The air tingled with the thought of the magazine with your poem in it. But you would never know what she was thinking.
VI
A long letter from Uncle Edward. Uncle Edward was worrying Mamma.
“He never could get on with your poor father. Or your Uncle Victor. He did his best to prevent him being made trustee. … And now he comes meddling, wanting to upset all their arrangements.”
“Why?”
“Just because poor Victor’s business isn’t doing quite so well as it did.”
“Yes, but why’s he bothering you about it?”
“Well, he says I ought to make another will, leaving half the boys’ money to you. That would be taking it from Dan. He always had a grudge against poor Dan.”
“But you mustn’t do anything of the sort.”
“Well—he knows your father provided for you. You’re to have the Five Elms money that’s in your Uncle Victor’s business. You’d suppose, to hear him talk, that it wasn’t safe there.”
“Just tell him to mind his own business,” Mary said.
“Actually,” Mamma went on, “advising me not to pay back any more of Victor’s money. I shall tell him I sent the last of it yesterday.”
There would be no more debts to Uncle Victor. Mark had paid back his; Mamma had paid back Roddy’s, scraping and scraping, Mark and Mamma, over ten years, over twenty.
A long letter from Uncle Victor. Uncle Victor was worrying Mamma.
“Don’t imagine that I shall take this money. I have invested it for you, in sound securities. Not in my own business. That, I am afraid I ought to tell you, is no longer a sound security.”
“Poor Victor—”
“It almost looks,” Mamma said, “as if Edward might be right.”
So right that in his next letter Uncle Victor prepared you for his bankruptcy.
“It will not affect you and Mary,” he wrote. “I may as well tell you now that all the Five Elms money has been reinvested, and is safe. As for myself, I can assure you that, after the appalling anxiety of the last ten years, the thought of bankruptcy is a relief. A blessed relief, Caroline.”
All through September and October the long letters came from Uncle Victor.
Then Aunt Lavvy’s short letter that told you of his death.
Then the lawyer’s letters.
It seemed that, after all, Uncle Victor had been mistaken. His affairs were in perfect order.
Only the Five Elms money was gone; and the money Mark and Mamma had paid back to him. He had taken it all out of his own business, and put it into the Sheba Mines and Joe’s Reef, and the Golconda Company where he thought it would be safe.
The poor dear. The poor dear.
VII
So that you knew—
Mamma might believe what Aunt Lavvy told her, that he had only gone to look out of the window and had turned giddy. Aunt Lavvy might believe that he didn’t know what he was doing.
But you knew.
He had been afraid. Afraid. He wouldn’t go up to the top-landing after they took Aunt Charlotte away; because he was afraid.
Then, at last, after all those years, he had gone up. When he knew he was caught in the net and couldn’t get out. He had found that they had moved the linen cupboard from the window back into the night nursery. And he had bolted the staircase door on himself. He had shut himself up. And the great bare, high window was there. And the low sill. And the steep, bare wall, dropping to the lane below.
Book V
Middle Age (1900–1910)
Chapter XXXI
I
She must have been sitting there twenty minutes.
She was afraid to look up at the clock, afraid to move an eyelid lest she should disturb him.
The library had the same nice, leathery, tobaccoey smell. Rough under her fingers the same little sharp tongue of leather scratched up from the arm of her chair. The hanging, half-open fans of the ash-tree would be making the same Japanese pattern in the top left hand pane of the third window. She wanted to see it again to make sure of the pattern, but she was afraid to look up.
If she looked up she would see him.
She mustn’t. It would disturb him horribly. He couldn’t write if he thought you were looking at him.
It was wonderful that he could go on like that, with somebody in the room, that he let you sit in it when he was writing. The big man.
She had asked him whether she hadn’t better go away and come back again, and he had said No, he didn’t want her to go away. He wouldn’t keep her waiting more than five minutes.
It was unbelievable that she should be sitting there, in that room, as if nothing had happened; as if they were there; as if they might come in any minute; as if they had never gone. A week ago she would have said it was impossible, she couldn’t do it, for anybody, no matter how big or how celebrated he was.
Why, after ten years—it must be ten years—she couldn’t even bear to go past the house while other people were in it. She hated them, the people who took Greffington Hall for the summer holidays and the autumn shooting. She would go round to Renton by Jackson’s yard and the fields so as not to see it. But when the brutes were gone and the yellow blinds were down in the long rows of windows that you saw above the grey garden wall, she liked to pass it and look up and pretend that the house was only waiting for them, only sleeping its usual winter sleep, resting till they came back.
It was ten years since they had gone.
No. If Richard Nicholson hadn’t been Mr. Sutcliffe’s nephew, she couldn’t, no matter how big and how celebrated he was, or how badly he wanted her help or she wanted his money.
No matter how wonderful
