Mrs. Dennistoun had a great deal to say about herself and the motives
which had at the last been too much for her, which had forced her to
come after her children at a moment’s notice, feeling that she could
bear the uncertainty about them no longer; and it was a thing so unusual
with her to have much to say about herself that there was certainly
something apologetic, something self-defensive in this unaccustomed
outburst. Perhaps she had begun to feel a little the unconscious
criticism that gathers round the elder person in a house, the
inclination involuntarily--which every one would repudiate, yet which
nevertheless is true--to attribute to her a want of perception,
perhaps--oh, not unkindly!--a little blunting of the faculties, a
suggestion quite unintentional that she is not what she once was. She
explained herself so distinctly that there was no doubt there was some
self-defence in it. “I had not had a letter for three days.”
And Elinor was far more humble than her wont. “I know, mother: I felt as
if it were impossible to write--till it was over----”
“My darling! I thought at last I must come and stand by you. I felt that
I ought to have seen that all the time--that you should have had your
mother by your side to give you countenance.”
“I had John with me, mother.”
“Then it is over!” Mrs. Dennistoun cried.
And at that moment Pippo, very late, pale, and with eyes which were red
with sleeplessness, and perhaps with tears, came in. Elinor gave her
mother a quick look, almost of blame, and then turned to the boy. She
did not mean it, and yet Mrs. Dennistoun felt as if the suggestion, “He
might never have known had you not called out like that,” was in her
daughter’s eyes.
“Pippo!” she said. “Why, Elinor! what have you been doing to the boy?”
“He does not look well,” said Elinor, suddenly waking up to that anxiety
which had been always so easily roused in respect to Pippo. “He was very
late last night. He was at the House with John,” she added,
involuntarily, with an apology to her mother for the neglect which had
extended to Pippo too.
“There is nothing the matter with me,” he said, with a touch of
sullenness in his tone.
The two women looked at each other with all the vague trouble in their
eyes suddenly concentrated upon young Philip, but they said nothing
more, as he sat down at table and began to play with the breakfast, for
which he had evidently no appetite. No one had ever seen that sullen
look in Pippo’s face before. He bent his head over the table as if he
were intent upon the food which choked him when he tried to eat, and
which he loathed the very sight of--and did not say a word. They had
certainly not been very light-hearted before, but the sight of the boy
thus obscured and changed made all the misery more evident. There was
always a possibility of over-riding the storm so long as all was well
with Pippo: but his changed countenance veiled the very sun in the
skies.
“You don’t seem surprised to see me here,” his grandmother said.
“Oh!--no, I am not surprised. I wonder you did not come sooner. Have you
been travelling all night?” he said.
“Just as you did, Pippo. I drove into Penrith last night and caught the
mail train. I was seized with a panic about you, and felt that I must
see for myself.”
“It is not the first time you have taken a panic about us, mother,” said
Elinor, forcing a smile.
“No; but it is almost the first time I have acted upon it,” said Mrs.
Dennistoun, with that faint instinct of self-defence; “but I think you
must have needed me more than usual to keep you in order. You must have
been going out too much, keeping late hours. You are pale enough,
Elinor, but Pippo--Pippo has suffered still more.”
“I tell you,” said Philip, raising his shoulders and stooping his head
over the table, “granny, that there is nothing the matter with me.”
And he took no part in the conversation as they went on talking, of any
subjects but those that were most near their hearts. They had, indeed,
no thoughts at all to spare but those that were occupied with the
situation, and with this new feature in it, Pippo’s worn and troubled
looks, yet bad to talk of something, of nothing, while the meal went on,
which was no meal at all for any of them. When it was over at last Pippo
rose abruptly from the table.
“Are you going out?” Elinor said, alarmed, rising too. “Have you any
engagement with the Marshalls for to-day?”
“I don’t know,” Philip said; “Mr. Marshall was ill yesterday. I didn’t
see them. I’m not going out. I am going to my room.”
“You’ve got a headache, Pippo!”
“Nothing of the kind! I tell you there is nothing the matter with me.
I’m only going to my room.”
Elinor put her hands on his arm. “Pippo, I have something to say to you
before you go out. Will you promise to let me know before you go out? I
don’t want to keep you back from anything, but I have something that I
must say.”
He did not ask with his usual interest what it was. He showed no
curiosity; on the contrary, he drew his arm out of her hold almost
rudely. “Of course,” he said, “I will come in here before I go out. I
have no intention of going out now.”
And thus he left them, and went with a heavy step, oh, how different
from Pippo’s flying foot: so that they could count every step,
up-stairs.
“What is the matter, what is the matter, Elinor?”
“I know nothing,” she said; “nothing! He was like himself yesterday
morning, full of life. Unless he is ill, I cannot understand it. But,
mother, I have to tell him--everything to-day.”
“God grant it may not be too late, Elinor!” Mrs. Dennistoun said.
“Too late? How can it be too late? Yes; perhaps you are right, John and
you. He ought to have known from the beginning; he ought to have been
told when he was a child. I acknowledge that I was wrong; but it is no
use,” she said, wiping away some fiery tears, “to go back upon that
now.”
“John could not have told him anything?” Mrs. Dennistoun said,
doubtfully.
“John! my best friend, who has always stood by me. Oh, never, never. How
little you know him, mother! He has been imploring me every day, almost
upon his knees, to tell Pippo everything; and I promised to do it as
soon as the time was come. And then last night I was so glad to think
that he was engaged with John, and I so worn out, not fit for anything.
And then this morning----”
“Then--this morning I arrived, just when I would have been better away!”
“Don’t say that, mother. It is always, always well you should be with
your children. And, oh, if I had but taken your advice years and years
ago!”
How easy it is to wish this when fate overtakes us, when the thing so
long postponed, so long pushed away from us, has to be done at last!
There is, I fear, no repentance in it, only the intolerable sense that
the painful act might have been over long ago, and the soul free now of
a burden which is so terrible to bear.
Philip did not leave his room all the morning. His mother, overwhelmed
now by the new anxiety about his health, which had no part in her
thoughts before, went to his door and knocked several times, always with
the intention of going in, of insisting upon the removal of all
barriers, and of telling her story, the story which now was as fire in
her veins and had to be told. But he had locked his door, and only
answered from within that he was reading--getting up something that he
had forgotten--and begged her to leave him undisturbed till lunch. Poor
Elinor! Her story was, as I have said, like fire in her veins; but when
the moment came, and a little more delay, an hour, a morning was
possible, she accepted it like a boon from heaven, though she knew very
well all the same that it was but prolonging the agony, and that to get
it accomplished--to get it over--was the only thing to desire. She tried
to arrange her thoughts, to think how she was to tell it, in the
hurrying yet flying minutes when she sat alone, listening now and then
to Philip’s movements over her head, for he was not still as a boy
should be who was reading, but moved about his room, with a nervous
restlessness that seemed almost equal to her own. Mrs. Dennistoun, to
leave her daughter free for the conversation that ought to take place
between Elinor and her son, had gone to lie down, and lay in Elinor’s
room, next door to the boy, listening to every sound, and hoping, hoping
that they would get it over before she went down-stairs again. She did
not believe that Philip would stand out against his mother, whom he
loved. Oh, if they could but get it over, that explanation--if the boy
but knew! But it was apparent enough, when she came down to luncheon,
where Elinor awaited her, pale and anxious, and where Philip followed,
so unlike himself, that no explanation had yet taken place between them.
And the luncheon was as miserable a pretence at a meal as the breakfast
had been--worse as a repetition, yet better in so far that poor Pippo,
with his boyish wholesome appetite, was by this time too hungry to be
restrained even by the unusual burden of his unhappiness, and ate
heartily, although he was bitterly ashamed of so doing: which perhaps
made him a little better, and certainly did a great deal of good to the
ladies, who thus were convinced that whatever the matter might be, he
was not ill at least. He was about to return up-stairs after luncheon
was over, but Elinor caught him by the arm: “You are not going to your
room again, Pippo?”
“I--have not finished my reading,” he said.
“I have a claim before your reading. I have a great deal to say to you,
and I cannot put it off any longer. It must be said----”
“As you please, mother,” he replied, with an air of endurance. And he
opened the door for her and followed her up to the drawing-room, the
three generations going one before the other, the anxious grandmother
first, full of sympathy for both; the mother trembling in every limb,
feeling the great crisis of her life before her; the boy with his heart
seared, half bitter, half contemptuous of the explanation which he had
forestalled, which came too late. Mrs. Dennistoun turned and kissed
first one and then the other with quivering lips. “Oh, Pippo, be kind to
your mother; she never will have such need of your kindness again in all
your life.” The boy could almost have struck her for this advice. It
raised a kind of savage passion in him to be told to be kind to his
mother--kind to her, when he had held her above all beings on the earth,
and prided himself all his life upon his devotion to her! What Mrs.
Dennistoun said to Elinor I cannot tell, but she clasped her hands and
gave her an imploring look, which was almost as bitterly taken as her
appeal to Philip. It besought her to tell everything, to hide nothing;
and what was Elinor’s meaning but to tell everything, to lay bare her
heart?
But once more at this moment an interruption--the most wonderful and
unthought-of of all interruptions--came. I suppose it must have been
announced by the usual summons at the street-door, and that in their
agitation they had not heard it. But all that I know is, that when Mrs.
Dennistoun turned to leave the mother and son to their conversation,
which was so full of fate, the door of the drawing-room opened almost
upon her as she was about to go out, and with a little demonstration and
pride, as of a name which it was a distinction even to be permitted to
say, of a visitor whose arrival could not be but an honour and
delightful surprise, the husband of the landlady--the man of the house,
once a butler of the highest pretensions, now only condescending to
serve his lodgers when the occasion was dignified--swept into the room,
noiseless and solemn, holding open the door, and announced “Lord St.
Serf.” Mrs. Dennistoun fell back as if she had met a ghost; and Elinor,
too, drew back a step, becoming as pale as if she had been the ghost her
mother saw. The gasp of the long breath they both drew made a sound in
the room where the very air seemed to tingle; and young Philip, raising
his head, saw, coming in, the man whom he had seen in court--the man who
had gazed at him in the theatre, the man of the opera-glass. But was
this then not the Philip Compton for whom Elinor Dennistoun had stood
forth, and borne witness before all the world?
He came in and stood without a word, waiting for a moment till the
servant was gone and the door closed; and then he advanced with a step,
the very assurance and quickness of which showed his hesitation and
uncertainty. He did not hold out his hands--much less his arms--to her.
“Nell?” he said, as if he had been asking a question, “Nell?”
She seemed to open her lips to speak, but brought forth no sound; and
then Mrs. Dennistoun came in with the grave voice of every day, “Will
you sit down?”
He looked round at her, perceiving her for the first time. “Ah,” he
said, “mamma! how good that you are here. It is a little droll though,
don’t you think, when a man comes into the bosom of his family after an
absence of eighteen years, that the only thing that is said to him
should be, ‘Will you sit down?’ Better that, however, a great deal, than
‘Will you go away?’”
He sat down as she invited him, with a short laugh. He was perfectly
composed in manner. Looking round him with curious eyes, “Was this one
of the places,” he said, “Nell, that we stayed in in the old times?”
She answered “No” under her breath, her paleness suddenly giving way to
a hot flush of feverish agitation. And then she took refuge in a vacant
chair, unable to support herself, and he sat too, and the party
looked--but for that agitation in Elinor’s face, which she could not
master--as if the ladies were receiving and he paying a morning call.
The other two, however, did not sit down. Young Philip, confused and
excited, went away to the second room, the little back drawing-room of
the little London house, which can never be made to look anything but an
anteroom--never a habitable place--and went to the window, and stood
there as if he were looking out, though the window was of coloured
glass, and there was nothing to be seen. Mrs. Dennistoun stood with her
hand upon the back of a chair, her heart beating too, and yet the most
collected of them all, waiting, with her eyes on Elinor, sign to know
her will, whether she should go or stay. It was the visitor who was the
first to speak.
“Let me beg you,” he said, with a little impatience in his voice, “to
sit down too. It is evident that Nell’s reception of me is not likely to
be so warm as to make it unpleasant for a third party. There was a
fourth party in the room a minute ago, if my eyes did not deceive me.
Ah!”--his glance went rapidly to where Philip’s tall boyish figure, with
his back turned, was visible against the further window--“that’s all
right,” he said, “now I presume everybody’s here.”
“Had we expected your visit,” said Mrs. Dennistoun, faltering, after a
moment, as Elinor did not speak, “we should have been--better prepared
to receive you, Mr. Compton.”
“That’s not spoken with your usual cleverness,” he said, with a laugh.
“You used to be a great deal too clever for me, you and Nell too. But if
she did not expect to see me, I don’t know what she thought I was made
of--everything that is bad, I suppose: and yet you know I could have
worried your life out of you if I had liked, Nell.”
She turned to him for the first time, and, putting her hands together,
said almost inaudibly, “I know--I know. I have thought of that, and I am
not ungrateful.”
“Grateful! Well, perhaps you have not much call for that, poor little
woman. I don’t doubt I behaved like a brute, and you were quite right
in doing what you did; but you’ve taken it out of me since, Nell, all
the same.”
Then there was again a silence, broken only by the labouring, which she
could not quite conceal, of her breath.
“You wouldn’t believe me,” he resumed after a moment, “if I were to set
up a sentimental pose, like a sort of a disconsolate widower, eh, would
you? Of course it was a position that was not without its advantages. I
was not much made for a family man, and both in the way of expense and
in--other ways, it suited me well enough. Nobody could expect me to
marry them or their daughters, don’t you see, when they knew I had a
wife alive? So I was allowed my little amusements. You never went in for
that kind of thing, Nell? Don’t snap me up. You know I told you I never
was against a little flirtation. It makes a woman more tolerant, in my
opinion, just to know how to amuse herself a little. But Nell was never
one of that kind----”
“I hope not, indeed,” said Mrs. Dennistoun, to whom he had turned, with
indignation.
“I don’t see where the emphasis comes in. She was one that a man could
be as sure of as of Westminster Abbey. The heart of her husband rests
upon her--isn’t that what the fellow in the Bible says, or words to that
effect? Nell was always a kind of a Bible to me. And you may say that in
that case to think of her amusing herself! But you will allow she
always did take everything too much _au grand serieux_. No? to be sure,
you’ll allow nothing. But still that was the truth. However, I’ll allow
something if you won’t. I’m past my first youth. Oh, you, not a bit of
it! You’re just as fresh and as pretty, by George! as ever you were.
When I saw you stand up in that court yesterday looking as if--not a
week had passed since I saw you last, by Jove! Nell---- And how you were
hating it, poor old girl, and had come out straining your poor little
conscience, and saying what you didn’t want to say--for the sake of a
worthless fellow like me----”
A sob came out of Elinor’s breast, and something half inaudible besides,
like a name.
“I can tell you this,” he said, turning to Mrs. Dennistoun again, “I
couldn’t look at her. I’m an unlikely brute for that sort of thing, but
if I had looked at her I should have cried. I daresay you don’t believe
me. Never mind, but it’s true.”
“I do believe you,” said the mother, very low.
“Thank you,” he said, with a laugh. “I have always said for a
mother-in-law you were the least difficult to get on with I ever saw. Do
you remember giving me that money to make ducks and drakes of? It was
awfully silly of you. You didn’t deserve to be trusted with money to
throw it away like that, but still I have not forgotten it. Well! I came
to thank you for yesterday, Nell. And there are things, you know, that
we must talk over. You never gave up your name. That was like your
pluck. But you will have to change it now. It was indecent of me to have
myself announced like that and poor old St. Serf not in his grave yet.
But I daresay you didn’t pay any attention. You are Lady St. Serf now,
my dear. You don’t mind, I know, but it’s a change not without
importance. Well, who is that fellow behind there, standing in the
window? I think you ought to present him to me. Or I’ll present him to
you instead. I saw him in the theatre, by Jove! with that fellow Tatham,
that cousin John of yours that I never could bear, smirking and smiling
at him as if it were _his_ son! but _I_ saw the boy then for the first
time. Nell, I tell you there are some things in which you have taken it
well out of me----”
“Mr. Compton,” she said, labouring to speak. “Lord St. Serf. Oh, Phil,
Phil!----”
“Ah,” he said, with a start, “do you remember at last? the garden at
that poky old cottage with all the flowers, and the days when you looked
out for wild Phil Compton that all the world warned you against? And
here I am an old fogey, without either wife or child, and Tatham taking
my boy about and Nell never looking me in the face.”
Philip, at the window looking out at nothing through the
hideous-coloured glass, had heard every word, with wonder, with horror,
with consternation, with dreadful disappointment and sinking of the
heart. For indeed he had a high ideal of a father, the highest, such as
fatherless boys form in their ignorance. And every word made it more
sure that this was his father, this man who had so caught his eyes and
filled him with such a fever of interest. But to hear Phil Compton talk
had brought the boy’s soaring imagination down, down to the dust. He had
not been prepared for anything like this. Some tragic rending asunder he
could have believed in, some wild and strange mystery. But this man of
careless speech, of chaff and slang, so little noble, so little serious,
so far from tragic! The disappointment had been too sudden and dreadful
to leave him with any ears for those tones that went to his mother’s
heart. He had no pity or sense of the pathos that was in them. He stood
in his young absolutism disgusted, miserable. This man his father!--this
man! so talking, so thinking. Young Philip stood with his back to the
group, more miserable than words could say. He heard some movement
behind, but he was too sick of heart to think what it was, until
suddenly he felt a hand on his shoulder, and most unwillingly suffered
himself to be turned round to meet his father’s eyes. He gave one glance
up at the face, which he did not now feel was worn with study and
care--which now that he saw it near was full of lines and wrinkles which
meant something else, and which even the emotion in it, emotion of a
kind which Pippo did not understand, hidden by a laugh, did not make
more prepossessing--and then he stood with his eyes cast down, not
caring to see it again.
The elder Philip Compton had, I think, though he was, as he said, an
unlikely subject for that mood, tears in his eyes--and he had no
inclination to see anything that was painful in the face of his son,
whose look he had never read, whose voice he had never heard, till now.
He held the boy with his hands on his shoulders, with a grasp more full
perhaps of the tender strain of love (though he did not know him) than
ever he had laid upon any human form before. The boy’s looks were not
only satisfactory to him, but filled his own heart with an unaccustomed
spring of pride and delight--his stature, his complexion, his features,
making up as it were the most wonderful compliment, the utmost sweetness
of flattery that he had ever known. For the boy was himself over again,
not like his mother, like the unworthy father whom he had never seen. It
took him some time to master the sudden rush of this emotion which
almost overwhelmed him: and then he drew the boy’s arm through his own
and led him back to where the two ladies sat, Elinor still too much
agitated for speech. “I said I’d present my son to you, Nell--if you
wouldn’t present him to me,” he said, with a break in his voice which
sounded like a chuckle to that son’s angry ears. “I don’t know what you
call the fellow--but he’s big enough to have a name of his own, and he’s
Lomond from this day.”
Pippo did not know what was meant by those words: but he drew his arm
from his father’s and went and stood behind Elinor’s chair, forgetting
in a moment all grievances against her, taking her side with an energy
impossible to put into words, clinging to his mother as he had done when
he was a little child.