They were not to blame; they could not be expected to know his innermost life, nor why it was that he felt suddenly as if he had profaned himself, and all that was most sacred to him. But that finer, nobler self that was always dormant within him, as eager to awaken to influences as it was to be lulled to sleep by them, became active and alert....
There was a hint of dawn in the sky as he came out into the empty street, his mind charged with a deep melancholy. But, as the cool air played about his face, he breathed more freely after the stuffy warmth of the room, and he walked with a firm step, square-shouldered, erect and courageous.
V
Some weeks later there came a letter which brought the reality of things into his own life. It was a short and regretful letter from a firm of Easterham solicitors, announcing the death of his aunt.
They informed him of the fact in a few, brief, dignified words. There was an undercurrent of excuse, as if they felt themselves personally responsible for the sudden demise, and were anxious to apologise for any inconvenience that might be felt by Mr Quain. He gathered that his aunt had lived on an annuity, which expired with her; that a little financial trouble—loans to a brother of whom Humphrey had never heard—absorbed her furniture and all her possessions, with the exception of a watch and chain, which she had willed to Humphrey. The funeral was to take place two days hence—and that was all.
The letter moved him neither to tears nor sorrow. His aunt had been as remote from him in life as she was in death. An unbridgeable abyss had divided them. Never, during the years he had lived in Easterham, after his father's death, had they talked of the fundamental things that mattered to one another. He felt that he owed her nothing, least of all love, for she remained in his memory a masterful, powerful influence, trying to fetter him down to a narrow life, without comprehension of the broad, beautiful world that lay at her doors.
He could see her now in her dress of some mysterious black pattern, and always a shawl over her shoulder, her white hair plastered close to her heavy gold earrings, her lips thin and compressed, and her eyes hard-set, when she said, "You must Get On." She did not know, when she urged him to go forward, how far he meant to go. Her vision of Getting On was bounded by Easterham—what could she know and understand of all the bewildering phases he had undergone; the bitter heartaches, the misery of failure, and the glory of conquest in a world wider than a million Easterhams.
But, as he thought of her dead, a strange feeling came to him that now she could understand everything, that she knew all, and was even ready to reach out in sympathy to him. Her last pathetic message—a watch and chain! The rude knowledge that he had gained of the secret things of her life—how she lived, her loan to the brother; it seemed that some hidden door which they had both kept carefully locked had been flung open widely—that his eyes were desecrating her profoundest secrets.