Epilogue

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WHEN I PUT down my pen, I meant to put away my memories with it. They had had days, weeks, months to settle, but in the end they didn’t, and that is how I came to write this epilogue.

During my breakdown I was like a train going through a series of tunnels; sometimes in the daylight; sometimes in the dark, sometimes knowing who and where I was, sometimes not knowing. Little by little the periods of daylight grew more continuous and at last I was running in the open; by the middle of September I was considered fit to go back to school.

I didn’t recover my memory of what happened at Brandham, however, after the revelation in the outhouse. That, like my coming home, remained a blank. I didn’t remember it and I didn’t want to. The doctor said it would be good for me to unburden myself, and my mother tried to make me, but I wouldn’t have told her if I could. When she volunteered to tell me what she knew, I shouted at her to stop; and I have never known how much she did know. “But you have nothing to be ashamed of,” she would say; “nothing at all, my darling. Besides, it’s all over now.”

But I didn’t believe her, and the capacity for disbelief, so difficult to acquire, is equally difficult to eradicate. I didn’t believe it was all over and I didn’t believe that I had nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary, it seemed to me that I had everything to be ashamed of. I had betrayed them all---Lord Trimingham, Ted, Marian, the whole Maudsley family, who had welcomed me into their midst. Just what the consequences had been I neither knew nor wished to know; I judged their seriousness by Mrs. Maudsley’s screams, which were the last sounds heard by my conscious ear---for the tidings of Ted’s suicide came to me voicelessly, like a communication in a dream.

His fate I did know, and it was for him I grieved. He haunted me. Not only in the most dreadful way, but by a persistent picture of him cleaning his gun. The idea that he had cleaned it to shoot himself with was a special torment to me; of all the thoughts he might have had while cleaning it, the thought that he was going to use it against himself must have been the one farthest from his mind. The irony of this was like an arrow in my spirit.

It did not occur to me that they had treated me badly. I did not know how to draw up an indictment against a grown-up person. A certain set of circumstances had arisen and it was for me to deal with them, just as at school I had had to deal with the persecution of Jenkins and Strode. Then I had succeeded; I had turned their taunt of “vanquished” against them. This time I had failed: it was I who was vanquished, and forever.

At school a spell had saved me; and at Brandham, too, I had resorted to a spell. The spell had worked: I couldn’t deny that. It had broken off the relationship between Ted and Marian, from whose continuance I had foreseen such direful consequences. It had uprooted the belladonna, and blasted it in Ted’s very arms. But it had recoiled on me. In destroying the belladonna I had also destroyed Ted, and perhaps destroyed myself. Was it really a moment of triumph when I lay prostrate on the ground, and the uplifted root rained down earth on me?

I saw myself entering Ted’s life, an unknown small boy, a visitant from afar, sliding down his straw-stack; and it seemed to me that from that moment he was doomed. And so was I---our fates were linked together. I could not injure him without injuring myself.

Yes, the supernatural powers I had invoked had punished my presumption. And why had they, when at school they had so clearly been on my side? The reason was, I told myself, that at Brandham Hall I had invoked these powers against each other, had tried to set the Zodiac against itself. In my eyes the actors in my drama had been immortals, inheritors of the summer and of the coming glory of the twentieth century.

So whichever way I looked, towards the world of experience or the world of the imagination, my gaze returned to me empty. I could make no contact with either, and lacking the nourishment that these umbilical cords convey, I shrank into myself.

+++

When Marcus and I met again at school we met almost as strangers. We were polite and distant with each other; we never went for walks together and never alluded to the past. No one commented on this; at school friendships were always being made and broken. I found new friends to go about with, but into these friendships I put little of myself---indeed, there was little left to put. But my daily glimpses of Marcus, reminding me of the need for secrecy, were like hammer-taps nailing me up. Gradually my active dread of hearing anything about Brandham passed into indifference, a progressive atrophy of curiosity about people that extended in many directions---in fact, in nearly all. But another world came to my aid: the world of facts. I accumulated facts: facts that existed independently of me, facts that my private wishes could not add to or subtract from. Soon I came to regard these facts as truths, and the only truths I cared to recognize. Pascal would have condemned them as being truth without charity; they contributed little to experience or imagination, but gradually took the place of both. Indeed, the life of facts proved no bad substitute for the facts of life. It did not let me down; on the contrary it upheld me and probably saved my life; for when the First World War came, my skill in marshalling facts was held to be more important than any service I was likely to perform on the field. So I missed that experience, along with many others, spooning among them. Ted hadn’t told me what it was, but he had shown me, he had paid with his life for showing me, and after that I never felt like it.

+++

Many records came to light besides those hidden in the collar-box. My mother and I were both inveterate hoarders; I had kept all her letters, she all mine; it was only a matter of time before I found our Brandham correspondence. Among the letters was an envelope, sealed down but unaddressed. What was it? Then in a flash I guessed: it was the letter Marian had given me for Ted on the afternoon of my birthday. In equal measure I wanted to open it and not to open it. Eventually I compromised by keeping it beside me, a prize to be opened only when I had finished.

My acquired respect for facts bore fruit, enabling me to lay some unction to my soul which at the time I had denied myself. Thus it became clear to me---chronology proved it---that Marian had been quite fond of me before there was any question of my acting as go-between. Afterwards she had redoubled her favours, making up to me and stuffing me with lies; but the episode of the green suit came first. I saw now, what I did not take in then, that her chief object in going to Norwich was to meet Ted Burgess: his must have been the raised hat on the other side of the square. But it would be unduly cynical to say I was only a pretext for her journey. It would have been such an expensive pretext, for one thing---not that she minded about money. I felt pretty sure that she was genuinely concerned about my permanently overheated state and wanted to do me a good turn. Inexplicable as it seemed to me now, the conviction that she had never really cared for me had been the bitterest of the pills I had to swallow. Similarly Lord Trimingham’s affability and condescension, on which I had set so much store, did not altogether proceed from the wish that I should be a convenient link between him and Marian. Ted’s behaviour had been more suspect. What a change there had been in his demeanour when I told him I was a visitor at the Hall! And how he had alternately cajoled and threatened me when I began to jib at taking the messages! And yet he had been really sorry about it; he had even said he was sorry, as a good child should. Perhaps among all of us---and that went for me, too---he was the only one who had had a true impulse of contrition.

I was able to winnow out other facts that had been hidden from me at the time. Marcus it must have been who told his mother that I knew something of Marian’s whereabouts when she gave out that she was with her old nannie; he had goaded me, by his superior knowledge of French, into making that silly and disastrous boast. I had assumed that all schoolboys obeyed the “no sneaking” rule as implicitly as I did---as Marcus himself did as long as he was at school. It hadn’t occurred to me that just as we changed our language and vocabulary when we went into polite society, so we changed our natures---or at least our expression of them.

And I, I was not so guilty as I believed myself to be in the long months that followed my visit, or so blameless as, in the years that followed them, I had come to think I was. I had come to blame the visit for everything, even for my vice of taking myself too seriously. I ought not to have read Marian’s note; I ought not to have falsified the hour of Marian’s rendezvous with Ted. The first had been regrettable though venial; and the second, if well meant, had been fatal in its consequences. But if I should not have done it now, in my middle sixties, it was because I had long ceased to have the wish to meddle, for good or ill, in other people’s business. “Once a go-between, never a go-between” had become my maxim.

As to the spell, I shook my head; I could not take it seriously. It did not fit into the world of facts. The search for facts, which meant the search for truth, had such a tranquillizing and reconciling effect on me that by the end the episode at Brandham Hall, that Bluebeard’s chamber in my mind, had lost its terrors. It was no more horrific than a long and intricate bibliographical quest. It might have been something that had happened to another person. With the opening of the door, and the installation of electric light into the cupboard, the skeletons had crumbled into dust.

The facts that I had brought to light had been sufficient for my purpose. They were incomplete, of course. If I wanted to know more precisely how I stood vis-à-vis life---success and failure, happiness and unhappiness, integration and disintegration, and so on---I should have to examine other facts, facts beyond the reach of memory and gleaned from outside, from living sources. I should have to know what happened to the other persons in the story, and how the experience had affected them. The others! I did not take kindly to the fact of others. I did not mind their names in print, providing evidence, but I did not want them in the flesh: that way they were most troublesome.

As to these “others” of Brandham Hall, somehow I could not think of them as going on after I had stopped. They were like figures in a picture, the frame enclosed them, the twofold frame of time and place, and they could not step outside it, they were imprisoned in Brandham Hall and the summer of 1900. There let them stay, fixed in their two dimensions: I did not want to free them.

So with a quiet mind I was able to approach the last piece of evidence, the unopened letter.

Darling, [it read---only one “darling” this time],

Our trusty messenger must have made a bloomer. You can’t have said six o’clock. Why, you’ll be all covered with hay-seed, you’ll have straw in your hair, you won’t be fit to be seen! So I’m writing to say, Come at six thirty if you can, because it’s our dear postman’s birthday and I have to be there to give him a little present, just the thing for a postman---he won’t have to walk any more, poor pet, when he takes our messages! I’m giving him this. Mama is making other plans for him and he may not be able to outwit her, cunning as he is, and if he doesn’t get through with it I shall be there at six, and wait till seven or eight or nine or Doomsday---darling, darling.

+++

The tears came into my eyes---tears, which I had never shed, I think, since I left Brandham Hall. So that was why she had given me the green bicycle---to facilitate my journeys between the Hall and the farm. Eh bien je jamais! She was a cool one. I didn’t mind; my only wish was that I had kept it, instead of letting Mother give it away because I wouldn’t use it.

The figures in the picture started moving; curiosity stirred in me again. I would go back to Brandham and find out what had happened after I left.

+++

Defying augury, I took a room at the Maid’s Head, and the next day I recklessly hired a car and drove to my objective.

My memories of the village were very hazy, but even so I shouldn’t have recognized it. The angle of vision makes a difference: I was a foot taller than when I had seen it last, and it seemed many feet lower. A passing motor-car cut off half the height of the houses; I saw a woman standing at an upper window, and her head and shoulders were invisible, the window was so low. The place had changed with all the changes of fifty years---the most changeful half century in history. I did not even feel a revenant; I felt a stranger. “What will have changed least?” I wondered. The church. To the church I bent my steps, and having reached it I went straight to the transept. There were two new mural tablets.

“Hugh Francis Winlove, Ninth Viscount Trimingham,” I read. “Born Nov. 15th. 1874, died July 6th. 1910.”

So soon! Poor Hugh! His could never have been a good life, I reflected, not in the doctor’s sense. Suddenly I thought of him as a man much younger than I, he who had seemed so much older: a young man of thirty-six, but looking any age; his face too damaged by the hand of man to respond to the kinder surgery of the hand of God. It had never struck me that besides the damage one could see, there might be other damage that one couldn’t.

Requiescat.

Had he ever married? I wondered. The tablet did not record a viscountess. There seemed to be no way of telling. But yes, there was, for here was another tablet, stuck away in the corner.

“Hugh Maudsley Winlove, Tenth Viscount Trimingham. Born Feb. 12th. 1901, killed in action in France June 15th. 1944; also of Alethea, his wife, killed in an air-raid Jan. 16th. 1941.”

If these were facts, then they were very odd facts. Little as I remembered of the circumstances of my departure, I was quite sure that Lord Trimingham was not married when I left; indeed, his engagement to Marian had not yet been made public. How had he contrived to get married and have a son in less than seven months?

That the explanation didn’t dawn on me shows what a deep impression the scene in the outhouse had left on my mind. I could not conceive of Marian going on after it; it was not only worse than death, it was death too: she was rubbed out.

Shaking my head, still puzzled and a little irritated---for I, who had got the better of so many facts, did not like it when facts got the better of me---I sat down in what I thought was the pew I had occupied fifty years before, and found myself, like myself of an earlier date, looking for a memorial to the eleventh Viscount.

But there was none. Had the line died out? Then it occurred to me that the eleventh Viscount might be still alive.

Thinking back to my past, lost self, I remembered how impatient I had always been with the Litany and with Christianity’s general insistence on sin. I did not want to think about it! Since then I had thought about it a great deal, though not in a religious spirit, and not as sin. I was resigned to my lot and sometimes congratulated myself on it; but when I rebelled against its drabness, I knew where the blame lay, and my resentment against Brandham Hall and all its works had hardened into a general grudge against mankind. I did not call them sinners---sin was not among my terms of reference---but I did not like or trust them.

But what of the sense of praise and thankfulness that I had then? What of the song I used to sing with so much gusto (singing was one of the studies I had given up): “My song shall be alway Thy mercy praising”? I would not have sung it now, even if I could have reached the notes. There seemed so little room for praise or thanksgiving in the modern world, and the mercy of God, on which people were all too prone to throw themselves, had been left behind with the Psalms.

In the porch as I came in I saw a notice which said that the church was kept open to visitors partly for the purpose of private prayer; and would the visitor pray for the parish priest, for the congregation committed to his charge, and for the souls of the faithful who had passed away in the hope of a joyful resurrection?

Though my church-going days were over, it seemed ungracious not to comply; and when I came to the souls of the faithful, I did not fail to say a prayer for Hugh, nor for his son and daughter-in-law; and then I remembered Ted, and though I could not be sure that he had been buried in consecrated ground and was eligible for the benefits of prayer, I said a prayer for him too. But still I was not satisfied. I remembered all the persons of our drama and prayed for them, and in the end I even prayed for myself.

I went out of the church uncertain what my next step should be. I had come to Brandham without a definite plan of campaign, but with some vague idea of searching out the oldest inhabitant and asking him or her for information. The pub was the most likely place to find such a person, but it was early still and the pubs would not be open for an hour. Anyhow I do not like pubs and had rarely been inside one.

I stood in the churchyard and looked down on the cricket field. It was mid-May, and they had been mowing it and rolling it and generally putting it in order for the season. Evidently cricket still flourished in Brandham. The pavilion was still there, facing me, and I tried to make out where I had been standing when I made my historic catch, wondering what it felt like to be a cricketer, for cricket was another thing I had been excused when I went back to school.

I turned and made my way down to the village, and as I entered the street I saw a man whose face seemed less unfamiliar to me than the others. He was a young man in the middle twenties, not the sort of person I was looking for; probably he was also a stranger to the place. Certainly he was a stranger to me, and I did not care about talking to strangers. But there was one question he might be able to answer.

He was wearing a sports coat and an old pair of corduroy trousers; his face was closed in thought.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but is there still a Lord Trimingham living at Brandham Hall?”

He looked at me as though he shared my prejudice against strangers, and as though he wanted to be left alone, and yet didn’t want to be left alone.

“There is,” he said rather shortly, “and as a matter of fact I am Lord Trimingham.”

Very much taken aback, I stared at him. I remembered his colouring: it was like a wheat-field, a ripe wheat-field in the month of May.

“You seem surprised,” he said, and his tone suggested that my surprise was uncalled for. “But I live only in a corner of the house---the rest is let to a girls’ school.”

I recovered myself a little. “Oh,” I said, “I didn’t mean that, though I’m glad to know you live there. You see I stayed there many years ago.”

At that his manner changed completely and he said, almost eagerly: “You stayed there? Then you know the house?”

“I remember parts of it,” I said.

“You stayed there?” he repeated. “When would that be?”

“In your grandfather’s time,” I said.

“My grandfather?” he said, and I saw that he was on his guard again. “You knew my grandfather?”

“Yes,” I said, “your grandfather, the ninth Viscount.” Out of some unsealed chamber of memory the pompous phrase slipped past my tongue. “He was your grandfather, wasn’t he?”

“Of course,” Lord Trimingham said, “of course. I never knew him, I’m afraid: he died before I was born. But I believe he was a charming man, if I may say so of my own relation.”

“You may,” I smiled. “He was a charming man.”

Lord Trimingham had lost a little of his aplomb: it was as though the breath of the May morning had gone out of him. He hesitated and then said: “And did you also know my grandmother?”

This time it was for me to echo him. “Your grandmother?”

“Yes, she was a Miss Maudsley.”

I took a long breath. “Oh yes,” I said. “I knew her very well. Is she still alive?”

“She is,” he said, without too much enthusiasm.

“And living where?”

“Here in the village, in a little house that used to belong to an old retainer of the family, called, I think, Nannie Robson. Perhaps you knew her, too?”

“No,” I said, “I never saw her, though I heard about her. . . . Is your grandmother well? “

“Quite well, except that she’s got rather forgetful lately, like old people do.” He smiled, a tolerant, youthful smile that seemed to relegate her without regret to the category of the old. “Why don’t you call and see her?” he went on. “She’d like to see you, I’m sure. She’s rather lonely. She doesn’t have many visitors.”

The inhibitions of fifty years rose up in me and took control of my face and voice.

“I think I’d better not,” I said, “I’m not sure she would want to see me.”

He looked at me a moment, good manners struggling with curiosity in his face.

“Well,” he said, “it’s for you to say.”

Suddenly I remembered that, Trimingham or no Trimingham, he was much younger than I was and I could claim an older person’s freedom of speech. At the same time I was aware of an Ancient Mariner in me who might be trying his patience.

“Would you,” I asked, “do me a great kindness?”

“Of course,” he said, with a fleeting glance at his wrist-watch. “What is it?”

“Would you tell Lady Trimingham that Leo Colston is here and would like to see her?”

“Leo Colston?”

“Yes, that is my name.”

He hesitated. “As a rule I don’t drop in on her,” he said. “I sometimes telephone. . . . What a boon it is! Was there a telephone here in your day?”

“No,” I replied. “It might have made a great difference if there had been.”

“Yes indeed,” said he. “My grandmother is a great talker, you know; old people sometimes are. But I’ll go if you like. I----” he stopped.

“It would be a great kindness,” I repeated, firmly. “Like you I shouldn’t want to---to take her unawares.” I thought of the last time I had done so.

“Very well,” said he, overcoming an obvious reluctance. “Mr. Leo Colston, was it? You think that she’ll remember the name? She’s rather forgetful.”

“I’m sure she will,” I said. “I’ll wait here for you.”

While he was gone I strolled about the street, searching for some object that would put me visually in line with the past. But nothing clicked. I saw the village hall, a sombre structure of smooth, dark-red brick, which looked incongruous among the glittering, grey flint houses. I ought to have remembered it, for it was the scene of my last public triumph, but I didn’t.

I saw my envoy coming towards me and went to meet him. His face was clouded, and the resemblance between him and Ted was stronger than ever.

“She didn’t remember you at first,” he said, “and then she remembered you very well. She said she would be very pleased to see you. She also asked me if I would give you luncheon, as she can’t: would you like that?”

“Yes,” I replied, “if you would.”

“I should be most happy to,” said he, not looking at all happy, “if you don’t mind taking pot-luck. But she wasn’t sure you’d want to come.”

“Oh, why? “I asked.

“Because of something that had happened long ago. You were only a little boy, she said. She said it wasn’t her fault.”

“Your grandfather used to say,” I said, “that nothing is ever a lady’s fault.”

He gave me a hard look.

“Yes,” I said, “I knew your grandfather extremely well, and you are very like him.”

He changed colour, and I noticed he was standing away from me, as his grandfather had at our last meeting.

“I’m very sorry,” he said, reddening, “if we didn’t treat you well.”

I was touched by the “we” and, remembering his grandfather’s fatal capacity for contrition, I said hastily:

“Oh, you had nothing to do with it. Please don’t give it another thought. Your grandmother----”

“Yes?” he said sombrely.

“Do you often see her?”

“Not very often.”

“Not many people go to see her, you said?”

“Not very many.”

“Did many people go to see her when she was at the Hall?”

He shook his head. “I fancy not very many.”

“Then why does she go on living here? “

“Frankly, I can’t imagine.”

“She was so beautiful,” I said.

“I have often been told so,” he replied. “I don’t quite see it myself. . . . You know your way to the house?”

I answered, conscious of having said it once before: “No, but I can ask.”

I noticed he didn’t offer to go with me, but he told me how to find the house. “Luncheon about one?” he added, and I promised to be there. I heard the rustle of his corduroy trousers as he walked away. And after a second or two I heard it again. He was coming back.

When he drew level with me he stopped and said, obviously making an effort, but without looking at me:

“Were you the little boy who----?”

“Yes,” I said.

+++

Marian received me in a small, heavily curtained room looking on the street, and below street-level---one went down a step to reach it. She was sitting with her back to the light.

“Mr. Colston,” the maid said.

She rose and held her hand out uncertainly.

“But is this really----? “ she began.

“I should have known you,” I said, “but I couldn’t expect you would know me.”

Actually I shouldn’t have known her. Her hair was bluish, her face had lost its roundness, her nose had grown more prominent and hawklike. She was very much made up and had developed a great deal of manner. Only her eyes, faded as they were, had kept their quality, their frosty fire. We talked a little of my journey and of what I had done in life, both subjects that were easily disposed of. For conversational purpose, an ounce of incident is worth a pound of routine progress, and my life had little incident to record. My temporary loss of memory at Brandham Hall had been the last dramatic thing that had happened to me. She went back to that.

“You lost your memory at the beginning,” she said; “I’m losing mine at the end---not really losing it, you know, but not quite remembering what happened yesterday, like poor old Nannie Robson used to. My memory for the past is still quite clear.”

I pounced on this and asked a question or two.

“One at a time,” she said. “One at a time. Marcus, yes, he was killed in the First War, and Denys, too. I forget which went first---Denys, I think. Marcus was your friend, wasn’t he? Yes, of course he was. A round-faced boy---he was Mama’s favourite, and mine too. We were a very devoted family, but Denys was never quite at home in it, if you know what I mean.”

“And your mother? “ I prompted her.

She sighed. “Poor Mama! It was a shame, those nervous people! I got over it, I got over it very well. We didn’t have the ball, you know; it had to be cancelled. Your mother came down---I remember her very well, a sweet woman---grey eyes like yours, and brown hair, and a quick way of moving and talking. We had to put her up at the inn. The house was chock-full for the ball, everyone tumbling over each other, you not speaking, Mama screaming out all sorts of Biblical words. It was a nightmare! And then Papa took charge and restored order. By the next day everyone was gone who could go; you stayed until the Monday, I remember, and how you heard about Ted we never knew. Perhaps Henry the footman told you: he was a friend of yours.”

“How did you know I knew?”

“Because one of the few things you said was ‘Why did Ted shoot himself? Wasn’t he a good shot?’ You see at first you thought he shot himself by accident, and a good shot wouldn’t have; you don’t have to be a good shot to shoot yourself. Ted had a weak streak in him like Edward has.”

“Edward?”

“My grandson. He should have waited till it all blew over, as I did. I knew it would blow over, once I was Lady Trimingham.”

“And Hugh?”

“And me?” she queried, puzzled.

“No,” I said, “Hugh”---I hooted it.

“Oh, Hugh,” she said. “He married me; he didn’t mind what they said. Hugh was as true as steel. He wouldn’t hear a word against me. We held our heads very high. If anyone didn’t want to know us we just ignored them, but everybody did. I was Lady Trimingham, you see. I still am. There isn’t another.”

“What was your daughter-in-law like?” I asked.

“Poor Alethea? Oh, such a dull girl. She had such dreary, stupid parties---I hardly ever went to them. I was living at the Dower House, and people came to me, of course, interesting people, artists and writers, not stuffy country neighbours. There are stuffy people even in Norfolk. My son wasn’t a sporting man, you know, he took after my father---he was the very image of him. But he hadn’t Papa’s drive. Papa was a wonderful man, and Mama was wonderful too---it is something to have had such very exceptional parents.”

“You haven’t told me what happened to your mother,” I reminded her.

“Oh, poor Mama! She couldn’t stay with us, you know, she had to go away, but we often went to see her, and she remembered all about us and was so glad I had married Hugh---she always wanted that, you know. I didn’t really, but I was glad I had, or people might not have been as nice to me as they were.”

“And your father?”

“Oh, Papa lived to be very old, nearly ninety, but he lost interest in the business after Mama left us, and when Marcus and Denys were killed he gave it up. But he often came to see us at the Hall, and when I was living at the Dower House he paid me many visits. We were always a very devoted family, you see.”

“How happy,” I thought, “has my life been compared with hers!” I couldn’t bear to hear much more, and yet I wanted to have the picture fitted in completely.

“Isn’t it rather dull for you, Marian,” I said, “to be living here alone? Wouldn’t you be happier in London?”

“Alone?” she said. “Alone, what do you mean? But people come in shoals. I almost have to turn them from the door, I’m quite a place of pilgrimage, I can tell you! Everybody knows about me, you see, they know what I’ve been through, and naturally they want to see me---just as you did.”

“I’m very glad I have,” I said, “and I’m glad to have met your nice young grandson, Edward.”

“Sh,” she said. “You mustn’t call him that, he likes to be called Hugh, though Edward is a family name, of course.”

I remembered the two Edwards in the transept.

“Well,” I said, “it must be a comfort to you to have him near you.”

At that her face fell, and the mask she had been wearing since I came showed signs of cracking.

“He is”---then she corrected herself: “he would be. But do you know, though we are the only two members of the family left, he doesn’t come to see me very much?”

“Oh, surely----” I protested.

“No, he doesn’t. Masses of people come, but he does not---I mean not regularly---not regularly like I used to see old Nannie Robson when she was old. Does he remind you of anyone?” she asked me suddenly.

“Well, yes, he does,” I said, surprised at being asked. “His grandfather. “

“That’s it, that’s it, he does. And of course he knows---he knows what he’s been told, what his parents told him, for he’s never spoken of it to me. And what other people may have told him---a village is a hive of gossip. And I think he has a grudge against me---you know why. The only person in the world who has! His own grandmother! And they tell me---he has never told me---that he wants to marry a girl---a nice girl, a Winlove cousin, a distant cousin, but still a Winlove---but he won’t ask her because---because this is still weighing on him. He feels---or so they tell me---that he’s under some sort of spell or curse, and that he’d hand it on. He’s just plain sillyl But no doubt he’s heard some rumour, totally false of course, that worries him. Now this is where you come in.”

“I?”

“Yes, Leo, you. You know the facts, you know what really happened. And besides me, only you know. You know that Ted and I were lovers; well, we were. But we weren’t ordinary lovers, not lovers in the vulgar sense, not in the way people make love today. Our love was a beautiful thing, wasn’t it? I mean, we gave up everything for each other. We didn’t have a thought except for each other. All those house-parties--- people being paired off like animals at stud---it wasn’t like that with us. We were made for each other. Do you remember what that summer was like?---how much more beautiful than any since? Well, what was the most beautiful thing in it? Wasn’t it us, and our feeling for each other? Didn’t you realize it when you took our letters for us? Didn’t you feel that all the rest---the house, the people coming and going---just didn’t count? And wouldn’t you feel proud to be descended from our union---the child of so much happiness and beauty?”

What could I say but yes?

“I’m glad you see it so,” she said, “for you were our instrument---we couldn’t have carried on without you. ‘Carried on’ ---that sounds a funny phrase---but you know what I mean. You came out of the blue to make us happy. And we made you happy, didn’t we? You were only a little boy, and yet we trusted you with our great treasure. You might never have known what it was, have gone through life without knowing. And yet Edward----” She stopped.

“But you can tell him, Leo, tell him everything, just as it was. Tell him that it was nothing to be ashamed of, and that I’m nothing to be ashamed of, his old grandmother whom people come miles to see! There was nothing mean or sordid in it, was there? And nothing that could possibly hurt anyone. We did have sorrows, bitter sorrows, Hugh dying, Marcus and Denys killed, my son Hugh killed, and his wife---though she was no great loss. But they weren’t our fault---they were the fault of this hideous century we live in, which has denatured humanity and planted death and hate where love and living were. Tell him this, Leo, make him see it and feel it; it will be the best day’s work you ever did. Remember how you loved taking our messages, bringing us together and making us happy---well, this is another errand of love, and the last time I shall ever ask you to be our postman. Why does he think I stay on here, except to be near him? And yet he has this grudge against me, he won’t come near me if he can help it, though shoals of people come that I don’t want to see. Sometimes I think he would rather I didn’t live here, but I won’t believe it. And make him get out of his head this ridiculous idea that he can’t marry: it’s that that wounds me most. I don’t want him to marry, Heaven knows, and bring some frightful woman to Brandham Hall---though the Winlove girl is quite nice, I believe. But every man should get married---you ought to have got married, Leo, you’re all dried up inside, I can tell that. It isn’t too late; you might marry still; why don’t you? Don’t you feel any need of love? But Edward (only don’t call him that), he must; he’s young---he’s the same age Ted was when you came to Brandham. He has all his life before him. Tell him he must get rid of these silly scruples---his grandfather would have had them, if I’d let him. Poor Ted, if he’d had more brains he wouldn’t have blown them out. You owe it to us, Leo, you owe it to us; and it’ll be good for you, too. Tell him there’s no spell or curse except an unloving heart. You know that, don’t you? Tell him to think kindly of his old grandmother, who only lives to love him.”

She ceased, greatly to my relief, for I had made several ineffectual attempts to stop her, having seen how she was tiring herself. We talked a little about indifferent subjects---the changes at Brandham, the changes in the world---and then I took my leave, promising to come again.

“Bless you,” she said, “bless you! You’re a friend in a thousand. Kiss me, Leo!”

+++

Her face was wet with tears.

A foreigner in the world of the emotions, ignorant of their language but compelled to listen to it, I turned into the street. With every step I marvelled more at the extent of Marian’s self-deception. Why then was I moved by what she had said? Why did I half wish that I could see it all as she did? And why should I go on this preposterous errand? I hadn’t promised to and I wasn’t a child, to be ordered about. My car was standing by the public call-box; nothing easier than to ring up Ted’s grandson and make my excuses. . . .

But I didn’t, and hardly had I turned in at the lodge gates, wondering how I should say what I had come to say, when the south-west prospect of the Hall, long hidden from my memory, sprang into view.

THE END