I keep those two facts firmly in my mind when I try to excuse Donald; for it was the main cause of that unkindness and perversity which I find it so hard to forgive. Even now, when I think how he used to discharge it on the poor little thing, as if it had been her fault, I have to remind myself that the lamb’s innocence made her a little trying.
She couldn’t understand why Donald didn’t want to have her with him in his library any more while he read or wrote. It seemed to her sheer cruelty to shut her out now when she was ill, seeing that, before she was ill, she had always had her chair by the fireplace, where she would sit over her book or her embroidery for hours without speaking, hardly daring to breathe lest she should interrupt him. Now was the time, she thought, when she might expect a little indulgence.
Do you suppose that Donald would give his feelings as an explanation? Not he. They were his feelings, and he wouldn’t talk about them; and he never explained anything you didn’t understand.
That—her wanting to sit with him in the library—was what they had the awful quarrel about, the day before she died: that and the paper-weight, the precious paper-weight that he wouldn’t let anybody touch because George Meredith had given it him. It was a brass block, surmounted by a white alabaster Buddha painted and gilt. And it had an inscription: To Donald Dunbar, from George Meredith. In Affectionate Regard.
My brother was extremely attached to this paper-weight, partly, I’m afraid, because it proclaimed his intimacy with the great man. For this reason it was known in the family ironically as the Token.
It stood on Donald’s writing-table at his elbow, so near the ink-pot that the white Buddha had received a splash or two. And this evening Cicely had come in to us in the library, and had annoyed Donald by staying in it when he wanted her to go. She had taken up the Token, and was cleaning it to give herself a pretext.
She died after the quarrel they had then.
It began by Donald shouting at her.
“What are you doing with that paper-weight?”
“Only getting the ink off.”