'Take this girl away!' cried the General, laughing. 'Inference, indeed, you monkey! Why, there will be no living with you soon. You have finished supper. Go, all of you! Come, I dismiss you with my blessing! And, Trixy——'
'Yes, dearest,' bleated the little creature. 'May I stay? I'll be as quiet as a mouse.'
'And drink in every word I say. No, thank you. Tell Yaseen Khan to bring my hookah, and then make yourself as scarce as you can. I want to have a talk with mother.'
'I wish I were mother,' said Trixy, looking back discontentedly. But she obeyed her father.
[CHAPTER III]
'IN VISIONS OF THE NIGHT'
Leaving the girls to think over what they had heard, we return to the heir and his mother. Unlike as they were in appearance and temperament, a strong affection united them. Mrs. Gregory had her weaknesses—her tremors, her hesitations, her curious infelicities of speech and action; but all of these her son tolerated, even, in a sense, loved. What to him rose grandly above them was the self-forgetting affection which throughout his life had shone out before him.
She, naturally, adored him. He may not have been altogether what she would have liked him to be, but he was hers. She had watched him through his infancy; in his childhood she had made herself a child again that she might love the things he loved; she had nursed him in his little sicknesses; she had taught him his catechism, and creed, and collects, and the beautiful old stories of the Old and New Testaments; with a full heart and passionate prayers she had sent him out to the perilous little worlds of school and college; and now it was her chief interest and delight to provide him with the physical comforts which, she always maintained, kept the mind serene and the body vigorous.
Sometimes she was dimly conscious, poor soul, that he was moving away from her spiritually. Having caught scraps of his conversation here and there, she had begun to feel afraid that his ideas strayed beyond the limits of the faith she had so patiently taught him. During the daytime, when he was away, she would take up the book he had been reading last—a volume of transcendental poetry or a dry philosophical treatise, and try—oh! so pitifully—to understand what it was in it that interested him. Her efforts were all in vain. After an hour of patient effort she would put down the book with a heavy sigh. Her failure was a measure of the distance that separated them—a proof, if any were needed, that they moved in different worlds. 'What was the use of giving him to me,' she would say to herself sometimes with a curious bitterness, 'if he was only to belong to me in his childhood? He is very little mine now. He will soon not be mine altogether.'