My mother seemed to think the inquiry very odd and somehow offensive. I asked if she thought the big diamond star was worth as much as £600.
She said I appeared to have a very sordid way of looking at things whose real value was that they were symbolic of something beyond price.
I said I knew that. But did she not think that for some great and important end, my father would have been the first to say, let the jewels be sold?
My mother put her hand up to her eyes. I blew out one candle and set a shield before the other.
She spoke my name and I started—the voice sounded odd. I went back to the bedside. "Are you ill?" I said. She shook her head and motioned me to sit down.
Then she told me. We were living on the proceeds of the diamond star.
The pendant had been sold last summer. There was nothing more worth selling except the furniture, and possibly a few prints.
We owed Lord Helmstone six months' rent.
I met the shock with the help of my secret. I steadied myself against the thought that, at the worst, I would find the means (through Aunt Josephine or somebody) for qualifying myself to support my mother and sister. I saw myself, at the worst, a humble soldier enlisting in that army where Eric held command. I, too, marching with that high companionship ... marching to the world's relief.
In the midst of telling how I was forging ahead with my London University Tutorial Correspondence, and to what the year's successful work was leading, I kept thinking that, after all, this ill wind might help to blow away the cloud that Eric's disapproval had brought lowering over the present and obscuring all the future. My mother will be proud of me, I thought. She will even be a little touched; and then, for all the light was so dim, I saw her face of horror!