I well remember our arrival. There was a tea-supper on the table, so meagre that my heart sank at the outset. There was my Aunt Martha. She seemed like a weak tired edition of my Grandmother. She looked miserable and underfed; I soon came to know that she was both. I regarded Albert, a dull heavy-faced boy with a big mouth and thick lips.
The latter soon opened. "Don't stare, you! Father, she's staring at me."
"It's not true. I'm not staring. I was just looking at him."
"Come, there, no answerings back in this house, learn that once for all." There was still a good deal of honey about Uncle Simeon's, still small voice, but it was flavoured with aloes now and other bitter things, whose presence he had kept hidden at Bear Lawn. The honeyed whine was now very near a snarl, as he showed his shiny white teeth and repeated, "Once for all." The Tawborough mask was being put aside already.
A clock outside struck the hour. I looked at the time-piece, which registered eight o'clock. So did he.
"She knows her bedroom, Martha? Yes. At eight she goes to bed, and eight in the morning we take our humble breakfast. Come now, to bed!"
I was faced with the Good-night difficulty. Albert I ignored, and he me. Aunt Martha was plain sailing. She looked kind, if weak and blurred. We kissed each other listlessly on the cheek. But from Uncle Simeon I shrank instinctively as I came near him. He saw my feelings, I saw he hated me for them, he saw that I felt his hate. That refusal to kiss was a silent declaration of inevitable war.
He took the offensive that very night, as the clock hands showed next morning.
I went upstairs with my candle, and sat down on a chair in the middle of the room. There was an unused smell about everything which seemed to add to my homesickness and sense of lost bearings. Bear Lawn had never been a gay and festive place, but it was home, and here in the dreary room the first-night-away-from-home feeling overcame me badly with all its disconsolate accompaniments of damp eyes and dry throat. The old injustice burned in my heart, the old bitterness came back. Why had I had to leave my Grandmother, the only one in the world who cared for me? Why was there nobody who loved me even more than that, in whose bosom I could hide my face and cry, whose love to me was wonderful? Why had the Lord left me no Mother who would have loved me best of all? The same old questions reduced me to the same old tears ... I pulled myself together and remembered my three-fold duty: to say my prayers, to read my psalm, to sing my hymn. I decided, with a true Saint's whim, to choose my nightly psalm by opening my Bible at random—I could gauge the whereabouts of the Psalms well enough, if only by the used look on the edge—and reading always the first psalm that caught my eye. Whether the Lord guided me to a choice of His own, or whether it was that my Bible opened naturally at so familiar a place, I do not know: anyway, there before me was the dirty, well-loved, well-thumbed page (page 537 I remember), and in the middle of it, plastered around with affectionate red crayon, stood my favourite 137th Psalm. I read aloud:
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.