‘I will go and tell Justine and the boys that I am to remain in their home. I suppose you do not wish me to leave it? You don’t feel as guilty before me as that. They will betray their pleasure at the news, and I suppose that will be balm to my sore heart. I may be fortunate that I have never needed any balm before. They would rather have me than you, Edgar. I suppose I have really been the only father they have known. It is a good thing that you have not to face this ordeal. You would be quite unequal to it. You have been very awkward in this last scene. I see what people mean when they say that I am the better of the two.’
‘So do I, Dudley.’
Dudley left them with a light step and they still stood apart. But as he paused to get his grasp on himself, he saw them move to each other and lift their eyes. Their ordeal was over: his had begun.
He paused at the door of the upper room and listened to the sound of voices. Justine and Aubrey and Mark were playing a game. Clement was standing on the hearth, as he had stood while the scene went on below. Dudley had not thought to dread this moment as much as he dreaded it. It had seemed that his main feeling must drown any other, and a thought just came that he could not be suffering to the last. He stood just inside the door and said the words which he felt would be his.
‘I bring you a piece of good news. You are not going to lose me. I am to remain the light of your home. You thought that my gain was to be your loss, but I am not going to have the gain. It seemed impossible that I should be going to marry, and it is impossible.’
‘What do you mean, Uncle?’ said Justine. ‘Have you changed your mind?’
‘No, I am better than that. I have been rejected in favour of my brother and I have risen above it. I am the same person, better and finer. The last little bit of self has gone. It was rather a large piece at our last interview, but that does not matter, now it has gone.’
‘Tell us what you mean,’ said Mark.
‘I don’t think I can be expected to say plainly that Maria has given me up and is going to marry your father. Surely you can save me from the actual words. I shall soon have said them. Surely you have taken the hint.’
‘It is really true, Uncle?’
‘Yes, you have taken it,’ said Dudley, sinking into a chair as if in relief.
‘We are to accept this as definite and acknowledged? It affects us as well as you.’
‘It does, doesn’t it? I had not thought of that. I am glad that you are to share the embarrassment. A burden is halved if it is shared, though it almost seems that it would be doubled. And you must be very uncomfortable. It is very soon for your father to want to marry.’
‘But Father can’t marry Miss Sloane,’ said Aubrey. ‘He is married to Mother.’
‘No, dear,’ said Justine, in a low tone. ‘Mother is dead.’
‘But she would not like him to have another wife.’ ‘We do not know, dear, Hush. Mother might understand.’ ‘So that is what it has meant,’ said Mark, ‘their being so much together.’
‘Is that what it was’, said Aubrey, ‘when I saw them — ’
Justine put her hand on his to enforce his silence. ‘Yes,’ said Dudley, ‘all of it was that. It is bad enough to bring out the best in me, and it has had to be the very best. And your position is not so good. Your father is losing no time in filling your mother’s place. I must make one mean speech; I can’t be the only person to suffer discomfiture. But of course you see no reason why I should suffer it, and of course I see that your mother would have wished this to happen, and that your father is simply fulfilling her wish.’
‘We cannot but rejoice that we are to keep you, Uncle,’ said Mark.
‘Yes, we must feel that for ourselves,’ said Justine. Clement and Aubrey did not speak.
‘I don’t wonder that you are ill at ease. And I must embarrass you further and tell you that you will have your money back again. I want you to feel some awkwardness which is not caused by my being rejected. No doubt you see that I do. But you will have the money after you have proved that you could give it up. It is just the position one would choose. And I have simply proved that I could take it back. My situation would not be chosen in any way. What do you think people will think of me? Will they despise me for being rejected? I do not say jilted. A vulgar word could not pass my lips.’
‘They will think what they always have of you, Uncle,’ said Justine.
‘That I am second to my brother? Well, they must think that. Do you think a vulgar word could pass their lips?’
‘I am sure it could not in connexion with you.’
‘That is a good thing. Perhaps I am a person who can carry off anything. I must be, because that is what I am doing. You will have to support me and not show it. I should not like it to be thought that I needed help from others. And as I am still well off, people won’t entirely despise me.’
‘You are many other things, Uncle.’
‘They are not the kind of things that people would see. People are so dreadful. I am not like them, after all.’
‘When will Father marry Miss Sloane?’ said Aubrey.
‘We do not know, dear. No one knows,’ said his sister. ‘Some time will have to pass.’
‘That seems so unreasonable,’ said Dudley. ‘Why should people wait to carry out their wishes? Of course they should not have them. I see that; I like to see it. I am not a man without natural feelings. I could not rise above them if I were without them. And that seems the chief thing that I do.’
‘Will you be taking up the repairs to the house again?’ said Justine, in a practical tone, as if to liberate her uncle from the thrall of speech.
‘Your father will think of that. It will be to his advantage. Oh, I must not let myself grow bitter. People are ennobled by suffering and that was not the speech of an ennobled man. And I thought of my advantage when my turn came. That came as a shock to people; I like to remember that it did. I was not a person who could be trusted to think of himself; they actually hardly expected it. If I had not become engaged, my true self would never have emerged. And now I shall never be thought the same of again. But I suppose nobody would be, whose true self had emerged.’
‘Is Father’s self made manifest now?’ said Aubrey.
‘Yes, it is, and we see that it is even worse than mine.’
Justine rose and shook out her skirt with a movement of discarding the traces of some pursuit.
‘People’s weaker side is not necessarily their truer self,’ she said, in a tone which ended the talk and enabled her uncle to leave the room.
A silence followed his going.
‘Are men allowed to marry someone else as soon as they like after their wives are dead?’ said Aubrey.
‘How many weeks is it?’ said Mark.
‘I do not know. We will not say,’ said his sister. ‘It can do no good.’
‘It may have been the emotion of that time which prepared the way for the other.’
‘It may have been. It may not. We do not know.’
‘Is it often like that?’ said Aubrey.
Justine sat down and drew him to her lap, and as he edged away to save her his weight, suddenly raised her hands to her head and burst into a flood of tears. Her brothers looked on in silence. Aubrey put his knee on the edge of her chair and stared before him.
‘Well, that is over,’ she said, lifting her face. ‘I had to let myself go at first. If I had not, it would only have been bottled up and broken out at some inopportune time. Witness my passages with Aunt Matty. Well, I have betrayed my feelings once and am in no danger of doing it a second time. I can feel that Uncle will be able to face his life, and that I shall be able to face seeing him do it.’
‘Shall we all be able to, or must we all cry?’ said Aubrey, who was himself taking the latter course.