“I have been thinking the last week, Henry, that perhaps in bringing your stenographer on this trip, and making her of use to me also, you have had it in mind to suggest, on our return, that she remain with us.”
Mr. Derwent’s eyes were fixed on the landscape. He did not respond at once, and Mrs. Nixon, looking at him sharply, was in doubt whether to interpret his silence as a guilty one.
“Marion,” he said at last, “do you often think of Alan?”
“Why—” Mrs. Nixon paused in her surprise at this irrelevancy,—“why, yes, I do.” It was with an effort that her thought unclasped itself from the present, to revert to the unfortunate one of the family: the brother whose every effort to succeed in life had seemed to be thwarted; whose children had died, and whose own life had suddenly and unexpectedly closed before he had arrived at middle age.
Mr. Derwent’s lips compressed under his white mustache, and his nostrils dilated.
Mrs. Nixon observed the change in his face with some dismay. She could not remember when she had last heard him refer to their sorrow. For the first time she realized that this was perhaps because it had gone too deep.
He still kept his gaze ahead as he continued, in detached sentences: “I never sympathized enough with Alan. I let him fight alone too long. I criticised when I should have carried him. There is no torture like that unavailing regret. Yesterday is dead, and repining is weakness. The only atonement I can make is to look on each individual need that presents itself before me, and ask myself what I would do now if that need was Alan’s.”
Mrs. Nixon was silent; her folded hands tightened. She was beholding an unsuspected wound, hidden always beneath her brother’s imperturbable exterior; and the apparition held her tongue-tied.