My Grandmother was the most incurious woman I have ever known: partly because of her inherent good nature, which made her regard all chatter about others as unkindly; partly because of her religion, which enabled her to see, though I think to exaggerate, the unimportance of earthly things. To every question, every trouble, every accusation, every wrong, she would everlastingly reply: "What will it matter in a hundred years?" and then, "Anyhow, 'tis the Lord's will." With a character thus compounded of kindness, unworldliness and fatalism, Grandmother was never born to pry. It quite irritated me how little she asked me about my life at Uncle Simeon's. I had believed myself the centre of the universe, the victim of the cruellest wrongs in human story; and here was my Grandmother thinking it friendly and loving and sympathetic to say "Don't 'ee brood over it, my dear. Forget it all. 'Twill seem little in a hundred years from now!"
Apart however from this pique that my miseries should be denied the glory of posthumous fame, I was glad that I was left alone with the past eight months of my life. I could hide without subterfuge my friendship with Robbie. Naturally, and artfully, I mentioned him sometimes.
"Such a nice little boy, Grandmother; he was really! We liked each other—ever so!"
Always my favourite form of insincerity: to tell the literal truth, while conveying by the context or my manner something much less—i. e. morally speaking, not the truth at all. I loved him; I told Grandmother I liked him. It was the truth, and a lie.
I also kept hidden in my own breast the chief events of New Year's Night.
* * * * * * *
Within a few weeks the eight months of Torribridge seemed infinitely far away: as though it were some one else's life I was contemplating from a distant mountain-peak. I have always found that the more complete my change of surroundings, the more distant does my previous life immediately become; until some sudden messenger from the earlier days brings it back with a vivid rush. I never lived again the present-moment horror, as it were, of that life with Uncle Simeon until one day, far ahead, when I realized with frightening suddenness, as I gazed at a certain face beside me, that those eyes, that smile, that gesture—were his.
I fell back almost insensibly into the old groove of Bear Lawn life: the bare empty-seeming silent house, the long days of loneliness and godliness, pinings and prayers, the two familiar black-clad figures in the old familiar horse-hair chairs, the harsh staccato jobations proceeding from one side of the fireplace, and the gentler but no less continual "Don't 'ee do it's!" from the other. Torribridge was soon a nightmare episode shot through with glad dreams more episodal still. This life in this house that had sheltered my first memories was, after all, my real life; was Life. It seemed as though I had never known any other; I often cannot remember whether certain things happened before or after Torribridge: my Bear Lawn life was all one.
Nevertheless a few notable changes marked my return.