Jane liked the funny cluttered room, however. She liked the old incongruous furniture and the silly curios and The Return of the Mayflower. She liked the sense of the past that curiously consecrated this ridiculous collection of inanimate objects that people had cared for and loved. No modern decorator could catch it, she thought, no matter how passionate his preoccupation with antiquity.
“Where is Mother?” said Alden suddenly.
Alden seemed a trifle out of humour. Tired, of course. Fearfully tired. They had all just returned from the service in the cemetery and Mrs. Carver had gone upstairs with Silly to take off her bonnet, in preparation for the Reading of the Will, in the front parlour. The Reading of the Will was a ceremony that all proper Carvers felt should follow a burial as day follows dawn. Jane had thought, considering how exhausted they all were and how long that Unitarian minister had prayed his impromptu prayers, that it would be just as well to defer it until the next morning. But Alden, as head of the family, had been adamant. And Mrs. Carver had thought it would be only correct. And Stephen had said that they might as well get it over. And Silly had murmured that it did not seem quite respectful to wait.
As Alden spoke, Mrs. Carver and Silly came into the parlour. Her mother-in-law, at eighty-four, Jane thought, was a very miraculous old lady. What a strain she had been under, what a shock she had sustained—the tragic termination of sixty-three years of marriage! Yet Mrs. Carver, as she entered the room, looked just as she had looked for the last ten years. She wore her familiar house gown of loose black silk. Mrs. Carver thought extremes were very foolish. She had not gone in for widow’s weeds. Her little white collar was fastened by a mourning pin of black jet. It was the only concession she had made to the solemnity of the day. She had told Jane, before setting out for the cemetery, that she had worn that pin to the funeral of her mother in eighteen-seventy-nine. Beneath the straight parting of her thin white hair, her face looked only a little tired and rather worried than sad. Jane soon saw what was worrying her. She walked straight across the room and pulled down one window shade until it was even with the other. A grief-stricken parlour maid, Jane thought with a smile, in raising them after the family had left the house for the funeral, had had no thought for the critical eyes across Beacon Street. Mrs. Carver turned and faced her family.
“Alden,” she said, “you look tired. Would you like a glass of port?”
Alden shook his head. He produced an imposing-looking document from the inside pocket of his cutaway.
“Stephen,” continued Mrs. Carver, “you’re not comfortable in that stiff chair. You’d better take your father’s. Sit down, Steve, and don’t fidget about.” She had seated herself, as she spoke, in the seat that Stephen had abandoned. Jane rose, with a gesture toward her own armchair. “No, Jane, I like a straight back. Now, Alden, find a nice place for yourself with a good light. Silly! Turn on the lamp for Alden. Can you see, dear? Then I think we’re quite ready.”
As Alden unfolded his imposing document, Silly sank down on a footstool beside his chair, her lank figure relaxed in lines of complete fatigue. In the folds of her new mourning Silly really looked as old as Mrs. Carver, thought Jane. Her hair was just as white and her face infinitely more weary. Two old ladies—mother and daughter! It was a shame about Silly. She had never had a life. She had never even achieved one carefree summer with Susan Frothingham, one trip abroad alone, one spree, one careless burst of freedom to enjoy and remember. Susan Frothingham had been dead for seven years, carried off by a gust of pneumonia in the flu epidemic of nineteen-twenty. It was a shame about Silly. But Alden was clearing his throat. He was looking at them all very solemnly through his pince-nez eyeglasses over the top of the imposing document.
The assembled Carvers stirred a trifle uneasily. A faint, tense thrill seemed to run around the room. The best, the most grief-stricken of families, Jane thought with a smile, were not quite impervious to the dramatic suspense of the moment in which a will is read. But Alden was speaking.
“I was made the executor of this will,” he was saying, and surely there was a hint of irritation in his voice, “but I never knew anything about its contents until yesterday morning, when I found it in Father’s safety-deposit box. He made it twelve years ago, just after Uncle Stephen’s death.”
Alden paused to adjust his eyeglasses, and again the assembled Carvers stirred a trifle uneasily. A dreadful phrase from the pen of John Galsworthy flashed through Jane’s mind. “Old Soames Forsyte would cut up a very warm man.” Old Mr. Carver would cut up a very warm man, also. But Jane felt curiously detached from the provisions of his testament. Stephen had more money, now, than Jane could spend the income on. And a Carver would always leave his fortune to Carvers. Soon Stephen would have too much money. Too much money to leave, in his turn, to his children. But that day, fortunately, thought Jane with a glance at Cicily, would not come soon. But Alden had resumed.
“The first provision, I am happy to say and you will all be happy to hear”—Alden’s voice had brightened a trifle—“is the foundation of a trust fund of one
