The Meaning of Night

All this was spoken in a sweet, low, confiding tone, quite at odds with her teasing words. I said nothing in reply as she turned and walked back to the door, but picked up my hat and stick, and followed her.

She was standing on the steps leading down to a narrow terrace, below which the ground fell away steeply towards the main carriage-road. Where the track from the Temple joined the road, I could see two lights twinkling in the darkness.

‘You have not come alone, then,’ I said.

‘No, John Brine brought me up in the landau.’

She seemed suddenly disinclined to talk, and took a few more steps down towards the terrace. Then, holding her lamp up close to her face, and with a troubled expression, she turned and said: ‘My father believed that everything we do in this life will be judged in the next. Do you believe that, Mr Glapthorn? Please tell me whether you do.’

I said that I feared Mr Carteret and I would have disagreed on this point, and that I favoured a rather more fatalistic theology.

At this, her face assumed a strange look of concentration.

‘So you do not believe in the parable of the sheep and the goats? That those who do good will see Heaven, and those who do evil will burn in the eternal fire?’

‘That was what I was brought up to believe,’ I replied, ‘but as I have been deficient in perfection from an early age, it has never seemed to me a comfortable philosophy. It is so ridiculously easy, don’t you think, to fall into sin? I prefer to believe that I was predestined for grace. It accords far more closely to my own estimation of myself, and of course it relieves one of the tedious necessity of always having to do good.’

I was smiling as I said the words, for I had meant them – partly – as an attempt at levity. But she had become strangely agitated, and began to walk quickly hither and thither about the terrace, apparently talking to herself in a mumbled undertone, her little lamp swinging by her side, until at last she stopped at the top of the steps that led down to the path, and stood staring out into the darkness.

The sudden change in her manner was dramatic and alarming, and I could see no immediate reason for it. But then I concluded that the grief that she had been holding back had begun at last to assert its natural ascendancy over her spirits, through being in a place that had such strong associations with her recently deceased father. I was about to tell her, as tenderly as I could, that there was no shame in mourning her poor papa; but I had hardly stepped down to the terrace when she looked up at me and, in an anxious voice, said she must return to the Dower House, whereat she began running down the path towards where John Brine was waiting with the landau.

I was determined not to run after her, like some panting Touchstone after his Audrey,^* but instead set off as coolly as I could, though with long urgent strides, following the bobbing lamp down the path. By the time I caught up with her, she was sitting back in the landau, pulling a rug across her lap.

And then, to my astonishment, she held out her hand and bestowed upon me the most delicious smile.

‘If you have quite finished taking the air, Mr Glapthorn, perhaps you would accompany me back to the Dower House. I’m sure you have walked quite far enough tonight. John, will you take us back, please.’

As we drove along, she began to speak reminiscently about her father – how he had taken her to the coronation of the present Queen,^* on the day after her fourteenth birthday, and how, at Lord Tansor’s instigation, Lady Adelaide Paget, one of the train-bearers, had introduced her to the new monarch, then of course not much more than a girl herself. From this recollection she turned to Mr Carteret’s inordinate fondness for anchovies (which she could not abide), his passion for Delftware (numerous fine examples of which I had noted on display in various parts of the Dower House), and the close relationship that he had enjoyed with his mother. How or why these things were connected in her mind, I cannot say; but she continued in this frantic recollective vein, running from one hurried memory of her father’s tastes and character to another in quick succession.

I looked out to see the looming mass of the many-towered house, rearing up against the paler backdrop of the early night sky, and studded here and there with little points of light. My attention was arrested by a fleeting glimpse of the Chapel windows, a subdued flickering glow of ruby-red and azure, illuminated from within by the candles set around Mr Carteret’s coffin. In that moment, the bells of Evenwood began to toll the hour of nine, and I became aware that my companion had fallen silent. When she spoke again, her manner and tone showed clearly that her thoughts had been brought back to the contemplation of her poor father’s fate, and to the trials of the coming days.

‘May I ask, Mr Glapthorn, whether your parents are still living?’

‘My mother is dead,’ I replied. ‘I never knew my father.’

I said the words without thinking, then instantly reflected on the singularity of my situation. For whom did I speak? For the orphaned Edward Glyver, with a dead mother and a father who had died before he was born? Or Edward Glapthorn, whom I had conjured into existence on learning the truth about my birth, and who was the possessor of two fathers and two mothers? Or the future Edward Duport, whose mother was indeed dead, but whose father still lived and breathed, here, in this great house, not a quarter of a mile from where we now were?

‘I am sorry for you, truly,’ she said. ‘Every child needs a father’s guiding presence.’

‘Not every father, perhaps,’ I observed, thinking of the execrable Captain Glyver, ‘can be considered fit for such a task. But I believe, Miss Carteret, from my brief acquaintance with him, that you may count yourself fortunate that yours was exceptional in that regard.’

‘But then some children, perhaps, are unworthy of their parents.’

She had turned her face away, and I saw her raise her hand to her face.

‘Miss Carteret, forgive me, is anything the matter?’

‘Nothing is the matter, I assure you.’ But she continued to look out into the darkness with unseeing eyes, her hand resting against her cheek. I saw that she was suffering, and so I thought I would make another attempt at encouraging her to give expression to her anguish.

‘Will you allow me to observe, Miss Carteret, as someone who has your interests most sincerely at heart, that grief should not be denied. It is—’

But I was unable to finish my clumsy peroration, for she instantly turned an affronted face upon me.