“In person, yes, a little; in mind—no! a thousand times no!” Then, recollecting herself, she added, “It was not likely. Mr. Gwynne has been dead so many years that my son”—it was always my son—“has no remembrance of his father.”
Alas! that there should be some whose memories are gladly suffered to perish with the falling of the earth above them.
A thought like this passed through the mind of Angus Rothesay. “I fancy,” said he, “that I once met Mr. Gwynne; he was”—-
“My husband.” Mrs. Gwynne's tone suppressed all further remark—even all recollection of the contemptible image that was intruding on her guest's mind—an image of a young, roistering, fox-hunting fool. Rothesay looked on the widow, and the remembrance passed away, or became sacred as memory itself. And then the conversation glided as a mother's heart would fain direct it—to her only son.
“He was a strange creature ever, was my Harold. In his childhood he always teased me with his 'why and because;' he would come to the root of everything, and would not believe anything that he could not quite understand. Gradually I began to glory in this peculiarity, for I saw it argued a mind far above the common order. Angus, you are a father; you may be happy in your child, but you never can understand the pride of a mother in an only son.”
While she talked, her countenance and manner brightened, and Captain Rothesay saw again, not the serene, stern widow of Owen Gwynne, but the energetic, impassioned Alison Balfour. He told her this.
“Is it so? Strange! And yet I do but talk to you as I often did when we were young together.”
He begged her to continue—his heart warmed as it had not done for many a day; and, to lead the way, he asked what chance had caused the descendant of the Balfours to become an English clergyman?
“From circumstances. When Harold was very young, and we two lived together in the poor Highland cottage where he was born, my boy made an acquaintance with an Englishman, one Lord Arundale, a great student. Harold longed to be a student too.”
“A noble desire.”