“Don’t, Jack, please,” she said. “It is better not to bring any other name into our talk.”
“I am sorry. Forgive me. Only it’s so much more terrible than you can know. It’s like a raging fire in one’s heart to feel as I do about it all. Only it does not make any difference to my feelings for you, and I do not think it ever will, even if you marry him. In any case I want you to feel that I am your slave wherever I am, and that nothing would be too much to ask me to do for you. I shall hear of all that happens from the aunties, and, perhaps, Paddy will write if she has time, and after a few years I shall come back to see you all.”
He stood up, and there was a new look of determination in his handsome, boyish face.
“I mean to try and make up for all the time I have wasted,” he said, “and prove that there is some good stuff in me yet.”
“Oh, Jack! you know we all think the world of you,” she urged.
“I know you have all combined to spoil me ever since I was a little chap,” with a wistful smile, “and I guess it was about time Mother Fate took me by the shoulders, so to speak, and pushed me out into the cold.
“She seems to have started off with the hardest blows first though,” he added. “It just feels like a clean sweep of everything I cared for most. To-morrow I must tell the aunts. I keep putting it off, because I can’t bear to begin, but it won’t make it any easier in the end. I think I’ll go for a tramp now. Trudging over the mountains helps a little and I feel—oh! I feel as if nothing in heaven or earth mattered much because of you, Eileen,” and he ground his teeth together to keep his self-command. A second later, feeling himself giving way, he strode across the room, and, passing out, closed the door quietly behind him.
Eileen rested her arms on the table, and leaning her tired head down upon them, sobbed her heart out in the old library.
That was the night Jack went up to his room and shut himself in without appearing at the supper-table, and the two little ladies clasped each other’s hands in mutely questioning distress, vaguely conscious that some new blow was about to fall. The next evening he told them.
They were sitting as usual, one on either side of the big, old-fashioned fireplace, and Miss Jane’s cap had got tilted a little to one side when she went to the door to speak to Eliza Spencer, whose baby had the whooping-cough. Miss Mary’s looked to be preparing itself to follow suit. They both wore little white shawls folded crosswise on their breasts and pinned with large Cairngorm brooches, which looked as if they might have come out of the Ark; and black silk mittens over their pretty little hands. In the morning the shawls were grey or black, and the mittens of fine wool, but in the evening, all through the winter, they sat on each side of the fireplace, dressed precisely the same, with the same species of knitting in their fingers, reminding one of two china ornaments. Almost ever since Jack could remember it had been the same, and he took in each little detail now with a new tenderness, from the quaint little elastic-side boots just showing on each footstool, to the softly waving white hair growing perceptibly thinner each year and the dainty caps that had such a habit of getting awry. Until that evening he felt he had never quite known how dear his two second mothers had become to him.