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‘“He was always quite kind to me. He didn't take much notice of me, but mother had everything she wanted for me quite naturally. He took it for granted that mother would see I had all it was right and necessary a child should have, whether in the way of necessity or pleasure. He would pat me on the head or cheek when we met and give me sixpences and shillings, and at Christmas and on my birthday there were always generous treats and presents.

‘“But I do not think all that ever gave me any pleasure, ever gave me any of that joy which there should be in a little child's existence.

‘“It was from him I first learnt I was silent. I heard him say one day:

‘“‘She's a silent little thing.'

‘“Afterwards I asked mother:

‘“‘Mummy, why am I a silent little thing?'

‘“She did not answer me but I remember still how pale she became and later on I heard him ask her why she had been crying.

‘“He was always very good to her. He was really fond of her; somehow his hard, aggressive, thrusting self seemed to find delight in her gentle, yielding personality, so strangely receptive as it was to stronger characters. He was really fond of her in his possessive kind of way, he took possession of her as he did of everything; she was a part of him and everything that belonged to him became at once important and valuable – and valued. I believe he would have grown fond of me if I had let him, if I had surrendered, too. But I never did, and he hardly noticed it or minded. My conquest did not seem to him of any importance, he no more bothered about me or conquering my personality, or knowing if I had one to conquer, than he did about his office clerks.

‘“Presently Jennie was born. He was very pleased, very proud, here was another witness to his power, to his success, another possession, and he measured all things by possession. Anything that was his had, so to say, from that mere fact, a kind of halo about it.

‘“He wanted a boy, too. So mother did her best, but she died instead because she was never very strong.

‘“She knew she was dying. So did I. I knew it from the first. It was when she knew it herself and knew I knew it, too, that she said to me:

‘“‘Brenda, what did your father mean when he told you to remember?'

‘“It angered me that she should ask that, ask me what we both knew so well. I said:

‘“‘I don't know.'

‘“Of course that was not true and she was not deceived. She said:

‘“‘I daren't pray... I daren't pray.'

‘“I didn't speak. I knew she wanted me to, but I kept silent. After a long time she said:

‘“‘It's all true about hell because I've been there ever since.'

‘“I did not ask her ever since what. Presently the nurse who had been out of the room on some errand or another came back, and then Sir Christopher – he was that by now – came tip-toeing in. I don't know why exactly, but that he should come in on tip-toe like that made me mad, I think. I remember the feeling that came over me. I spoke to the nurse. I think perhaps what I did then was the most dreadful thing any woman has ever done since the world began. I don't think I would have done it had he not come in like that on tip-toe. I said:

‘“‘You won't mistake the medicine, nurse, will you?'

‘“I don't think Sir Christopher understood then. Perhaps he did later. But mother heard. Mother understood. I saw how she shrank and trembled and was still again, and, ah – how she looked at me, how terribly she looked at me. The nurse began to laugh. I daresay she would have been vexed if she had not laughed. But she stopped laughing. She felt laughter was not right and I expect she explained that by reminding herself that it was a sick-room. But it was not that that made laughter wrong. She stopped laughing and said:

‘“‘Good gracious, no, indeed I won't.'

‘“I remember that scene so well. By now the nurse was staring at the three of us, her eyes, her mouth wide open. She looked so bewildered I could have burst out laughing in my turn. Sir Christopher was staring at me. He was puzzled, just puzzled. That was all, vaguely puzzled, vaguely annoyed that he was puzzled. I knew he thought I was not behaving nicely and I suppose I wasn't. He was a man with a great gift for not understanding – especially when he did not want to understand. Mother lay quite still, one does lie still when one has suddenly been stabbed right through the heart. I think she hardly moved or spoke again, though it was nearly two days before – before her second death.

‘“I think Sir Christopher soon put the scene out of his mind. He decided not to think of it any more. He was so strong he had the power to do that – to put the things he did not wish to remember clean out of his mind. I had not.

‘“I know her death was a great sorrow to him and he missed her, but I think he was almost as much puzzled and annoyed as he was grieved. It was astonishing to him that events he had always been so well able to control should thus escape his grasp; he had a sense of having been unfairly treated, he was angry as though a rightful possession of his had been suddenly snatched away behind his back.

‘“It was, I am quite sure, for my mother's sake that he showed he wished to do all he could for me. He told somebody who had spoken about me:

‘“‘I look upon Brenda's future as my responsibility.'

‘“Even a responsibility he thought of as ‘his', and my future, too, he thought should belong to him as well.

‘“Not that he took much notice of me. He was a busy man and work helped him to forget, both his real grief for my mother's loss and the insult that had been offered to his sense of property. He made up for that by accumulating still more, very successfully, but he never forgot mother, and for her sake he still continued to do what he thought his duty by me. Also I think he knew I was fond of Jennie and that Jennie was fond of me; and then quite naturally the house management fell into my hands and I know I did it well. I have a kind of gift for organizing and managing, at any rate it was never any trouble to me, and everything in the house ran smoothly, as he liked it to.

‘“He was not a subtle man. A thing had to be very obvious before it impressed itself on him. I remember once when something was said about my silence, he laughed, and pulled my ear, and said:

‘“‘Anyhow, I am glad my little girl is not a chatterbox.'

‘“Always that ‘my', you see.

‘“But I wasn't a little girl any more and it was some time after this that I began to see him watching me. I never said anything. I never referred to either my father or my mother. I was, I am sure, no more silent than I had always been, than I had been when he laughed about it.

‘“But now I could see he was watching me, and, when I was there, he began to change a little from his usual boisterous, confident self. I wonder if it was the intensity of my thoughts that he became aware of? Perhaps it is because thought can be felt that after a time I began to be aware that he was afraid. I knew that before he did, I think at first he was only conscious of a vague unease, but it was not very long before he knew that it was fear he felt. When I came into a room when he was there, I could see it from the way he looked up. When he went out of a room where I was sitting, I could see it in the way he walked. When we remained together in a room, then I knew it still more certainly. But yet it often seemed to me that he did not know what it was he feared or what he was afraid of. Only every day that passed he knew just a little tiny bit more clearly. Once or twice he even tried to make me talk.

‘“The next thing was that he began to encourage young men to come to the house. But what had I to do with young men when there was no room in my mind save for the one thought that never left it?

‘“All the time his fear was growing and all the time he never knew whether there was any reason for it. Perhaps if he had been more certain he could have faced it better, known better what to do. But there was nothing that he could do, because, if he sent me away, then that would have been to acknowledge his fear, and he would not.

‘“I wonder if there are other houses like ours, houses that look so calmly prosperous, so placidly content, proud houses where nothing seems to be but wealth and ease, and yet where doubt and fear and guilt brood day and night?

‘“Then Mark Lester appeared. I think really he had been there a long time only I had never noticed him much. I hardly realized that he was constant in the changing crowd of young men who came and went. It never occurred to me that his great ill-fortune had been to fall in love with me. How should I have known? Love and hate do not go well together.

‘“Sir Christopher noticed Mark, became aware of his assiduity, saw he was in earnest. In his direct, determined way he spoke to Mark himself. Then he spoke to me. He made himself quite clear. I think the chance of escape offered him made him desperate it should be taken. Mark wanted to marry me. I was to accept him. Of course, any other young man would have done as well, but Mark was there, he wanted me, he was eligible. If I refused – but a refusal was not contemplated. In his relief at the thought of getting rid of me, Sir Christopher was his old masterful, certain self once more.

‘“He told me he would settle forty thousand pounds on me, absolutely.

‘“An enormous sum! An incredibly generous sum for a man to settle on a stepdaughter who had so little real claim on him.

‘“But I understood, very well I understood.

‘“I knew that forty thousand pounds, that huge fortune, was just a bribe. Just as my father had tried to bribe my love, so now my stepfather tried to bribe my hate!

‘“It is strange how sometimes things seem to return upon themselves and happen all over again and yet so differently.

‘“Mark loved me. I knew that now. I saw the choice quite clearly. I could have a fortune, love, happiness, content – all that was offered me.

‘“A bribe!

‘“I do not think it ever occurred to me to accept.

‘“I do not think it ever occurred to my stepfather that I would refuse.”'

‘“But this offer of a bribe did one thing. It made me certain. It took all my doubts away.

‘“Now I knew.

‘“Already I had all my preparations complete. For long and long I had had every detail worked out in my mind – and variations of every detail to meet every conceivable chance and change.

‘“No wonder that when I had so much to think of, I got the name for being silent. How could I talk and chatter when in my mind I was rehearsing step by step the task that lay before me, that I had been called upon so dreadfully to accomplish, when always there was present to me my father's ghost: ‘Remember'?

‘“Long and long ago I had had a key made of the private drawer where I knew my stepfather kept his revolver. No one else had ever seen it, no one except me. I had not only seen it, but handled it as well, and made sure it was loaded and in working order.

‘“I went to a gunsmith, too, and got him to show me how to use a pistol and practised with one to get accustomed to it.

‘“Oh, there was nothing that I overlooked.

‘“He was very fond of billiards and often spent the hour before dinner in the billiard-room. He used to say that it was while he was ‘knocking the balls about' that all his best ideas came to him, and that he found the solution to all his business worries.

‘“I made a point of using the same hour for my music. He liked me to play. He used to say he was fond of music. Really he meant that he was fond of noise and silence worried him. He would not have cared, he would hardly have known, whether I was playing Beethoven or jazz. It was all one to him so long as it was not silence.

‘“There was one piece I played very often so that everyone in the house knew it well. I secured a record of it. I obliterated the first half of the record so that when it was put on, for that first half no sound came. Then I practised playing that first half on the piano, and stopping at the exact point where the record began. I got to do that on the dot, so that no one could have told when my piano stopped and the record began.

‘“All this time I had a sort of odd certainty that when the moment came, I should know. I was certain somehow that it could not pass without summoning me to my task.

‘“I knew it would be revealed to me, and it was.

‘“There was a production of
Hamlet
at the Regency Theatre that Jennie was very keen on seeing. She and I went together.

‘“She enjoyed it very much, she said. To me, the play was not an enjoyment, but a message.

‘“Indeed, it was as if it had been put on for me alone.

‘“How well I understood him – Hamlet himself, I mean. I knew so well that shrinking, trembling terror that he showed, because he had been called to such a task. How well I understood his hesitation and his doubts, for he, too, was not certain; how well I recognized the agony with which he tried to persuade himself the monstrous truth was not. In the interview with his mother, it was myself I saw with my mother, and her great cry of anguish was my own mother's. All that scene had been my experience, too. Even when he threw away Ophelia's love with his cry: ‘Get thee to a nunnery, go!' I knew it was because he could not help it, since love and hate are opposites, and to choose the one is to reject the other. So I saw myself rejecting the claim that Jennie's love made on me. That was wrong, all wrong, but at the time I did not know that I loved Mark. That came later. I thought there was no one but Jennie I cared anything about, and I knew I must put her aside – as Hamlet put aside Ophelia – because, if I did not, I could not do what had to be done.

‘“But all that part of my thought was wrong, how wrong I found out afterwards. Jennie and I were in no way like Hamlet and Ophelia; how could we be. And I had forgotten that Ophelia killed herself. I was to be reminded of that, too. She killed herself because she knew what Hamlet had to do – it was easier like that than if she had waited till she knew what he had done!