There passed 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 did _tant bien que mal_
with 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. I would 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, all along, 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 any
one'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 for his 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
like this, 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 knows what 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 was noble 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.