“It is for you to take his place,” she said indicating my father’s chair, opposite to hers.
“Oh, not I!” exclaimed grandfather with agitation. “Valentine, I can’t take that place. I am nothing now but an old beast.”
She urged, but in vain; nothing would induce him to yield. Then my mother turned to me with that expression, at once calm and frightened, which she had worn ever since—since she became a widow.
“It must be you,” she said.
Without a word I seated myself in my father’s place and for a few moments I found it impossible to speak. Why this emotion for so simple and natural a thing? So simple and so natural indeed was the transmission of authority.
I have compared the house to a kingdom, and the succession of heads of the family to a dynasty. And now this dynasty had come to me. My mother was exercising the regency, and I was wearing the crown. And now I learned at the same time its weight and its honour. As before this I had been born into sorrow and into death, I was now born into the sense of my responsibility in life. Indeed I do not know whether I can compare the feeling that took possession of me with any other emotion. It pierced my heart with that sharp and cruel dart which is generally attributed to love. And from my wound sprang up, as it were, a gush of red blood, the sense of exaltation which was to colour all my life—blood which, far from subtracting from life’s forces, would add to the eternal defences of our race.
Thus, before I had attained the age of man, I entered, by anticipation, upon the great struggle which without fail forms a part of every human existence, the struggle between liberty and acceptance, between the horror of servitude and the sacrifices which are the price of permanence. A delightful but dangerous teacher had early revealed to me the miraculous charm of nature, of that very love and pride with which we think to bring the earth into subjection, but this too sweet and enervating charm would never again entirely possess me. My life was henceforth fixed to an iron ring: it would no longer depend upon my own fancy. Toward the mirages of happiness I should henceforth reach out only fettered hands. But these fetters are those which every man must one day assume, whether he actually mounts a throne or whether his empire is only over an acre or a name. Like a king I was responsible for the decadence or the prosperity of the kingdom—The House.
A few days later, since I must begin my medical studies, I also was obliged to go away, for a time. This parting tore my heart: in the zeal of my new part, I would fain have believed my presence necessary to my mother, who must be quite crushed by the loss of him who was her life. Her calmness, however, surprised me, and also the clearness of her judgment, and that mysterious new authority that every one felt. At the time of the funeral Martinod had begged for the honour of making a speech, reminding all present of my father’s devotion to the public weal, but she had refused. I could not understand her repelling a repentant enemy, and would willingly have given a contrary opinion. But not long afterward we learned that Martinod, hoping to capture the Mayor’s office, had counted upon thus making use of the dead to regain his lost popularity. Aunt Deen’s they had not laid aside their arms. They would never lay them aside. But the hearth-stone had its watchful guardians, neither to be duped nor lulled to sleep.
But there would be loneliness there, with only Nicola and Jamie. Grandfather would hardly count, for he was failing from day to day. He who had always had such horror of enclosures now asked almost every evening if the doors were locked and bolted. What did he fear? Once, arousing from a doze, he earnestly called for his father. Aunt Deen took him up almost roughly:
“You know very well that he has been dead these thirty years!”