Chapter XVIII

Nan lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling above her. She had been in bed two hours and more, but still she was awake, broad awake. That evening she had promised to marry Michael, and now she lay thinking about it. A clock away outside had struck one long ago, it struck two now; but she did not hear it, any more than did her father lying dead in the room across the landing. No thoughts of that father occurred to her now; it certainly did not occur to her as disloyalty or disrespect to him that she had planned a future with Michael before he was buried. It was not. There was no disloyalty or disrespect in her feelings for him; there could be none in her actions.

Her thoughts centred round what she had that evening undertaken. Had she done well to say she would marry Michael? Was it really the thing to do? It was the simplest thing, certainly, and, at the first glance, the one which appeared to offer the nearest to a continuance of life as it had been—which is what human nature, especially when suffering from shock, instinctively inclines towards. They could be married easily: asking no one, telling no one; it was their concern solely. They could go to one of those City churches which she loved, where they were nothing and no one, chance comers borne in for a minute on the tide of life. A little minute in the dim place, a little pause with just themselves and God; and then out again into the streets with their passing and repassing life, and then home to the old house.

Without thinking, she found herself picturing the going back to the old house, the old ways, the day’s work, and the day’s burden, and the evening’s rest; it seemed part of the inevitable scheme of things. But in fact it was not so; she remembered that. The old house was coming down, the old life was at an end; the work would pass to strangers. She did not know a great deal about her father’s monetary affairs, nothing really; but she did not expect there would be much for her. The business, she imagined, would be sold for what it would fetch, along with the treasures in the upper rooms. She felt a pang for both, she had lived so long and so closely with them; but she concluded they would have to go so that affairs might be wound up and liabilities met, and even then she expected to be but scantily provided for. Michael, she knew, expected there to be even less for her; she had perceived that in the talk of the evening. In his scheme, the marriage was somewhat as it was in hers, a matter that concerned none but themselves; a momentary stepping aside to make the contract, and then a going on again much as before, only they were to go on in the small Midland town where he had lived for the last four months.

And, of course, he was right; Nan knew it as she lay watching the alternating light and darkness as the moon passed in and out of clouds. That was what it would be. Were Michael some other kind of man they might perhaps have made shift to carry on her father’s business between them, and made a small living out of it. Being the kind he was it was impossible; he was made for other things, and he must do them whether he would or no. He had got to work out his life another way; she realised that, and it no more occurred to her to seek to change it than to change the seasons of the year. But it did occur to her to ask whether the marriage was really the best thing.

Her knowledge of love and lovers, even in fiction, was very limited, she knew almost nothing of the subject; but she knew that she and Michael were not lovers. He had in some fashion loved Lady Sibyl Carson; she knew that, though it had never been spoken of between them. It had not been, perhaps, the strongest passion, not the sort that had figured in the few novels she had read. She more than suspected his passion, whatever it was, had been submerged in the wreck which had broken his career; the lost love taking a second place to the lost work, the memory of it surviving only with other tide wrack. But such as it was, it was love; and she instinctively knew it to be something quite different from his feeling for herself. She was friend and sister to him, the quiet, comprehending companion, the one who understood even better than he did himself; but the bond between them was not love; he did not love her as men love women when they eagerly seek them in marriage.

And she herself? She considered the question fairly, her rather slow, but unusually accurate, mind weighing it almost as if it concerned another. Not quite perhaps, even thus to herself alone there were points at which the spirit shrank from the mind’s clear-sighted probe; yet in the main fairly and very searchingly, seeking, with a truth few women practise with themselves, not only what Michael was to her, but also what in her inmost soul she held of those unknowns—love and life.

Suddenly she sat up in bed. “No!” she said almost aloud. “It is not that! He is not that to me. He is not the man—if there ever could be one!”

She put back her hair and looked out at the cloudy sky where the moon was going down behind chimney stacks. She realised that, whatever was or was not cloudy in her mind, one thing at least was clear, neither she nor Michael were really thinking of marriage at all. “It is not to be married we want,” she thought, “but to go on with life as it was. We could do that better without, I believe, whether we were separate or together all the time. Marriage would not help; there would be something wrong with it.”

But she did not say anything of her thoughts the next day, she was not yet quite sure enough of her own conclusions. The coming of day brought rather a revulsion of feeling and a perception afresh of the easiness, at all events, in the initial stages, of abiding by the decision of yesterday. Still, though she said nothing of her doubts to Michael, she arranged with him that no mention should be made to the Foregoods of any understanding between them.

Possibly the brother and sister had some suspicions; the long absence in the warehouse-room might have justified such in people who rather hopefully looked for it.

“It would be the best thing possible,” Miss Janet observed in private. “It’s very likely to come sooner or later, and the sooner the better, I say; I see no reason to wait about. We’re not the Annarlys to be obliged to inconvenience ourselves and everyone else by delaying to speak for fear the neighbours should think it odd.”

And Josiah agreed. “Yes,” he said, “yes, if she wants to, if he’ll make her happy.”

“Make her happy!” Miss Janet said scornfully. “Of course he will. He takes half as much looking after as a baby, and that’s what most women want. What she’ll be happy to do till she gets a real baby, when he’ll have to look after himself and her too, and they’ll both be as proud as they are surprised to find he can do it. They’ll think when they’ve found it out, and got to the common-sense place of commonplace happiness, that they’re the only ones who’ve ever got there, and have made the greatest discovery of the age. And so they will have too. God bless the nonsense!” and she wiped her eyes unashamed.

But the same evening that she said it—it was the evening before the funeral—Nan gave the first warning of doubt to Michael.

They had been talking of his work and some of the difficulties of it, and the circumstances she would be called upon to share.

“Things are better than they were,” he said. “I don’t mean they are magnificent, or ever will be; the place will never be more than a little one-horse affair, a dyer’s on the smallest scale. But I have a liking for it, and I think you will have, although I don’t suppose I shall ever make money of it, certainly never make engineering shops—that isn’t everything, is it? George is rather a nuisance, I must own; he and Milligen are about as easy to move as a couple of pigs, but as they usually pull opposite ways, I sometimes come in. You’ll understand when you come to live near them.”

“—If I do,” she said.

“If you do? You will when we are married.”

“Yes—” she hesitated. “I’m not quite sure about that marriage, not perfectly certain—are you?”

“Of course,” he answered; then, struck by her manner, asked, “Are not you? You were. Have you changed your mind?”

“I don’t know it’s that exactly,” she said. “I’m not sure I knew my mind. Are you sure? I don’t mean were you that evening, but are you quite sure now that it would be best for us to be married?”

“Why, certainly! If it was best then, it is now—nothing has happened to alter it.”

“No,” she agreed, “that’s so; but we may have made a mistake then? We have had more time to think about it, and, after thinking, I am not sure that to be married is what we really want; indeed, I am nearly sure it is not. You think about it.”

“You had better tell me what you think,” he said.

She would much rather he had arrived at his own conclusions by himself, but she did her best, trying to speak as impersonally as possible, to state the matter in the unbiassed way they talked of most things. On the whole she succeeded wonderfully well, seeing the nature of the subject, curiously well; so well that in itself it was something of an argument of the truth of what she said. People who could so logically investigate feeling and impersonally weigh situations were hardly in the normal condition of those contemplating the marriage of choice.

But if Michael began to suspect that he did not say so then, Miss Janet came in before Nan had much more than stated her views, and before he had had a chance to refute or consider them. But that was no disadvantage in Nan’s eyes; she would rather he thought over what she had said alone. “You think about it,” she said later. “We must each think about it; we must each be quite sure, and I’m not—or, rather, I’m nearly sure it had better not be.”

The next day was the funeral, and so no opportunity during the earlier part of the day for any private talk.

Mr. Annarly came to the funeral; also one of the Barmister relations, and two of the business friends, the others were Jews and so debarred by religion. To Mr. Annarly’s surprise his brother-in-law, Mr. Giles Cordover, was present. He remembered to have heard his wife or daughters remark that Uncle Giles had taken Nan Barmister for a motor ride; beyond that nothing had ever been said, or known, of any acquaintance between them. It was odd Giles should be at the funeral, Mr. Annarly thought, though, when one came to think of it, perhaps not odder than plenty of other things he did. Mr. Annarly did not get any speech with him; he did not come with the funeral party, nor did he leave with them; he said a few words to Nan at the graveside, squeezed her hand hard, and went about his business.

It is quite possible Mr. Annarly would like to have gone about his too; he was rather busy just now; also not at all at ease in scenes of family emotion: weddings, funerals, or similar times when the tenor of ordinary life and feeling is broken. But he did not go; Nan was his dead wife’s niece and a lonely girl, so far as relatives were concerned; he must return to the house with her, he was too kind-hearted to think of anything else. So he went with the Foregoods and Michael.

Robert Barmister’s will was read to this small party in the brown upper room. It was commendably brief, and contained little or no indication of the amount, small or otherwise, of property to be disposed of; but it rather surprised Mr. Annarly. He had always heard the women of his household speak, kindly but condescendingly, of Nan as a person of very modest attainments, and by this will Robert Barmister, a shrewd man, bequeathed to her the management of his beloved business! Josiah Foregood was to have a third share, she to have the other two-thirds and the control, also everything else of which the testator stood possessed, with a very free hand in the management of it. There was, however, a condition attached; or, rather, as the lawyer explained, it was an expressed wish, not a legal restraint, for it was contained in a private letter to Nan and not in the will itself, and so not legally binding upon her.

“My late client,” the lawyer said, “wished to include this private condition in the will, embodying it in a codicil while keeping its nature private. But, as I pointed out to him, it was impossible to make it legally binding without publishing its nature; on that he decided to leave the will as it originally stood, expressing his wishes respecting the condition to the inheritrix, and leaving her to carry them out as her conscience should direct.”

“Most extraordinary,” Mr. Annarly said, “most extraordinary!” He meant the disposal of the business quite as much as the unknown condition. “Of course, it’s not like a City concern, anything big; it’s only trade certainly, and smallish at that, but it’s one that wants technical knowledge, I should have thought, and proper handling.”

The lawyer, to whom these remarks were addressed in a decorously lowered voice, bowed, but answered in the same. “I believe Miss Barmister is considered, by those who know, a finer expert in this particular business and a truer virtuoso than her father.”

“You don’t say so?” Mr. Annarly said, and looked in some bewilderment towards Nan, who now rose from where she sat at the far end of the room and came towards them.

“Have you the letter for me?” she asked the lawyer.

He produced it. “You will perceive,” he said, “that it was your father’s wish you should open and read it when you were alone.”

She glanced at the sealed envelope and saw that instruction written upon it. “He knew it would be easiest for me,” she said. “I think so slowly and never at all properly, if there are people talking; I could not really make up my mind, if I were not quiet and alone.”

“I hope,” the lawyer spoke impressively, “you will not do anything rashly or hastily. Since it was your father’s desire, I took charge of the letter, and told you his original instructions in the matter, but it was under protest; I could not personally approve an effort—as this was—to give a private and personal expression the force of law. No doubt you will wish to carry out your father’s instructions, no doubt they are such as can with ease and propriety be carried out; but it is my duty to tell you, as I told him, that you are not legally compelled to do so. You inherit in any case.”

“Thank you,” Nan said. “Yes, I understand. I don’t think father would have wanted me to do what he thought wrong or impossible. And I expect he knew that I would not do it, if I thought it so, no matter what depended on it. We were very good friends, you know, we understood——”

Her eyes filled with tears as she spoke. Mr. Annarly’s grew misty too; he patted her arm kindly. “You must come down to Hurstbury,” he said, “the girls will be pleased to have you; you must come and stay a long time.”

She thanked him, and then slipped away to read her letter.

“A good girl,” he said to the lawyer, “an affectionate daughter. I suppose there won’t be much for her, poor thing, when all’s said and done?”

The lawyer looked surprised. “She inherits a two-thirds interest in the business, and all that her father had saved,” he said.

“Yes, yes, so I understood—but what’s that? Not much I’m afraid. Enough to live on in a small way, if they manage the business properly, and with Foregood, who knows it through and through, interested one may reckon on that. There will be enough to keep her from want, I suppose, but not much more—though that’s more than I anticipated. Fact, I was prepared to have to do something for her myself. She was my dead wife’s niece, you know; I shouldn’t like her to want.”

The lawyer applauded such generous intentions, but said there was no need to anticipate any necessity for them. “I cannot,” he said, “speak with perfect accuracy on the subject, but I believe I may safely say that Miss Barmister’s income will be very much nearer two thousand a year than one.”

“What!” Mr. Annarly exclaimed. “You don’t mean it! You can’t mean it!”

He looked round the room and, very incorrectly, appraised the things in it. “I should never have thought it!” he said. “I had no notion. Why, he didn’t live at the rate of three hundred a year!”

He repeated it once or twice to himself; he could not get used to the idea at all. He spoke of it to Michael, to whom it was as much news as it was to him; also to Josiah Foregood, who was not very surprised.

“Yes,” the latter said in his gentle way, “he made a good deal of late years; he was a clever man, a very shrewd man. It’s wonderful he should have left me a share in the business; a great honour, I feel it, a responsibility too. I hope I’ll prove worthy.”

He accompanied Mr. Annarly and the lawyer to the door, and then went to the dolphin room to look rather wistfully at the dead man’s desk, and try to realise his own new position. Miss Janet, in the meantime, went to superintend domestic affairs. The fact that Nan had inherited more than anyone anticipated did not make any difference to her, or prevent her from going to see that the wine and cake were properly disposed of. Michael was left alone when he had said good-bye to his father. He hesitated a moment in the hall, then went slowly upstairs. The fact of Nan’s inheritance did make some difference to him. Nan with two thousand a year and her father’s business to manage was a different person from Nan penniless and homeless, crying alone in the twilight; at least, different in so far that he would not have proposed marriage to her. Of course, Nan was Nan, whatever she had or whatever she was; and she would always be Nan, a thing apart, one to come back to, less a person than a comfort and a sense of rest, from which one drew support and found the best of oneself and things. But it was not for that reason he had proposed marriage to her, marriage had nothing to do with that, nor that with marriage. He had proposed it to her because she was crying alone in the twilight. She had divined it quicker than he had, and divined too that the other, that which they really were to each other, did not depend on it, would exist without it, possibly better without it. She had doubted yesterday whether they were right to marry; he doubted now that he knew she was to have two thousand a year and her father’s business.

Nan was standing by the window in the upper room when he came in. She held her father’s letter open in her hand, and though she turned as he entered, he could not tell from her face how the contents had affected her.

“Do you know you will be a comparatively rich woman?” he said, suddenly remembering that she was the only person with whom the amount of the inheritance had not been discussed.

“Shall I?” she said. “I rather fancied from the letter there must be more than we thought, a good deal more.”

“It is a good deal,” he said, and told her.

“As much as that?” she asked, but without excitement.

She took the letter from its envelope. “I want you to read it,” she said.

“Are you sure?” he hesitated. “Is it what he wished?”

“I am sure it is what I do,” she answered, “and in this case I am the best judge; he generally trusted me to decide what concerned me. Read it; it touches you as well as me.”

He unfolded it and read:

DEAR NAN,

_I am told that I cannot legally limit my bequests to you by
any conditions not made public. As I do not choose to have your
affairs and my actions talked over by those not concerned, to the
possible bringing about of what I want to avoid, I do not make this
condition public, but I expect you to act as if it were legally
binding, none the less._

_The condition on which I leave you practically all I have—and you
will find it a good deal more than you expect—is that you do not
marry Michael Annarly. Should you do so, I wish everything to go to
Josiah Foregood._

_Your affectionate father,_
ROBERT BARMISTER.

So Barmister had foreseen the position and determined to decide it for them; at least, so it seemed to Michael as he read the letter. Not very flattering to him himself, perhaps, but none the less a wise decision, the one they must inevitably have come to. He felt it, and felt it so completely fitted in with the thoughts which had occupied him as he came upstairs that he found himself saying, “That settles it,” as if he had already discussed them aloud.

“Settles what?” Nan asked.

“The question of our marrying or not.”

“Does it?”

“Certainly. I could not marry you in the face of that.”

“You could.”

“I couldn’t. I couldn’t very well, seeing I am practically a penniless failure, if you had the money; how much less since you are to lose if I do.”

“It would not make any difference if we cared,” she said. “If you cared—like that—you would hardly know whether I had money or had not; it would not hurt your pride that I should have it, or your generosity that I should lose it. And the same with me—it would not embarrass me to have when you had not, or trouble me to lose on account of you; nothing in the world would matter so long as we had each other—if we cared—that way.”

“I think it would,” he said.

But she persisted. “No,” she said, “I am sure of it. If we loved, nothing else would matter; we should hardly know anything else.”

“I rather fancy we should,” he said, “and anyhow—I can’t take this sacrifice of you. Before ever I read the letter I felt that. Why should you give up this life and work for mine—as you would have to if we married—even if you could keep the money?”

“It would be nothing if one loved,” she said. “Why, if one loved a tinker one would put down one’s coronet or career—whichever one had—and go out joyfully and tramp to the world’s end after him! And if one loved a duke one would gladly learn the ways and conventions of his class, though it would be a lot harder, and thankfully share them with him. There isn’t any giving up to love or any forgiving or giving either, it’s—just love.”

She spoke with absolute certainty, and though Michael would not agree, she held to it.

“You should know,” she said, “for you love your work; you do not sacrifice to that, for there is no sacrifice in giving everything to it. There is never any choice to you whether you shall or shan’t; what it needs it must have, without counting the cost—there is no cost. That is love.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m not sure, but I do know. It has never come my way, perhaps never will, but I know it; and knowing—I am not going to marry on less.”