"My dear father, consult an expert if you like, but I don"t admit it is my mother"s writing."
"Why, you just said it was!" cried Dolly.
"Never mind if I did," he blazed out; "and hold your tongue."
The poor little wife coloured at this, and, drawing her handkerchief from her pocket, shed a few tears. No one noticed her. Evie was scowling like an angry boy. The two men were gradually a.s.suming the manner of the committee-room. They were both at their best when serving on committees.
They did not make the mistake of handling human affairs in the bulk, but disposed of them item by item, sharply. Caligraphy was the item before them now, and on it they turned their well-trained brains. Charles, after a little demur, accepted the writing as genuine, and they pa.s.sed on to the next point. It is the best--perhaps the only--way of dodging emotion. They were the average human article, and had they considered the note as a whole it would have driven them miserable or mad.
Considered item by item, the emotional content was minimised, and all went forward smoothly. The clock ticked, the coals blazed higher, and contended with the white radiance that poured in through the windows.
Unnoticed, the sun occupied his sky, and the shadows of the tree stems, extraordinarily solid, fell like trenches of purple across the frosted lawn. It was a glorious winter morning. Evie"s fox terrier, who had pa.s.sed for white, was only a dirty grey dog now, so intense was the purity that surrounded him. He was discredited, but the blackbirds that he was chasing glowed with Arabian darkness, for all the conventional colouring of life had been altered. Inside, the clock struck ten with a rich and confident note. Other clocks confirmed it, and the discussion moved towards its close.
To follow it is unnecessary. It is rather a moment when the commentator should step forward. Ought the Wilc.o.xes to have offered their home to Margaret? I think not. The appeal was too flimsy. It was not legal; it had been written in illness, and under the spell of a sudden friendship; it was contrary to the dead woman"s intentions in the past, contrary to her very nature, so far as that nature was understood by them. To them Howards End was a house: they could not know that to her it had been a spirit, for which she sought a spiritual heir. And--pushing one step farther in these mists--may they not have decided even better than they supposed? Is it credible that the possessions of the spirit can be bequeathed at all? Has the soul offspring? A wych-elm tree, a vine, a wisp of hay with dew on it--can pa.s.sion for such things be transmitted where there is no bond of blood? No; the Wilc.o.xes are not to be blamed.
The problem is too terrific, and they could not even perceive a problem.
No; it is natural and fitting that after due debate they should tear the note up and throw it on to their dining-room fire. The practical moralist may acquit them absolutely. He who strives to look deeper may acquit them--almost. For one hard fact remains. They did neglect a personal appeal. The woman who had died did say to them, "Do this," and they answered, "We will not."
The incident made a most painful impression on them. Grief mounted into the brain and worked there disquietingly. Yesterday they had lamented: "She was a dear mother, a true wife; in our absence she neglected her health and died." To-day they thought: "She was not as true, as dear, as we supposed." The desire for a more inward light had found expression at last, the unseen had impacted on the seen, and all that they could say was "Treachery." Mrs. Wilc.o.x had been treacherous to the family, to the laws of property, to her own written word. How did she expect Howards End to be conveyed to Miss Schlegel? Was her husband, to whom it legally belonged, to make it over to her as a free gift? Was the said Miss Schlegel to have a life interest in it, or to own it absolutely? Was there to be no compensation for the garage and other improvements that they had made under the a.s.sumption that all would be theirs some day? Treacherous! treacherous and absurd! When we think the dead both treacherous and absurd, we have gone far towards reconciling ourselves to their departure. That note, scribbled in pencil, sent through the matron, was unbusinesslike as well as cruel, and decreased at once the value of the woman who had written it.
"Ah, well!" said Mr. Wilc.o.x, rising from the table. "I shouldn"t have thought it possible."
"Mother couldn"t have meant it," said Evie, still frowning.
"No, my girl, of course not."
"Mother believed so in ancestors too--it isn"t like her to leave anything to an outsider, who"d never appreciate."
"The whole thing is unlike her," he announced. "If Miss Schlegel had been poor, if she had wanted a house, I could understand it a little.
But she has a house of her own. Why should she want another? She wouldn"t have any use for Howards End."
"That time may prove," murmured Charles.
"How?" asked his sister.
"Presumably she knows--mother will have told her. She got twice or three times into the nursing home. Presumably she is awaiting developments."
"What a horrid woman!" And Dolly, who had recovered, cried, "Why, she may be coming down to turn us out now!"
Charles put her right. "I wish she would," he said ominously. "I could then deal with her."
"So could I," echoed his father, who was feeling rather in the cold.
Charles had been kind in undertaking the funeral arrangements and in telling him to eat his breakfast, but the boy as he grew up was a little dictatorial, and a.s.sumed the post of chairman too readily. "I could deal with her, if she comes, but she won"t come. You"re all a bit hard on Miss Schlegel."
"That Paul business was pretty scandalous, though."
"I want no more of the Paul business, Charles, as I said at the time, and besides, it is quite apart from this business. Margaret Schlegel has been officious and tiresome during this terrible week, and we have all suffered under her, but upon my soul she"s honest. She"s NOT in collusion with the matron. I"m absolutely certain of it. Nor was she with the doctor, I"m equally certain of that. She did not hide anything from us, for up to that very afternoon she was as ignorant as we are.
She, like ourselves, was a dupe--" He stopped for a moment. "You see, Charles, in her terrible pain your mother put us all in false positions.
Paul would not have left England, you would not have gone to Italy, nor Evie and I into Yorkshire, if only we had known. Well, Miss Schlegel"s position has been equally false. Take all in all, she has not come out of it badly."
Evie said: "But those chrysanthemums--"
"Or coming down to the funeral at all--" echoed Dolly.
"Why shouldn"t she come down? She had the right to, and she stood far back among the Hilton women. The flowers--certainly we should not have sent such flowers, but they may have seemed the right thing to her, Evie, and for all you know they may be the custom in Germany."
"Oh, I forget she isn"t really English," cried Evie. "That would explain a lot."
"She"s a cosmopolitan," said Charles, looking at his watch. "I admit I"m rather down on cosmopolitans. My fault, doubtless. I cannot stand them, and a German cosmopolitan is the limit. I think that"s about all, isn"t it? I want to run down and see Chalkeley. A bicycle will do. And, by the way, I wish you"d speak to Crane some time. I"m certain he"s had my new car out."
"Has he done it any harm?"
"No."
"In that case I shall let it pa.s.s. It"s not worth while having a row."
Charles and his father sometimes disagreed. But they always parted with an increased regard for one another, and each desired no doughtier comrade when it was necessary to voyage for a little past the emotions.
So the sailors of Ulysses voyaged past the Sirens, having first stopped one another"s ears with wool.
CHAPTER XII
Charles need not have been anxious. Miss Schlegel had never heard of his mother"s strange request. She was to hear of it in after years, when she had built up her life differently, and it was to fit into position as the headstone of the corner. Her mind was bent on other questions now, and by her also it would have been rejected as the fantasy of an invalid.
She was parting from these Wilc.o.xes for the second time. Paul and his mother, ripple and great wave, had flowed into her life and ebbed out of it for ever. The ripple had left no traces behind; the wave had strewn at her feet fragments torn from the unknown. A curious seeker, she stood for a while at the verge of the sea that tells so little, but tells a little, and watched the outgoing of this last tremendous tide. Her friend had vanished in agony, but not, she believed, in degradation.
Her withdrawal had hinted at other things besides disease and pain. Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilc.o.x had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart--almost, but not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the sh.o.r.e that he must leave.
The last word--whatever it would be--had certainly not been said in Hilton churchyard. She had not died there. A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man. In Margaret"s eyes Mrs. Wilc.o.x had escaped registration. She had gone out of life vividly, her own way, and no dust was so truly dust as the contents of that heavy coffin, lowered with ceremonial until it rested on the dust of the earth, no flowers so utterly wasted as the chrysanthemums that the frost must have withered before morning. Margaret had once said she "loved superst.i.tion." It was not true. Few women had tried more earnestly to pierce the accretions in which body and soul are enwrapped. The death of Mrs. Wilc.o.x had helped her in her work. She saw a little more clearly than hitherto what a human being is, and to what he may aspire. Truer relationships gleamed.
Perhaps the last word would be hope--hope even on this side of the grave.
Meanwhile, she could take an interest in the survivors. In spite of her Christmas duties, in spite of her brother, the Wilc.o.xes continued to play a considerable part in her thoughts. She had seen so much of them in the final week. They were not "her sort," they were often suspicious and stupid, and deficient where she excelled; but collision with them stimulated her, and she felt an interest that verged into liking, even for Charles. She desired to protect them, and often felt that they could protect her, excelling where she was deficient. Once past the rocks of emotion, they knew so well what to do, whom to send for; their hands were on all the ropes, they had grit as well as grittiness and she valued grit enormously. They led a life that she could not attain to--the outer life of "telegrams and anger," which had detonated when Helen and Paul had touched in June, and had detonated again the other week. To Margaret this life was to remain a real force. She could not despise it, as Helen and Tibby affected to do. It fostered such virtues as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank, no doubt, but they have formed our civilisation. They form character, too; Margaret could not doubt it; they keep the soul from becoming sloppy.
How dare Schlegels despise Wilc.o.xes, when it takes all sorts to make a world?
"Don"t brood too much," she wrote to Helen, "on the superiority of the unseen to the seen. It"s true, but to brood on it is medieval. Our business is not to contrast the two, but to reconcile them."
Helen replied that she had no intention of brooding on such a dull subject. What did her sister take her for? The weather was magnificent.
She and the Mosebachs had gone tobogganing on the only hill that Pomerania boasted. It was fun, but over-crowded, for the rest of Pomerania had gone there too. Helen loved the country, and her letter glowed with physical exercise and poetry. She spoke of the scenery, quiet, yet august; of the snow-clad fields, with their scampering herds of deer; of the river and its quaint entrance into the Baltic Sea; of the Oderberge, only three hundred feet high, from which one slid all too quickly back into the Pomeranian plains, and yet these Oderberge were real mountains, with pine-forests, streams, and views complete. "It isn"t size that counts so much as the way things are arranged." In another paragraph she referred to Mrs. Wilc.o.x sympathetically, but the news had not bitten into her. She had not realised the accessories of death, which are in a sense more memorable than death itself. The atmosphere of precautions and recriminations, and in the midst a human body growing more vivid because it was in pain; the end of that body in Hilton churchyard; the survival of something that suggested hope, vivid in its turn against life"s workaday cheerfulness;--all these were lost to Helen, who only felt that a pleasant lady could now be pleasant no longer. She returned to Wickham Place full of her own affairs--she had had another proposal--and Margaret, after a moment"s hesitation, was content that this should be so.
The proposal had not been a serious matter. It was the work of Fraulein Mosebach, who had conceived the large and patriotic notion of winning back her cousins to the Fatherland by matrimony. England had played Paul Wilc.o.x, and lost; Germany played Herr Forstmeister some one--Helen could not remember his name. Herr Forstmeister lived in a wood, and, standing on the summit of the Oderberge, he had pointed out his house to Helen, or rather, had pointed out the wedge of pines in which it lay. She had exclaimed, "Oh, how lovely! That"s the place for me!" and in the evening Frieda appeared in her bedroom. "I have a message, dear Helen," etc., and so she had, but had been very nice when Helen laughed; quite understood--a forest too solitary and damp--quite agreed, but Herr Forstmeister believed he had a.s.surance to the contrary. Germany had lost, but with good-humour; holding the manhood of the world, she felt bound to win. "And there will even be some one for Tibby," concluded Helen. "There now, Tibby, think of that; Frieda is saving up a little girl for you, in pig-tails and white worsted stockings but the feet of the stockings are pink as if the little girl had trodden in strawberries. I"ve talked too much. My head aches. Now you talk."
Tibby consented to talk. He too was full of his own affairs, for he had just been up to try for a scholarship at Oxford. The men were down, and the candidates had been housed in various colleges, and had dined in hall. Tibby was sensitive to beauty, the experience was new, and he gave a description of his visit that was almost glowing. The august and mellow University, soaked with the richness of the western counties that it has served for a thousand years, appealed at once to the boy"s taste; it was the kind of thing he could understand, and he understood it all the better because it was empty. Oxford is--Oxford; not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another; such at all events was to be its effect on Tibby. His sisters sent him there that he might make friends, for they knew that his education had been cranky, and had severed him from other boys and men. He made no friends. His Oxford remained Oxford empty, and he took into life with him, not the memory of a radiance, but the memory of a colour scheme.
It pleased Margaret to hear her brother and sister talking. They did not get on overwell as a rule. For a few moments she listened to them, feeling elderly and benign.
Then something occurred to her, and she interrupted.
"Helen, I told you about poor Mrs. Wilc.o.x; that sad business?"
"Yes."
"I have had a correspondence with her son. He was winding up the estate, and wrote to ask me whether his mother had wanted me to have anything.
I thought it good of him, considering I knew her so little. I said that she had once spoken of giving me a Christmas present, but we both forgot about it afterwards."