The Last and the First (16 page)

“Yes, my lady? If a decision is in question. It might not always be.”

“You have not married yourself, Cook,” said Eliza, smiling. “The spell has held in your case.”

“I have not felt called upon, my lady. Advances have been made.”

“People should be able to judge better when they are mature.”

“Well, but mature, my lady, in the case of single, young ladies! It is hardly a term to be applied.”

“I am in no hurry to lose my daughters. I feel I hardly want to lose Miss Roberta at all.”

“No, my lady, that is the face to put on it,” said Cook, in approving encouragement as she went her way.

“Cook is disturbed that you and the others have not married,” said Eliza, as she rejoined her step-daughter.

“Well, I am disturbed that she has not. We should have had someone in her place, and been spared her talk and its undercurrents.”

“I think she is really attached to us all.”

“I don't feel it is true affection. She sees us too much as we are. You forget that love is blind. And she forgets it too.”

“I wonder how you will manage a house and servants of your own.”

“I have always been seen as too managing. There should be no trouble. But I have no wish to learn from experience. I will profit by yours.”

They ended their talk and returned to the library, and
found that Sir Robert was before them. As he saw them enter together, a light came to his face.

“Here come the two people who in their different ways order my life,” he said.

“The ways are very different,” said Eliza. “Mine depends on myself, and Hermia's on what fell into her hands from someone else. But happily the hands were the right ones.”

“I told you it was coming,” said Roberta to Angus, “a friendship between Hermia and Mater. It will put a change through our lives. And no change is wholly good.”

“Hermia has bought it dear. She has given up a fortune and forfeited revenge for a wrong done to herself. It is a high price to pay, and Mater can hardly not recognise it. Now there is a question to be asked, that we are afraid to answer. How is Mater facing her return to us after her exposure?”

“It is better not to ask it. If we put ourselves into someone else's place we might as well be in it. And there is everything to be said for keeping out of this one.”

“How much courage does she need? We can't help our thoughts.”

“More than it is possible to have. She is having to manage without it. And that needs a different courage. And she is not showing any lack of it. And her opinion of herself and what she does may uphold her.”

“The same might be said of Hermia. But she does not need to be upheld.”

“She does not indeed. She is established on the heights, and Mater is cast down from them. How the first can be last, and the last first!”

After Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett died, in August 1969, it was found that she had appointed no literary executor. It has therefore fallen to her publisher to prepare her final manuscript for press. For assistance in this work I am much indebted to Miss Cicely Greig, Miss Elizabeth Sprigge and Mr. Charles Burkhart, all of whom have made suggestions which have been most valuable in deciding on the text printed here.

L. Gollancz

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

Copyright © 1971

The moral right of the author has been asserted

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ISBN: 9781448206629
eISBN: 9781448206261

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