[A letter on heavy cream paper, folded in thirds, with a crease worn nearly to a hole along one fold. Mrs. Vickers's hand, shaky from illness. Dated in the upper right.]
171 Bathurst Street, Toronto, Canada, the 14th of November, 1893.
My dearest August,
I write to you with, I believe, weeks to live, and some of what I write here I have promised my conscience for twenty-two years that I would say before I died. I have been postponing the saying. I can postpone it no further.
Your mother Elspeth, my sister, who died in April of this year — whom you mourned at her bedside and whom I mourned from too far a distance — was the most hidden and the most honorable of women. I do not say "hidden" in reproach. She was hidden because her life required it. A woman of the Humes' position is trained in what may not be said, and my sister had a talent for the training that was, in her generation of our family, unequalled.
What I am about to write is not a reproach to my sister. It is the lifting, at the latest possible moment, of a silence that my sister bore her whole life and that she bore, I believe, alone.
She loved — and I write "loved" without the diminutives, because I watched them love each other for two years and the word does not diminish — she loved Dr. Abraham Kelsey of Port Hume, who was then her physician and hers alone, who attended her after the difficult delivery of your brother Edmund in 1862 and of your sister Clara in 1864, who became in those ten years that followed a man she spoke with daily and a man who spoke with her in return as her husband William did not speak with her. They began — I am giving you the date, because if you are to carry this knowledge I wish you to have the date — in the spring of 1871. They ended only with Dr. Kelsey's death in the summer of 1879, though the particular tenderness had gone quiet some years before.
You, dearest August, were born on the fourteenth of November, 1872. You are as near as a woman's careful arithmetic can reckon — and my sister's arithmetic was careful — your father Abraham Kelsey's son. You are not William Hume's son by blood.
You are William Hume's son by every other construction. He raised you. He gave you his name. He believed, and continued to believe until he died in 1898, that you were his, and in all the meanings of fatherhood that are worth anything he was right. The blood is a small thing beside the raising. I would not have you think otherwise for an hour.
I write this to you because you asked me, in your letter of last month — the letter you wrote me after Elspeth's funeral, when you were at the house at Vanderlin Row and going through her small effects — why she had always looked at you with an expression you could not name. I have thought a long time about what to answer you. I have decided that the only answer I can give that will not be a new lie is the true answer.
Dr. Kelsey was a fine man. He died too early. He had, toward the end, understood that you were his, though he had not held you. He attended your second birthday at Hume House — it was the only time he met you — and he wrote to my sister afterwards that he was glad you had William's nose and not his, because William's nose would make your life easier. He was that kind of man. He thought about your life. I hope this is, at last, some comfort.
I ask of you, dear August, three things, and I ask them as the last thing you will hear from me:
First, do not tell Edmund. Do not tell Clara. Your sister Clara will one day be told, I have reason to believe — our mother Elspeth had asked me, before she died, whether I would testify to what I knew if certain papers of hers should one day be opened, and I said I would, and I trust that the papers will do the hard work and that my testimony will be small; but I believe that Clara and Clara alone should be told from within our family, and I believe that that telling should come from Elspeth's own hand, which it will. Edmund does not need to know. William did not know. It is not a knowledge that helps any of them.
Second, forgive my sister. She loved you. She loved you within the silence she kept. She loved you as your mother, always, from the hour of your birth to the hour of her death.
Third, if it is within your gift, forgive Dr. Kelsey. He was not a man to boast of what he could not raise. He was a man who lived with knowing, and he carried it as a man of his kind is trained to carry his knowings — which is to say, alone. He died not cheaply. I have met him, of course, not often, but enough; I know.
I have loved you, August, from your first hour. Whatever else has or has not been true of our family, that has been true. I would not have you carry anything of what I have here written as a grievance. I would have you carry it as the last secret of my sister's life, which is now yours to keep or to burn, and which I believe she would have wished you to keep, but not to act upon.
I am, from a sickroom that is quieter than it has been for weeks,
Your aunt, Maribel
P.S. — I will not be here when this letter reaches you. The nurse who carries it to the post will tell you so. Do not write back to this house; write, if you must write, to our sister Celia in Montreal, who will bring whatever you send me to the cemetery. — M.