IX.
"Mary, do you know why you're crying?"
Roddy's face was fixed in a look of anger and resentment, and of anxiety as if he were afraid that at any minute he would be asked to do something that he couldn't do.
They had come down together from the locked room, and gone into the drawing-room where the yellow blinds let in the same repulsive, greyish, ochreish light.
Her tears did not fall. They covered her eyes each with a shaking lens; the chairs and tables floated up to her as if she stood in an aquarium of thick, greyish, ochreish light.
"You think it's because you care," he said. "But it's because you don't care…. You're not as bad as I am. I don't care a bit."
"Yes, you do, or you wouldn't think you didn't."
"No. None of us really cares. Except Mamma. And even she doesn't as much as she thinks she does. If we cared we'd be glad to sit in there, doing nothing, thinking about him…. That's why we keep on going upstairs to look at him, to make ourselves feel as if we cared."
She wondered. Was that really why they did it? She thought it was because they couldn't bear to leave him there, four days and four nights, alone. She said so. But Roddy went on in his hard, flat voice, beating out his truth.
"We never did anything to make him happy."
"He was happy," she said. "When Mark went. He had Mamma."
"Yes, but he must have known about us. He must have known about us all the time."
"What did he know about us?"
"That we didn't care.
"Don't you remember," he said, "the things we used to say about him?"
She remembered. She could see Dan in the nursery at Five Elms, scowling and swearing he would kill Papa. She could see Roddy, and Mark with his red tight face, laughing at him. She could see herself, a baby, kicking and screaming when he took her in his arms. For months she hadn't thought about him except to wish he wasn't there so that she could go on playing. When he was in the fit she had been playing on the Kendals' piano, conceited and happy, not caring.
Supposing all the time, deep down, in his secret mysterious life, he had cared?
"We must leave off thinking about him," Roddy said. "If we keep on thinking we shall go off our heads."
"We are off our heads," she said.
Their hatred of themselves was a biting, aching madness. She hated the conceited, happy self that hadn't cared. The piano, gleaming sombrely in the hushed light, reminded her of it.
She hated the piano.
They dragged themselves back into the dining-room where Mamma and Dan sat doing nothing, hiding their faces from each other. The afternoon went on. Utter callousness, utter weariness came over them.
Their mother kept looking at the clock. "Uncle Victor will have got to Durlingham," she said. An hour ago she had said, "Uncle Victor will have got to York." Their minds clung to Uncle Victor as they had clung, four days ago, to Dan, because of his unconsciousness.