“Let me hear it,” said Mr. Ferguson quickly. He returned to the chair at his table. Here might be, after all, a pleasant way out of this disconcerting interview. “Will you smoke?” he asked, and he held out a tin of cigarettes to his visitor.
“Now fire away!” he said. Mr. Ferguson was in a much more cheerful mood.
Discomfort, however, had not vanished from the room. It had passed from Mr. Ferguson. But it had entered into Paul. He stammered and was shy. Finally he blurted out:
“I find the explanation of everything in my father’s passionate love for my mother.”
Mr. Ferguson’s eyes turned slowly from the plane trees to Paul’s face.
“Will you go on, please?”
“My mother was French.”
“Yes. Virginia Ravenel. She sang for one season at Covent Garden. She was the most beautiful girl I ever saw in my life.” He laughed, tenderly caressing his recollections. “There was a time when I fancied myself your father’s rival. You have a look of her, Mr. Ravenel. She was fair like you,” and he was still musing with pleasure and just a touch of regret upon the pangs and ardours of that long-vanished season of summer and magic, when Paul Ravenel thoroughly startled him.
“I think that my mother died in giving me birth,” he said. “That’s how I explain to myself my father’s distance and uneasiness with me. I was the enemy, and worse than that, the enemy who had won. No wonder he couldn’t endure me, if with her death his whole world went dark. And everything else follows, doesn’t it? His friends came to mean—not nothing at all, but an actual annoyance, an encroachment on his grief. He shut himself up far away in a little town where no one knew him, and brooded over his loss. And men who do that become extravagant, don’t they, and lose their perspective, and do far-fetched, unreasonable things. Thus, my mother was French. So in a sort of distorted tribute to her memory, he changed his own nationality and took hers, and with it her name, and cut himself completely off from all his old world—a sort of monk of Love!”
Mr. Ferguson listened to the boy’s speech, which was delivered with a good deal of hesitation, without changing a muscle of his face. So this was why Paul could elate with a laugh the flight from the man with the medals and the lighted courtyard of the Guildhall. This was what he believed! Well, it was the explanation which a boy ignorant of life, nursed by dreams and poetry and loneliness and eager to believe the world a place of sunlight and high thoughts, might easily have conceived.