Gordon returned to his slow pace up and down the room, and as he went he talked:
“The fiercest animals have the smallest litters, and he was an only child, though he had been told he had a half-sister somewhere in the world. He was unmanageable in temper, sullenly passionate, a queer little bundle of silent rages and wants and hates—the sort people call ‘inhuman.’ There was never but one nurse, if I remember, who could manage him at all. He had a twisted foot—the gift of his mother, and added to by a Nottingham quack. He lived in lodgings,—cursed fusty they were, too, the fustiest in Aberdeen,—with his mother. He had never set eyes on his father; how he knew he had one, I can’t imagine. When he was old enough, he was sent to ‘squeel’, as they called it in Aberdeen dialect—day-school, where he learned to say:
‘God—made—man.
Let—us—love—Him,’
and to make as poor a scrawl as ever scratched over a frank. He was a blockhead, a hopeless blockhead! The master,—how devout and razor-faced and dapper he was! he was minister to the kirk also,—used to topsy-turvy the class now and then, and bring the lowest highest. These were the only times the boy was at the head. Then the master would say, ‘Now, George, man, let’s see how soon you can limp to the foot again!’ This was a jest, but when the others shouted, the boy used to turn cold with shame. Small wonder he didn’t learn, for he didn’t want to. A pity, too, Dallas, for in those days three words and a half-smile would have changed him. I venture it would take more than that to-day!”
He paused, his brows frowning, his lips drawn softly. When he went on, it was in a more constrained tone:
“One year, suddenly, everything changed. His guardian took him from the school and he had a tutor—a very serious, saturnine young man, with spectacles,”—Dallas had taken off his own and was polishing them earnestly with his handkerchief,—“who didn’t make the boy hate him—a curious thing! He was a great man already in the boy’s eyes, because he had been in America when the Colonies were fighting King George. The boy would have liked to be a colonist too—he had never been introduced to the gaudy charlatanry of kings and the powwowishness of rank. He hadn’t become a lord then, himself.
“This marvel of a tutor wasn’t pestilently prolix. He taught him no skimble-skamble out of the catechism, though he was a good churchman; but the first time the boy looked in those big horn spectacles, he knew there was one man in the world who could understand him. The tutor made him want to learn, too, and strangest of all, he never seemed to notice that his pupil was lame. How did he perform that miracle, Dallas?”
The older man set his glasses carefully on the ridge of his nose, as he shook his head with a little graceful, deprecating gesture that was very winning. Hobhouse’s eyes were tracing the design of the carpet.
“I remember once,” Gordon continued, “a strange thing happened. The boy’s father came to Aberdeen. One day—the boy was walking up the High Street with his tutor—some one pointed him out. To think that splendid-looking man in uniform was his father! He felt very pitiful-hearted, but he plucked up courage and went up to him and told him his name.”