“I am fed up with our daughter’s behavior,” the Lady Burney repeated, rising. “I will go now and speak to her alone.” Then she too vanished, ignoring alike her husband’s half-begun remonstrance and Jeremy’s second bow.
It was with some amazement that Jeremy found himself alone again with the old man. His brain staggered under a multitude of impressions. The astonishing locution employed by the great lady had been hardly respectable in his own day, and it led him to consider the strange, pleasant accent which had struck him in Roger Vaile’s first speech and which was so general that already his ear accepted it as unremarkable. Was it, could it be, an amazing sublimation of the West Essex accent, which in an earlier time had been known as Cockney? Then his eye fell on the silent, now drooping figure of the Speaker, and recalled him to the odd under-currents of the family scene he had just beheld.
“My wife comes from the west,” said the Speaker in a quiet, tired voice, catching his glance, “and sometimes she uses old-fashioned expressions that maybe you would not understand ... or perhaps they are familiar to you.... But tell me, how would a father of your time have punished Eva for her behavior?”
“I don’t know,” Jeremy answered uncomfortably. “I don’t know what she did that was wrong.”
The Speaker smiled a little sadly. “Like me, she is ... is unusual. She should not have addressed you first or taken the lead so much in speaking to you. I fear any other parent would have her whipped. But I—” his voice grew a little louder, “but I have allowed her to be brought up differently. She can read and write. She is different from the rest, like me ... and like you. I have studied to let her be so ... though she hardly thinks it ... and I daresay I have not done all I should. I have been busy with other things and between the old and the young.... I was already old when she was born—but now you....” His voice trailed away into silence, and he considered Jeremy with full, expressionless eyes. At last he said, “Come with me and I will make arrangements for your reception here. In a few days I shall have something to show you and I shall ask your help.” Jeremy followed, his mind still busy. His absurd premonitions had been driven away by tangled speculations on all these changes in manners and language.
CHAPTER VI
THE GUNS
1
DURING the days that immediately followed, the Speaker left Jeremy to make himself at home as best he could in the new world. For a time Jeremy was inclined to fear that by a single obstinacy he had forfeited the old man’s favor. He had been removed from the little room which he had first occupied to another, larger and more splendidly furnished, near the Speaker’s own apartments. But he had pleaded, with a rather obvious confidence in his right to insist, that he should be allowed to continue his friendship with Roger Vaile. Some obscure loyalty combined with his native self-will to harden him in this desire; and the Speaker was displeased by it. He had evidently had some other companion and instructor in mind.
“The young man is brainless, like all his kind,” he objected. “You will get no good from him.”
“But he did save my life. Why would he think of me if I forgot him now?”