“Living at old Crockford’s,” he went on. “I don’t understand the story. The old man talked and talked, and Walter—”
“What has Walter to do with it, Edward? He has gone out without any breakfast. Have you sent him to see after anything? Where has he gone?”
“Gone! is he gone? Why, he’s gone to her, I suppose; that’s the amusing thing. He says ‘there’s things one man doesn’t tell to another;’ one man!—that’s how Wat speaks to me, Annie.” He gave a laugh which was far from joyful. “I think the boy’s gone off his head.”
“Wat says—I don’t know what you mean, Edward.”
“No more do I; it’s past understanding. It’s the sort of thing people talk of, but I never thought it would come in our way. It’s an entanglement with some girl in the village. Don’t you know what that means?”
“Edward!” cried the mother; and a flash of color like a flame passed over her face. She was confounded, and unable to make any comment even in her thoughts.
“You can’t take it in, and I don’t wonder; neither can I, that know more of the world than you can do. Our Wat, that has never seemed anything but a school-boy! Why, Horry will be saying presently, ‘There are some things that one man doesn’t tell to—’ I don’t know what the world is coming to,” he cried, sharply. When Sir Edward himself was taken by surprise he felt by instinct that something sudden and unexpected must have occurred to the world.
Lady Penton was perhaps still more taken by surprise than her husband. But she did not make any observations against the world. The sudden flush faded from her face as she sat opposite to him, her astonished eyes still fixed upon him, her hands crossed in her lap. But a whole panorama instantly revealed itself before her mind. How could she have been so blind? Walter had been absent continually, whenever he could get an opportunity of stealing away. The reading in the evening, and a hundred little kindly offices which he had been in the habit of performing for his sisters, and with them, had all dropped, as she suddenly perceived. For weeks past he had been with them very little, taking little interest in the small family events, abstracted and dreamy, wrapped in a world of his own. She saw it all now as by a sudden flash of enlightenment. “Some things a man doesn’t tell to another man”—oh, no, not even to another woman, not to his mother! How strange, bewildering, full of confusion, and yet somehow how natural! This was not her husband’s point of view. To him it was monstrous, a thing that never used to happen, an instance of the decay and degradation of the world. Lady Penton, though the most innocent of women, did not feel this. To her, with a curious burst of understanding, as if a new world had opened at her feet, it seemed natural, something which she ought to have expected, something that expanded and widened out her own world of consciousness. Walter, then, her boy, loved somebody. It brought a renewed, fainter flush to her cheek, and a wonderfully tender light to her eyes. She thought of that first, before it occurred to her to think (all being the work of a moment) who it was who had opened this new chapter in her boy’s life, and made Walter a man, the equal of his father. Oh, that he should have become the equal of his father, a man, loving, drawing to himself the life of another, he who was only a boy! This wonder, though it might have an acute touch in it, had also a curious sweetness. For Lady Penton was not the hungering jealous mother of one child, but the soft expansive parent of many, and never had shut herself up in the hope of retaining them altogether for her own.
“It is very strange,” she said, after a pause, “it takes a good time to accustom one’s self to such an idea” (which was not the case, for she had done it in the flash of a moment). “It would be quite nice—and agreeable,” she added, with some timidity, “if it was a—right person; but did you say, Edward—what did you say?”
“Nice!” he cried, with an explosion like thunder, or so it seemed to his wife’s ears, a little nervous with all that had happened. “You can’t have listened to what I have been saying. I told you plainly enough. A girl that has been living at old Crockford’s, a girl out of the village—no, worse, much worse, sent down from London, to be out of some one’s way—”