eleanor, how far my hospitality is likely to be extended willingly to you after last week," replied John, coldly.

He had not yet spoken to his sister-in-law about the interference of Sir Percy Mortimer with his private affairs, and he now awaited her excuses of reproaches with a curiosity that was very faintly tinged with apprehension.

"Oh, I'm not at all ashamed of what I did," she declared. "George can't speak up for himself, and it was my duty to do all I could to help him in a matter of life and death."

John's cheeks flushed with stormy rose like a menacing down, and he was about to break over his sister-in-law in thunder and lightning when Laurence, entering the room at the moment and only hearing imperfectly her last speech, nodded and sighed:

"Yes, yes. Eleanor is indeed right. Yes, yes. In the midst of life...."

Everybody hurried to take advantage of the diversion; a hum of plat.i.tudes rose and fell upon the funereal air. John in a convulsion of irritability ordered the dog-cart to drive him to the station. He was determined to travel back to town alone; he feared that if he stayed any longer at Ambles his brother-in-law would revive the discussion about his play; he was afraid of Hugh's taking advantage of his mother's death to dodge British Honduras and of James' trading upon his filial piety to recover the silver and the family portraits.

When John got back to Church Row he found a note from Miss Hamilton to say she had influenza and was unlikely to be back at work for at least a week--if indeed, she added, she was able to come back at all. This unpleasant prospect filled him with genuine gloom, and it was with great difficulty that he refrained from driving immediately to Camera Square in order to remonstrate with her in person. His despondency was not lightened by Mrs. Worfolk's graveside manner and her a.s.sumption of a black satin dress hung with jet bugles that was usually reserved to mark the more cheerful festivals of the calendar. Worn thus out of season hung it about the rooms like a fog, and its numerous rustlings coupled with the housekeeper's sighs of commiseration added to the lugubrious atmosphere a sensation of damp which gave the final touch to John's depression. Next morning the weather was really abominable; the view over London from his library window showed nothing but great cobwebs of rain that seemed to be actually attached to a sky as gray and solid as a dusty ceiling. Action offered the only hope of alleviating life upon such a day, and John made up his mind to drive over to Chelsea and inquire about his secretary's health. He found that she was better, though still in bed; being anxious to learn more about her threatened desertion he accepted the maid's invitation to come in and speak to Mrs.

Hamilton. The old lady looked more like a clown than ever in the forenoon while the rice-powder was still fresh upon her cheeks, and John found her humor as irritating as he would have found the humor of a real clown in similar circ.u.mstances. Her manner towards him was that of a person who is aware of, but on certain terms is willing to overlook a grave indiscretion, and she managed most successfully to make him feel that he was on his defense.

"Yes, poor Doris has been very seedy. And her illness has unluckily coincided with mine."

"Oh, I'm sorry ..." he began.

"Thank you. I'm used to being ill. I am always ill. At least, as luck will have it, I usually feel ill when Doris has anything the matter with her."

This John was ready to believe, but he tried to look at once shocked and sympathetic.

"Do not let us discuss my health," Mrs. Hamilton went on scorching her eyebrows in the aureole of martyrdom she wore. "Of what importance is my health? Poor Doris has had a very sharp attack, a very sharp attack indeed."

"I'm afraid that the weather...."

"It's not the weather, Mr. Touchwood. It is overwork." And before John could say a word she was off. "You must remember that Doris is not used to hard work. She has spent all her life with me, and you can easily imagine that with a mother always at hand she has been spared the least hardship. I would have done anything for her. Ever since my husband died, my life has been one long buffer between Doris and the world. You know how obstinately she has refused to let me do all I wanted. I refer to my brother-in-law, Mr. Hamilton of Glenc.o.c.kie. And this is the result. Nervous prostration, influenza, a high temperature--and sharp pains, which between ourselves I'm inclined to think are perhaps not so bad as she imagines. People who are not accustomed to pains," said the old lady, jealously, "are always apt to be unduly alarmed and to attribute to them a severity that is a leetle exaggerated. I suffer so much myself that I cannot take these pains quite as seriously as Doris does. However, the poor child really has a good deal to put up with, and of course I've insisted that she must never attempt such hard work again. I don't suppose you meant to be inconsiderate, Mr. Touchwood. I don't accuse you of deliberate callousness. Please do not suppose that I am suggesting that the least cruelty in your behavior; but you _have_ overworked her. Moreover, she has been worried. One or two of our friends have suggested more in joke than in earnest that she might be compromised by her a.s.sociation with you. No doubt this was said in joke, but Doris lacks her mother's sense of humor, and I'm afraid she has fretted over this. Still, a st.i.tch in time saves nine, and her illness must serve as an excuse for what with a curiously youthful self-importance she calls 'leaving you in the lurch.' As I said to her, 'Do not, my dear child, worry about Mr. Touchwood. He can find as many secretaries as he wants. Probably he thought he was doing you a good turn, and you've overstrained yourself in trying to cope with duties to which you have not been accustomed. You cannot expect to fly before you can walk.'"