The Last and the First Read online

  “Well, it is Agnes, the under-housemaid, miss,” said Mrs. Duff, as if the position did amount to this. “And we must accept it as an incident.”

  “But what is it? Is the girl much hurt?”

  “Well, it is hard to say, miss. They make the most of it. Her account is only her own.”

  “Should we send for the doctor?” said Angus.

  “The message has been despatched, sir. I took it on myself. And after your usual exchange a word can ensue on Agnes. It may be all that is called for.”

  “It is a tiresome thing to happen,” said Eliza.

  “Well, my lady, the term may suffice.”

  “I will arrange for the staircase to be mended.”

  “It takes an incident, my lady, to lead to the point of preventing them. But better late than never.”

  “I will come and see Agnes.”

  “Well, attention is focused on her, my lady. And enough is as good as a feast. There will be the natural effect.”

  “She had better rest for a few days.”

  “There are light duties, my lady. And things to be done for Miss Hermia before she goes. If she will have the same needs in her new life as she has had in this one.”

  “We don’t know much about the new life. We have only just heard of it.”

  “Yes, my lady, it is outside your range,” said Mrs. Duff in a tone of sympathy as she withdrew. “There is a difference in spheres that you would be alive to.”

  “Does Mrs. Duff listen at doors?” said Angus. “Or has she powers of her own?”

  “Most of them listen,” said Eliza. “They see no harm in it.”

  “What harm does it do them? I should see the good in it.”

  “The village carpenter can do the repair. The appearance does not matter for the back staircase.”

  “Its users are entitled to safety, and nothing further.”

  “They will not mind. They come from simple homes. Mrs. Duff has done better with her opportunities than you are doing with yours, Hermia.”

  “I may use them, now they have come. I have her example before me.”

  “I wonder if you could say what they will be. Well, it is no good to talk about it.”

  “None. If it was any good a fair amount would be done by now.”

  Eliza walked out of the room as if she had not heard, and Madeline spoke in a grave tone.

  “Hermia, must you go to such lengths with Mater? I don’t mean you should not say what you feel, but there is reason in everything.”

  “Then what do you mean? I say just what I feel.”

  “There is no need to show yourself in this light. It will leave such a sorry memory.”

  “It will leave a right one. I have always said it in my heart. And as I am going I dare to voice it. And I should not have escaped without doing so. I see what my bonds have been. And I see they are barely broken.”

  “We saw them being assailed and wrenched apart,” said Angus. “And we see no one else will ever break them.”

  “There must be bonds in every life,” said Madeline. “There are things in all of us that prove we need them.”

  “There are,” said Sir Robert’s voice. “And you must cease to break them, Hermia. You are having your wish granted, in the face of Mater’s doubt and mine, and should be grateful to me, and more to her. I should not have granted it, if she had pressed her view. She is showing forbearance and tolerance. What are you showing?”

  “Neither at the time. But I have had to show them. And I should have to show them again. What I am showing is a resolve to live my own life according to myself. Whose life is it but mine? I am forced to show it and to go on showing it. I should be grateful to pursue my way in peace. There seems no end to it.”

  “Well, well, there is an end. You have faced us and conquered us, and take the spoils of the victor. We may live to see you are wise. We hope we shall, my dear. That we did not want the change does not mean we don’t want your success in it. We want it as much as you do. You take that knowledge with you.”

  He left them, as if bringing the matter to a fitting end, and Angus spoke at once.

  “I wished I dared to praise myself. It seems a family gift. Father and Mater and Hermia all have it. And I think Madeline has it in a way of her own.”

  “Then I should not ever use it. I am quite aware I am not all that I should be.”

  “I am so much more than I should be that I am ashamed of it. I have the gift after all, and can use it.”

  “We are all ashamed of it,” said Roberta. “There is no credit in not being free. If the compulsions of our life were lifted, I wonder what would break forth. It might not be a case for the family gift.”

  “It might not,” said Madeline. “Father is right. A certain amount of restraint is a safeguard. Hermia may not find her new life as different in that way as she expects.”

  “I shall find it different enough. It will be free from the forces that crush the impulse of life. That is all that I expect. I can hardly have learned to expect much.”

  “I wonder how long the feeling will last. It seems a rather indefinite one.”

  “As long as the conditions here remain. As long as there is the memory of them. And that will be while I live.”

  “Which is the braver thing?” said Angus. “To do as Hermia has done, or what we are to go on doing?”

  “What Hermia has done,” said Roberta. “The obvious can be true. What we should not dare to do. We can say that we show the deeper courage. But we know it is the depths of cowardice. Our hearts tell us.”

  “Courage can take different forms,” said Madeline. “We can think of many examples of it.”

  “Is your own life one of them?” said Hermia.

  “We are not always thinking of ourselves and our own lives.”

  “There is not often much thought left over from them.”

  “There was one form of courage in this case,” said Angus. “And Hermia showed it.”

  “I am glad I am without it,” said Roberta. “To think what I might have to do!”

  “To think what Hermia did do!”

  “I am not sure that courage is the right word,” said Madeline. “Or at any rate the only one.”

  “I am sure it is,” said Hermia.

  Chapter III

  “Osbert, you ought to know how to cut a ham.”

  “Then I do know, Grannie. I only dare to do what I ought.”

  “Do you expect other people to eat the fat you have left?”

  “Is it any good to expect it? Do you think they would?”

  “The fat of ham is quite different from other fat.”

  “That hardly seems worth while when it all has the same end.”

  “You should cut the fat and lean together, and leave what you can’t eat.”

  “I knew waste was not wicked. That is what I will do.”

  “What good do you suppose the fat is by itself?”

  “No good. Or with anything else. What good could it be?”

  “A young man should eat whatever is provided. The fat of ham is quite a wholesome food.”

  “How do you know? What means is there of knowing?”

  “I know from my own experience.”

  “Grannie, what words are these? Pray do not go any further.”

  “Can’t we forget the ham?” said Osbert’s sister. “It dominates the sideboard, but it need hardly do the same to our lives.”

  “You are late, Amy,” said Mrs. Grimstone, turning to the door as a girl of fourteen appeared and came to her seat. “And must you edge into the room as if you were ashamed of entering?”

  Her grand-daughter did not explain that she was ashamed of entering at this hour.

  “And what a time to come down! Were you not called?”

  “Oh I think so, Grannie. Yes, I believe I was. I don’t remember.”

  “I suppose you were so sunk in sloth that you forgot who you were,” said Mrs. Grimstone, speaking a true word, if hardly in jest.
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  “I fear your words may apply to me, Mamma,” said a slow, deep voice, as a middle-aged man entered and stooped to salute his mother. “The spirit may have been willing, but the flesh was weak.”

  “Well, what will you have?” said Mrs. Grimstone, accepting this form of the account, and distinguishing by her tone between a son and a grand-child. “There is hot fish here, and a ham at the side.”

  Hamilton Grimstone paused and bent his head before making a material choice. He was deliberate over the observance, and raised his eyes as if he had conferred and gained some benefit.

  “We have said grace,” said his mother, just enunciating the words.

  “But I had not, Mamma. And it is not an omission I care to make. One of the penalties of tardiness is the missing of the ritual that inaugurates our day, and without which the day itself is never the same to me.”

  “What will you have, Amy?” said Mrs. Grimstone, turning from her son, whose beliefs she shared without sharing his pleasure in them.

  “Oh, I think some ham please, Grannie.”

  “I am of similar mind,” said Hamilton, with his slow smile. “But I hesitate to broach the oleaginous mass that obstructs it.”

  “The fish should be used,” said Mrs. Grimstone, in a considering manner, supplying a plate of it for Amy, and meeting a silent acceptance. “It is Osbert who cuts the ham in that way. I have dealt with the matter.”

  “When matters arise, that is what she does with them,” said Erica.

  Erica alone of Jocasta Grimstone’s grand-children took her on equal terms, and was regarded as qualified to do so. Jocasta did not esteem people for being dependent on herself. She was a tall, upright woman of eighty-four with a small, alert, pallid face, small, penetrating eyes and an air of omniscience which had grown with its long exercise. Her Christian name had been chosen by a parent with more respect for the classics than knowledge of them; and she had accepted it and made it her own.

  Her surviving son might have resembled her, had not his lineaments been so overlaid by flesh that the likeness had vanished with them. His pendulous cheeks and chin, pale, globular eyes and almost pendulous frame arrested many a glance. At fifty he might have been any later age, but was seldom guessed to be his own. He had inherited money from a godfather, and gave his time to studying and adding to it, and to consulting his advisers to this end. Jocasta felt to him as her son, but had her own view of him as a man, and was in no danger of her namesake’s history.

  Her grand-children were of shorter and lighter build, with narrower features and livelier eyes, and a look of covert humour that was fostered by their life. Osbert’s features were set a little askew, and gave him an expression in accordance with himself. Erica alone attained to comeliness, and her uncle’s eyes recognised this as they rested on her.

  The three were the orphan children of an unsuccessful son of Jocasta’s, and made their home in her house in default of any other. She had educated Osbert and his sister, and articled Osbert to a firm of lawyers nearby, not disposed to afford him more than this, or to esteem him more for his enforced acceptance of it.

  “The bell,” she said, in an incidental tone.

  Her grandson rose and rang it.

  “You can take the ham, Hollander,” she said to the middle-aged manservant who answered it. “Your breakfast is late this morning.”

  “We have not eaten or drunk to-day, ma’am,” said Hollander, in a tone without expression, as none was needed.

  “I said your breakfast was late. You need not repeat it in another form. When a staircase is being repaired you would expect to meet a difference.”

  “It was by dint of an effort that your breakfast was served as usual, ma’am. The matter was urgent as danger might have supervened.”

  “I heard it had done so.”

  “Yes, in the large house, ma’am. A housemaid fell on the broken wood and might have sustained injury if she had not saved herself,” said Hollander, his tone recognising her indebtedness to no one else. “As it is the doctor has been called.”

  “And has come and gone and will come again?”

  “Well, ma’am, he is in charge of the case.”

  “It is not good news. It is most tiresome for Lady Heriot.”

  “Her vigour may not return in a moment, ma’am,” said Hollander, making no change of protagonist. “Owing to its already being used to its limit.”

  “I might go across and sympathise with Lady Heriot,” said Jocasta to her family. “We never seem to know them any better.”

  “There is no question of return to duty, ma’am,” said Hollander, more insistently, as if his meaning had not been clear.

  “Well, you can take the ham. Some of the fat may have to be cut away.”

  “Yes, ma’am, to put the edible portion at disposal,” said Hollander, standing with his eyes on it.

  “I suppose the carpenter has a meal before he goes?”

  “It would be assumed, ma’am. If the saying is true, and appearances are deceitful,” said Hollander, leaving them with a faint smile on his lips.

  “Amy, are you still asleep?” said Jocasta, making no response in kind. “The trap will soon be here. I want to know if Miss Murdoch will be in this afternoon. I may be able to call. I have some questions to ask.”

  “Oh, she will not, Grannie,” said Amy, no longer asleep. “She is very busy just now. There is a good deal to be done.”

  “She will be free for tea. I will go at that time. Remember to take the message.”

  “But I never see her, Grannie. She has her tea taken to her room. She is arranging things with the new headmistress and has no time.”

  “New headmistress? Is Miss Murdoch giving up?”

  “No, but she is taking a partner. And they are planning things together. There is to be a good deal of change.”

  “Oh, I remember the letter now. It seems that a partner is needed. I hope she will serve her purpose. Do you know her name?”

  “Oh, it is the name of the people whose housemaid had the accident.”

  “Heriot? It would hardly be that. It is not a usual name.”

  “It is the one in question, ma’am,” said Hollander, now moving round the table. “The eldest Miss Heriot has gone into a school as a partner. The carpenter heard when he went to mend the stair.”

  “What can be the reason of it? I wonder Sir Robert either allowed it or afforded it. Are you going to do nothing this morning, Osbert?”

  “Yes, I am, Grannie. The office is closed to-day.”

  “Is there nothing in the world but lawyer’s work?”

  “Not much, as it is coming to seem to me.”

  “Are you also doing nothing, Erica?”

  “Well, what do I generally do?”

  “You are too much your father’s children. He made no effort and has left no mark. You should take warning by him.”

  “It seems disrespectful to take warning by a parent.”

  “Respect has to be earned,” said Jocasta, resting her eyes without expression on her other son. “Will you be in for luncheon, Hamilton?”

  “Not in person, Mamma. In thought I shall be with you. And with my mind’s eye see you at the table with your young group about you. And so enjoy a phantom companionship.”

  This group, when it gathered, would have been glad for companionship to be of this nature. Jocasta was in the state of nervous strain that occurred in her at intervals without warning or apparent cause.

  “No words, if you please!” she said as she came to her seat. “We can eat and drink without them. I have seen it many times.”

  “So our companionship will be phantom,” murmured Erica.

  “Let it be,” said Jocasta, lifting her hand as if to ward off some hostile force. “Let there be no sign or sound.”

  This condition prevailed and did its work, and later in the day Jocasta left her house and crossed the road to the larger one. Returning, swift and upright, satisfied with herself, she found the world had changed. />
  “So, Osbert, you have touched the height of humour.”

  “The words are yours, Grannie. I hardly like to agree.”

  Whether Osbert agreed or not, someone else did, as Amy’s mirth testified.

  “Where did you get that skirt? It must have been from my wardrobe.”

  “Well, yes, that is where it was. Where would a skirt be?”

  “That is one of my widow’s caps. You must have opened a drawer.”

  “Well, yes, it is what I do with drawers.”

  “It ought not to be. There might be something you should not see. People are entitled to their private lives.”

  “I should have thought they were the last things they were entitled to. I could not think of your having one.”

  “Is this behaviour typical of your personal life?”

  “No, it is an isolated instance.”

  “I wonder if that is the truth.”

  “Grannie, do you doubt my word?”

  “Well, this surreptitious folly is not so straightforward, is it?”

  “Oh, Grannie, have I been dishonourable? The thing I thought I could not be, even in jest.”

  “Jests can reveal people as much as anything else.”

  “So they can. Think how mine has revealed me. And how other people’s might reveal them. Or rather, keep your thoughts away from it.”

  “I hope you did not crush the cap?”

  “No, no, I treated it with great respect.”

  “What have you to do this evening, Amy?”

  “Oh, I have just to write an essay.”

  “Just!” said Osbert. “Suppose we all had to write one! Perhaps we can all write this one.”

  “What is the subject matter?” said Erica.

  “Oh, how to spend a day of leisure,” said Amy, consulting a notebook.

  “How to prevent its being one is what is meant.”

  Amy did not acknowledge the assistance but gathered her materials and moved away.

  “How much have you written?” said Jocasta, after a while. “Come and show me.”

  Amy sat up and put her hand over the page, her eyes dilating.

  “Oh, it is nothing, Grannie. You would see it was. There is nothing there.”