The tutor himself, who had been "on the foundation" at Eton, had helped to fill me with anticipations of public-school life. It was decided that I also should go to Eton, but as an oppidan, and becoming already a partisan of my own part of the school, I often now disputed conclusions or questioned facts in my tutor's school anecdotes, which commonly tended to the sole glorification of the "collegers."
I must not omit to mention an interview that about this period took place between my father and Mrs. Bundle. It was one morning just after the Eton matter had been settled, that my nurse presented herself in my father's library, her face fatter and redder than usual from being swollen and inflamed by weeping.
"Well?" said my father, looking up pleasantly from his accounts. But he added hastily, "Why, bless me, Mrs. Bundle, what is the matter?"
"Asking your pardon for troubling you, sir," Nurse Bundle began in a choky voice, "but as you made no mention of it yourself, sir, your kindness being what it is, and the young gentleman as good as gone to school, and me eating the bread of idleness ever since that tutor come, I wished to know, sir, when you thought of giving me notice."
"Give you notice to do what?" asked my father.
"To leave your service, sir," said Mrs. Bundle, steadily. "There's no nurse wanted in this establishment now, sir."
My father laid one hand on Mrs. Bundle's shoulder, and with the other he drew forward a miniature of my mother which always hung on a standing frame on the writing-table.
"It is like yourself to be so scrupulous," he said; "but you will never again speak of leaving us, Mrs. Bundle. Please, for her sake," added my father, his own voice faltering as he looked towards the miniature. As for Nurse Bundle, her tears utterly forbade her to get out a word.
"If you have too much to do," my father went on, "let a young girl be got to relieve you of any work that troubles you; or, if you very much wish for a home to yourself, I have no right to refuse that, though I wish you could be happy under my roof, and I will see about one of those cottages near the gate. But you will not desert me—and Reginald—after so many years."
"The day I do leave will be the breaking of my heart," sobbed Nurse Bundle, "and if there was any ways in which I could be useful—but take wages for nothing, I could not, sir."