Ivor’s expulsion was never again referred to between them—unless, perhaps, it was in reference to it that Aunt Moira, as he rose to go upstairs to change, called him to her and gave him one of those rare kisses—the last must have been quite three years before—that so unexpectedly clung to his cheek for a warm second; and then she examined him so straightly that he began a confused smile.
“You have intolerant eyes, anyway,” she said at last. For Aunt Moira was one of those who believed in intolerance; not she to advise youth to be tolerant, indulgent. She would tolerate anything in a nation, but she would not tolerate in an individual what she would not tolerate in herself. Always she had wanted her men to be good and great, and with the passing of the years she had decided that men cannot be good and great and tolerant in this self-scarred world. “Certainly, there are two sides to every question; but one of them looks over an abyss.” That is what Aunt Moira said; for she had looked over an abyss.
CHAPTER II
1
Aunt Moira was the only relation Ivor had, that he was aware of; and towards the end of the year after he left school she sickened of a cancer and was tortured to death. But before she died she told her nephew an ancient tale.
Ivor had originally been told that his father had died of a sudden illness, a few weeks before his birth. His natural curiosity on the subject had elicited the more particular information that his father had died of a sudden inflammation of the lungs—which Ivor somehow never realised meant pneumonia until he himself had it—in the thirty-ninth year of his age, in Italy. Thirty-nine had seemed to young Ivor a reasonable age at which to die, but he had been curious about Italy, for Italy had seemed a curious place for his father to have died in. But nothing on earth could move Aunt Moira to speak of what she did not wish to speak, and Ivor had to wait until a certain gray October afternoon of his nineteenth year, when he was much more curious about himself than about the ghosts that had given him birth, to hear the ancient tale that Aunt Moira must tell from her bed.
But she, who was commonly so impatient of fantasy, as of all excretions of inactive minds, must needs begin her tale with the casual statement that Ivor had never had a father at all! Whereupon Ivor looked very serious, and said nothing. “Technically speaking, of course,” snapped Aunt Moira, as though he had made a fool of himself. His real father, he who had loved and had been loved by his mother, and who had died in Italy, had been, implied Aunt Moira—implied Aunt Moira!—a vastly different person from any Mr. Marlay who could possibly have occurred in any strictly legal relation to his mother. “That,” said Lady Moira, “accounts to your nose and your Christian names.” For, of course, like other rebels, Aunt Moira could be a frightful snob when she chose.
But Aunt Moira’s tale came slowly, for that long-hidden cancer was at last and openly having its way with her, so certain the disease was that no surgeon’s knife could now avail the proud, tired body but in the one way itself made inevitable, from day to day of pain. But though, for press of suffering, her tongue must needs be still every now and then, her eyes were unmastered, keen and suspicious—for she would have no nonsense about her tale being misunderstood by this young man who sat rather too quietly by her bed, looking darker and sulkier than ever in the dim light of the heavily-curtained bedroom; and, in just such a silence, her eyes could dare the young man to feel the least atom of anger against the dead parents who had left him in what she didn’t hesitate to describe as “this mess.” Though, as she rather cynically said later, it was a much less careless mess than commonly happens:
“For you will be very well off, Ivor. There was nothing careless, nothing shoddy, even about your father’s lawlessness; as I hope there never will be about yours—but remember always that all lawlessness, like all cruelty, is fundamentally vulgar.” And Aunt Moira, having successfully contradicted herself, was again subdued by a stress of pain, and lay a while so still and silent that she might have seemed a carved figure but for those ever-open indomitable eyes that brooded suspiciously upon him.
And Ivor stirred restlessly, suddenly uncomfortable in the hard little chair which Aunt Moira had commanded him to pull up to the bed; Ivor stirred uneasily and wanted to stretch his legs and do something sensible with his hands, such as digging them into his pockets, but it was quite impossible to do any of those natural things, for one somehow didn’t lounge before Aunt Moira. But soon the discomfort of his body waned to nothing before the discomfort of his mind, for as she spoke or was silent he somehow began to feel that he was treating Aunt Moira unfairly, he felt a little mean for not thinking about it all as Aunt Moira seemed to expect him to think about it all—dear Aunt Moira, who was so seriously intent on explaining to him his illegitimacy! And so, of course, he ought to be serious too; and he had an uncomfortable feeling that there must be something beastly in him for not taking his illegitimacy so seriously as it was expected of him, and he wondered if it was all part of that same beastliness in him that had made him feel “bored” at school instead of going through with it in the ordinary way. And suddenly he thought of Transome, just a flash of a grinning thought behind his serious attention to Aunt Moira—how amazingly affected Transome would be if it was suddenly sprung on him by an Aunt Moira that the late Colonel Transome had never had any existence, technically speaking, and that therefore, he, Transome, was as illegitimate as any one could be! And the thought of Transome, faced with this news, persisted, how he would think it was the most important thing that had ever happened to any one outside of a book, and how he would be bursting with the tragic news until he simply had to confide in some one, saying: “I say, old boy, I’ve gone and turned out to be a bastard. Now what could be fairer than that?” And then Ivor pulled himself together sharply, feeling frightfully mean and uncomfortable—but the idea still persisted in him that his illegitimacy wasn’t at all important to him, not at all disturbing: interesting, of course, but not really important or disturbing. But, faced by Aunt Moira’s stern eyes—and hurt eyes they were too, just now and then, as though a sudden memory had hurt them—he tried his best to think as he was expected to think, just like the bustling people in Fielding’s Tom Jones....