"He says you must go to the rectory when you want to see him. You must remember you have come back to a family with old-fashioned notions. Your uncle thought I ought to have you to myself in the first hour or two. He remembered that I had not seen my son for fifteen years."
"Ah, by Jove! fifteen years—so it is!" said Harold, taking his mother's hand and drawing it under his arm; for he had perceived that her words were charged with an intention. "And you are as straight as an arrow still; you will carry the shawls I have brought you as well as ever."
They walked up the broad stone steps together in silence. Under the shock of discovering her son's Radicalism, Mrs. Transome had no impulse to say one thing rather than another; as in a man who had just been branded on the forehead all wonted motives would be uprooted. Harold, on his side, had no wish opposed to filial kindness, but his busy thoughts were determined by habits which had no reference to any woman's feelings; and even if he could have conceived what his mother's feeling was, his mind, after that momentary arrest, would have darted forward on its usual course.
"I have given you the south rooms, Harold," said Mrs. Transome, as they passed along a corridor lit from above and lined with old family pictures. "I thought they would suit you best, as they all open into each other, and this middle one will make a pleasant sitting-room for you."
"Gad! the furniture is in a bad state," said Harold, glancing around at the middle room which they had just entered; "the moths seem to have got into the carpets and hangings."
"I had no choice except moths or tenants who would pay rent," said Mrs. Transome. "We have been too poor to keep servants for uninhabited rooms."
"What! you've been rather pinched, eh?"
"You find us living as we have been living these twelve years."
"Ah, you've had Durfey's debts as well as the lawsuits—confound them! It will make a hole in sixty thousand pounds to pay off the mortgages. However, he's gone now, poor fellow; and I suppose I should have spent more in buying an English estate some time or other. I always meant to be an Englishman, and thrash a lord or two who thrashed me at Eton."
"I hardly thought you could have meant that, Harold, when I found you had married a foreign wife."