Parents and Children (23 page)

quoted Faith, with rising feeling.

‘Faith does have points in common with Heaven,' said Hope.

‘Not a cage,' said Nevill. ‘A nice, glass
case.'

‘We needn't kill a robin,' said Honor. ‘Father kills other birds.'

‘All hang down,' said Nevill. ‘Poor birds!'

‘Yes, that is what I mean,' said Faith. ‘Poor birds!'

Nevill beat his hands together and uttered the sounds he made when chasing the fowls.

‘The bird couldn't run, if it were stuffed and dead,' said Gavin.

‘It sings,' said Nevill. ‘Father's bird sings in its case.'

‘I don't think it can do that,' said Faith.

‘Tweet, tweet,' said Nevill, in disproof of this, assuming a listening air.

‘I don't think they are very cruel to anything,' said Eleanor.

‘Well, only to Faith,' said Hope: ‘I think they are to her. It is three against one.'

‘I do not feel that at all,' said Faith.

‘We only don't think the same as she does,' said Honor;

‘We can't all think alike, can we?' said Faith. ‘But I hope we shall agree about this some day.'

‘Some day he will shoot a little bird for you,' promised Nevill, in vague amendment, as Faith bent to bid him good-bye.

‘Have you all read Father's letter?' said Eleanor. ‘It is meant for us all. There is a note for me, that I have taken;

Regan put aside a note for herself, with a look of promise at her husband.

‘Here is a letter addressed to Isabel,' said Eleanor, turning out the envelope. ‘I had better see if there is anything in it, before it goes upstairs.'

‘No, Mother,' said Luce, putting out a restraining hand, ‘that is not the way to deal with letters. Let Isabel have it intact, as she would expect. That will teach her how to treat correspondence.'

‘Does she not know?' said Daniel. ‘Has she never seen any letters?'

‘I daresay not addressed to herself,' said Graham. ‘As she has no friends, she can only hear from her family. And they generally shares one's life. In her case they always do.'

‘Your father may have put in something as an afterthought,' said Eleanor, still handling the letter.

‘Then Isabel will tell you of it,' said Daniel.

‘I don't know that she will. She is a strange, independent child. And her father may not have thought to give a definite direction.'

‘He would put any message for you into your own letter,' said Graham.

‘Not certainly. Things so often occur to him at the last. He may even have written this note on purpose to include something, and thought he would give Isabel pleasure at the same time.'

‘There is no ground for that assumption,' said Sir Jesse, in an easy tone.

‘More than anyone would think, who did not know Fulbert.'

‘Would you say that, Mother?' said Luce. ‘I think it is more like Father to have his own message for each of us. I can often tell to which one he is speaking, by his voice and words.'

‘But not by his notes,' said Eleanor, smiling. ‘You have never watched him write them, if you think that.'

‘We generally communicate by word of mouth, as we share our home,' said Daniel.

‘But he has to deal with people outside,' said his mother. ‘His family is not the whole of his life. He has a good deal of correspondence.'

‘Then I suppose he addresses his letters to the people who are to read them. And this one is addressed to Isabel.'

‘A letter written by my own husband to my own child and enclosed in a letter to me, is not a secret from me,' said Eleanor, tearing the envelope.

‘We see it is not,' said Graham.

‘You talk as if we all lived in a state of estrangement.'

‘Two of us will now do so.'

‘No, my boy, Isabel will hardly notice that the envelope is broken.'

‘Father seems anyhow to have wasted an envelope,' said Daniel.

‘A weak yielding to curiosity, Mother, that is unworthy of you,' said Luce.

Eleanor looked surprised by the charge. She had felt no interest in Fulbert's word to his daughter, and had given the true account of her motives.

‘You don't keep the children apart in your mind, as Father does, Mother.'

‘They don't need all that differentiation. I am tired of hearing about it.'

‘It is well that they should not need it,' said Sir Jesse.

‘It teaches them to be touchy and exacting.'

‘You do not expect those qualities in Isabel,' said Daniel. ‘I trust that your method will prove its success.'

‘There is nothing in the letter,' said his mother, putting it down. ‘Isabel can have it when someone goes upstairs.'

‘Who will be the bearer of it?' said Graham.

‘None of you need be. I will take it myself when I go to the schoolroom. For the matter of that, the girls will be passing in a minute.'

‘You might put it in a fresh envelope,' said Graham.

‘I am not ashamed of anything I do,' said Eleanor, raising her brows. ‘I should not dream of hiding it. I have opened Isabel's letter, and she may know I have done so.'

‘I am sorry for that,' said Daniel.

‘I never know why revealing baseness makes it better,' said Graham.

‘People do not reveal such a thing,' said Sir Jesse.

‘Isabel,' said Eleanor, raising her voice, as footsteps sounded in the hall, ‘come in and say good morning to us. Are you all there?'

Isabel and Venice and Miss Mitford entered the room.

‘Good morning,' said Miss Mitford, looking at Eleanor and using a tone of compliance with an injunction.

‘Good morning, Miss Mitford; good morning, my dears. I want to read you Father's letter. Come and hear it.'

The two girls listened to the letter, put the normal questions and comments, and were about to go.

‘Here is a note put in for you, Isabel,' said Eleanor, handing it to her daughter.

‘Thank you. Father said he would write to me,' said Isabel, turning to show the letter to her sister.

‘It came inside my letter,' said her mother.

‘Who opened it?' said Isabel.

‘Now, who had the right to do that?' said Eleanor, stroking her hair. ‘No one touched it, who had no business with it. I should not have allowed that. I wanted to see if there was any message for me. There is one for all of you in my letter.'

Isabel looked at her mother's note, as it lay on the table.

‘You have not let anyone see that.'

‘Well, naturally not, my dear. Father would not have liked it.'

‘Would he have wished you to see mine?'

‘Think for a moment and tell me.'

‘It is a pity you do such second-rate things,' said Isabel, in a slow voice. ‘It is a mean way of using power.'

‘What other second-rate thing have you known me do?'

‘You do not deny the term. And these things are never isolated.'

‘Come, come, my child. You would have shown me the letter, would you not?'

‘I might have had no choice. But I should have read it myself first. There would have been a semblance of free will. Decency would not have been outraged.'

‘What a term to use of a mother's overlooking her child's correspondence!'

‘The thing's being between a mother and child, or rather its coming from a mother, adds to the ugliness.'

‘Do you think it so important that a little girl's letter should be private? It clearly cannot be so in itself.'

Isabel deliberately took up her mother's letter and tore it open.

Eleanor took no notice, as if regarding such an incident as too trivial to heed.

Isabel glanced down the letter and then opened her own. A faint smile crept round her lips as she scanned it, and she put it in her pocket and relinquished the first. Fulbert's attitude to writing was as his wife had suggested. He had done the duty amid a pressure of work. It had been convenient to him that his sentiments as a husband and father should be the same. The two letters were identical in wording, except for the beginning and end. Isabel looked round the room.

‘Father draws no distinction between Mother and me,' she said, with a touch of satisfied pride. ‘He has copied one letter from the other. I don't know which was the original.'

Eleanor took up her own note and found that this was the case. Regan tore open hers and looked in appeal at her granddaughter. Isabel yielded her own letter, and Regan made a swift comparison and smiled her relief. Graham, who had been watching his grandmother, relaxed his expression.

‘You meant to sacrifice me, and you have sacrificed Father,' said Isabel to her mother. ‘You thought I should look childish and foolish, and you have contrived that he does. You can deal as you will with people who are away. He and I were both in your hands.'

‘I did not think how you would appear,' said Eleanor. ‘It is not a question that would enter my mind. I thought there might be a message from Father, as I said. And you must see that the letter did not apply especially to you.'

‘You see the same about yours. And you would not have let me read it, if you had not read mine. You only did that to make the whole matter seem nothing.'

‘Well, I am glad it has come to seem so,' said Eleanor, finding
that she matched her power against her daughter's, as she could not otherwise withstand her. ‘It did not take much to make it.'

‘You know you will not mention to Father that the two letters are the same.'

‘I should hardly think of it. And you give the message to yourself too much of a place. He wrote it separately to give you pleasure. He had no idea it would be pushed into this sort of prominence.'

‘Doubtless he had not,' said Sir Jesse.

‘None at all. That is clear,' said Isabel. ‘He meant it to be private.'

‘I have written the same letter to different people,' said Daniel. ‘But never to people under the same roof. Separation struck me as the first condition.'

‘So an idea came to you,' said his grandfather.

‘Your father was very much occupied,' said Eleanor.

‘A very disorganizing circumstance,' said Graham, sighing.

‘Well, Isabel will be able to write him a nice, long, amusing letter in exchange,' said Eleanor, with a hint of revenge on her daughter. ‘She has no duties and she can give plenty of time to it. Will you see that she does it, Miss Mitford?'

‘Well, it is nothing to do with me.'

‘That seems to be the case,' said Sir Jesse.

‘Then she can attend to it herself,' said Eleanor. ‘She is old enough to write her own letters.'

‘And also to read them. The one thing follows from the other,' said Isabel. ‘People's correspondence is their own affair.'

‘Is that quite the word for this little message?'

‘You used it yourself. And you talk about a long, amusing letter in return. If I describe this scene, I might write one. Perhaps I shall.'

‘I don't think you would like to make Father feel even a little uncomfortable. It was not a very unnatural thing to model a letter on one already written, when he was pressed for time.'

‘I think I could give the scene without referring to that. That does not seem to me the point of it.'

Eleanor gave a glance almost of apprehension at her daughter, and turned to the governess.

‘So James is at school today.'

‘Yes.'

‘He could find no excuse for staying at home. If he had known that Isabel was to have a letter from her father, he might have used that.'

‘It seems to be an event of a portentous nature,' said Sir Jesse.

‘Venice must write a letter to Father, and then perhaps she will have the message next time,' said Eleanor, smiling at her daughter.

‘Father might have some copies of a note printed off, so that we could all have one,' said Graham. ‘Then he could reap a good harvest in exchange.'

‘What a lot you make of the little circumstance of the notes being worded in the same way!' said Eleanor, in a wondering tone.

‘It is true that they do so,' said Sir Jesse.

‘You were led further by your assumption that they were different, Mother,' said Daniel.

‘Oh, don't let us go on harping on one little point. Pray let us change the subject. Do you feel that you have lived these weeks since Father left us, as he would like? Do you feel that, Isabel?'

‘I have no choice how to live them. The question is more pertinent for you. What do you feel about the weeks, including this morning?'

‘I have done my best,' said Eleanor. ‘I daresay he would like me to do better.'

‘Shall we stamp off a dozen impressions of a creditable letter, and all sign it?' said Daniel. ‘Nevill could put a cross.'

‘You have been helped to a subject for a jest,' said Eleanor. ‘And between you, you will make the most of it.'

‘They generally share such things,' said Sir Jesse.

‘I hope Father will not stay away long,' said Isabel.

‘What an odd little speech!' said her mother. ‘You would surely not hope the opposite. And you know that he must stay for six months.'

‘Mother, Isabel is younger and more helpless than you,' said Luce, in a low tone.

Eleanor looked at Isabel, and suddenly covered her face in her hands and broke into tears.

Sir Jesse rose and walked from the room, holding the paper before him with an effect of being absorbed in it. Regan smiled on the family in simple affection. She thought little of the opening of the letter, and assumed that trouble had arisen because the moment was ripe. Her son had left his family, and it was brought to this.

Miss Mitford sat down to await the end of the scene. She did not leave it, because of its human appeal. She was the happiest person present, as she was more often than was suspected. She did not let pity for her employer or pupil mar her interest. Pity had come to be the normal background of her mind, and other feelings arose irrespective of it.