“That is a very fantastic name to give the child.”
“How critical you are, John! perhaps it is, but what does it matter at his age? any name does for a baby. Why, you yourself, as grave as you are now——”
“Don’t, aunt,” said John. “It is a grave matter enough as it appears to me.”
“Not for the present; not for the present, John.”
“Perhaps not for the present: if you prefer to put off all the difficulties till they grow up and crush you. Have there been any overtures, all this time, from—the other side?”
“Dear John, don’t overwhelm me all in a moment, in the first pleasure of seeing you, both with the troubles that are behind and the troubles that are in front of us,” the poor lady said.
Theweather was fine, which was by no means always a certainty at Waterdale, and Elinor had become a great pedestrian, and was ready to accompany John in his walks, which were long and varied. It was rather a curious test to which to subject himself after the long time he had been away, and the other tests through which he had gone. Never had he been so entirely the companion of Elinor, never before had they spent so many hours together without other society. At Windyhill, indeed, their interviews had been quite unrestrained, but then Elinor had many friends and interests in the parish and outside of it, visits to pay and duties to perform. Now she had her child, which occupied her mornings and evenings, but left her free for hours of rambling among the hills, for long walks, from which she came back blooming with the fresh air and breezes which had blown her about, ruffling her hair, and stirring up her spirits and thoughts. Sometimes when there has been heavy and premature suffering there occurs thus in the young another spring-time, an almost childhood of natural, it may be said superficial pleasure—the power of being amused, and of enjoying every simple satisfaction without anyarrière penséelike a child. She had recovered her strength and vigour in the mountain air—and in that freedom of being unknown, with no look ever directed to her which reminded her of the past, no question which brought back her troubles, had blossomed out into that fine youthful maturity of twenty-six, which has already an advantage over the earlier girlhood, the perfection of the woman grown. Elinor had thought of many things and understood many things, which she had still regarded with the high assumptions of ignorance three or four years ago. And poor John, who had tried so hard to find himself a mate that suited him, who had studied so many girls more beautiful, more accomplished than Elinor, in the hope of goading himself, so to speak, into love, and had not succeeded—and who had felt so strongly that another man’s wife must not occupy so much of his thoughts, nor another man’s child give him an unwilling pleasure which was almost fatherly—poor John felt himself placed in a position more trying than any he had known before, more difficult to steer his way through. He had never had so much of her company, and she did not conceal the pleasure it was to her to have some one to walk with, to talk with, who understood what she said and what she did not say, and was in that unpurchasable sympathy with herself which is not to be got by beauty, or by will, or even by love itself, but comes by nature. Elinor felt this with simple pleasure. Without any complicating suspicion, she said, “What a brother John is! I always felt him so, but now more than ever.” “You have been, so to speak, brought up together,” said Mrs.Dennistoun, whose mind was by no means so easy on the subject. “That is the reason, I suppose,” said Elinor, with happy looks.
But poor John said nothing of this kind. What he felt was that he might have spared himself the trouble of all those researches of his; that to roam about looking for a young lady whom he might—not devour, but learn to love, was pains as unnecessary as ever man took. He still hugged himself, however, over the thought that in no circumstances would he have been a marrying man; that if Elinor had been free he would have found plenty of reasons why they should remain on their present terms and go no farther. As it was clear that they must remain on their present terms, and could go no farther, it was certainly better that he should cherish that thought.
And curiously enough, though they heard so little from the outside world, they had heard just so much as this, that John’s assiduities to the Miss Gaythornes (which the reader may remember was the first of all his attempts, and quite antiquated in his recollection) had occasioned remarks, and he had not been many evenings at Lakeside before he was questioned on the subject. Had it been true, or had he changed his mind or had the lady——? It vexed him that there was not the least little opposition or despite in their tones, such as a man’s female friends often show towards the objects of his admiration, not from any feeling on their own part, except that most natural one, which issurprised and almost hurt to find that, “having known me, he could decline”—a feeling which, in its original expression, was not a woman’s sentiment, but a man’s, and therefore is, I suppose, common to both sides. But the ladies at Lakeside did not even betray this feeling. They desired to know if there had been anything in it—with smiles, it is true; but Mrs. Dennistoun at the same time expressed her regret warmly.
“We were in great hopes something would come of it, John. Elinor has met the Gaythornes, and thought them very nice; and if there is a thing in the world that would give me pleasure, it would be to see you with a nice wife, John.”
“I am sure I am much obliged to you, aunt; but there really was nothing in it. That is, I was seized with various impulses on the subject, and rather agreed with you: but I never mentioned the matter to any of the Miss Gaythornes. They are charming girls, and I don’t suppose would have looked at me. At the same time, I did not feel it possible to imagine myself in love with any of them. That’s quite a long time since,” he added with a laugh.
“Then there have been others since then? Let us put him in the confessional, mother,” cried Elinor with a laugh. “He ought not to have any secrets of that description from you and me.”
“Oh, yes, there have been others since,” said John. “To tell the truth, I have walked round a great many nice girls asking myself whether I shouldn’t find itvery delightful to have one of them belonging to me. I wasn’t worthy the least attractive of them all, I quite knew; but still I am about the same as other men. However, as I’ve said, I never mentioned the matter to any of them.”
“Never?” cried Mrs. Dennistoun, feeling a hesitation in his tone.
He laughed a little, shamefaced: “Well, if you like, I will say hardly ever,” he said. “There was one that might, perhaps, have taken pity upon me—but fortunately an old lover of hers, who was much more enterprising, turned up before anything decisive had been said.”
“Fortunately, John?”
“Well, yes, I thought so. You see I am not a marrying man. I tried to screw myself up to the point, but it was altogether, I am afraid, as a matter of principle. I thought it would be a good thing, perhaps, to have a wife.”
“That was a very cold-blooded idea. No wonder you—it never came to anything. That is not the way to go about it,” said Elinor with the ringing laugh of a child.
And yet her way of going about it had been far from a success. How curious that she did not remember that!
“Yes,” he said, “I am quite aware that I did not go about it in the right way, but then that was the only way in which it presented itself to me; and when I had made up my mind at last that it was a failure, I confessit was with a certain sense of relief. I suppose I was born to live and die an old bachelor.”
“Do not be so sure of that,” said Elinor. “Some day or other, in the most unlooked-for moment, the fairy princess will bound upon the scene, and the old bachelor will be lost.”
“We’ll wait quite contentedly for that day—which I don’t believe in,” he said.
Mrs. Dennistoun did not take any part in the later portion of this discussion; her smile was feeble at the places where Elinor laughed. She said seriously after this fireside conference, when he got up to prepare for dinner, putting her hand tenderly on his shoulder, “I wish you had found some one you could have loved, John.”
“So did I—for a time,” he said, lightly. “But you see, it was not to be.”
She shook her head, standing against the firelight in the dark room, so that he could not see her face. “I wish,” she said, “I wish—that I saw you with a nice wife, John.”
“You might wish—to see me on the woolsack, aunt.”
“Well—and it might come to pass. I shall see you high up—if I live long enough; but I wish I was as sure of the other, John.”
“Well,” he said with a laugh, “I did my best; but there is no use in struggling against fate.”
No, indeed! how very, very little use there was. He had kept away from them for nearly two years;while he had done his best in the meantime to get a permanent tenant for his heart which should prevent any wandering tendencies. But he had not succeeded; and now if ever a man could be put in circumstances of danger it was he. If he did not appear in time for their walk Elinor would call him. “Aren’t you coming, John?” And she overflowed in talk to him of everything—excepting always of that one dark passage in her life of which she never breathed a word. She asked him about his work, and about his prospects, insisting upon having everything explained to her—even politics, to which he had a tendency, not without ideas of their use in reaching the higher ranks of his profession. Elinor entered into all with zest and almost enthusiasm. She wrapped him up in her sympathy and interest. There was nothing he did that she did not wish to know about, did not desire to have a part in. A sister in this respect is, as everybody knows, often more full of enthusiasm than a wife, and Elinor, who was vacant of all concerns of her own (except the baby) was delighted to take up these subjects of excitement, and follow John through them, hastening after him on every line of indication or suggestion which he gave—nay, often with her lively intelligence hastening before him, making incursions into undiscovered countries of which he had not yet perceived the importance. They walked over all the country, into woods which were a little damp, and up hill-sides where the scramble was often difficult enough, and along the side of thelake—or, for a variety, went rowing across to the other side, or far down the gleaming water, out of sight, round the wooded corner which, with all its autumnal colours, blazed like a brilliant sentinel into the air above and the water below. Mrs. Dennistoun watched them, sometimes with a little trouble on her face. She would not say a word to throw suspicions or doubts between them. She would not awaken in Elinor’s mind the thought that any such possibilities as arise between two young people free of all bonds could be imagined as affecting her and any man such as her cousin John. Poor John! if he must be the victim, the victim he must be. Elinor could not be disturbed that he might go free. And indeed, what good would it have done to disturb Elinor? It would but have brought consciousness, embarrassment, and a sense of danger where no such sense was. She was trebly protected, and without a thought of anything but the calm yet close relations that had existed so long. He—— but he could take care of himself, Mrs. Dennistoun reflected in despair; he must take care of himself. He was a man and must understand what his own risks and perils were.
“And do you think this plan is a success?” John asked her one day as they were rowing homeward up the lake. The time of his visit was drawing to a close; indeed it had drawn to a close several times, and been lengthened very unadvisedly, yet very irresistibly as he felt.
Her face grew graver than usual, as with a suddenrecollection of that shadow upon her life which Elinor so often seemed to have forgotten. “As much of a success,” she said, “as anything of the kind is likely to be.”
“It suits you better than Windyhill?”
“Only in being more out of the world. It is partially out of the world for a great part of the year; but I suppose no place is so wholly. It seems impossible to keep from making acquaintances.”
“Of course,” he said, “I have noticed. You know people here already.”
“How can we keep from knowing people? Mamma says it is the same thing everywhere. If we lived up in that little house which they say is the highest in England—at the head of the pass—we should meet people I suppose even there.”
“Most likely,” he replied; “but the same difficulties can hardly arise.”
“You mean we shall not know people so well as at—at home, and will not be compelled to give an account of ourselves whatever we do? Heaven knows! There is a vicarage here, and there is a squire’s house: and there are two or three people besides who already begin to inquire if we are related to So-and-So, if we are the Scotch Dennistouns, or the Irish Comptons, or I don’t know what; and whether we are going to Penrith or any other capital city for the winter.” Elinor ended with a laugh.
“So soon?” John said.
“So soon—very much sooner, the first year: withmamma so friendly as she is and with me so silly, unable to keep myself from smiling at anybody who smiles at me!”
“Poor Elinor!”
“Oh, you may laugh; but it is a real disadvantage. I am sure there was not very much smile in me when we came; and yet, notwithstanding, the first pleasant look is enough for me, I cannot but respond; and I shall always be so, I suppose,” she said, with a sigh.
“I hope so, Elinor. It would be an evil day for all of us if you did not respond.”
“For how many, John? For my mother and—ah, you are so good, more like my brother than my cousin—for you, perhaps, a little; but what is it to anybody else in the world whether I smile or sigh? It does not matter, however,” she said, flinging back her head; “there it is, and I can’t help it. If you smile at me I must smile back again—and so we make friends; and already I get a great deal of advice about little Pippo. If we live here till he grows up, the same thing will happen as at the Cottage. We will require to account to everybody for what we do with him—for the school he goes to, and all he does; to explain why he has one kind of training or another; and, in short, all that I ran away from: the world wherever one goes seems to be so much the same.”
“The world is very much the same everywhere; and you cannot get out of it were you to take refuge in a cave on the hill. The best thing is generally to let itknow all that can be known, and so save the multitude of guesses it always makes.”
Elinor looked at him for a moment with her lips pressed tightly together, and a light in her eyes; then she looked away across the water to the golden hills, and said nothing; but there was a great deal in that look of eager contradiction, yet forced agreement, of determination above all, with which right and wrong had nothing to do.
“Elinor,” he said, “do you mean that child to grow up here between your mother and you—in ignorance of all that there is in the world besides you two?”
“That child!” she cried. “John, I think you dislike my boy; for, of course, it is Pippo you mean.”
“I wish you would not call him by that absurd name.”
“You are hard to please,” she said, with an angry laugh. “I think it is a very sweet little name.”
“The child will not always be a baby,” said John.
“Oh, no: I suppose if we all live long enough he will some time be a—possibly disagreeable man, and punish us well for all the care we have spent upon him,” Elinor said.
“I don’t want to make you angry, Elinor——”
“No, I don’t suppose you do. You have been very nice to me, John. You have neither scolded me nor given me good advice. I never expected you would have been so forbearing. But I have always felt you must mean to give me a good knock at the end.”
“You do me great injustice,” he said, much wounded. “You know that I think only of what is best for you—and the child.”
They were approaching the shore, and Mrs. Dennistoun’s white cap was visible in the waning light, looking out for them from the door. Elinor said hastily, “And the child? I don’t think that you care much for the child.”
“There you are mistaken, Elinor. I did not perhaps at first: but I acknowledge that a little thing like that does somehow creep into one’s heart.”
Her face, which had been gloomy, brightened up as if a sunbeam had suddenly burst upon it. “Oh, bless you, John—Uncle John; how good and how kind, and what a dear friend and brother you are! And I such a wretch, ready to quarrel with those I love best! But, John, let me keep quiet, let me keep still, don’t make me rake up the past. He is such a baby, such a baby! There cannot be any question of telling him anything for years and years!”
“I thought you were lost,” said Mrs. Dennistoun, calling to them. “I began to think of all kinds of things that might have happened—of the steamboat running into you, or the boat going on a rock, or——”
“You need not have had any fear when I was with John,” Elinor said, with a smile that made him warm at once, like the sun. He knew very well, however, that it was only because he had made that little pleasant speech about her boy.
Therepassed after this a number of years of which I can make no record. The ladies remained at Lakeside, seldom moving. When they took a holiday now and then, it was more for the sake of the little community which, just as in Windyhill, had gathered round them, and which inquired, concerned, “Are you not going to take a little change? Don’t you think, dear Mrs. Dennistoun, your daughter would be the better for a change? Do you really think that a little sea air and variety wouldn’t be good for the boy?” Forced by these kind speeches they did go away now and then to unknown seaside places in the north when little Philip was still a child, and to quiet places abroad when he grew a boy, and it was thought a good thing for him to learn languages, and to be taught that there were other countries in the world besides England. They were absent for one whole winter in France and another in Germany with this motive, that Philip should learn these languages, which he didtant bien que malwith much assistance from his mother, who taught herself everything that she thought the boy should know, and shared his lessons in order to push him gently forward. And on the whole, he did very well in this particular of language, showing much aptitude, though not perhaps much application. Iwould not assert that the ladies, with an opinion very common among women, and also among youth in general, did not rather glory in the thought that he could do almost anything he liked (which was their opinion, and in some degree while he was very young, the opinion of his masters), with the appearance of doing nothing at all. But on the whole, his education was the most difficult matter in which they had yet been engaged. How was he to be educated? His birth and condition pointed to one of the great public schools, and Mrs. Dennistoun, who had made many economics in that retirement, was quite able to give the child what they both called the best education. But how could they send him to Eton or Harrow? A boy who knew nothing about his parentage or his family, a boy bearing a well-known name, who would be subject to endless questions where he came from, who he belonged to? a hundred things which neither in Waterdale nor in their travels had ever been asked of him. What the Waterdale people thought on the subject, or how much they knew, I should not like to inquire. There are ways of finding out everything, and people who possess family secrets are often extraordinarily deceived in respect to what is known and what is not known of those secrets. My own opinion is that there is scarcely such a thing as a secret in the world. If any moment of great revolution comes in your life you generally find that your neighbours are not much surprised. They have known it, or they have suspected it, allalong, and it is well if they have not suspected more than the truth. So it is quite possible that these excellent people knew all about Elinor: but Elinor did not think so, which was the great thing.
However, there cannot be any question that Philip’s education was a very great difficulty. John Tatham, who paid them a visit soberly from time to time, but did not now come as of old, never indeed came as on that first occasion when he had been so happy and so undeceived. To be sure, as Philip grew up it was of course impossible for any one to be like that. From the time Pippo was five or six he went everywhere with his mother, her sole companion in general, and when there was a visitor always making a third in the party, a third who was really the first, for he appealed to his mother on every occasion, directed her attention to everything. He only learned with the greatest difficulty that it was possible she should find it necessary to give her attention in a greater degree to any one else. When she said, “You know, Pippo, I must talk to Uncle John,” Pippo opened his great eyes. “Not than to me, mamma?”
“Yes, dearest, more than to you for the moment: for he has come a long way to see us, and he will soon have to go away again.” When this was first explained to him, Pippo inquired particularly when his Uncle John was going away, and was delighted to hear that it was to be very soon. However, as he grew older the boy began to take great pleasure in Uncle John,and hung upon his arm when they went out for their walks, and instead of endeavouring to monopolise his mother, turned the tables upon her by monopolising this the only man who belonged to him, and to whom he turned with the instinct of budding manhood. John too was very willing to be thus appropriated, and it came to pass that now and then Elinor was left out, or left herself out of the calculation, urging that the walk they were planning was too far for her, or too steep for her, or too something, so that the boy might have the enjoyment of the man’s society all to himself. This changed the position in many ways, and I am not sure that at first it did not cost Elinor a little thus to stand aside and put herself out of that first place which had always been by all of them accorded to her. But if this was so, it was soon lost in the consideration of how good it was for Pippo to have a man like John to talk to and to influence him in every way. A man like John! That was the thing; not a common man, not one who might teach him the baseness, or the frivolity, or the falsehood of the world, but a good man, who was also a distinguished man, a man of the world in the best sense, knowing life in the best sense, and able to modify the boy’s conception of what he was to find in the world, as women could never do.
“For after all that can be said, we are not good for much on those points, mother,” Mrs. Compton would say.
“I don’t know, Elinor; I doubt whether I would exchange my own ideas for John’s,” the elder lady replied.
“Ah, perhaps, mother; but for Pippo his experience and his knowledge will do so much. A boy should not be brought up entirely with women any more than a girl should be with men.”
“I have often thought, my dear,” said Mrs. Dennistoun, “if in God’s providence it had been a girl instead of a boy——”
“Oh!” said the younger mother, with a flush, “how can you speak—how could you think of any possible child but Pippo? I would not give him for a score of girls.”
“And if he had been a girl you would not have changed him for scores of boys,” said Mrs. Dennistoun, who added after a while, with a curious sense of competition, and a determination to allow no inferiority, “You forget, Elinor, that my only child is a girl.” The elder lady (whom they began to call the old lady) showed a great deal of spirit in defence of her own.
But Philip was approaching fourteen, and the great question had to be decided now or never; where was he to be sent to school? It was difficult now to send him to bed to get him out of the way, he who was used to be the person of first importance in the house—in order that the others might settle what was to be his fate. And accordingly the two ladies came down-stairs again after the family had separated in the usual way, in order to have their consultation with their adviser.There was now a room in the house furnished as a library in order that Philip might have a place in which to carry on his studies, and where “the gentlemen” might have their talks by themselves, when there was any one in the house. And here they found John when they stole in one after the other, soft-footed, that the boy might suspect no complot. They had their scheme, it need not be doubted, and John had his. He pronounced at once for one of the great public schools, while the ladies on their part had heard of one in the north, an old foundation as old as Eton, where there was at the moment a head master who was quite exceptional, and where boys were winning honours in all directions. There Pippo would be quite safe. He was not likely to meet with anybody who would put awkward questions, and yet he would receive an education as good as anyone’s. “Probably better,” said Elinor: “for Mr. Sage will have few pupils like him, and therefore will give him the more attention.”
“That means,” said John, “that the boy will not be among his equals, which is of all things I know the worst for a boy.”
“We are not aristocrats, as you are, John. They will be more than his equal in one way, because many of them will be bigger and stronger than he, and that is what counts most among boys. Besides, we have no pretensions.”
“My dear Elinor,” said John Tatham (who was by this time an exceedingly successful lawyer, member forhis native borough, and within sight of a Solicitor-Generalship), “your modesty is a little out of character, don’t you think? There can be no two opinions about what the boy is: an aristocrat—if you choose to use that word, every inch of him—a little gentleman, down to his fingers’ ends.”
“Oh, thank you, John,” cried Pippo’s inconsistent mother; “that is the thing of all others that we hoped you would say.”
“And yet you are going to send him among the farmers’ sons. Fine fellows, I grant you, but not of his kind. Have you heard,” he said, more gravely, “that Reginald Compton died last year?”
“We saw it in the papers,” said Mrs. Dennistoun. Elinor said nothing, but turned her head away.
“And neither of the others are married, or likely to marry; one of them is very much broken down——”
“Oh, John, John, for God’s sake don’t say anything more!”
“I must, Elinor. There is but one good life, and that in a dangerous climate, and with all the risks of possible fighting, between the boy and——”
“Don’t, don’t, John!”
“And he does not know who he is. He is ignorant of everything, even the fact, the great fact, which you have no right to keep from him——”
“John,” she cried, starting to her feet, “the boy is mine: I have a right to deal with him as I think best. I will not hear a word you have to say.”
“It is vain to say anything,” said Mrs. Dennistoun; “she will not hear a word.”
“That is all very well, so far as she is concerned,” said John, “but I have a part of my own to play. You give me the name of adviser and so forth—a man cannot be your adviser if his mouth is closed before he speaks. I have a right to speak, being summoned for that purpose. I tell you, Elinor, that you have no right to conceal from the boy who he is, and that his father is alive.”
She gave a cry as if he had struck her, and shrank away behind her mother, hiding her face in her hands.
“I am, more or less, of your opinion, John. I have told her the same. While he was a baby it mattered nothing, now that he is a rational creature with an opinion of his own, like any one of us——”
“Mother,” cried Elinor, “you are unkind. Oh, you are unkind! What did it matter so long as he was a baby? But now he is just at the age when he would be—if you don’t wish to drive me out of my senses altogether, don’t say a word more to me of this kind.”
“Elinor,” said John, “I have said nothing on the subject for many years, though I have thought much: and you must for once hear reason. The boy belongs—to his father as much as to you. I have said it! I cannot take it back. He belongs to the family of which he may one day be the head. You cannot throw away his birthright. And think, if you let him grow up likethis, not knowing that he has a family or a—unaware whom he belongs to.”
“Have you done, John?” asked Elinor, who had made two or three efforts to interrupt, and had been beating her foot impatiently upon the ground.
“If you ask me in that tone, I suppose I must say yes: though I have a great deal more that I should like to say.”
“Then hear me speak,” cried Elinor. “Of us three at least, I am the only one to whom he belongs. I only have power to decide for him. And I say, No, no: whatever argument there may be, whatever plea you may bring forward, No and no, and after that No! What! at fourteen, just the age when anything that was said to him would tell the most; when he would learn a lesson the quickest, learn what I would die to keep him from! When he would take everything for gospel that was said to him, when the very charm of—of that unknown name——”
She stopped for a moment to take breath, half choked by her own words.
“And you ought to remember no one has ever laid claim to him. Why should I tell him of one that never even inquired—— No, John, no, no, no! A baby he might have been told, and it would have done him no harm. Perhaps you were right, you and mother, and I was wrong. He might have known it from the first, and thought very little of it, and he may know when he is a man, and his character is formed and he knowswhat things mean—but a boy of fourteen! Imagine the glamour there would be about the very name; how he would feel we must all have been unjust and the—the other injured. You know from yourself, John, how he clings to you—you who are only a cousin; he knows that, yet he insists upon Uncle John, the one man who belongs to him, and looks up to you, and thinks nothing of any of us in comparison. I like it! I like it!” cried Elinor, dashing the tears from her eyes. “I am not jealous: but fancy what it would be with the—other, the real, the—— I cannot, cannot, say the word; yes, the father. If it is so with you, what would it be with him?”
John listened with his head bent down, leaning on his hand: every word went to his heart. Yes, he was nothing but a cousin, it was true. The boy did not belong to him, was nothing to him. If the father stepped in, the real father, the man of whom Philip had never heard, in all the glory of his natural rights and the novelty and wonder of his existence, how different would that be from any feeling that could be raised by a cousin, an uncle, with whom the boy had played all his life! No doubt it was true: and Phil Compton would probably charm the inexperienced boy with his handsome, disreputable grace, and the unknown ways of the man of the world. And yet, he thought to himself, there is a perspicacity about children which is not always present in a man. Philip had no precocious instincts to be tempted by his father’s habits; he had the true sight of a boy trained amid everything that wasnoble and pure. Would it indeed be more dangerous now, when the boy was a boy, with all those safeguards of nature, than when he was a man? John kept his mind to this question with the firmness of a trained intelligence, not letting himself go off into other matters, or pausing to feel the sting that was in Elinor’s words, the reminder that though he had been so much, he was still nothing to the family to whom he had consecrated so much of his life, so much now of his thoughts.
“I do not think I agree with you, Elinor,” he said at last. “I think it would have been better had he always known that his father lived, and who he was, and what family he belonged to; that is not to say that you were to thrust him into his father’s arms. And I think now that, though we cannot redeem the past, it should be done as soon as possible, and that he should know before he goes to school. I think the effect will be less now than if the discovery bursts upon him when he is a young man, when he finds, perhaps, as may well be, that his position and all his prospects are changed in a moment, when he may be called upon without any preparation to assume a name and a rank of which he knows nothing.”
“Not a name. He has always borne his true name.”
“His true name may be changed at any moment, Elinor. He may become Lord Lomond, and the heir——”
“My dear,” said Mrs. Dennistoun, growing red, “that is a chance we have never taken into account.”
“What has that to do with it?” she said. “Is his happiness and his honour to be put in comparison with a chance, a possibility that may never come true? John, for the sake of everything that is good, let him wait till he is a man and knows good from evil.”
“It is that I am thinking of, Elinor; a boy of fourteen often knows good from evil much better than a youth of twenty-one, which is, I suppose, what you call a man. My opinion is that it would be better and safer now.”
“No!” she said. “And no! I will never consent to it. If you go and poison my boy’s mind I will never forgive you, John.”
“I have no right to do anything,” he said; “it is of course you who must decide, Elinor: I advise only; and I might as well give that up,” he added, “don’t you think? for you are not to be guided by me.”
And she was of course supreme in everything that concerned her son. John, when he could do no more, knew how to be silent, and Mrs. Dennistoun, if not so wise in this respect, was yet more easily silenced than John. And Philip Compton went to the old grammar-school among the dales, where was the young and energetic head-master, who, as Elinor anticipated, found this one pupil like a pearl among the pebbles of the shore, and spared no pains to polish him and perfect him in every way known to the ambitious schoolmaster of modern times.
Itis needless to say that the years which developed Elinor’s child into a youth on the verge of manhood, had not passed by the others of the family without full evidence of its progress. John Tatham was no longer within the elastic boundaries of that conventional youth which is allowed to stretch so far when a man remains unmarried. He might have been characterized asencore jeune, according to the fine distinction of our neighbours in France, had he desired it. But he did not desire it. He had never altogether neglected society, having a wholesome liking for the company of his fellow creatures, but neither had he ever plunged into it as those do who must keep their places in the crowd or die. John had pursued the middle path, which is the most difficult. He had cultivated friends, not a mob of acquaintances, although as people say he “knew everybody,” as a man who had attained his position and won his success could scarcely fail to do. He had succeeded indeed, not in the fabulous way that some men do, but in a way which most men in his profession looked upon as in the highest degree satisfactory. He had a silk gown like any dowager. He had been leading counsel in many cases which were now of note. He was among, not the two or three perhaps, but the twenty or thirty, who were at the head ofhis profession. If he had not gone further it was perhaps more from lack of ambition than from want of power. He had been for years in Parliament, but preferred his independence to the chance of office. It is impossible to tell how John’s character and wishes might have been modified had he married and had children round him like other men. Had the tall boy in the north, the young hero of Lakeside, been his, what a difference would that have made in his views of life! But Philip was not his, nor Philip’s mother—probably, as he always said to himself, from his own fault. This, as the reader is aware, had always been fully recognised by John himself. Perhaps in the old days, in those days when everything was possible, he had not even recognised that there was but one woman in the world whom he could ever wish to marry. Probably it was only her appropriation by another that revealed this fact to him. There are men like this to be found everywhere; not so hotly constituted as to seize for themselves what is most necessary for their personal happiness—possessed by so many other subjects that this seems a thing to be thought of by-and-by—which by-and-by is generally too late.
But John Tatham was neither a disappointed nor an unhappy man. He might have attained a higher development and more brilliant and full life, but that was all; and how few men are there of whom this could not be said! He had become Mr. Tatham of Tatham’s Cross, as well as Q.C. and M.P., a county gentlemanof modest but effective standing, a lawyer of high reputation, quite eligible either for the bench or for political elevation, had he cared for either, a member of Parliament with a distinct standing, and therefore importance of his own. There was probably throughout England no society in which he could have found himself where his position and importance would have been unknown. He was a man approaching fifty, who had not yet lost any of the power of enjoyment or begun to feel the inroads of decay, at the very height of life, and unconscious that the ground would shortly begin to slope downwards under his feet; indeed, it showed no such indication as yet, and probably would not do so for years. The broad plateau of middle age lasts often till sixty, or even beyond. There was no reason to doubt that for John Tatham it would last as long as for any man. His health was perfect, and his habits those of a man whose self had never demanded indulgences of the vulgar kind. He had given up with some regret, but years before, his chambers in the Temple: that is, he retained them as chambers, but lived in them no longer. He had a house in one of the streets about Belgrave Square, one of those little bits of awkward, three-cornered streets where there are some of the pleasantest houses of a moderate kind in London; furnished from top to bottom, the stairs, the comfortable quaint landings, the bits of corridor and passage, nothing naked or neglected about it—no cold corner; but nothing fantastic; not very much ornament, a few good pictures, a great dealof highly-polished, old-fashioned dark mahogany, with a general flavour of Sherraton and Chippendale: and abundance of books everywhere. John was able to permit himself various little indulgences on which wives are said to look with jealous eyes. He had a fancy for rare editions (in which I sympathise) and also for bindings, which seems to me a weakness—however, it was one which he indulged in moderation. He possessed in his drawing-room (which was not very much used) a beautiful old-fashioned harpsichord, and also he had belonging to him a fiddle of value untold. I ought, of course, to say violin, or rather to distinguish the instrument by its family name; I have no doubt it was a Stradivarius. But there is an affectionate humour in the fiddle which does not consist with fine titles. He had always been fond of music, but even the Stradivarius did not beguile him, in the days of which I speak, to play, nor perhaps was his performance worthy of it, though his taste was said to be excellent. It will be perceived by all this that John Tatham’s life had many pleasures.
And I am not myself sorry for him because he was not married, as many people will be. Perhaps it is a little doleful coming home, when there is never anybody looking out for you, expecting you. But then he had never been accustomed to look for that, and the effect might have been irksome rather than pleasant. His household went on velvet under the care of a respectable couple who had “done for” Mr. Tatham foryears. He would not have submitted to extortion or waste, but everything was ample in the house; the cook by no means stinted in respect to butter or any of those condiments which are as necessary to good cooking as air is to life. Mr. Tatham would not have understood a lack of anything, or that what was served to him should not have been the best, supplied and served in the best way. Failure on such points would have so much surprised him that he would scarcely have known what steps to take. But Jervis, his butler, knew what was best as well as Mr. Tatham did, and was quite as little disposed to put up with any shortcoming. I say I am not sorry for him that he was not married—up to this time. But, as a matter of fact, the time does come when one becomes sorry for the well-to-do, highly respectable, refined, and agreeable man who has everything that heart can desire, except the best things in life—love, and the companionship of those who are his very own. When old age looms in sight everything is changed. But Mr. Tatham, as has been said, was not quite fifty, and old age seemed as far off as if it could never be.
He was a man who was very good to a number of people, and spent almost as much money in being kind as if he had possessed extravagant children of his own. His sister Mary, for instance, had married a clergyman not very well off, and the natural result had followed. How they could have existed without Uncle John, much less how they could have stumbled intopublic schools, scholarships, and all the rest of it, would be difficult to tell, especially now in these days when a girl’s schooling ought, we are told, to cost as much as a boy’s. This latter is a grievance which must be apparent to the meanest capacity. Unless the girl binds herself by the most stringent vowsnotto marry a poor curate or other penniless man the moment that you have completed her expensive education, I do not think she should in any case be permitted to go to Girton. It is all very well when the parents are rich or the girls have a sufficiency of their own. But to spend all that on a process which, instead of fructifying in other schools and colleges, or producing in life a highly accomplished woman, is to be lost at once and swallowed up in another nursery, is the most unprofitable of benefactions. This is what Mary Tatham’s eldest girl had just done, almost before her bills at Newnham had been paid. A wedding present had, so to speak, been demanded from Uncle John at the end of the bayonet to show his satisfaction in the event which had taken all meaning out of his exertions for little Mary. He had given it indeed—in the shape not of a biscuit-box, which is what she would have deserved, but of a cheque—but he was not pleased. Neither was he pleased, as has been seen, by the proceedings of Elinor, who had slighted all his advice yet clung to himself in a way some women have. I do not know whether men expect you to be quite as much their friend as ever after they have rejected your counsel and taken their own (exactly opposite) way:but women do, and indeed I think expect you to be rather grateful that they have not taken amiss the advice which they have rejected and despised. This was Elinor’s case. She hoped that John was ashamed of advising her to make her boy acquainted with his family and the fact of his father’s existence, and that he duly appreciated the fact that she did not resent that advice; and then she expected from him the same attention to herself and her son as if the boy had been guided in his and not in her way. Thus it will be seen his friends and relations expected a very great deal from John.
He had gone to his chambers one afternoon after he left the law courts, and was there very busily engaged in getting up his notes for to-morrow’s work, when he received a visit which awakened at once echoes of the past and alarms for the future in John’s mind. It was very early in the year, the end of January, and the House was not sitting, so that his public duties were less overwhelming than usual. His room was the same in which we have already seen on various occasions, and which Elinor in her youth, before anything had happened to make life serious for her, had been in the habit of calling the Star Chamber, for no reason in the world except that law and penalties or judgments upon herself in her unripe conviction, and suggestions of what ought to be done, came from that place to which Mrs. Dennistoun had made resort in her perplexities almost from the very beginning of John’s reign there. Mr. Tatham had been detained beyond his usual time bythe importance of the case for which he was preparing, and a clerk, very impatient to get free, yet obliged to simulate content, had lighted the lamp and replenished the fire. It had always been a comfortable room. The lamp by which John worked had a green shade which concentrated the light upon a table covered with that litter of papers in which there seemed so little order, yet which Mr. Tatham knew to the last scrap as if they had been the tidiest in the world. The long glazed bookcase which filled up one side of the room gave a dark reflection of the light and of the leaping brightness of the fire. The curtains were drawn over the windows. If the clerk fumed in the outer rooms, here all was studious life and quiet. No spectator could have been otherwise than impressed by the air of absolute self-concentration with which the eminent lawyer gave himself up to his work. He was like his lamp, giving all the light in him to the special subject, indifferent to everything outside.
“What is it, Simmons?” he said abruptly, without looking up.
“A lady, sir, who says she has urgent business and must see you.”
“A lady—whomustsee me.” John Tatham smiled at the very ineffectualmust, which meant coercion and distraction to him. “I don’t see how she is going to accomplish that.”
“I told her so,” said the clerk.
“Well, you must tell her so again.” He had scarcelylifted his head from his work, so that it was unnecessary to return to it when the door closed, and Mr. Tatham went on steadily as before.
It is easy to concentrate the light of the lamp when it is duly shaded and no wind to blow it about, and it is easy to concentrate a man’s attention in the absolute quiet when nothing interrupts him; but when there suddenly rises up a wind of talk in the room which is separated from him only by a door, a tempest of chattering words and laughter, shrill and bursting forth in something like shrieks, making the student start, that is altogether a different business. The lady outside, who evidently had multiplied herself—unless it was conceivable that the serious Simmons had made himself her accomplice—had taken the cleverest way of showing that she was not to be beat by any passive resistance of busy man, though not even an audible conversation with Simmons would have startled or disturbed his master, to whom it would have been apparent that his faithful vassal was thus defending his own stronghold and innermost retirement. But this was quite independent of Simmons, a discussion in two voices, one high-pitched and shrill, the other softer, but both absolutely unrestrained by any consciousness of being in a place where the chatter of strange voices is forbidden, and stillness and quiet a condition of being. The sound of the talk rang through Mr. Tatham’s head as if all the city bells were ringing. One of the unseen ladies had a very shrill laugh, to which she gavevent freely. John fidgeted in his chair, raised up his eyes above the level of his spectacles (he wore spectacles, alas! by this time habitually when he worked) as if lifting a voiceless appeal to those powers who interest themselves in law cases to preserve him from disturbance, then made a manly effort to disregard the sounds that filled the air, returning with a shake of his head to his reading. But at the end of a long day, and in the dulness of the afternoon, perhaps a man is less capable than at other moments to fight against interruption of this kind and finally he threw down his papers and touched his bell. Simmons came in full of pale indignation, which made itself felt even beyond the circle illuminated by the lamp.
“What can I do?” he said. “They’ve planted themselves by the fire, and there they mean to stay. ‘Oh, very well, we’ll wait,’ they said, quite calm. And I make no doubt they will, having nothing else to do, till all is blue.”
Mr. Simmons had a gift of expression of which all his friends were flatteringly sensible, and he was very friendly and condescending to John, of whom he had taken care for many years.
“What is to be done?” said Mr. Tatham. “Can’t you do anything to get them away?”
Simmons shook his head. “There’s two of them,” he said, “and they entertain each other, and they think it’s fun to jabber like that in a lawyer’s office. The young one says, ‘What a queer place!’ and the other,she holds forth about other times when she’s been here.”
“Oh, she’s been here other times—— Do you know her, Simmons?”
“Not from Adam, Mr. Tatham—or, I should say, from Eve, as she’s a lady. But a real lady I should say, though she don’t behave herself as such—one of the impudent ones. They are never impudent like that,” said Mr. Simmons, with profound observation, “unless they are real high or—real low.”
“Hum!” said John, hesitating. And then he added, “There is a young one, you say?”
But I do not myself think, though the light-minded may imagine it to be so, that it was because there was a young one that John gave in. It was because he could do nothing else, the noise and chatter of the voices being entirely destructive of that undisturbed state of the atmosphere in which work can be done. It was not merely the sounds but the vibration they made in the air, breaking all its harmony and concentration. He tried a little longer, but was unsuccessful, and finally in despair he said to Simmons, “You had better show them in, and let me get done with them,” in an angry tone.
“Oh, he will see us after all,” said the high-pitched voice. “So good of Mr. Tatham; but of course I should have waited all the same. Dolly, take Toto; I can’t possibly get up while I have him on my knee. You can tell Mr. Tatham I did not send in my name todisturb him, which makes it all the more charitable of him to receive me; but, dear me, of course I can tell him that himself as he consents to see us. Dolly, don’t strangle my poor darling! I never saw a girl that didn’t know how to take up a dear dog before.”
“He’s only a snappish little demon, and you spoil him so,” said the other voice. This was attended by the sound of movement as if the party were getting under weigh.
“My poor darling pet, it is only her jealousy: is that the way? Yes, to be sure it is the next room. Now, Dolly, remember this is where all the poor people are ruined and done for. Leave hope behind all ye who enter here.” A little shriek of laughter ended this speech. And John, looking up, taking off his spectacles, and raising a little the shade of the lamp, saw in the doorway Lady Mariamne, altered as was inevitable by the strain and stress of nearly twenty years.
I donot mean to assert that John Tatham had not seen Lady Mariamne during these twenty years, or that her changed appearance burst upon him with anything like a shock. In society, when you are once a member of that little world within a world, everybody sees everybody else from time to time. He had not recognised her voice, for he was not in the smallest degreethinking of Lady Mariamne or of any member of her family, notwithstanding that they now and then did make a very marked appearance in his mind in respect of the important question of that connection which Elinor in her foolishness tried to ignore. And John was not at all shocked by the progress of that twenty years, as reflected in the appearance of this lady, who was about his own standing, a woman very near fifty, but who had fought strenuously against every sign of her age, as some women foolishly do. The result was in Lady Mariamne’s case, as in many others, that the number of her years looked more like a hundred and fifty than their natural limit. A woman of her class has but two alternatives as she gets old. She must get stout, in which case, though she becomes unwieldy, she preserves something of her bloom; or she may grow thin, and become a spectre upon which art has to do so much that nature, flouted and tortured, becomes vindictive, and withdraws every modifying quality. Lady Mariamne had, I fear, false hair, false teeth, false complexion, everything that invention could do in a poor little human countenance intended for no such manipulation. The consequence was that every natural advantage (and there are some which age confers, as well as many that age takes away) was lost. The skin was parchment, the eyes were like eyes of fishes, the teeth—too white and too perfect—looked like the horrible things in the dentists’ windows, which was precisely what they were. On such a woman, the very heightof the fashion, to which she so often attaches herself with desperation, has an antiquated air. Everything “swears,” as the French say, with everything else. The softness, the whiteness, the ease, the self-abnegation of advancing age are all so many ornaments if people but knew. But Lady Mariamne had none of these. She wore a warm cloak in her carriage, it is true, but that had dropped from her shoulders, leaving her in all the bound-up rigidity in which youth is trim and slim and elastic, as becomes it. It is true that many a woman of fifty is, as John Tatham was, serenely dwelling on that tableland which shows but little difference between thirty-five, the crown of life, and fifty-five; but Lady Mariamne was not one of these. She had gone “too fast,” she would herself have allowed; “the pace” had been too much for such survivals. She was of the awful order of superannuated beauties of which Mr. Rider Haggard would in vain persuade us “She” was not one. I am myself convinced that “She’s” thousands of years were all written on her fictitious complexion, and that other people saw them clearly if not her unfortunate lover. And Lady Mariamne had come to be of the order of “She.” By dint of wiping out the traces of her fifty years, she had made herself look as if she might have been a thousand, and in this guise she appeared to the robust, ruddy, well-preserved man of her own age, as she stood, with a fantastic little giggle, calling his attention, on the threshold of his door.
Behind Lady Mariamne was a very different figure—that of the serious and independent girl without any illusions, who is in so many cases the child of such a mother, and who is in revolt so complete from all that mother’s traditions, so highly set on the crown of every opposite principle, that nature vindicates itself by the possibility that she may at any moment topple over and become again what her mother was. He would have been a bold man, however, who in the present stage would have prophesied any such fate for Dolly Prestwich, who between working at Whitechapel, attending on a ward in St. Thomas’s, drawing three days a week in the Slade School, and other labours of equally varied descriptions, had her time very fully taken up, and only on special occasions had time to accompany her mother. She had been beguiled on this occasion by the family history which was concerned, and which,fin de siécleas Dolly was, excited her curiosity almost as much as if she had been born in the “forties.” Dolly was never unkind, sometimes indeed was quite the reverse, to her mother. When Mr. Tatham, with a man’s brutal unconsciousness of what is desirable, placed a chair for Lady Mariamne in front of the fire, Dolly twisted it round with a dexterous movement so as to shield the countenance which was not adapted for any such illumination. For herself, Dolly cared nothing, whether it was the noonday sun or the blaze of a furnace that shone upon her; she defied them both to make her wink. As for complexion, she scorned that old-fashioned vanity. She had not very much, it is true. Having been scorchedred and brown in Alpine expeditions in the autumn, she was now of a somewhat dry whitish-greyish hue, the result of much loss of cuticle and constant encounter with London fogs and smoke. She carried Toto—who was a shrinking, chilly Italian greyhound—in a coat, carelessly under one arm, and sat down beside her mother, studying the papers on John’s table with exceedingly curious eyes. She would have liked to go over all his notes about his case, and form her own opinion on it—which she would have done, we may be sure, much more rapidly, and with more decision, than Mr. Tatham could do.
“So here I am again, you will say,” said Lady Mariamne. She had taken off her gloves, and was smoothing her hands, from the points of the fingers downwards, not, I believe, with any intention of demonstrating their whiteness, but solely because she had once done so, and the habit remained. She wore several fine rings, and her hands were still pretty, and—unlike the rest of her—younger than her age. They made a little show with their sparkling diamonds, just catching the edge of the light from John’s shaded lamp. Her face by Dolly’s help was in the shadow of the green shade. “You will say so, Mr. Tatham, I know: here she is again—without thinking how self-denying I have been, never to come, never to ask a single question, for all these years.”
“The loss is mine, Lady Mariamne,” said John, gravely.
“It’s very pretty of you to say that, isn’t it, Dolly? One’s old flirts don’t always show up so well.” And here the lady gave a laugh, such as had once been supposed to be one of Lady Mariamne’s charms, but which was rather like a giggle now—an antiquated giggle, which is much less satisfactory than the genuine article. “How I used to worry you about poor Phil, and that little spitfire of a Nell—and what a mess they have made of it! I suppose you know what changes have happened in the family, Mr. Tatham, since those days?”
“I heard indeed, with regret, Lady Mariamne, that you had lost a brother——”
“A brother! two!” she cried. “Isn’t it extraordinary—poor Hal, that was the picture of health? How little one knows! He just went, don’t you know, without any one ever thinking he would go. Regg in India was different—you expect that sort of thing when a man is in India. But poor Hal! I told you Mr. Tatham wouldn’t have heard of it, Dolly, not being in our own set, don’t you know.”
“It was in all the papers,” said Miss Dolly.
“Ah, well, you didn’t notice it, I suppose: or perhaps you were away. I always say it is of no use being married or dying or anything else in September—your friends never hear of it. You will wonder that I am not in black, but black was always very unbecoming to me, and dark grey is just as good, and doesn’t make one quite so ghastly. But the funny thing is that now Phil—who looked as if he never could be in the running, don’t you know—is heir presumptive. Isn’t it extraordinary? Two gone, and Phil, that lived much faster than either of them, and at one time kept up an awful pace, has seen them both out. And St. Serf has never married. He won’t now, though I have been at him on the subject for years. He says, not if he knows it, in the horrid way men have. And I don’t wonder much, for he has had some nasty experiences, poor fellow. There was Lady—— Oh, I almost forgot you were there, Dolly.”
“You needn’t mind me,” said Dolly, gravely; “I’ve heard just as bad.”
“Well,” said Lady Mariamne, with a giggle, “did you ever know anything like those girls? They are not afraid of anything. Now, when I was a girl—don’t you remember what an innocent dear I was, Mr. Tatham?—like a lamb; never suspecting that there was any naughtiness in the world——”
John endeavoured to put on a smile, in feeble sympathy with the uproariousness of Lady Mariamne’s laugh—but her daughter took no such trouble. She sat as grave as a young judge, never moving a muscle. The dog, however, held in her arms, and not at all comfortable, then making prodigious efforts to struggle on to its mistress’s more commodious lap, burst out into a responsive bark, as shrill and not much unlike.
“Darling Toto,” said Lady Mariamne, “come!—it always knows what it’s mummy means. Did you eversee such a darling little head, Mr. Tatham?—and the faithful pet always laughs when I laugh. What was I talking of?—St. Serf and his ladies. Well, it is not much wonder, you know, is it? for he has always been a sort of an invalid, and he will never marry now—and poor Hal being gone there’s only Phil. Phil’s been going a pace, Mr. Tatham; but he has had a bad illness, too, and the other boys going has sobered him a bit; and I do believe,now, that he’ll probably mend. And there he is, you know, tied to a—— Oh, of course,sheis as right as a—as right as a—trivet, whatever that may be. Those sort of heartless people always are: and then there’s the child. Is it living, Mr. Tatham?—that’s what I want to know.”
“Philip is alive and well, Lady Mariamne, if that is what you want to know.”
“Philip!—she called him after Phil, after all! Well, that is something wonderful. I expected to hear he was John, or Jonathan, or something. Now, where is he?” said Lady Mariamne, with the most insinuating air.
John burst into a short laugh. “I don’t suppose you expect me to tell you,” he said.
“Why not?—you can’t hide a boy that is heir to a peerage, Mr. Tatham!—it is impossible. Nell has done the best she could in that way. They know nothing about her in that awful place she was married from—of course you remember it—a dreadful place, enough to make one commit suicide, don’t you know. The Cottage, or whatever they call it, is let, and nobody knows anything about them. I took the trouble to go there, I assure you, on my own hook, to see if I could find out something. Toto nearly died of it, didn’t you, darling? Not a drop of cream to be had for him, the poor angel; only a little nasty skim milk. But Mr. Tatham has the barbarity to smile,” she went on, with a shrill outcry. “Fancy, Toto—the cruelty to smile!”
“No cream for the angel, and no information for his mistress,” said John.
“You horrid, cruel, cold-blooded man!—and you sit there at your ease, and will do nothing for us——”
“Should you like me,” said John, “to send out for cream for your dog, Lady Mariamne?”
“Cream in the Temple?” said the lady. “What sort of a compound would it be, Dolly? All plaster of Paris, or stuff of that sort. Perhaps you have tea sometimes in these parts——”
“Very seldom,” said John; “but it might be obtainable if you would like it.” He put forward his hand, but not with much alacrity, to the bell.
“Mother never takes any tea,” said Miss Dolly, hastily; “she only crumbles down cake into it for that little brute.”
“It is you who are a little brute, you unnatural child. Toto likes his tea very much—he is dying for it. But you must have patience, my pet, for probably it would be very bad, and the cream all stucco, or something. Mr. Tatham, do tell us what has become of Nell? Now,have you hidden her somewhere in London, St. John’s Wood, and that sort of thing, don’t you know? or where is she? Is the old woman living? and how has that boy been brought up? At a dame’s school, or something of that sort, I suppose.”
“Mother,” said Dolly, “you ought to know there are now no dame’s schools. There’s Board Schools, which is what you mean, I suppose; and it would be very good for him if he had been there. They would teach him a great deal more than was ever taught to Uncle Phil.”
“Teach him!” said Lady Mariamne, with another shriek. “Did I ask anything about teaching? Heaven forbid! Mr. Tatham knows what I mean, Dolly. Has he been at any decent place—or has he been where it will never be heard of? Eton and Harrow one knows, and the dame’s schools one knows, but horrible Board Schools, or things, where they might say young Lord Lomond was brought up—oh, goodness gracious! One has to bear a great many things, but I could not bear that.”
“It does not matter much, does it, so long as he does not come within the range of his nearest relations?” This was from John, who was almost at the end of his patience. He began to put his papers back in a portfolio, with the intention of carrying them home with him, for his hour’s work had been spoilt as well as his temper. “I am afraid,” he added, “that I cannot give you any information, Lady Mariamne.”
“Oh, such nonsense, Mr. Tatham!—as if the heir to a peerage could be hid.”
It was not often that Lady Mariamne produced an unanswerable effect, but against this last sentence of hers John had absolutely nothing to say. He stared at her for a moment, and then he returned to his papers, shovelling them into the portfolio with vehemence. Fortunately, she did not herself see how potent was her argument. She went on diluting it till it lost all its power.
“There is the ‘Peerage’ if it was nothing else—they must have the right particulars for that. Why, Dolly is at full length in it, her age and all, poor child; and Toto, too, for anything I know. Is du in the ‘Peerage,’ dear Toto, darling? And yet Toto can’t succeed, nor Dolly either. And this year Phil will be in as heir presumptive and his marriage and all—and then a blank line. It’s ridiculous, it’s horrible, it’s a thing that can’t, can’t be! Only think of all the troops of people, nice people, the best people, that read the ‘Peerage,’ Mr. Tatham!—and that know Phil is married, and that there is a child, and yet will see nothing but that blank line. Nell was always a little fool, and never could see things in a common-sense way. But a man ought to know better—and a lawyer, with chambers in the Temple! Why, people come and consult you on such matters—I might be coming to ask you to send out detectives, and that sort of thing. How do you dare to hide away that boy?”
Lady Mariamne stamped her foot at John, but this proceeding very much incommoded Toto, who, disturbed in his position on her knee, got upon his feet and began to bark furiously, first at his mistress and then, following her impulse, at the gentleman opposite to her, backing against the lady’s shoulder and setting up his little nose furiously with vibrations of rage against John, while stumbling upon the uncertain footing of the lap, volcanically shaken by the movement. The result of this onslaught was to send Lady Mariamne into shrieks of laughter, in the midst of which she half smothered Toto with mingled endearments and attempts at restraint, until Dolly, coming to the rescue, seized him summarily and snatched him away.
“The darling!” cried Lady Mariamne, “he sees it, and you can’t see it, a great big lawyer though you are. Dolly, don’t throttle my angel child. Stands up for his family, don’t he, the dear? Mr. Tatham, how can you be so bigoted and stubborn, when our dear little Toto—— But you always were the most obstinate man. Do you remember once, when I wanted to take you to Lady Dogberry’s dance—wasn’t it Lady Dogberry’s?—well, it was Lady Somebody’s—and you said you were not asked, and I said, what did it matter: but to make you go, and Nell was with me—we might as well have tried to make St. Paul’s go——”