But suddenly he realised that Aunt Moira was speaking of his mother, and that awoke him vividly, for he remembered his mother dimly, and he remembered to have loved her, even as he loved the idea of her now, she was so gentle and serious a ghost. He wanted Aunt Moira to describe her minutely, her person and character and loveliness, and he wanted to hear about how she had loved his father. But Aunt Moira could never be minute, could not even describe in the ordinary way; but, when moved, would make some gesture of speech, as though to unfold a tapestry that she had long kept hidden, and then she would hold a torch to that tapestry, a flaming torch that cast a great light here and a deep shadow there, and left the listener gaping at so wanton a vagueness cloaked by so grand a manner.
Aunt Moira did not speak of his mother as his mother, at least she didn’t seem to, but as something much finer and grander and more intangible. She created for Ivor not the sad and quiet mother of his faint memory, but a figure of story; and she seemed, as it were defiantly, to speak of Ann Marlay as a woman of women, as of a tradition that is as ancient as song. In fact Aunt Moira, in that large and reckless way you couldn’t help loving in her, filled in a portrait of a lady as Gainsborough might have painted it, in the grand and fearless manner—anyway, his mother seemed very grand and fearless by the time Aunt Moira had done with her torchlight description; but Ivor could not, try as he would, see this fine and exquisite lady as his mother. He could not reconcile this tragic and remote figure of romance with a dimly acute memory: a memory of an emotion that had quite filled a very little boy’s heart and eyes with a tremendous thrill, when there had bent over him a lovely white face and calm, gentle eyes; and these eyes were so wide and deep and dark with a shining darkness that the little boy had just let them cover him with a faëry silence. It had been a marvellous plaything between them, that faëry silence; until, one day, it had taken bodily shape as death, and then down had swooped Aunt Moira....
2
But Ann Marlay’s womanhood, in the historic sense, was only the preface to Lady Moira’s tale—as such, indeed, has been the preface to many a tale, that womanhood so exquisitely contrived to serve love and to destroy ambition. The stuff of the tale, the very heart of all the alarums of the romance, lay—as Aunt Moira saw it, not unnaturally—with that fine gentleman, her younger brother and his father: through whom, of course, for all her gallant talk of his mother, her interest and affection for himself had descended, as she didn’t now trouble to conceal. And Ivor was made to see, vividly, how Aunt Moira must have treasured, inexorably and immensely, that other young man, his father—and how his father, head of his house at a rebellious age, must have evaded and combated and rebelled, very mightily and stormily of course, but always and only to succumb. The sterling intimacy of Aunt Moira’s life, this between herself and her younger brother had been—and how likely a one to bring one of them to trouble, as was well proved!
He was tall, of course, this father of his, and with hair as fair and thick as his own was dark and thick: and, Aunt Moira rather cruelly said, a rather obvious kind of face—though by “obvious” Ivor later found she meant the kind of face that leads crusades or smashes things; and, of course, with that nose piratical and predatory, that mountainous and ancient nose, brother to her own and father to Ivor’s. Aunt Moira, with a toss at her idol, suggested that that other young man might have been all the better for brown eyes instead of blue, for she had very unconventional views about eyes, saying: “There is something musty and expected about blue eyes in that kind of face,” and that Ivor’s looks lost nothing for his mother having given him her dark eyes. “But it is of no importance,” said Aunt Moira.
Ivor had happened, it appeared, in the tenth year of his parent’s mating—“a word,” said Aunt Moira, “to be used very rarely”—and so the months of storm-tossed wonderings that had preceded that love’s consummation showed Ivor his father as a young man of about eight or nine-and-twenty, unhappily married five years before. And Ivor particularly liked to imagine his father during those first months of strivings this way and that way: this way, a barren and comfortless marriage—“a girl like a stone,” said Aunt Moira, “but not one of those stones that seagulls worship”—and that way the dim figure of lovely Ann Marlay, distracting him to leave quarrying stone and live, just live and love. And as Ivor thought of those preliminary months of strivings, this way honour and that way life, he couldn’t help feeling that, from a certain point of view, a great deal of fuss had been made of an issue, how confused soever. They seemed to have made tragedies for themselves where we would make a trunkcall; they seemed, his aunt and his father, to have debated the thing largely and at large—only in the end to do what it was quite inevitable that they must do, to yield to the most secret and compelling of the laws of life, which is the law of lawlessness. And as Ivor thought of the “girl like a stone,” he saw, dimly and painfully, what Aunt Moira with her sweeping distaste for sub-human people could not see, how even a figure of stone can be absent-mindedly crucified by full-blooded people.
It had been, of course, natural enough for that tempestuous young man to have at once hurried off his elder sister and dearest friend to see and love the girl Ann Marlay: to that house on Putney Hill where she lived with her father, a drowsy old gentleman who collected stamps and books, but little knowledge of men and none of daughters.
“Miracles cannot be explained,” Aunt Moira said to Ivor, in explaining this particular one. “For indeed it was a miracle that happened to your father—to meet, by chance and on the open road, the one woman in the world who could touch him so that nothing else could ever touch him!”
“They met like birds,” said Aunt Moira, and was silent a while. And in her eyes was that expression, profound and absorbed, of one who is going to die.
The actual ingredients of the miracle had been, it seemed, an accident to his carriage, a maimed dog, and a trembling girl on the curb, silently rebuking him for his negligence; and then Ivor’s father, least casual of men and as hurt as the dog, protesting his way with it in his arms into her father’s house near by, to placate her and comfort the dog—and to change the whole manner and colour of his life.