And he left her, went slowly up the stairs, reflecting that Harold and Daan knew what the hidden Something was, the Something which Mamma and Takma had kept hidden between themselves for years and years.... The doctor had also known it, probably.... The doctor was dead, Takma was dead, but Mamma did not know that yet ... and Mamma now had the hidden Thing to herself.... But Harold knew where it lay and Daan also knew where it lay ... and Ina was looking for it....
He grinned on the landing upstairs before he went in to his mother; he could hear Stefanie's grating voice inside.
"I," he said to himself, "don't care a hang for the whole crew. As long as they leave me alone, with my pipe and my books, I don't care a hang for the whole pack of them ... even though I do come and see my mother once a week.... And what she is keeping to herself and what she did with Takma, sixty years ago, I don't care a curse about either; that's her business, their business maybe ... but my business it is not."
He entered and, when he saw his mother, preternaturally old and frail in the red dusk of the curtains, he hesitated and went up to her, full of awe....
[CHAPTER XXVI]
There was another ring; and Anna, profoundly moved by the death of Dr. Roelofsz and moaning, "Oh dear, oh dear!" opened the door to Ottilie Steyn de Weert and Adèle Takma. Ina came out to them in the passage. They did not know of the doctor's death; and, when they heard and saw Daan and Harold in the morning-room, there was a general outcry—subdued, because of Mamma upstairs—and cross-questioning, a melancholy dismay and confusion, a consulting one with another what had best be done: whether to tell Mamma or keep it from her....
"We can't keep it from her for ever," said Ottilie Steyn. "Mamma doesn't even know about Mr. Takma ... and now there's this on top of it! Oh, it's terrible, terrible! Adèle, are you going up?"
"No," said Adèle Takma, shrinking, in this house, now that she knew. "No, Ottilie, I must go home, Mamma will have plenty of visitors without me."
She shrank from seeing the old lady, now that she knew; and, though she had walked to the house and walked in with Ottilie Steyn, she would not go upstairs.