FullReads

‘Well, we couldn’t do anything else,’ she said.

‘You don’t know what you might do,’ he said. ‘Everything is left to you and Emmie, equally. You’do as you like with it–only don’t sell this house, don’t part with it.’

‘No,’ she said.

‘And give Hadrian my watch and chain, and a hundred pounds out of what’s in the bank–and help him if he ever wants helping. I haven’t put his name in the will.’

‘Your watch and chain, and a hundred pounds–yes. But you’ll be here when he goes back to Canada, father.’

‘You never know what’ll happen,’ said her father.

Matilda sat and watched him, with her full, haggard eyes, for a long time, as if tranced. She saw that he knew he must go soon–she saw like a clairvoyant.

Later on she told Emmie what her father had said about the watch and chain and the money.

‘What right has he’–he–meaning Hadrian–‘to my father’s watch and chain–what has it to do with him? Let him have the money, and get off,’ said Emmie. She loved her father.

That night Matilda sat late in her room. Her heart was anxious and breaking, her mind seemed entranced. She was too much entranced even to weep, and all the time she thought of her father, only her father. At last she felt she must go to him.

It was near midnight. She went along the passage and to his room. There was a faint light from the moon outside. She listened at his door. Then she softly opened and entered. The room was faintly dark. She heard a movement on the bed.

‘Are you asleep?’ she said softly, advancing to the side of the bed.

‘Are you asleep?’ she repeated gently, as she stood at the side of the bed. And she reached her hand in the darkness to touch his forehead. Delicately, her fingers met the nose and the eyebrows, she laid her fine, delicate hand on his brow. It seemed fresh and smooth–very fresh and smooth. A sort of surprise stirred her, in her entranced state. But it could not waken her. Gently, she leaned over the bed and stirred her fingers over the low-growing hair on his brow.

‘Can’t you sleep tonight?’ she said.

There was a quick stirring in the bed. ‘Yes, I can,’ a voice answered. It was Hadrian’s voice. She started away. Instantly, she was wakened from her late-at-night trance. She remembered that her father was downstairs, that Hadrian had his room. She stood in the darkness as if stung.

‘It is you, Hadrian?’ she said. ‘I thought it was my father.’ She was so startled, so shocked, that she could not move. The young man gave an uncomfortable laugh, and turned in his bed.

At last she got out of the room. When she was back in her own room, in the light, and her door was closed, she stood holding up her hand that had touched him, as if it were hurt. She was almost too shocked, she could not endure.

‘Well,’ said her calm and weary mind, ‘it was only a mistake, why take any notice of it.’

But she could not reason her feelings so easily. She suffered, feeling herself in a false position. Her right hand, which she had laid so gently on his face, on his fresh skin, ached now, as if it were really injured. She could not forgive Hadrian for the mistake: it made her dislike him deeply.

Hadrian too slept badly. He had been awakened by the opening of the door, and had not realized what the question meant. But the soft, straying tenderness of her hand on his face startled something out of his soul. He was a charity boy, aloof and more or less at bay. The fragile exquisiteness of her caress startled him most, revealed unknown things to him.

In the morning she could feel the consciousness in his eyes, when she came downstairs. She tried to bear herself as if nothing at all had happened, and she succeeded. She had the calm self-control, self-indifference, of one who has suffered and borne her suffering. She looked at him from her darkish, almost drugged blue eyes, she met the spark of consciousness in his eyes, and quenched it. And with her long, fine hand she put the sugar in his coffee.