He did not kiss Edith, but he fanned her with his soft hat until she waved him off, and found voice to say:
“It is the heat, and your vivid description of that poor fellow’s death. Did you tell me he was married?”
She asked the question from an intense desire to know if anything had ever been said of herself in connection with the dead.
“No, he was not married, but there was some talk of an affaire du cœur between him and a young English girl, who went off soon after. There’s a bug on your dress, Miss Lyle. Why,”—and, as if it had just occurred to him, Godfrey continued,—“your name is the same as his. It cannot be, though, that you were at all related. He lived up near Alnwick. On our way from Scotland, father and I hunted up his friends, a sister and widowed mother,—poor but honest women, as the biographers say. The mother lives with her daughter, and we gave them a thousand dollars, and the young woman promised to call her little boy after me. The Governor,—that’s father,—did not quite like it, I guess, but I don’t see the harm. Why, I’ve named three different Dutch babies in Hampstead, all the children of Mrs. Peterkin Vandeusenhisen. Two of them are twins,—and I called one Godfrey Schuyler, and the other Schuyler Godfrey,—while the third, which happened to be a girl, was christened Alice Creighton,—that’s a young lady from New York, fathers ward, who is at Hampstead a great deal,—and so proud! You ought to have seen her bit of a pug nose go up when she heard the Dutch baby baptized. Why, she nearly jumped out of her skin when Mrs. Van,—as I call her for short,—on being asked for the name, replied: ‘Alice Creighton Vandeusenhisen, if you please.’ The last was a suggestion of my own, by way of making a more striking impression on Alice, because you see, Mrs. Vandeusenhisen had a son,—Peterkin, junior, who was in love with Miss Creighton, and used to send her cakes of maple sugar and sticks of molasses candy he made and pulled himself. You ought to see his hands! The day before the christening I dressed up like a gypsy and deceived the girls and told their fortune, and said Alice would marry a Dutchman, with a long name, like Vandue something. So complete was my disguise that they did not suspect me, and when Alice heard the name at church, Alice Creighton Vandeusenhisen, she started up as if to forbid the banns, and then catching sight of my face she understood it at once, and was so angry, and when we were home from church she cried and said she hated me and would never speak to me again. But she got over it, and last Christmas sent a wax doll with a squawk in its stomach to her namesake.”
Godfrey had wandered very far from the woman on the heather hills who had called Abelard Lyle her son, and though Edith wished to know something more of her she did not venture to question her companion lest he should wonder at her interest in an entire stranger. She had laughed immoderately at his account of the babies named for himself and Miss Alice, and when he finished she said:
“You must be very fond of children, I think.”
“Yes, I am. I’d like a houseful, and when I marry I mean to have enough boys to make a brass band. I told Alice so once, and her nose went higher than it did when she heard the baby’s name. She called me a wretch, and an insulting dog, and said she hated boys, and me most of all. I knew she didn’t, though, because you see,—well, Alice has ten thousand a year, and that will straighten the worst case of turn-up nose in the world. She is an orphan and father is her guardian, and he and mother and Uncle Calvert, that’s my half-uncle and Alice’s, too, put their heads together and thought she’d be a good match for me, and it is rather an understood thing that we will marry some time, but I don’t believe we are half as likely to as if they’d said nothing about it. A fellow don’t want his wife picked out and brought to him off-hand as Eve was brought to Adam.”
Here Godfrey paused, and rising from his chair shook down his pants, a habit of his when he was interested or excited, and as his sister Julia said, “had talk on the brain.” He certainly had it now, for Edith was the first one he had found whom he had cared to talk to since leaving the ship, and after two or three shakes he resumed his seat, and told her of himself particularly; how he was going to college the next year, if he was home in time, and after that intended to study law and distinguish himself, if possible.
“Mother was very proud of me, and hoped great things of me,” he said. “I do not wish to disappoint her, for though she is dead, I cannot help thinking that she knows about me just the same, and when I am tempted to yield to what you call the small vices, I always feel her thin white hand on my head where she laid it not long before she died, and said, ‘Be a good and great man, Godfrey, and avoid the first approaches of evil.’ Mother was what they call a fashionable woman, but she was good before she died, and so sure as there is a heaven, so sure she is there, and I’ve never smoked, nor touched a drop of spirits, nor sworn a word since she died, and I never mean to either.”
Godfrey’s voice was low and tender, and his manner subdued when he spoke of his mother, but very different when he touched upon his sisters and ridiculed Julia’s fine lady airs and Emma’s readiness to be stuffed,—his definition for believing everything she heard, even to the most preposterous story. They were at Schuyler Hill now, he said, and Alice was there too, studying with their governess, Miss Browning, who, between the three, was awfully nagged, though she was quite as airy and stuck-up as Alice and Jule, and called him “that dreadful boy!”