“Ay, do,” said Rolfe; “that will be a new form of circumlocution.”
Sir Charles complied, with a smile. “Lady Bassett's theory is, that children derive their nature quite as much from their wet-nurses as from their parents, and she thinks the faults we deplore in Reginald are to be traced to his nurse; by-the-by, she is a dark woman too.”
“Well,” said Rolfe, “there's a good deal of truth in that, as far as regards the disposition. But I never heard color so accounted for; yet why not? It has been proved that the very bones of young animals can be colored pink, by feeding them on milk so colored.”
“There!” said Lady Bassett.
“But no nurse could give your son a color which is not her own. I have seen the woman; she is only a dark Englishwoman. Her arms were embrowned by exposure, but her forehead was not brown. Mr. Reginald is quite another thing. The skin of his body, the white of his eye, the pupil, all look like a reversion to some Oriental type; and, mark the coincidence, he has mental peculiarities that point toward the East.”
Sir Charles lost patience. “On the contrary,” said he, “he talks and feels just like an English snob, and makes me miserable.”
“Oh, as to that, he has picked up vulgar phrases at that farm, and in your stables; but he never picked up his musical genius in stables and farms, far less his poetry.”
“What poetry?”
“What poetry? Why, did not you hear him? Was it not poetical of a wounded, fevered boy to beg to be laid by the window, and to say 'Let me drink the moonshine?' Take down your Homer, and read a thousand lines haphazard, and see whether you stumble over a thought more poetical than that. But criticism does not exist: whatever the dead said was good; whatever the living say is little; as if the dead were a race apart, and had never been the living, and the living would never be the dead.”
Heaven knows where he was running to now, but Sir Charles stopped him by conceding that point. “Well you are right: poor child, it was poetical,” and the father's pride predominated, for a moment, over every other sentiment.