"Let us wait. It will come soon. It will come soon, for you and me."
His voice had sounded imploringly; his eyes shone wet with terror. She sat stiff and upright in her chair; her fingers trembled violently in the deep, black folds of her lap. But a lethargy descended upon both of them; the strange lucidity and the anxious tension of their unaccustomed words seemed but for a moment to be able to galvanize their old souls, as though by a suggestion from without. Now they both grew lethargic and became very old indeed. For a long time they stared, each at his window, without words.
Then there was a ring at the front-door.
[1] Malay: nurse, ayah.
[CHAPTER IV]
It was Anton Dercksz, the old lady's eldest son by her second marriage; by her first she had only an unmarried daughter, Stefanie de Laders. Anton also had never married; he had made his career in Java; he was an ex-resident. He was seventy-five, taciturn, gloomy and self-centred, owing to his long, lonely life, full of lonely thoughts about himself, the heady thoughts of a sensualist who, in his old age, had lapsed into a sensualist in imagination.... It had been his nature, first instinctively, then in a more studied fashion, to hide himself, not to give himself; not to give of himself even that which would have won him the praise and esteem of his fellow-men. Endowed with intelligence above the ordinary, a student, a man of learning, he had fostered that intelligence only for himself and had never been more than an average official. His self-centred, gloomy soul had demanded and still demanded solitary enjoyments, even as his powerful body had craved for obscure pleasures.
He entered in his overcoat, which he kept closely wrapped about him, feeling chilly, though it was still a sunny September and autumn had hardly given its first shiver. He came to see his mother once a week, from an old habit of respect and awe. Her children—elderly men and women, all of them—all called regularly, but first asked Anna, the maid, with the cat always among her skirts, who was upstairs with Mamma. If some member of the family were there already, they did not go up at once, anxious on no account to tire her with too great a gathering and too many voices. Then Anna would receive them in the downstairs morning-room, where she kept up a fire in the winter, and often the old servant would offer the visitor a brandy-cherry. If old Mr. Takma had only just arrived, Anna did not fail to say so; and the children or grandchildren would wait downstairs for a quarter of an hour and longer, because they knew that Mamma, that Grandmamma liked to be alone for a while with Takma, her old friend. If Takma had been there some time, Anna would reckon out whether she could let them go upstairs at once.... The companion was not there in the afternoons, except when mevrouw sent for her, as sometimes happened when the weather was bad and nobody called.
Anton Dercksz entered, hesitating because of Takma, uncertain whether he was intruding. The old woman's children, however much advanced in years, continued to behave as children to the once stern and severe mother, whom they still saw in the authority of her motherhood. And Anton in particular always saw her like that, seated in that chair which was as an unyielding throne, strange in that very last and fragile life hanging from a brittle, invisible thread, which, in snapping, would have broken life's last string. At the window, because of a lingering ray of sunshine outside, the mother sat in a crimson twilight of curtains and valance, sat as if she would never move again until the moment came for the dark portals to open. For the "children" did not see her move, save with the single, angular gesture sometimes suggested by once active, but now gouty, slender, wand-like fingers. Anton Dercksz knew that—if the portals had not opened that day—his mother would move, round about eight o'clock, to be taken to bed by Anna and the companion. But he never saw this: what he saw was the well-nigh complete immobility of the brittle figure in the chair that was almost a throne, amid a twilight just touched with pink. Old man as he himself was, he was impressed by this. His mother sat there so strangely, so unreally: she sat waiting, waiting. Her eyes, already glazed, stared before her, sometimes as though she were afraid of something.... The lonely man had developed within himself an acute gift of observation, a quick talent for drawing inferences, which he never allowed any one to perceive. For years he had held the theory that his mother was always thinking of something, always thinking of something, an invariable something. What could it be?... Perhaps he was mistaken, perhaps he looked too far, perhaps his mother's expression was but the staring of almost sightless eyes. Or was she thinking of hidden things in her life, things sunk in her life as in a deep, deep pool? Had she her secrets, as he had his, the secrets of his sullen hedonism? He was not inquisitive: everybody had his secrets; perhaps Mother had hers. He would never strive to find out. People had always said that Takma and Mother had been lovers: she no doubt thought of those old things ... or was she not thinking, was she merely waiting and staring out of her window?... However this might be, his awe remained unchanged.
"It is lovely weather, for September," he said, after the usual greetings.