Never in his life had he seen any likeness of her. His father had not once mentioned her name in his hearing, and, as a little boy, he had been given by his nurses to understand that she existed somewhere in that mysterious and enormous category of things about which well-brought-up children were not supposed to inquire. There was a certain fitness in thus meeting her unknown face as he entered Whanland for the first time since he left it in the early months of his infancy. She had been here all the time, waiting for him in the dust and darkness. As he set the picture against the wall her eyes looked at him with a secret intelligence. That he had nothing to thank her for was a fact which he had gathered as soon as he grew old enough to draw deductions for himself; but, all the same, he now felt an unaccountable sympathy with her, not as his mother—for such a relationship had never existed for him—but as a human being. He went to the little window under the slope of the roof and looked out over the fields. On the shore the sea lay, far and sad, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The even, dreary sound came through a crack in the two little panes of glass. He turned back to the picture, though he could hardly see it in the strengthening dusk; her personality seemed to pervade the place with a brave, unavailing brightness. It struck him that, in that game of life which had ended in her death, there had been her stake too. But it was a point of view which he felt sure no other being he had known had ever considered.
Mr. Barclay’s voice calling to him on the staircase brought him back from the labyrinth of thought. He hurried out of the garret to find him on the landing, rather short of breath after his ascent.
‘The Misses Robertson are below, Mr. Speid; they have driven out from Kaims to bid you welcome. I have left them in the library.’
‘The Misses Robertson?’
‘Miss Hersey and Miss Caroline Robertson; your cousins. The ladies will not be long before they find you out, you see. They might have allowed you a little more law, all the same. But women are made inquisitive—especially the old ones.’
‘I think it vastly kind,’ said Speid shortly. ‘I remember now that my father spoke of them.’
As they entered the library, two small figures rose from their chairs and came forward, one a little in front of the other.
The sisters were both much under middle height, and dressed exactly alike; it was only on their faces that the very great difference in them was visible. There was an appealing dignity in the full acknowledgment of her seventy years which Miss Hersey carried in her person. She had never had the smallest pretension to either intellect or attraction, but her plain, thin face, with its one beauty of gray hair rolled high above her forehead, was full of a dignity innocent, remote, and entirely natural, that has gone out of the modern world. Miss Caroline, who was slightly her senior, was frankly ugly and foolish-looking; and something fine, delicate, and persuasive that lay in her sister’s countenance had, in hers, been omitted. Their only likeness was in the benignity that pervaded them and in the inevitable family resemblance that is developed with age. The fashion of their dresses, though in no way grotesque, had been obsolete for several years.
‘Welcome, Mr. Speid,’ said Miss Hersey, holding out a gentle, bony hand. ‘Caroline, here is Mr. Speid.’
It was no slight effort which the two feeble old ladies had made in coming to do him honour, for they had about them the strangeness which hangs round very aged people when some unaccustomed act takes them out of their own surroundings, and he longed to thank them, or to say something which should express his sense of it. But Barclay’s proximity held him down. Their greeting made him disagreeably aware of the lawyer’s presence; and his incongruity as he stood behind him was like a cold draught blowing on his back. He made a hurried murmur of civility, then, as he glanced again at Miss Hersey’s face, he suddenly set his heels together, and, bending over her hand, held it to his lips.