"I could not help feeling anxious about her. I felt as if I were responsible for everything that could assail or hurt her; that every hair of her head was a charge upon my conscience. Her health, her happiness, her talents and tastes and fancies—it was mine to care for all these. My protégée, Standish called her. In this farewell walk through the dull Sunday streets, in the dull October twilight, it seemed as if she were much more than my protégée—my dearest, most sacred care, the purpose and the promise of my life.
"To-night we were to say good-bye. We were to have parted at the door in Great Ormond Street; but, standing on the doorstep, waiting for the opening of that inexorable door, which would swallow her up presently, like a tomb, I felt all at once that I could not sacrifice this last evening. Standish was dining out. There would only be loneliness and a roast chicken awaiting me at half-past seven. The chicken might languish, uneaten; the ghosts might have the dull, commonplace room; I would finish the evening with Martha's tea and toast, and hear Esperanza sing her favourite numbers of Handel and Mendelssohn, to the accompaniment of an ancient Stoddart piano, a relic of the schoolroom in my Suffolk home, the piano on which my mother took her first music-lesson.
"It was an evening in Elysium. A back parlour is sometimes large enough to contain paradise. I did not question my own heart, or analyze my beatific sensations. I ascribed at least half my happiness to Handel and Mendelssohn, and that feeling of exaltation which only sacred music can produce. There were no anxious questionings in my mind till after I had said good-bye to Esperanza—good-bye, till the third week in December—and had left the house. Those uneasy questionings were inspired by my dear old Martha, who opened the hall door for me, and said gravely, as I shook hands with her—
"'It would never do, Mr. George. I know what kind of lady your mother is, as well as anybody. It would never do.'
"I did not ask her what it was that would never do; but I carried a new sense of trouble and difficulty out into the autumn wind.
CHAPTER IX.
"A WHITE STAR MADE OF MEMORY LONG AGO."
"'It would never do.' Those words of Martha's—so earnestly spoken by the kind soul who cared for me almost as tenderly as a mother cares for her own—haunted me all through the rapid run to Cambridge, walked the quadrangles of Trinity with me, tramped the Trumpington Road upon my shoulders, like that black care which sits behind the traveller. 'It would never do.' No need to ask my good Martha for the meaning of that emphatic assertion. I knew what shape her thoughts had taken as she watched me sitting by the little square piano—the old, old piano, with such a thin, tinkling sound—listening to that seraphic voice, and looking at that delicate profile and exquisite colouring of faintly flushed cheek, lifted eye, and shadowy hair. My old nurse had surprised my secret almost before I knew it myself; but, by the time I was back in my shabby ground-floor sitting-room at Trinity, I knew as well as Martha knew that I had let myself fall deep in love with a girl whom I could never marry with my mother's approbation. I might take my own way in life and marry the girl I loved; but to do so would be to forfeit my mother's affection, to make myself an outcast from her house.
"'I know what kind of a lady your mother is,' said Martha, in her valedictory address.
"Was I, her son, likely to be ignorant of the mother's character, or unable to gauge the strength of her prejudices—prejudices that seemed so much a part of her nature as to form a strong argument against Locke's assertion that there are no innate ideas? Indeed, in reading that philosopher's famous chapter, it always seemed to me, that if the average infant had to begin the A B C of life at the first letter, my mother must be a 'sport' or exception to the general rule, and must have been born with her brain richly stocked with family pride and social distinctions. In all the years I had lived with her I had never seen her unbend to a servant, or converse on equal terms with a tradesman. She had a full appreciation of the value of wealth when it was allied with good birth; but the millionaire manufacturer or the lucky speculator belonged to that outer circle of which she knew nothing, and of which she would believe no good.