Her eye! The father stood confounded, not able to believe his ears. He made one more attempt at a question, not with words, but with a half-stupefied look, again silencing Crockford with his hand.
“I tell you, father,” cried Walter, with irritation, “there are things one man doesn’t tell another, not even if—” He was pleased, poor boy, with that phrase; but the examination, the discovery was intolerable to him. He gave a wave of his hand toward Crockford, as if saying, “Question him—hear him—hear the worst of me!” with a sort of contemptuous indignation; then shot between the two other men like an arrow, and was gone.
“Things one man doesn’t tell to another, even if it’s his father.” One man to another! was it laughable, was it tragical? Sir Edward, in the confusion of his soul, could not tell. He looked at Crockford, but not for information; was it for sympathy? though the old stone-breaker was at one extremity of the world and he at the other. He felt himself shaking his head in a sort of intercommunion with old Crockford, and then stopped himself with a kind of angry dismay.
“If you’ve anything to say on this subject, let me have it at once,” he said.
“I can talk more freely, sir, now as he’s gone. That young gentleman is that fiery, and that deceived. The young uns is like that. Sir Edward; us as is older should make allowances, though now and again a body forgets. I’m one that makes a deal of allowances myself, being a great thinker, Sir Edward, in my poor way. Well, sir, it’s this, sir—and glad I am as you’re by yourself and I can speak free. She’s nobody no more nor I am. She’s a little baggage, that’s what she is. How she come to me was this. A brother of mine, as has been no better than what you may call a rollin’ stone all his life, and has done a many foolish things, what does he do at last but marry a woman as had been a play-actress, and I don’t know what. They say as she was always respectable—I don’t know. And she had a daughter, this little baggage as is here, as was her daughter, not his, nor belonging to none of us. But her mother, she bothered me to ’ave ’er, to take her out of some man’s way as wanted to marry her, but his friends wouldn’t hear of it. And that’s how it is. How she came across Mr. Walter is more than I can tell. That’s just how things happens, that is. You or me, Sir Edward, begging your pardon, sir, it’s a thing that don’t occur to the likes of us; but when a young gentleman is young and tender-hearted, and don’t know the world—The ways of Providence is past explaining,” Crockford said.
Sir Edward stood with that habitual look in his face of a man injured and aggrieved, and full of a troubled yet mild remonstrance with fate, and listened to all this only half hearing it. He heard enough to understand in a dull sort of way what it was which had happened to his boy, a thing which produced upon him perhaps a heavier effect than it need have done by reason of the vagueness in which it was wrapped, the blurred and misty outlines of the facts making it so much more considerable. It was not what Crockford said it was, not the mere discovery that his son had got into a foolish “entanglement,” as so many have done before him, with some village girl, that produced this effect upon him. It was Walter’s words so strangely dislocating the connection between them, cutting the ground from under his feet, changing the very foundations of life; “things one man doesn’t tell to another”—one man!—to another. He kept saying it over in his mind with a bewilderment that kept growing, a confusion which he could not get right—one man, to another. It was this he was thinking of, and not what Crockford had said, when he went back to the dining-room, where all the children had finished breakfast, and his wife met him with a look so full of surprise. “What has kept you, Edward? everything is cold. Have you sent Wat out for anything? Has anything happened?” she said.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
MATERNAL DIPLOMACY.
“You had better send the children off to play, and never mind if everything is cold. It’s my own fault; it’s the fault of circumstances.” He seated himself at table as he spoke and helped himself to some of the cold bacon, which was not appetizing; nor had he much appetite. His face was full of care as he swallowed his cup of tea, keeping an eye uneasily upon the children as they were gradually coaxed and led and pushed away. When the door closed upon the last of them there was still a moment of silence. Sir Edward trifled with his cold bacon, he crumbled his roll, he swallowed his tea in large abstract gulps; but said nothing, his mind being so full, yet so confused and out of gear. And it was not till his wife repeated her question, this time with a tone of anxiety, that he replied,
“What is it? It’s something that has taken me all aback, as you see. It’s—something about a woman.”
“Something about a woman!” she repeated with the utmost astonishment; but had he said “something about a cabbage,” Lady Penton could not have been less alarmed.