The Son of His Father; vol. 1/3

CHAPTER XVII.

MOTHER AND SON.

The little parlour was in painful good order, the blinds drawn up, the daylight coming in as usual, the hearth so cleanly swept, the fire so bright, the two chairs standing one on each side. It was all so suggestive of the old people, as if they might have only gone out for a walk, arm in arm, in their old way, and soon would come in and sit down and look up smiling at their boy, and bid him come near the fire, for it was a cold day. This suggestion flashed to John’s heart as he came in, and might have overwhelmed him with sorrow and tears; but the presence of that tall figure in her black cloak and close bonnet effectually put a stop to any expression. She drew one of those chairs from the fire to the table, without any sense of desecration, or of disturbing any sacred image, and sat down. Her face was very grave, but without any harshness. She was always very serious, yielding to no lighter impulses. She turned to John, who stood vaguely, not knowing what he was to do, by the table.

‘Now,’ she said, not without feeling, ‘there are only us two—we must try to understand each other.’

He made no reply. The movement she had made of the chair, though perfectly simple and quite unintended, was enough to re-awaken in his mind all the resistance, the repulsion, which indeed her action throughout had never suffered to fade. For she had managed everything in a perfectly clear, unhesitating, business way, giving her orders with quiet and brief decision saving everybody trouble, but leaving no place for any consultation, for any of those faltering conversations upon what would have been most pleasant, or according to the ideas of the departed, which draw together mourners in their grief. There was no particular appearance of grief in her at all. She was serious and pale; but then, she was always so, and there had been no room for sentiment in anything she had done or said.

No creature more desolate than the boy himself at that moment ever stood by a new-filled grave. The love which had enveloped him so closely all his life had passed altogether away. He felt as if there was no longer anyone that cared for him in the world. He felt that this familiar place, which had been his home for so long, was not only to cease to be his home, but to cease altogether. The jar of the chair as it was drawn aside seemed to go through his heart. It was only a commonplace piece of furniture now, a common old chair to be put up at an auction. The place seemed to be desecrated by that simple movement. He had thought he would keep the house just as it was, like a little temple to the memory of the good guardians of his childhood. He was to be their heir, he took that for granted. He would leave everything, he thought, and from time to time come back out of the midst of the active life he had planned for himself, and always find them in imagination sitting there to meet him. No doubt John would soon have found out the impossibility of that fond imagination; but this was what he thought. He had even planned how he should put the gardener and his wife—themselves old people for whom it would make a provision—into the house to keep it for him, which he had said to himself, with tender childish pleasure, would please grandmamma. But with the jar of that chair as it was drawn aside, John’s tender imaginations went from him, leaving him with a sense of astonishment and startled waking up. He had another will to calculate with of which he had not thought.

She kept looking at him while these thoughts passed in a tumult through his mind, waiting for an answer. It was but for a very short time, yet to both of them it seemed long: and with all her seriousness she was of a disposition which could not brook waiting. She said, ‘Well!’ a little sharply, when he made no reply.

‘I did not say anything,’ John replied.

‘No, you did not say anything—you made no response. You look at me as if you wanted to make a quarrel over those graves. But you shall not make any quarrel, on that point I am resolved. We must understand each other.’

He went and leant upon the mantelpiece and stood looking down into the fire. Make a quarrel! It seemed to John that his heart would burst with the pang this misconception gave him. A quarrel, over their graves! But, though the suggestion was so abhorrent, he felt the sense of rebellion and resistance grow stronger and stronger. He would not even meet her eye. He would withdraw into that passive unyielding silence which of all things in the world is most difficult to meet and to withstand.

She turned again towards him though she could not see his face.

‘John,’ she said, ‘don’t make me feel, at a moment when I am far from wishing to feel it, how you have been spoiled by my father and mother—and how wrong I was in giving you out of my own care.’

He made a fierce gesture of denial at the first part of her sentence, and added at the last, with a sort of mocking echo, ‘Out of your own care!’

‘I have said that it is time we understood each other,’ she said, ‘I don’t know whether it was merely to wound me that you flung at me that suggestion that I was not your mother.’ Here she made a pause, and he too, his attention suspended with an excitement that took away his breath. ‘If that was the motive, it was fully successful. It did wound me. But if you had any real doubt on the subject——’

‘He had, he had!’ he said to himself, the blood throbbing in his head with a giddy sense of mounting up and up to the circles of the brain, and yet he knew very well what she was going to say, and knew also that it was true.

‘It seems strange that I should have to put such an assurance into words. Who would have borne with your alienation and your caprices, but your mother? Many women even, in the circumstances, would have said, Let him go. If nature has no voice, if there are no recollections of your childhood to move you—never mind! Say it since you feel it. But I have not been willing to do that. I have felt that the moment would come—and the moment has come—when, you would have nobody but me. I have spoken to Susie about it,’ she added, with a slight tremor in her voice.

‘Susie!’ The name brought a new sensation—something that touched his heart.

‘Your sister—your only sister—as I am your only mother, though you have so strangely misconceived me and denied me. I put that all down to the circumstances, not to you. I am not blaming you—only we must understand each other now.’

John, leaning on the mantelpiece with his face overshadowed by his hand, knew in his heart that all this was true. He made no attempt within himself to deny it. The reality of it was too much for him. It went into his heart like a stone in deep water, deep, deep to the bottom, where it lay a dead weight never to be got rid of. He could not protest or say anything, as if he were surprised by this sudden announcement. He was not surprised. He felt now that he had known it all well enough, that when he said otherwise it had only been in the impulse of the moment, with a frantic short-lived hope that perhaps that might come true. Alas! he knew very well that it was this which was true. He seemed to remember her now always silent, cold, an image of reserve and gravity in the midst of the more cheerful scenes in his memory. It was rather from the extreme occupation of his mind with these thoughts and recollections which surged through it, than from any antagonistic intention that he said nothing. But standing there with his head bent and his eyes lowered it was not wonderful that he should appear to her an impersonation of silent rebellion, a determined opponent.

‘You say nothing;’ she spoke in a tone in which a growing exasperation began to make itself felt. ‘It might have been less painful for me to let you go on in your own delusion—if delusion it was. But unfortunately you cannot be free of me and my authority; you are at an age when your life has to be settled for you, and in that as in everything else it is with me only that you have to do.’

John changed his position a little, which, in the high strain of emotion at which they were, seemed to both of them like a sort of response; so that he was almost forced to add, ‘With you only?’ faintly. He did not intend to say it. It did not mean anything. It was a mere echo, as if the air caught the words. But it had not upon her this harmless effect. Her paleness, which nothing else had touched, flushed high at these words; she made a sudden movement as if she had received a blow.

‘With me only,’ she repeated, with mingled energy and irritation, as if he had suggested a doubt. ‘Who else?—do you mean to say? do you think——?’ These questions came from her hurriedly with something quite unlike her usual gravity and calm. Then she stopped with a panting hard-drawn breath, and added after a moment, in a tone almost of derision, ‘As you are so intent on setting yourself against me, perhaps you will tell me what, left to yourself, you would do.’

John could not quite tell what this change of tone meant. He was not used to the quick interchange of argument nor was he quick to note the significance of the inflections of a voice. He had never known controversy at all, until he had embarked upon this one, and the moment he withdrew from the unintentional force of silence, in which he had at first wrapped himself, his ignorance and defencelessness became apparent. He thought however that she was withdrawing from her position, and recognising some claim in him to know and judge for himself. He left the place where he had been standing, and came to the middle of the room, throwing himself into a chair on the other side of the table.

‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that all this is mine now.’

‘What is yours?’

‘I mean: I suppose it is—all left to me? I could stay here, and—give no one any trouble.’

‘Left to you, my father’s house and all that he had! Is that what you mean? and you would stay here?’

‘I suppose so,’ said John. ‘I don’t know why. It seems natural, I thought it would always be mine. If I was wrong, I’m—I’m very sorry,’ he cried, giving a sudden bewildered glance round him, with a new and painful light of possibility breaking on his mind.

‘And you would stay here?’ she said. ‘And do—what? nothing? If you have your plans made——’

‘I have no plans made. I have not thought of anything. I supposed—that was how it could be.’ He looked at her for the first time with a bewildered appeal in his eyes. ‘If you knew what it was—to change all at once from being so—spoilt, perhaps, as you say, always understood, never found any fault with——’ in spite of himself his voice faltered, ‘to change from that to—to—— and being not very old, nor knowing very well: it makes a great difference,’ John said, feeling a sob swell upwards in his boyish throat, and breaking off that he might not betray himself. And he did not look at her again to see if there was in her any responsive feeling, but leaned his head upon his hands, shading his countenance from the light. And then there followed a moment of silence,—so silent, so long—with the clock ticking loudly through it with a sort of triumphant click-clack, as if that ceaseless measure were the master of all.

After a while she spoke again, with a softened voice.

‘I recognise,’ she said, ‘all the difference: poor boy!—it is natural you should feel it. I am a stranger—so to speak—though I—gave you birth, which is something, perhaps. But it is not your fault. Tell me—you think that all my father had to leave is yours, and that you might continue to live here, just as before—is that what you expect?’

He made a little movement with one hand, still leaning his head on the other. It was a movement that looked like assent. And yet this was not what he had expected; for he had expected nothing, nor had he any thought what he was to do.

‘To do nothing?’ she continued, ‘or to do—what? To live all alone at your age—to carry on the sort of life my father led? That was suitable enough at his time of life, but not at all for you. To keep the maid Sarah and the gardener, and doze in your chair of an afternoon? This could not be seriously what you thought.’

He started a little and cast a look at her, half indignant, half piteous, but did not reply.

‘I am not laughing at you,’ she said, quite gently; ‘you will yourself see when I put it to you that this would be quite impossible. Now I must tell you how things really are. All that my father had is divided between you and me: but you are too young to enter into possession of your share. It will accumulate for you till you are twenty-one, and in the meantime the charge of you naturally lies with me. Whatever has to be determined is between us two. This is what I told you when we came in; you have nobody but me.’

To describe what John’s feelings were while she spoke would be impossible; everything seemed to swim and dissolve around him. It was true that he had formed no definite idea to himself of what was to come; and yet there had never seemed any question about this—that he was his grandfather’s heir—his natural and lawful heir. Nothing else had occurred to him. There had been nothing said about it; but it was this arrangement which seemed inevitable to the boy. He did not think even that any will was wanted. He, John Sandford, and no one else, could succeed John Sandford. This was what he had believed; and in this inheritance a certain sense of liberty was involved. He had thought of various things he would do. That about keeping up the house for one thing, and putting in the old gardener to take care of it; and then of the measures he would take in his own person to learn his profession, and prepare himself for a larger life. But in all of these thoughts emancipation was the first article. He did not suppose that he could have much to do with Emily. He had shivered a little when he so named her in his own mind, feeling a chill shadow of doubt as to who she was. But he had never remembered that he was only seventeen, much under age, and that he might have to yield to some other will instead of doing his own. He looked at her with a sort of helpless alarm in his eyes, feeling that everything was going to pieces round him, and as if he were feeling for something to clutch at in the general whirl.

‘You are surprised,’ she said, ‘and yet it is quite true. You have been put, perhaps, in a false position, John. It is not your fault, nor anyone’s; but I cannot let it go on. You are only seventeen. Who at seventeen is fit to be his own master? The position would be absurd, if it were not worse. It is sad for us both that you have not been brought up to care for me. I never realised how it might be when I left you in my father’s and mother’s hands. I was willing that they should have you, but not that they should turn the heart of my child away from me.’

John’s voice broke forth hoarse, not as it had sounded in his own ears before, ‘It was not their fault.’

‘I do not ask whose fault it was. Mine, perhaps, for giving you up; but that is past and need not to be taken into account. The thing we have to do is to get right now.’

Right! did she call this right? Whose doing had it been that she had become Emily, the daughter of the old people, in his eyes—not herself, not his mother? And then he gave her a furtive look to see if, perhaps, she looked like his mother now, and was no longer Emily. She met his wistful look with one that was troubled too; but even this expression did not change her. And whose fault was that? He seemed to hear the old people talking of Emily with many unguarded comments. It was like her, they would say. When a letter came, or when they would ramble off into those mutual recollections with which so often, to John’s amusement, they had traced out for him, with glimpses of the half-seen landscape all around, the story of their lives, that name always came in from time to time: ‘Emily said—Emily did—this or that. How like that was to Emily! It was her way of looking at things: for Emily never would see, don’t you know—never made any allowance——’ A hundred such scenes appeared to him, like scenes out of some play suddenly becoming visible without any will of his. How could he help it, if his mind had collected out of all these unconscious portraits an image of Emily, which was more clear than anything else he knew? It was not their fault. Was it not she herself who was to blame if this was how he knew her best, as the daughter whom the old people were half afraid of, whose probable criticism alarmed them, whose thoughts were not as theirs? The fear of her which crept into his own mind was more chill, more overwhelming—for how could he make any stand against her if it was true that he was entirely at her mercy, without any defence or shield.

That little quiet parlour, the old people’s room with all its old-fashioned furniture and little prim ornaments! Had it ever beheld such a mute encounter, such a strange struggle before? The boy looked at his mother and she at him. His eyes appealed to her, yet resisted her, while hers—but he could not read what they meant. He was not capable of comprehending, in his youthful inexperienced judgment, the many things he wot not of, the recollections, the sternness, the relentings that were in his mother’s eyes. But no more was said. For just then Sarah came in, pushing open the door with the great tray in her arms to prepare for tea—which was a thing that could not be intermitted, though heaven and earth should be beginning to dissolve and drop away.

CHAPTER XVIII.

FAREWELL.

It was all over—his resistance and his notion of being able to resist, his hopes and all the foundation for them, his fond dreams and thoughts (so fallacious and so foolish) of independence, of settling matters for himself, of keeping the little house as a sort of monument to the old people to whom it belonged. Could anything be more vain than these visions? It was all settled now, and not a child in the village had less to do with it than he. The furniture was to be sold, the house itself to be let if it could not be disposed of. The gardener and Sarah had received their dismissal. They remained only till ‘the family’ left, which was an event now fixed for next day. In short, every part of John’s little world had crumbled under him. Himself was of no account in all the changes that had been determined upon. They were all quite reasonable, perhaps necessary, and his childish intention had been silly as well as vain. He understood that now; but how painful was the discovery? It left him aching body and soul, not only with the thought of what was to come, but with the smarting sensation of pain and shame, that overwhelming sense of having formed ludicrous intentions impossible to carry out, which is so terrible to youth. He felt himself blush from head to foot when he thought how foolish he had been, and how impossible that which he had supposed the most natural thing in the world. For the sting of it was that he saw the impossibility, and how childish it was to suppose that he could have done it, and the futility of everything he had imagined and planned. It was natural that she should take all the steps she had done—calmly, without the silly sentiment into which he had fallen. She was acting only as reasonable people should act—but he, he had been going on like a foolish boy.

John had passed through a great many vicissitudes both of mind and situation in these past days. He had been to his own thinking independent, feeling very young and forlorn indeed, but yet with a firmness of purpose and a tenderness of feeling which had given him confidence in himself. He had felt that he would not abuse the old people’s confidence. He would make a man of himself to do them credit. He would show them honour in his keeping up of everything that had pleased them, in his return, whenever he had leisure, to the home in which their love had guarded him. That had been his first phase, and it had been full of a simple youthful dignity, and a sense of worthiness of the trust they had placed in him. And then there had come a revolution, a storm, a fierce moment of fighting and resistance to the new will, a fight which was weakened from the beginning by the fatal conviction that it must be lost. And now even the struggle was over, and he had fallen—into what had he fallen? Into a child again—into what perhaps was his natural position—the place of a boy who did not quite know what was going to be done with him, whose fate was in other hands, who had to wait and hear what was intended, where he was to be placed, with a knowledge that his own wishes had very little to do with it, and no dignity, no freedom at all! Could there be a greater downfall for a sensitive, high-spirited boy? With a certain mental elation, tempered by sorrow, he had felt himself a man though only seventeen, with all the tender ambitions of a boy, to do credit to those that loved him: now he had fallen back to the position of a child—wistfully dependent, uncertain what his fate was to be. In more ordinary circumstances even, such as happen every day, a boy who has been brought up by his grandparents, made into the son of their old age, matured by the constant company of people full of experience, and the indulgence which comes with the end of life, is apt to feel a terrible downfall when he goes back into his own family, where his parents, in their busy prime, think but little of his precocious wisdom, and do not respect at all the fictitious independence into which he has grown, and where his brothers and sisters, a rabble rout, knock him about in a way which is supposed to be very much to his advantage.

John’s experiences were but a little more painful. The disenchantment was complete. He was shaken out of all opinion of himself. Perhaps even his feeling that his own will or way was of no importance at all exceeded reality: for he had no reason to suppose that his mother would be entirely indifferent to what he wished. She had not been unkind. She was not an emotional woman, nor given to any effusion of sympathetic feeling; but she was not unkind. But John in his downfall and dismay could not consider that. He felt himself altogether brought low. And then his position, so far as his mother was concerned, was so painful and extraordinary. She was his mother; he could not, even to himself, set up any other hope. He could not blind himself to the conviction that this was she that appeared in his childish recollections, always so silent, putting him aside, saying that the boy was not to know. But he could not call her ‘mother,’ having known her so long and seen to the depths of her character as Emily. He said ‘she’ to himself, and no more. She was the arbiter of his life. He did not think she cared at all for him, or minded whether he was happy or otherwise. Secretly, perhaps, he thought that she preferred he should not be happy; but that he knew, even while he entertained the thought, was a wrong thing to think, unkind and untrue: yet he kept it in his mind all the same.

He was strolling along with his hands deeply thrust into his pockets, and despondency unspeakable in his soul, feeling that everything that made life worth living had been taken from him. He was going to the rectory to say good-bye. Good-bye was what was in his heart towards everything he looked on. Not a house he passed but was familiar to him—the shop, the post-office, even Johnson at the public-house, though the old people had so disapproved of him, and John had grown up in the idea that he was not much better than the roaring lion, seeking whom he might devour, of Scripture: they were all kind, familiar objects now. He regretted them all, worthy and unworthy. As he went along, there was some recollection associated with every bit of the road. There, Dick Spencer had thrown a snowball and hit him, and made his forehead bleed; a snowball with a stone in it—but how sorry Dick was! There he had run against Percy on the way to school and they had both come to the ground, rolling over each other. At another corner was the spot where Elly used to start to run and get before them all, with swift, light steps like a deer, scarcely touching the ground. All the boys had united in saying that it was not fair, that Elly could not stay, that the slowest of them could have beaten her in a quarter-of-a-mile; but, nevertheless, she had always got first whatever they might say. He was turning over all these old things in his heart while he strode along slowly, languidly, his whole being in pain, when suddenly, in the midst of his troubled thoughts, a slap came on his shoulder from behind, and a cheerful voice hailed him:

‘Why, Jack! what are you doing here at this time of day?’

Then another voice addressed the first one with that pleasant frankness which characterises brothers or dear friends, and bid him for a blockhead to remember. Whereupon the first speaker penitently cried out:

‘I beg your pardon! You know I didn’t mean to be unfeeling, Jack.’

John had scarcely the heart to turn round. He did so, half, saying, in a tone of little interest,

‘Have you fellows come back?’

The fellows were two. They were older than John. One—the nearest to him in age—was short and of spare figure, neat and careful of apparel; the other was some two years older, a person of advanced age in the estimation of his juniors, who did not think Dick’s sense was on a level with his years. He was large and fair, a full-grown man in person, with a moustache which many an older man might envy, and a careless good-humour and heartiness about him which was very attractive to many of his fellow-creatures, though his own immediate belongings were a little contemptuous of them. Both the lads were dressed with a little of that jauntiness which characterises the University. They came from a centre of boyish fashion; their coats were cut on the correctest model, and even Percy, though so much the wiser of the two, would have died, it was evident to the commonest observer, rather than wear anything which he ought not to have worn. The very canes which both of them scrupulously carried were exactly the right kind of cane. When John turned round slowly upon them, he was a little overawed as he awoke to it by the splendour of their appearance.

‘I didn’t know you were here,’ he said.

‘No, only for the day. Where are you going—to the rectory? Come along, then. That’s all right,’ said Dick. ‘We wanted to go and look you up, but didn’t like.’

Percy gave his brother a push aside.

‘I should have come fast enough; but I wanted to know first—that’s to say, we thought you might have relations or something. We’re awfully sorry, you know, Jack.’

‘Awfully sorry,’ echoed Dick, eager to make his sympathy known.

‘There’s nobody but my mother,’ said John, with an effort. ‘We are going away to-morrow morning.’

‘Going away?’

‘Yes. I’m going back with my mother. There is to be a sale and the house is to be let.’ John forced himself to say all this with an appearance of stolid calm.

Dick thrust his arm into John’s, and, half roughly, half tenderly, led him along.

‘Come and talk to Aunt Mary,’ he said. This was his own idea of consolation. He could not himself say anything that would be of any use to a mourner; but Aunt Mary, if anyone, could. Dick always said that he would back her against the world.

John suffered himself to be led along a little more quickly than the pace at which he had been going along the street. He was vaguely encouraged by Dick’s arm within his, and even by Percy’s little trim shadow walking along on the other side of him. The boys had naturally nothing to say. What could they have to say to a comrade in trouble? They could only stand by him; grip his hand till he cried out; hold his arm tight in theirs; get him a chair, as if he had been a girl; minister to his wants in any way he would let them: but otherwise, beyond ‘awfully sorry,’ what could they say?

‘We have made a run home to see Aunt Mary and Elly,’ said Percy, ‘but we can’t stay above an hour or two. It’s a capital offence, don’t you know, to be out of college without leave; but Dick had something he wanted to look to, and so had I. I wish we had come before yesterday.’

‘It didn’t matter,’ said John.

‘We tried hard,’ said Dick, ‘and then we thought at least you’d like to see us before——’

‘Are you going to town, Jack? Best thing for you. You will be sure to get something there. And nothing so easy as to meet one’s friends in town,’ said Percy, briskly. Dick was inclined to make allusions, to dwell upon the departure from Edgeley, and repeat that he was awfully sorry. But Percy was much more a man of the world. It was always better, he had heard, to speak in the most cheerful way to fellows who were in trouble, and direct their eyes beyond the trouble to the time when all should be cheerful again. ‘You must leave us your address,’ he said. ‘We constantly run up to town. We shall see more of you than if you were staying here.’

‘I don’t know if I shall have an address,’ said John. ‘I—don’t know where I’m going. I’m—all at sea. I know nothing. It’s like a mist—’

‘I know,’ said Percy, soothingly: ‘that’s how fellows feel; but it can’t last like that. You’ll have to pick up, and go on again, don’t you know.’

Dick did not say anything, but he gave John’s arm a sort of hug, which almost threw the boy off his feet.

‘Why, there’s Elly running along in her wild way. She ought to know that she’s not a child now,’ said Percy, who understood it was a good thing to divert a fellow’s thoughts from himself and his troubles as soon as possible. ‘Hallo, Ell! Where are you running, like a rabbit, and never looking? and here we are, and here’s Jack.’

‘Oh, you have come!’ said Elly, suddenly perceiving them, with a flash of her eyes from one to another, but holding out her hand to John between them. ‘You ought to have been here yesterday, you know. What does it matter coming now? Jack, Aunt Mary wants you. Never mind the boys. Oh, you two, why didn’t you come yesterday? Don’t tell me you couldn’t have come if you had tried!’

‘We couldn’t, though,’ said Percy; while Dick, drawing his arm from John’s, stood abashed, making no reply. ‘You don’t know what a fellow old Scrymgeour is. He won’t give you leave. And to-day we came, you know, without asking. So we’ve got to be back before the gates are closed.’

‘I know,’ said Elly, ‘you’ve come to-day for your own pleasure; but when there was something serious to do, something you were wanted for—— John, do run; Aunt Mary is waiting for you, and afterwards you can see these two. You might have had sense enough,’ she added, as John left them; ‘you might have had heart enough—the last of the two old people that were always so nice to us—and then poor Jack. Papa saw it,’ said Elly, as if that was something unusual, ‘as well as Aunt Mary and me.’

‘Funerals are horrible things,’ said Dick, under his breath.

‘But what is the use of talking when we couldn’t manage it?’ said Percy, glibly. ‘We thought it better to come and see him, poor old beggar, after. And, I say, what’s all this about a mother? Has he got a mother? and perhaps a sister and a brother? and no doubt a nearer one still and a dearer one?’

‘How dare you laugh,’ cried Elly, stamping her foot: and ‘I say, stop that!’ said Dick, with a low growl.

John did not hear anything beyond the merest murmur of this conversation. He left them quarrelling, explaining themselves with that ease of brother and sisterhood which sets all politeness at defiance, and hurried on as Elly had directed him to see Mrs. Egerton. Perhaps John had not the same absolute confidence in her powers of consolation that her nephew had, but she had always been very kind to him, and he went with a sort of dull pleasure, knowing that she would be even more kind than usual to-day. She was in her own special room, the morning-room, which looked out over the shrubberies to the village street in the distance, and whence she saw, more or less, all that was going on. It was a room more useful than ornamental, with bookshelves filled with shabby books, which formed a sort of extra lending library for the parish, and cupboards full of the goods purchased for the Clothing Club, and all sorts of parish necessities; but it was also very bright, with its corner windows, one in each angle, and its air of occupation and cheerfulness. Mrs. Egerton looked up as John came in after a little tap at the door. She held out her hand to him across the table, where she was busy with the concerns of the parish, and drew him to a chair opposite to her.

‘Dear boy,’ she said, ‘how I have wanted to see you.’ Her smile was beaming warm with kindness. It was not love, but it was the nearest thing to it, and it warmed the chilled and famished youth.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I hope you were coming to me of yourself, John.’

‘I was on my way,’ he said.

‘That’s right! I thought you would not desert your old friends. I told Elly to look out for you, and, if you were not coming, to bring you. Now tell me, my dear boy, do you go or stay?’

‘We are going to-morrow, Mrs. Egerton.’

‘To-morrow? So soon as that? And you say we——’

‘With my mother, Mrs. Egerton.’

He grew a little pale, and so, it seemed, did she.

‘Is that—that lady your mother, John?’

‘Yes,’ he said, and no more.

‘And you knew all along that your mother was living? How strange that you never spoke of her—that we never heard—I hope, dear John, I—I trust——’

She had meant to say, ‘that she is kind to you.’ But her courage failed her in sight of his pale, set face.

‘We heard from her always regularly, but there seemed nothing to write about. She had given me up to my grandparents.’ John had to pause to get rid of the sob in his throat; but he was determined to tell all he knew, to leave nothing to be found out. ‘She has been living in London, with little time to herself.’

It was a curiously lame story. He felt it was so, as he told it; hitherto it had all seemed simple enough. He met Mrs. Egerton’s look of interest and her interrogative ‘Yes?’ with sudden confusion, as if it was all a made-up tale.

‘Yes?’ she said, and paused with her eyes full of a hundred questions expecting him to resume. But John had told everything he had to tell, and stopped short with no more to say. She sat looking at him for a minute longer expecting when he should resume. Then, as he said nothing, she asked, as if to make a beginning again and draw him on, ‘Are there any more of the family?’

‘I have a sister,’ John said.

‘Oh! a sister. I am very glad to hear it. I am extremely glad for your sake. A sister is so near—a sister will sympathise. I have seen—Mrs. Sandford, once: it seems so strange to say that name and not to mean your dear old grandmamma, my kind, true old friend.’ Mrs. Egerton’s bright eyes were moistened with tears, but John sat stolid in the stupidity of his grief, and made no sign. ‘Did you know I had seen her once?’ she said. ‘She is Mrs. Sandford, isn’t she? and that is your name? She must have married—a cousin, I suppose?’

John made no reply. He felt a sense of guilt come over him. He said to himself that she was not Mrs. Sandford, nor was that his name; but his lips were sealed. He did not himself know how it was. His discovery of his own childish name had led to no further discoveries, and in his own family no one had given him any help to understand how it was. The subject was one which now he could not enter upon with his mother; and he felt by instinct, though no warning had ever been given to him, that it was a subject he must not speak of to others. So he made no answer, but in his heart felt a pang of secret guilt. He had not been used to secrets, especially he had not been used to concealing anything about himself: and now, in the sting of this consciousness, he sat silent, unresponsive, feeling himself dull and blank in presence of the kind, genial, affectionate woman full of curiosity, who wanted to know everything. She wanted him to tell her everything—to confide in her: and she was disappointed that the boy to whom she had been so kind should close up all the avenues to his heart and make no reply. Then Mrs. Egerton opened her drawer and took out her present to John. She was very liberal in the way of presents, loving to give them, delighted to give pleasure to others. What she had got for John was a gift of real value, a pretty gold hunting-watch, which was much better than the silver one that his grandparents had given him. It was very pretty, very nice, very kind; but when he took the old shabby silver one out of his pocket which had been given him when he was a boy, which had never gone very well, in order to make place for the new one, he tried his best to thank his kind friend, but he held the little old watch in his hand and gazed at it with troubled eyes.

‘You must give it away to some one,’ said Mrs. Egerton. ‘It will be a pleasure for you to give it to some good lad—Hedger’s boy, perhaps, who has been with you so long.’

He murmured an assent, but put the old watch back again into another pocket with a quick revolt of feeling. Give it away—to Ned Hedger. Oh! no, no, not for the world! He would keep it all his life for grandmamma’s sake.

Then there was a tumult in the room with the entrance of all the young people, and John did his best to allow himself to be ‘cheered up’ by the boys as they intended. But he was not cheered up, and was very glad to steal away with Elly to go ‘once round the garden,’ she said, before he went away. The rectory garden had witnessed so many of the pleasures of his childhood. It was big and old-fashioned, with an orchard attached, where the children had roamed at their pleasure. The girl and the boy set out talking with a little show of vivacity, but, as they strayed along the shady paths, they got more and more silent. At the bottom of the orchard, where the long stretch of the common showed under the trees, and all was silent and full of recollections, Elly suddenly thrust her hand into his.

‘Oh, Jack!’ she said, ‘how will you bear going away? Always think of me just here under the old pear-tree. Look how it is coming out like a great white tower of blossoms. I shall come here and think of you; and that will keep us near to each other. And, Jack——’

‘Yes, Elly?’

‘If you should feel lonely or anything—if you should miss home very much—oh, just think! I’ll come and do my algebra here, and think of you. It will be always something—not like your grandmother, but always something—a little bit of a home just here under the pear-tree.’

‘Elly,’ said John, ‘will you do one thing for me? There is nobody but you that I would ask.’

‘Yes, I will, Jack; half-a-dozen. Tell me what it is.’

‘There are the two old chairs by the fire. They will be sold like all the rest. I’ve money enough to buy them, but nowhere to put them. Oh, Elly!’

‘They shall stand in my own room. I’ll always keep them there,’ said Elly, with enthusiasm, ‘the two dear old chairs! Oh! yes, yes, Jack; in my own room.’

‘Thanks, awfully,’ said John.

He grasped the little, warm hand she had put into his, and they stood for a moment holding each other, like two children, by the hand.

‘Oh, Jack! this is dreadfully like good-bye now!’

‘It is good-bye. Elly, you give the boys a kiss when they go away. Won’t you give me one too? Oh, not if you don’t like; it’s only because it seems cold, just shaking hands, after what you have said.’

There was no blush on John’s simple face. He meant in absolute sincerity what he said. The girl reddened, being, perhaps, a little more advanced in life, though a year younger than the boy. She turned away her head for the moment, but then turned to him again with a steady look, and suddenly inclined her head towards him.

‘Yes, Jack; it will be like being brother and sister really, and for good.’

‘For good,’ he repeated, touching her fresh cheek with honest, tender lips; and then they went back sedately to the house, very quiet, with a certain awe upon them. For it is a ceremonial, and a sad one, to say that first good-bye.

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

LONDON: PRINTED BY DUNCAN MACDONALD, BLENHEIM HOUSE.