Insall got up and walked to the end of the terrace, gazing at a bluebird on the edge of the lawn.
“Well, not necessarily,” he said, after a while. “Did you ever find out anything about her family?”
“Oh, yes, I met the father once, he's been out two or three times, on Sunday, and came over here to thank me for what I'd done. The mother doesn't come—she has some trouble, I don't know exactly what. Brooks, I wish you could see the father, he's so typically unique—if one may use the expression. A gatekeeper at the Chippering Mills!”
“A gatekeeper?”
“Yes, and I'm quite sure he doesn't understand to this day how he became one, or why. He's delightfully naive on the subject of genealogy, and I had the Bumpus family by heart before he left. That's the form his remnant of the intellectual curiosity of his ancestors takes. He was born in Dolton, which was settled by the original Bumpus, back in the Plymouth Colony days, and if he were rich he'd have a library stuffed with gritty, yellow-backed books and be a leading light in the Historical Society. He speaks with that nicety of pronunciation of the old New Englander, never slurring his syllables, and he has a really fine face, the kind of face one doesn't often see nowadays. I kept looking at it, wondering what was the matter with it, and at last I realized what it lacked—will, desire, ambition,—it was what a second-rate sculptor might have made of Bradford, for instance. But there is a remnant of fire in him. Once, when he spoke of the strike, of the foreigners, he grew quite indignant.”
“He didn't tell you why his daughter had joined the strikers?” Insall asked.
“He was just as much at sea about that as you and I are. Of course I didn't ask him—he asked me if I knew. It's only another proof of her amazing reticence. And I can imagine an utter absence of sympathy between them. He accounts for her, of course; he's probably the unconscious transmitter of qualities the Puritans possessed and tried to smother. Certainly the fires are alight in her, and yet it's almost incredible that he should have conveyed them. Of course I haven't seen the mother.”
“It's curious he didn't mention her having been Ditmar's stenographer,” Insall put in. “Was that reticence?”
“I hardly think so,” Augusta Maturin replied. “It may have been, but the impression I got was of an incapacity to feel the present. All his emotions are in the past, most of his conversation was about Bumpuses who are dead and buried, and his pride in Janet—for he has a pride—seems to exist because she is their representative. It's extraordinary, but he sees her present situation, her future, with extraordinary optimism; he apparently regards her coming to Silliston, even in the condition in which we found her, as a piece of deserved fortune for which she has to thank some virtue inherited from her ancestors! Well, perhaps he's right. If she were not unique, I shouldn't want to keep her here. It's pure selfishness. I told Mr. Bumpus I expected to find work for her.”
Mrs. Maturin returned Insall's smile. “I suppose you're too polite to say that I'm carried away by my enthusiasms. But you will at least do me the justice to admit that they are rare and—discriminating, as a connoisseur's should be. I think even you will approve of her.”