CHAPTER XIII.
Fourteen months passed quickly and quietly away in the Pennant household, during which time the eldest son never once revisited his old home. At first Rees wrote to his mother regularly once a week. Very short indeed his notes were, but they were always warmly affectionate, and they always contained messages for Deborah and a remittance of thirty shillings or two pounds towards the house-keeping expenses. Poor Mrs. Pennant, who had been told how difficult to get situations in London were, was crazily proud of the immediate success of her favorite son, and only afraid that, in the wish to send her as much as he could, he was denying himself more than he ought to do.
Before long, however, these dutiful attentions began to fail. The remittances dropped off first, and the notes contained excuses, to which his doting mother replied by immediate assurances that she was in no need of money. This was now true. The energetic Godwin, who was acquitting himself admirably in his new position, sent home to his mother more than enough money to keep the little household in comfort. He also persuaded Hervey to apply for his own old situation in the Monmouth Bank, with many artful suggestions as to its being only for a time, and just to show people that a young man of unusual intellect could make himself a position anywhere. Hervey had swallowed the bait, got the situation, and, rather to his own disgust, proved a very good clerk. Once in the bank, therefore, he remained there, as Godwin had expected. For however high his soul might soar, and however far his great mind might roam, his great body had a habit of remaining docilely, in cabbage-like fashion, wherever circumstances placed it.
Both Hervey and Godwin remained as much in love with Deborah as ever, but she resisted steadily every attempt to break down the brotherly and sisterly relation between her and them. Godwin, in spite of discouragement, persisted, every time that he paid his mother a visit, in renewing his advances. But he did so in such a prosaic, matter-of-fact manner that Deborah could treat them as a joke.
“Are you still in the same mind, Deb?” he would ask in an off-hand tone, at the first opportunity when they were left together.
“About what?” she would say, affecting to have forgotten such a ridiculous trifle as his last proposal.
“About marrying me.”
“Marrying you! Of course. What nonsense!”
“Very well, then, I hope you’ll die an old maid,” he would say viciously, to close the subject.
And Deborah would only laugh to herself in a contented manner, as if she felt that in that respect her fate was in her own hands.