“They want him to go next month,” said Mrs. Wise.
Silence fell on the table; every one’s heart and nearly every one’s eyes were filled. Alf, bright-eyed, jolly little thick-set Alf to be going away from them, thousands of miles away—why, it was as if Death had stalked suddenly into the room and selected the merriest of them all for its victim!
“Next month!” gasped Phyl.
“They have a representative here at present,” said the doctor. “His passage is taken by the Ormuz. We must tell the lad soon.”
But what a thing to tell a home-loving laddie! The dead mother’s people had made overtures at last. There were only a father and a spinster sister left, for death had broken up their proudly serried ranks of late, and the spirits of those remaining were broken too—in a certain degree.
When Mrs. Wise died they went to Sunnymeade for the funeral, and there saw Alf. The other four boys they took no notice of, for they were all their father’s boys entirely; Alf alone had the eyes and hair and manner the grandfather remembered in his [206] ]daughter when she was a child, and dear to his heart. More than this, Alf was “Alfred Wyndham Mergell Wise,” every name his grandfather’s. They were asking now to have him given to them entirely. The old man had been a merchant, and had made a big fortune; the daughter had a large income of her own,—all would be Alf’s, for they had no other relatives they cared to think of leaving it to. The boy would have the best of educations—English public school life followed by Oxford—and could choose for himself among all the professions. He would have the advantage of travel, for the grandfather had left Australia for ever, and wintered on the Continent, and spent the summer in England. The doctor felt he must accept the offer. He himself could give the boy no advantages; his very schooling at a second-rate grammar-school was a serious item, and the future he could not even think of, crippled as he was with such a family and so narrow a purse. Clif and Ted were fighting their way into the world without help from him; Alf would certainly be forced to do the same, had he only his father to depend upon. And the boy had not much strength of will or perseverance; left to himself he would probably twenty years hence be occupying almost the same place in whatever office he was placed in now. It was plain it would be madness to refuse the offer; in after years the boy would be sure to upbraid them did they follow their own inclination.
[207]
]They had not told him yet, not wishing to unsettle him before all was decided, but the rest of the family knew, and their eyes used to follow his comings-in and goings-out, and their hearts would swell at his merry chatter.
“A month!” Phyl echoed again.
Mrs. Wise forced the tremble from her voice.
“Here he is coming from the garden,” she said. “Your father is obliged to go out till nine, but when he comes back we are going to tell him. Please every one be quiet and just as usual until we call him into the drawing-room to us; I don’t want it broken to him in any careless fashion.”