“If you do marry—never long for a son. Never build your hopes on him—trusting he will keep up your name, and be the stay of your old age. I had one boy, sir; he was more to me than all my daughters.”
A desperate question was I prompted to ask—I could not withhold it—though the old man's agitated countenance showed that it must be one passing question only.
“Is your son living?”
“No. He died young.”
This, then, must be the secret—simple and plain enough. He was “a boy”—he died “young,” perhaps about eighteen or nineteen—the age when boys are most prone to run wild. This lad must have done so; putting all the circumstances together, the conclusion was obvious, that in some way or other he had, before his death, or in his death, caused his father great grief and shame.
I could well imagine it; fancy drew the whole picture, filling it up pertinaciously, line by line. A man of Mr. Johnston's character, marrying late in life—as he must have done, to be seventy when his youngest child was not much over twenty—would be a dangerous father for any impetuous headstrong boy. A motherless boy too; Mrs. Johnston died early. It was easy to understand how strife would rise between him and the father, no longer young, with all his habits and peculiarities formed, sensitive, over-exacting; rigidly good, yet of somewhat narrow-minded virtue: scrupulously kind, yet not tender; alive to the lightest fault, yet seldom warming into sympathy or praise. The sort of man who compels respect, and whom, being oneself blameless, one might even love; but having committed any error, one's first impulse would be to fly from him to the very end of the earth.
Such, no doubt, had been the case with that poor boy, who “died young.” Out of England, no doubt, or surely they would have brought him home and buried him under the shadow of his father's church, and his memory would have left some trace in the family, the village, or the neighbourhood. As it was, it seemed blotted out—as if he had never existed. No one knew about him—no one spoke about him, not even the sisters, his playmates. So she—the second sister—had said. It was a tacit hint for me also to keep silence; otherwise I would have liked to ask her more about him—this poor fallen boy. I know how suddenly, how involuntarily, as it seems, a wretched boy can fall—into some perdition never afterwards retrieved.
Thinking thus—sitting by the bedroom fire with Mr. Johnston asleep opposite—poor old man, it must have been his boy's case and not his own which has made him so sensitive about only sons—I suddenly called to mind how, in the absorbing anxiety of the last three weeks—that day—the anniversary—-had slipped by, and I had not even recollected it. It could be forgotten then?—was this a warning that I might let it pass, if it would, into oblivion—and yield like any other man, to pleasant duties, and social ties, the warmth of which stole into me, body and soul, like this blessed household fire. It could not last—but while it did last, why not share it; why persist in sitting outside in the cold?
You will not understand this. There are some things I cannot explain, till the last letter, if ever I should come to write it. Then you will know.
Tea over, Miss Theodora came to see after “our patient,” as she called him, asking if he had behaved well, and done nothing he ought not to have done?