His feelings as connected with Nora—sharpened and deepened as they all had been by his discovery of her painful narrative-were embittered still more by coming in contact with her parents. Old John was in the same helpless state of mind and body as before,—neither worse nor better; but waking up at intervals with vivid gleams of interest in the election at the wave of a blue banner, at the cry of “Blue forever!” It was the old broken-clown charger, who, dozing in the meadows, starts at the roll of the drum. No persuasions Dick could employ would induce his father to promise to vote even one Yellow. You might as well have expected the old Roman, with his monomaniac cry against Carthage, to have voted for choosing Carthaginians for consuls. But poor John, nevertheless, was not only very civil, but very humble to Dick,—“very happy to oblige the gentleman.”
“Your own son!” bawled Dick; “and here is your own grandson.”
“Very happy to serve you both; but you see you are the wrong colour.”
Then as he gazed at Leonard, the old man approached him with trembling knees, stroked his hair, looked into his face, piteously. “Be thee my grandson?” he faltered. “Wife, wife, Nora had no son, had she? My memory begins to fail me, sir; pray excuse it; but you have a look about the eyes that—” Old John began to weep, and his wife led him away.
“Don’t come again,” she said to Leonard, harshly, when she returned. “He’ll not sleep all night now.” And then, observing that the tears stood in Leonard’s eyes, she added, in softened tones, “I am glad to see you well and thriving, and to hear that you have been of great service to my son Richard, who is a credit and an honour to the family, though poor John cannot vote for him or for you against his conscience; and he should not be asked,” she added, firing up; “and it is a sin to ask it, and he so old, and no one to defend him but me. But defend him I will while I have life!”
The poet recognized woman’s brave, loving, wife-like heart here, and would have embraced the stern grandmother, if she had not drawn back from him; and, as she turned towards the room to which she had led her husband, she said over her shoulder,—
“I’m not so unkind as I seem, boy; but it is better for you, and for all, that you should not come to this house again,—better that you had not come into the town.”
“Fie, Mother!” said Dick, seeing that Leonard, bending his head, silently walked from the room. “You should be prouder of your grandson than you are of me.”
“Prouder of him who may shame us all yet?”
“What do you mean?”