Chapter Ten.
New-Found Relations.
“Speak of me as I am: nothing extemporate.”
Shakespeare.
The drowsy cabman was aroused from his slumbers to be, rather to his surprise, paid and dismissed, but paid so handsomely that he went off thinking himself for once in the way of good luck. Then Mr Morison said a few words to his coachman and, getting into the brougham, took his seat beside his niece.
“Lettice,” he said quietly, speaking at once to relieve her embarrassment, “I have told the coachman to drive round a quiet way before we go home, to give you time to tell me all you can, every detail, about Arthur, so that we may not lose an hour. Will you now give me the whole particulars?”
Calmed by his quiet, almost matter-of-fact manner, Lettice did so, though the recital led her into much painful to relate. For now that, thanks to the terrible anxiety through which she was passing, the scales had fallen from her eyes, she saw in its true light, even perhaps with exaggerated harshness—for Lettice was never one to do things by halves—her own wilful blindness, her own prejudice, unreason, and self-will. And when she came to tell her uncle how she had written to Arthur, she altogether broke down.
“I had better show you his letter,” she said, amidst her tears; “it will make you understand him. He has exaggerated, has he not?” she said, looking up wistfully. “If he had not been overstrained and morbid, he would not have taken it up so, would he?”
She sat quietly waiting till Mr Morison had read the letter. His face was very grave as he handed it back to Lettice. But it was grave with anxiety not with indignation.
“He was certainly in a very excited and morbid state when he wrote this,” he said. “He has been overworking himself probably. No one in possession of their senses would do anything but laugh at his imagining himself disgraced for life by having failed in his first attempt at passing for Woolwich;” and Mr Morison could not help smiling.
“I am afraid I helped him to think so,” said Lettice; “you see, he refers to what I wrote. I could not understand his seeming so much less in earnest than he used to be, and so spiritless, and I wrote meaning to rouse him. I did not know, that is my only excuse—indeed, I did not know till now, what explains it all—the dislike he had taken to his intended profession,” she added earnestly.