CHAPTER XVII.
MOTHER AND SON.
They drove back together alone without a word, sitting close together, not looking at each other—saying nothing. A few neighbours, out of ‘respect,’ had attended old Mr. Sandford’s funeral; and many hearts in the village were sore for John. Behind the drawn blinds in the rectory, and in many humbler houses, they spoke of the boy with great tenderness. ‘He’ll find out the difference,’ people said. ‘The old people thought there was nobody like him: but if it’s an aunt, perhaps with children of her own——’ And none of the little cortége returned with the mourners to the house. The two were left altogether alone.
The little parlour was in painful good order, the blinds drawn up, the daylight coming in as usual, the hearth so cleanly swept, the fire so bright, the two chairs standing one on each side. It was all so suggestive of the old people, as if they might have only gone out for a walk, arm in arm, in their old way, and soon would come in and sit down and look up smiling at their boy, and bid him come near the fire, for it was a cold day. This suggestion flashed to John’s heart as he came in, and might have overwhelmed him with sorrow and tears; but the presence of that tall figure in her black cloak and close bonnet effectually put a stop to any expression. She drew one of those chairs from the fire to the table, without any sense of desecration, or of disturbing any sacred image, and sat down. Her face was very grave, but without any harshness. She was always very serious, yielding to no lighter impulses. She turned to John, who stood vaguely, not knowing what he was to do, by the table.
‘Now,’ she said, not without feeling, ‘there are only us two—we must try to understand each other.’
He made no reply. The movement she had made of the chair, though perfectly simple and quite unintended, was enough to re-awaken in his mind all the resistance, the repulsion, which indeed her action throughout had never suffered to fade. For she had managed everything in a perfectly clear, unhesitating, business way, giving her orders with quiet and brief decision saving everybody trouble, but leaving no place for any consultation, for any of those faltering conversations upon what would have been most pleasant, or according to the ideas of the departed, which draw together mourners in their grief. There was no particular appearance of grief in her at all. She was serious and pale; but then, she was always so, and there had been no room for sentiment in anything she had done or said.
No creature more desolate than the boy himself at that moment ever stood by a new-filled grave. The love which had enveloped him so closely all his life had passed altogether away. He felt as if there was no longer anyone that cared for him in the world. He felt that this familiar place, which had been his home for so long, was not only to cease to be his home, but to cease altogether. The jar of the chair as it was drawn aside seemed to go through his heart. It was only a commonplace piece of furniture now, a common old chair to be put up at an auction. The place seemed to be desecrated by that simple movement. He had thought he would keep the house just as it was, like a little temple to the memory of the good guardians of his childhood. He was to be their heir, he took that for granted. He would leave everything, he thought, and from time to time come back out of the midst of the active life he had planned for himself, and always find them in imagination sitting there to meet him. No doubt John would soon have found out the impossibility of that fond imagination; but this was what he thought. He had even planned how he should put the gardener and his wife—themselves old people for whom it would make a provision—into the house to keep it for him, which he had said to himself, with tender childish pleasure, would please grandmamma. But with the jar of that chair as it was drawn aside, John’s tender imaginations went from him, leaving him with a sense of astonishment and startled waking up. He had another will to calculate with of which he had not thought.
She kept looking at him while these thoughts passed in a tumult through his mind, waiting for an answer. It was but for a very short time, yet to both of them it seemed long: and with all her seriousness she was of a disposition which could not brook waiting. She said, ‘Well!’ a little sharply, when he made no reply.
‘I did not say anything,’ John replied.
‘No, you did not say anything—you made no response. You look at me as if you wanted to make a quarrel over those graves. But you shall not make any quarrel, on that point I am resolved. We must understand each other.’
He went and leant upon the mantelpiece and stood looking down into the fire. Make a quarrel! It seemed to John that his heart would burst with the pang this misconception gave him. A quarrel, over their graves! But, though the suggestion was so abhorrent, he felt the sense of rebellion and resistance grow stronger and stronger. He would not even meet her eye. He would withdraw into that passive unyielding silence which of all things in the world is most difficult to meet and to withstand.