‘Half-an-hour ago,’ she repeated at length, in a low voice. ‘Did she know I was on the way?’
‘For twenty hours she has scarcely taken any notice. The last was——’
‘The last must have been what she said to the boy,’—his mother spoke of him as if he were a thing and not a person—‘and that was, he says, about me, something he did not understand. I hope there was no talk about—— affairs.’
‘Emily, you are not softened, even by death.’
‘It is not in me, I suppose,’ she said, with a sigh. Then she turned round to John. ‘Why did you not tell me that she was ill? You wrote from yourself. You said nothing about her—or nothing to speak of. If you had told me she was ill, I might have been in time.’
They both turned and looked at him, his grand-father with heavy eyes and a blank aspect of exhaustion and helplessness, but, with so much expression as was left in him, reproachful too.
And all power of self-defence, of anything but submission and acquiescence, seemed taken from John.
‘I did not think of it,’ he said, giving himself up, as he was dimly conscious, to total misconstruction, but what did it matter? Nothing seemed to be of any consequence in the subtle misery which had invaded the house. John did not feel even that he was aware of the cause of it. He scarcely thought of his grandmother, dead. He knew only that where all had been so happy and full of tenderness there was nothing but a chill misery and desolation, with a fault of his somehow involved, he could not tell how.
‘Of course I should have come at once,’ she repeated, turning round again to the fire, with her hands held over it. ‘We did not always understand each other. We were not like each other. How can one help it if that is so?’
‘Children are not always like their parents,’ Mr. Sandford said.