The Son of His Father. Mrs. Oliphant
all had been so happy and full of tenderness there was nothing but a chill misery and desolation, with a fault of his somehow involved, he could not tell how.
‘Of course I should have come at once,’ she repeated, turning round again to the fire, with her hands held over it. ‘We did not always understand each other. We were not like each other. How can one help it if that is so?’
‘Children are not always like their parents,’ Mr. Sandford said.
‘Some are not.’ She half turned towards John again with a movement of her hand as if directing her father’s attention to him. ‘There are likenesses—that take away one’s breath.’
‘Ah—yes—it may be so,’ the old man said. Then, as if waking up, ‘Will you take anything? The house is upset—there is nobody to give any orders. Still,’ he said, looking round at the table where a cloth was laid, ‘there are meals all the same.’
She looked up at him with a momentary softening in her face, and put her hand on his arm.
‘Poor father,’ she said.
‘Yes—I’ll be poor, poor enough by myself. To begin—that sort of thing at my time of life—after nearly fifty years——’
‘Be thankful that you have had fifty years—without any trouble,’ she said. And then, ‘I should like to see her. No doubt she is changed, much changed, since I saw her last. Don’t stir, father—sit down and rest—you are ready to drop with fatigue. The boy will show me the way.’
‘I hope you won’t think it strange. I—I couldn’t go with you, Emily.’
‘No. I understand it all. Sit down there in your own chair.’
The old man seated himself with a sudden burst of sobbing.
‘It’s not mine, it’s her chair. I like it so. I like it so! For fifty years! and she will never sit here more.’
‘Poor father!’ she said again. Her face softened more and more as she looked at him; she stooped down and kissed his forehead. ‘Now, come,’ she said to John. To him there was no softening. She gave him a fixed look as she signed to him to lead the way—a look of recognition, of stern investigation, which stirred the boy’s being. It seemed to call his faculties together, and awake him from the torpor of consternation and grief. He forgot almost where he was going, and what he was to see.
They went together into the room, already all in order, in the chill and rigid decorum of a chamber of death. All was white and cold. The curtains laid back, the white coverlet folded, a fine embroidered handkerchief covering the spot scarcely indented in the pillow where the head lay. John went in with his light in his hand, though there were candles on the table, in a tumult of personal feeling, which for the moment swept away all the natural emotion which that scene was calculated to call forth. He did not think of what lay there, but of the stranger so near him and yet so distant, so coldly serious, without any grief, only the subdued regret of a spectator, and with that keen observation of himself underneath, like a spectator too, but a spectator almost hostile. He had never known in all his life before what it was to be judged coldly, weighed in the balances and found wanting. His very soul seemed penetrated by the look, which fixed on something, he knew not what, that was hostile in him. Her eyes, as she followed him, searched into him, and he felt nothing but those keen looks going through and through his soul.
But when he came face to face with that little waxen image which lay upon the bed, a flood of other feelings poured through the boy’s mind. For the first time he saw that which was Something awful and solemn, yet Nothing. Sometimes the dead retain the looks of life, and lie and smile upon us as if they slept; but sometimes the effect is very different, and, after a long illness, the worn-out body loses all the characteristics of identity. His mother went up to the bed, passing him by, and, without a word, lifted the handkerchief. When John saw what was underneath, he gave a great cry, a cry almost of horror; his limbs trembled under him.
‘They’ve taken her away,’ he said, hoarsely, ‘they’ve taken her away.’
The other spectator said not a word. She knew better. Death was to her no wonder. She had lived long enough to see it in all its aspects. She stood looking down upon the little body, the little, little body shrunken out of all semblance of life; the worn-out garment of long living, never big enough for the soul that had inhabited it, and cast it off as if it had never been hers.
‘No,’ she said at last; ‘they have not taken her away. This is all she has left.’
She took the candle out of John’s trembling hand, and held it so that the light fell on the small head surrounded by the white cap, and the face in which no expression lingered. The room was very strange. The white bed laid out in rigid lines, the small and solemn thing laid therein, the black, tall figure standing by throwing the light down from her hand. She was not like a woman by her mother’s bed-side, but like a solemn spectator expounding the mysteries of life and death.
‘People are as different,’ she said, ‘in their dying as in their living. She has taken everything with her she could take. She wouldn’t leave even a look for me, as if she thought I could have come, and did not. But I’ll not excuse myself here. Mother’—she stooped down, and kissed the waxen forehead—‘good-bye. You would have been a good mother to one more like yourself; she has been a good mother to you——’
John said no word in reply. He had fallen down by the bedside, with a sickening sense of loss which was more than grief. He could not speak, or even think. His young soul seemed to go out in a gasp towards the nothingness that seemed before him. He had thought she would be dear and beautiful still in her death—as people said—more dear, more beautiful than in life. But this was not as people said. His heart sank into depths unspeakable. Only last night what words she had spoken to him from that bed. And now, and now——!
‘Poor boy!’ said his mother, with her hand on his shoulder, ‘you have never seen death before! Come away; she would not like you to stay here; never come again. And forget that. For once she has not thought of other people. She has taken all she could away with her; her own look, as well as all the rest. Rise up, and come away.’
John obeyed her, scarcely knowing what he did. And so presently did all the house. She took the command of everything instantly, as if it was her right to do so. There was not much conversation, as may be supposed. She sat down by the fire, after the meal at which she eat moderately without any look of reluctance, and talked a little, in the same grave tone, to her father. But there were no tears, no words of sorrow. The old man gave a broken sort of account of his wife’s illness, subdued into a narrative of facts by the influence of that serious, but quite conventional, figure opposite to him; while John sat at the table behind, with a book before him, which he did not read, listening in a miserable way to every word, feeling a wretchedness which was beyond description, but which could not get vent in the ordinary way, because of the atmosphere about him, which was full of the new presence. He had been hungry, poor boy, but could not eat, feeling that to be able to eat at such a moment was more horrible than words can say. And his brain was giddy for want of sleep. Body and soul were in the same condition of exhaustion and misery. But still the slow exchange of those subdued voices over the fire held him like a spell.
The next days passed slowly and yet swiftly, every moment with leaden feet, yet, when they were gone, looking like a dream. And everything was done without trouble, it seemed; in perfect order and quiet, the whole house pervaded by the strong, still presence of this stranger. If there had been a confusion before between his mother and the daughter of the old people, the Emily whom he knew so well, there was no confusion now. John’s mother had disappeared into the mists from amid which her idea had never clearly developed itself. She had been swept out of his horizon altogether. He saw still very clearly in that far distant background, the father who was dead—but not her any more. And this was Emily, who had come to set everything right. It was almost a difficulty for him not to call her by that name. She was a very useful and very powerful personality in the house; but, as a matter of fact, no one knew what to call her. Her name was Sandford, like her father’s. It was on her travelling-bag and her