“I should be glad, my Grace, if I felt more convinced that the minds of our children are really a blank as far as any knowledge of religion goes.”
“I am sure Mr. and Mrs. Fellowes——”
“Dearest, the idea is revolting! Fellowes, a gentleman! And his wife! She is your friend, that is sufficient.” He bowed as his grandfather, the courtliest man in a courtly court might have done. “But I fear that when very young the children may have received foreign impressions, the class that people the stable-yard are often quite versed in what they term ‘the truths of the Gospel’.”
“But so long ago?”
“Not so very long after all, and impressions are most tenacious things, more especially erroneous ones. Does the fact not hamper us daily, dearest? Even this moment,” he went on musingly, “after all these years, I can recollect praying at my mother’s knee with a quite astonishing fervour, which now seems next to reasonless, and yet I doubt if the impression of that fervour will ever leave me.”
“We can only hope, dearest,” she said.
Her husband’s fear depressed her, she was feeling just then, and rather to her cost, how very remarkably clinging old impressions were. They were hovering round her at that very moment and entwining her in a maze of the old dead visions of dead days, when she was a child herself and wore long lawn nightgowns with frilled sashes, and said prayers. She went over to the fire to make it up and ended by putting it out.
“Oh, Henry,” she said at last, from the hearthrug, shivering a little, “what if, after all, we might just as well have allowed our children to run along the common groove like those very fat children of Mrs. Manners’,—they seem wholesome and not devoid of intelligence. And then they are handsome and well grown, yet the boy is ten and not even in Latin; Mrs. Manners considers that in ten years the fact will make no difference in his career. On the contrary, look at Dacre, think of the load of anxiety and thought we have expended upon him and yet——” She broke off sadly.
Her husband regarded her for a minute with sympathizing eyes.
“Dearest,” he said at last softly, “you are apt to forget the fact that our poor Dacre is—I hate to hurt you, dear, but you know it—he is most unfortunately a throwing-back, and must follow the fate of his kind. He must enter the army,—it is deplorable, but so it must be.”