“Let’s walk fast,” he said, “your mother may be anxious over our delay.”
I was thinking within myself: “One of these days I shall go away. One of these days I shall be my own master, like grandfather.”
VII
THE FIRST DEPARTURE
A FEW days after this disappointing walk—perhaps even the next day—I went to my mother’s room to get a forgotten school book. I was already turning the latch of the door when I heard two voices. One, my mother’s, was familiar to my ear, but its tones were almost new to me, by reason of the firmness now mingled with its habitual gentleness; when we were little she had sometimes spoken to us in that tone to require more attention and earnestness in our little duties, or our lessons. As for the other, it must have been that of a stranger, even of some one asking for alms, for it came to my ear hushed, veiled, melancholy. What visitor was this whom my mother received in her room and not in the drawing-room? I dared neither go in nor let go of the latch, lest in falling it should betray my presence. Hooted to the spot, at once by timidity and curiosity, I listened to the dialogue going on within.
“I am sure you are mistaken,” my mother was saying. “The child is going through a crisis, but he is not different from his brothers and sisters; he is not estranged from us.”
“The chasm is deeper than you think, Valentine,” replied the other voice. “I feel that I am losing him. If you had seen him at Malpas, how inflexible he was, how he resisted my exhortations, almost my entreaties.”
“He is only a child.”
“Too mature a child. I can not yet be sure what it is that estranges him from us, but I shall find out. Ah, poor dear, there is no use in trying to reassure me; three years ago my father completed his cure by keeping him out of doors, but he did not give back to us the same child that we had entrusted to him: he has changed his heart, and it is in childhood that the heart is formed. This child is no longer ours.”
This child is no longer ours. The statement lifted me up with a sort of vanity. I belonged to no one. I was free. That liberty which grandfather had not been able to command, even in the blood of the days of June, had all of a sudden become mine!
I had recognised my father’s voice, and my parents were talking of me. But why had they so interchanged their attitudes that I had not at first recognised them? I had always supposed that they could not change. Mother was always anxious about nothing at all—when the wind blew or the thunder growled, even far away, she never failed to light the blessed candle; or her shadow behind her chamber window told us that she was watching for the return of the absent ones. She was never wholly at peace, unless we were all grouped around her, except, indeed, when praying, for she lived very near to God. It sometimes happened that father would laugh at her for her endless anxieties. During my illness, and longer ago, when the house had been put up for sale, it was he, always he, who kept up her woman’s courage, who assured her of the future, reminded her of the constant protection of Providence. I had never imagined them otherwise, and now behold they had changed parts,—it was mother who was uplifting father in his discouragement.