John obeyed her, scarcely knowing what he did. And so presently did all the house. She took the command of everything instantly, as if it was her right to do so. There was not much conversation, as may be supposed. She sat down by the fire, after the meal at which she eat moderately without any look of reluctance, and talked a little, in the same grave tone, to her father. But there were no tears, no words of sorrow. The old man gave a broken sort of account of his wife’s illness, subdued into a narrative of facts by the influence of that serious, but quite conventional, figure opposite to him; while John sat at the table behind, with a book before him, which he did not read, listening in a miserable way to every word, feeling a wretchedness which was beyond description, but which could not get vent in the ordinary way, because of the atmosphere about him, which was full of the new presence. He had been hungry, poor boy, but could not eat, feeling that to be able to eat at such a moment was more horrible than words can say. And his brain was giddy for want of sleep. Body and soul were in the same condition of exhaustion and misery. But still the slow exchange of those subdued voices over the fire held him like a spell.
The next days passed slowly and yet swiftly, every moment with leaden feet, yet, when they were gone, looking like a dream. And everything was done without trouble, it seemed; in perfect order and quiet, the whole house pervaded by the strong, still presence of this stranger. If there had been a confusion before between his mother and the daughter of the old people, the Emily whom he knew so well, there was no confusion now. John’s mother had disappeared into the mists from amid which her idea had never clearly developed itself. She had been swept out of his horizon altogether. He saw still very clearly in that far distant background, the father who was dead—but not her any more. And this was Emily, who had come to set everything right. It was almost a difficulty for him not to call her by that name. She was a very useful and very powerful personality in the house; but, as a matter of fact, no one knew what to call her. Her name was Sandford, like her father’s. It was on her travelling-bag and her linen, and the book or two she carried with her. E. Sandford; no more. To the servants it was a great problem how to address her. Mrs. Sandford it did not seem possible she should be; and Miss Sandford—there was something in her which seemed to contradict that title. Something of youth is associated with it, a possibility of dependence, and a secondary place. But no such ideas were compatible with the presence of this new-comer, of whom no one out of the house had ever heard before. The curate even, who was the only visitor, looked at her with a sort of diffident curiosity, and said ‘your daughter,’ when he spoke of her to the old man. She went to the funeral, supporting her father on her arm, while John walked with Mr. Cattley behind. A great many people, indeed, it might be said the whole parish, attended the funeral; and there were many tears among the crowd. But Emily shed no tear. She kept her father’s arm in hers, and encouraged and supported him. The old gentleman, who had been so strong and hale, had sunk all at once into helplessness; his heavy foot, that had been so steady, became shuffling and uncertain; sometimes he would sob feebly, like the voluntary crying of a child, without tears.
And more and more to John was this melancholy period like a dream. It all fitted in, one event with another—the meeting at the station, the pause at the door, when he thought for a moment that Emily would have turned back, and gone away without entering the house; and then that scene upstairs, the tall figure all in black, her bonnet still on, a veil drooping over her face, holding up the light over the snow-cold whiteness of the bed and the dead face on the pillow. He shuddered when he thought of that scene. It was all a dream—a dream from which he might perhaps awake to see all these sombre circumstances disappear, and the old, sweet life which was real—the only real life he could think of, with the two old faces, full of love, beaming on him—would come back. But that, John knew very well, it would never do. And what was it that lay before him?—new work, a strange place, his old grandfather left alone and desolate, his mother of whom he had once dreamed disappeared into thin air, and nothing certain in the world but Emily, who was and was not Emily, but—— But now the dream within dreams had gone. He did not believe that she was his mother. He began to think, in all seriousness, that his mother must have been a younger sister, one, perhaps, about whom there was a mystery, who had perished along with his father, who—but that seemed very confusing and wonderful to think of—might have been the subject of that secret of which his grandmother had spoken. It was all so strange, so little clear, that this solution of the matter took stronger form in John’s thoughts.
On the evening after the funeral they were all seated together once more like the old arrangement, two on different sides of the fire, the boy in the middle with his book, but, ah! so different. No kind looks exchanged across him, all meaning love to him; no interest in what he was doing; no consciousness on his part that he was the principal figure, the centre of their thoughts. John was of no importance now, and felt it. He was in the background, an insignificant unit in the group. His grandfather sat, saying nothing, limp in his chair, a little irritable, ready to watch any movement, while Emily (he could not call her anything but Emily) sat between the fire and the table with her work. Presently John awoke to the consciousness that she was talking of himself.
‘I should like you to tell me what you have arranged about the boy?’
‘The boy’ was what she called him almost always. And the words were never uttered without rousing a sense of injury in John’s heart.
‘How can I tell you,’ said Mr. Sandford, ‘about John or anything? Do you think I’m able to be troubled about that?’
‘You must,’ she said, in her steady, serious tone, ‘for in a day or two I shall have to go back, and all business should be settled before I go.’
‘Must!’ said the old man, with unwonted fire; and then he fell again into the half-whimpering tone of complaint. ‘I have never had that said to me. I’ve been master in my own house, and no one to lift their hand against me, near upon fifty years.’
‘Father, you will recognise, if you think, that I have a right to hear about the boy. You had settled to send him to an engineer? So much I know; but who is it, and where? It is far more easy to tell me than to quarrel with me about my right to ask.’