To the boy these words were meaningless. The creamy drawl with which they were uttered robbed them of the vicious or ferocious, making them mere humorous explosions. He could laugh at them, and yet he laughed with a feeling of discomfort.
The discomfort was the greater because in kindness to him lay the one point as to which the couple were agreed. Making no attempt to reconcile elements so discordant, all he could do was to soften the conditions which each found distasteful. He kept the house tidier for the man; he did for the woman a few of the things her husband overlooked.
"It's him that ought to do that," she would point out, in dull rebellion. "He's doing it for some other woman I'll be bound. Who is that woman that he meets?"
Conjugal betrayal was also new to Tom, and not easily comprehensible. That a man with a wife should also be "going with a girl" was a possibility that had never come within his experience while living with the Tollivants. He had heard a good many things from Art, as also from some other boys, but this event seemed to have escaped even their wide observation. It would have escaped his own had not Mrs. Quidmore harped on it.
"I do believe he'd like to see me in my grave. I'm in their way, and they'd like to get me out of it. Oh, you needn't tell me! Couldn't you keep an eye on him, and tell me what she's like?"
For Mrs. Quidmore's sake he watched Mr. Quidmore, but as he didn't know what he was watching him for the results were not helpful. And he liked them both. He might have said that he loved them both, since loving came to him so easily. Mrs. Quidmore washed and mended his clothes, and whenever she went to Harfrey or some other town she added to his wardrobe. Mr. Quidmore was forever dropping into his ear some gentle, honeyed confidence of which Mrs. Quidmore was the butt. Neither of them ever scolded him, or overworked him. He was in the house almost as a son. And then one day he learned that he was to be there altogether as a son.
XII
He never knew how and when the question as to his adoption had been raised, or whether the husband or the wife had raised it first. Here, too, the steps were taken with that kind of mystification which shrouded so much of his destiny. He himself was not consulted till, apparently, all the principal parties but himself had decided on the matter. One of the Guardians, or a representative, asked him the formal question as to whether or not he should like it, and being answered with a Yes, had gone away. The next thing he knew he had legally become the son of Martin and Anna Quidmore, and was to be henceforth called by their name.