4
During the hour that followed, the family gathered in the morning-room and exchanged few words. Brand, inwardly rigid, outwardly composed, maintained his position by the window. He watched the movement of life in the quiet world outside, the changing shapes of clouds, the flight of small birds, their dun-coloured bodies flinging a dark shadow on the unbroken expanse of snow. At any moment, he felt, his crucial hour would be upon him. All that had preceded this moment was evanescent, insubstantial as a shadow, distorting, as shadows do, the reality following on its heels. It seemed to him that to fail now would be treachery, not to his relations or to his father, but to his own personality, to the spirit informing the wayward flesh. Only by a rich fulfilment of his dream could he justify the mad act of last night. A man not unaccustomed to thought and to the arguments of philosophy, he could even find a certain irrational seemliness and worth in his own deed, provided he did not permit the fruit to turn rotten. “Like trees flourishing on a stinking corpse,” he thought characteristically.
Once, Olivia, who with her husband had rejoined the group, said with a sharp gasp, “We shan’t be implicated, Eustace, surely?”
Eustace returned, “We are implicated. How can we help it?”
Glancing from the impassivity that he instantly resumed to Richard’s remote air, that might conceal any emotion from stark fear to a blank resignation that neither hopes nor believes anything, Brand was impressed by the Power that, creating men with visible features, had made it possible for them to conceal every trace of sensibility, so that onlookers could watch them, spy on their quiet moments, but still learn nothing. Under their masks, what emotions racked them, these two men for whom so much was at stake? They must know that their individual relations with the dead man would be the subject of public discussion, and that such discussion was bound to react on their careers and ambitions. Were they afraid, even though they were aware of their own innocence? Or did they think of those revelations that were bound to be made, and that must affect their professional lives? Was there a shadow of pity in either of them for the dead man or for him who bore the weight of the knowledge of his death? For surely his was the worst position of them all. If the truth were discovered, he would, though he would suffer another kind of disaster, be relieved from the tremendous pressure he must endure now, this sense of unbearable knowledge. Last night, standing by his father’s body, he had restrained a desire to summon the household with some cock-and-bull story of having heard strange sounds and come downstairs to investigate—anything, he had felt, rather than bear the burden of knowing the truth, unshared by anyone else. And to-day that weight pressed yet more heavily upon him. One part of his nature struggled to conceal every trace of evidence that could point to him as the victim of the situation; but there was another clamorous instinct that assured him that to share his knowledge would be blessed relief. It would imply the end of this inward torment, this sense of being helpless in the dark, without the slightest notion of where he was placing his feet. At any instant he might plunge to disaster; a chance word, a heedless reply, might mean self-betrayal. He saw himself as the fox torn and bloody in the jaws of the hounds; his inward being panted and exerted, as the hunted fox must do to escape pursuit, but he wondered how strong that instinct for life remained in the creature which knew that, escaping this time, it must be captured and rent to pieces at the last.
He moved uneasily, one hand holding fast to the dark window-sill. “Pull yourself together. Think of the future. This is a nightmare, but it will pass. All things pass. Only the spirit of man is indomitable.” As he had waited, stupefied, beside the body some hours ago, repeating that formula, “He’s dead. I’ve killed him. I’m a murderer. Murderers hang,” so now he repeated in his heart these encouragements to preserve him from the worst of Judas-acts, the betrayal of the inner man through fear.
He received assurance from the sight of Eustace, smooth, sophisticated, uncaring, with his air of bestowing patronage on the men among whom he moved, men less worldly than himself and, therefore, less successful; only to-day he detected signs of that arrogant pose shaken, fear peering through the cracks. It strengthened his resolve to maintain the part he had created for himself, and his sense of responsibility ebbed.
Amy cried in petulant tones, “What a long time that man is in the library. What can there be for him to do? And how insufferable to have a stranger” (and such a stranger, implied her tone, a common man probably related to half the servants, who are always eager to spread gossip and make bad blood) “turning over our intimate possessions.”
Richard spoke heavily. “There’s a good deal for him to examine, I suppose. And I don’t doubt there’s plenty of local gossip that has already reached his ears. People in a small place like this have very little else to do but talk.” Despite his experience, he believed, with Amy, that the working-class population, as they were termed at a time when to work openly was a subtle disgrace, were maddeningly engrossed in the affairs of their social superiors; and if anyone had attempted to disillusion him, and point out that their own lives were of infinitely greater importance to the men and women to whom he referred than the most sensational crash in—say—his own life, he would have
