The inquisitiveness of Keith with regard to his ancestors and the past life of his parents continued for quite a while. Other family connections seemed unreal and did not interest him. Having no sister or brother of his own, relationships of that kind were meaningless to him. Parents, on the other hand, constituted a tangible personal experience, and the presence of Granny taught that this experience was common to grown-up people as well as children.
The curiosity he evinced was queerly impersonal, however, and might well be called intellectual. The information he received had no power over his own life. He could have been told anything, and he would have accepted it calmly as something not affecting himself. The only thing that influenced him was the manner of the person answering his questions. To that manner he was almost morbidly sensitive, and from it he concluded whether the various details related should please or disturb him.
Instinctively he pressed his inquiries at points eliciting marked resistance. And it was not what he actually learned, but the evasions encountered, that produced the sensitiveness about his own backgrounds which later often influenced his attitude harmfully at moments when he most needed complete self-assurance. It was the reluctance with which certain parts of the family history were told, and the total withholding of others, that taught him to be ashamed of things for which he could not be held personally responsible. The effect of this lesson on his character was the more fatal because it remained unconscious so long. Having become doubtful as to the worth of the roots of the tree, it was only natural that he should also feel doubts about the fruit.
Concerning the real character of his forbears he learned next to nothing. All that he heard related to external circumstances that were, or were not, judged respectable and presentable. One fact in particular was subject to the most rigid exclusion from all family conversations, and yet it leaked down to Keith at a time when he was utterly incapable of appreciating its significance. It piqued him mightily without disturbing him.
One day they were visited by his father's married sister, who was lacking in sentimentality and had a disturbing way of calling a spade a spade. The inevitable testing of the boy's cleverness by making him tell his own name led to a discussion of family names in general, Keith's mother expressing a great admiration for that of Wellander.
"Oh, yes, it's good enough," remarked her sister-in-law, "but it is not the right one, you know, and the old one was much finer."
"I know," said the mother, "but I don't know what the name used to be."
"Cederskjöld, and I think it was recognized as noble. I never knew the inside of it, but it looks peculiar. Carl's and my father and his brother and two sisters took common action to get the family name changed to Wellander. I am sure my grandfather must have been up to some rather striking deviltry, and for all I know he might have been hanged."
"Hush," cried Keith's mother with a quick glance at the boy who was taking in everything with wide-open eyes and ears.
Keith did not wait for anything more, but sneaked off by himself to think. The change of the name seemed nothing at the time, but the suggestion that his great-grandfather had been hanged was startling enough to give food for many meditations. Fortunately, or unfortunately, his aunt's manner had been too nonchalant to give him any clues. And from the manner of his mother he gathered merely that the asking of questions would be useless. So it came about that Keith for the first time in his life regretted the premature death of his paternal grandfather, from whom, otherwise, he might have elicited some more satisfactory information.