Ivy Compton-Burnett - A Heritage and its History

“You will soon see living people here, my aunts and my cousins of two generations. You know we call them what they are thought to be.”

“Do you feel they are seen as that?” said Marcia, as they went upstairs.

“If they are not, we shall never know. We do not mean ever to know. The truth is to be covered by silence, and gradually by time. That is what my father used to say.”

“No wonder you were tempted to say it. I hope it will be as good as it sounds. It seems the way to speak in this house. And it is right that it should have a secret. It is not such a sinister one. Did your cousin mind his disinheritance, when you were born?”

“More than he has said, or thought I knew. More than I knew anyone could mind anything, that was not a grief. I suppose that is what it was. He loves the place more than I do, more than my father did, more than my mother has come to. He has cared for it better than I could. I am wise to leave it in his hands.”

“Your mother does not mind your marrying. You have not been everything to each other.”

“No, not as you mean it. There has been a lack of emotion in our life. You know enough to understand.”

“I am glad not to exact a sacrifice. That sounds of more advantage than it is. Of course we don’t have the chance to get used to it. I daresay it is a taste we could acquire.”

“This is to be our room,” said Hamish. “It is the one my father had. My mother has never slept here. She has the one that was his brother’s.”

“I ought to be different,” said Marcia, turning to the glass, to see her tall, spare figure, low, wide brow, deep-set, grey eyes and straight, unyouthful features as strangers would see them. “I am older and plainer and less poor than I ought to be. Someone younger and more dependent would fit the part. And the house would have more welcome for her.”

“My mother likes you, I can see,” said Hamish.

“And do you see that I like her? How well do you know me? It is not the people I am afraid of here, but the place. I shall be glad to feel it is inhabited by human beings like myself, though they might not so describe themselves. I feel that you and I and your mother might be immured here and forgotten.”

“There is no lack of family life. I hope it will not be too much.”

“Better that than too little, anyhow better than nothing. We must have something more than emptiness.”

The hour came when the other family entered the house. Marcia faced the seven pairs of eyes with their interest and question of the future, and responded, as she did everything, according to herself. When she had glanced once from Hamish’s face to Simon’s, she did not do so again.

“This is a new day for us,” said Fanny. “The history of our house unfolds. It is a thing that is serious to us. My sister and I have learned it.”

“I am learning,” said Marcia. “I have already gone a little way. It is hard to look at the future of a place with so much behind. It seems that such a long history must be near its end. I shall need help.”

“You shall have it,” said Simon. “And you will not want it long. It is a grateful house, kind to its inmates, sad to lose them. When I left it, I felt its sympathy, and I still feel it.”

“I knew it was human. I must simply resist its hold. I cannot be bound and burdened. I must be free and travel light. I shall live in it, an alien, in the end I daresay a slave, but never drawn into it, always apart in myself.”

“I could be away from it for fifty years and never be apart.”

“I could be in it for as long, and always be. My hope is to fear and serve it, and hand it on to people who love the bond. I could never join them.”

“The wives of our family have done so. It has gone on through the centuries.”

“As everything has here,” said Marcia, as they went in to dinner. “Nothing belongs to the present, and it is in the present that we live. Otherwise we live in what is not there, in what is in our minds and nowhere else.

I must go forward and not back. We know what is behind. What is before us is enough.”

“What is behind is a part of us, rooted in our being. We have grown from it. Something deep in us remembers it. In a sense nothing is forgotten.”

“In another sense everything is. And nothing in me remembers this. Everything warns me that I am to take nothing from it, and give it myself. Well, it has taken better people, and will take more.”

“Different people, we will say,” said Simon.

“Another institution is to receive us in the end,” said Ralph. “We are glad to feel we can rely on it.”

“The workhouse?” said Marcia, smiling at once. “It is far removed from this one. But I believe the past rules there as well. So you may in a way be prepared for it.”

“This subject already!” said Simon. “You must forgive my son. He has no other.”

“It was my father who introduced it. And he has not provided a second.”

“Hamish’s birth upset a great deal,” said Marcia to Simon, and paused.

“It was a natural change. One that often happens,” said Simon, and also paused.

“You must not think we did not welcome Hamish,” said Julia, from her place.

“No one could have welcomed me,” said Hamish to his wife. “Certainly the house did not. Of course my mother did in time. Yes, I am to sit opposite Cousin Simon, on your other side. Graham is taking my place. I am to have my own way tonight.”

Marcia lowered her tone.

“Hamish, I wish you had not told me. I wish I did not know. No one can speak or be spoken to, without saying or hearing too much. How is it all to go on, and how to end?”

“I had to tell you. You had to know about Naomi. You would have seen in time.”

“I could have thought you had broken things off in some other way. It is a common thing.”

“How long would you have thought it? You would have seen and heard. You are not a person who does not do both. And I did not break it off. I should not have done so. I would not let anyone think it. Least of all would I let you. What would you think of me? What should I think of myself?”

“Yes, I see I had to know. And the knowledge in itself is nothing. It is the mystery and meaning that smother it. But I shall do my part. It is an easier one than yours.”

“Hamish and I have ended our feeling,” said Naomi. “The sense of our relationship helped us. It is true that we needed help.”

“And I thought I had little in my life,” said Hamish, looking from one to the other. “Now I have both of you, I feel it is so much.”

“I wish I had less,” said Marcia, smiling. “All this that surrounds me, and all these relations who are something else! It stretches over the future.”

“And we seem a fated family,” said Ralph. “Claud is resolved to marry Emma. And we must admit it is on our line.”

“I am sorry for such talk,” said Simon. “I should have thought my son would know better.”

“You surely had not such a hope of me, sir.”

“It is true that I am hardly given it.”

“I wish you had never had to leave this house,” said Marcia to Simon. “I wish it could have been different. It seems it might have been. Hamish could not be your son, and yet had to be, when his life denied it. It is a hard, sad thing. And it came from so little.”

“The last word is a true and kind one.”

“It is the only one. How often you have said it!”

“We must not say it again. The truth is not to be thought or said. It is as if it had not been.”

“You know it is not. It will never be. It might be so more, if we were not all here together, if Hamish and I were somewhere else. It is Hamish who forces it to the surface, so that it follows us with all that must be hidden. And the cloud is lasting. It will never lift.”