Auntie Hamps nodded.
“You’re the finest sixty I ever saw!” said Edwin, with unaffected admiration.
And she was fine. The pride in her eye as she made the avowal—probably the first frank avowal of her age that had passed those lips for thirty years—was richly justified. With her clear, rosy complexion, her white regular teeth, her straight spine, her plump figure, her brilliant gaze, her rapid gestures, and that authentic hair of hers falling in Victorian curls, she offered to the world a figure that no one could regard without a physical pleasure and stimulation. And she was so shiningly correct in her black silk and black velvet, and in the massive jet at her throat, and in the slenderness of her shoe! It was useless to recall her duplicities, her mendacities, her hypocrisies, her meannesses. At any rate she could be generous at moments, and the splendour of her vitality sometimes, as now, hid all her faults. She would confess to aches and pains like other folk, bouts of rheumatism for example—but the high courage of her body would not deign to ratify such miserable statements; it haughtily repelled the touch of time; it kept at least the appearance of victory. If you did not like Auntie Hamps willingly, in her hours of bodily triumph, you had to like her unwillingly. Both Edwin and Maggie had innumerable grievances against her, but she held their allegiance, and even their warm instinctive affection, on the morning of her sixtieth birthday. She had been a lone widow ever since Edwin could remember, and yet she had continued to bloom. Nothing could desiccate nor wither her. Even her sins did not find her out. God and she remained always on the best terms, and she thrived on insincerity.
Five.
“There’s a little parcel for you, auntie,” said Edwin, with a particular effort to make his voice soft and agreeable. “But it’s in Manchester. It won’t be here till to-morrow. My fault entirely! You know how awful I am for putting off things.”
“We quite expected it would be here to-day,” said the loyal Maggie, when most sisters—and Clara assuredly—would have said in an eager, sarcastic tone: “Yes, it’s just like Edwin, and yet I reminded him I don’t know how many times!” (Edwin felt with satisfaction that the new leaf was already turned. He was glad that he had said ‘My fault entirely.’ He now said to himself: “Maggie’s all right, and so am I. I must keep this up. Perfect nonsense, people hinting that she and I can’t get on together!”)
“Please, please!” Auntie Hamps entreated. “Don’t talk about parcels!” And yet they knew that if they had not talked about a parcel the ageing lady would have been seriously wounded. “All I want is your love. You children are all I have now. And if you knew how proud I am of you all, seeing you all so nice and good, and respected in the town, and Clara’s little darlings beginning to run about, and such strong little things. If only your poor mother—!”
Impossible not to be impressed by those accents! Edwin and Maggie might writhe under Auntie Hamps’s phraseology; they might remember the most horrible examples of her cant. In vain! They were impressed. They had to say to themselves: “There’s something very decent about her, after all.”
Auntie Hamps looked from one to the other, and at the quiet opulence of the breakfast-table, and the spacious solidities of the room. Admiration and respect were in that eye, always too masculine to weep under emotion. Undoubtedly she was proud of her nephew and nieces. And had she not the right to be? The bearded Edwin, one of the chief tradesmen in the town, and so fond of books, such a reader, and so quiet in his habits! And the two girls, with nice independent fortunes: Clara so fruitful and so winning, and Maggie so dependable, so kind! Auntie Hamps had scarce anything else to wish for. Her ideals were fulfilled. Undoubtedly since the death of Darius her attitude towards his children had acquired even a certain humility.