‘All this has nothing to do with Mr. Beresford,’ she said, quietly, but with a flush of rising offence.
‘No, no.’ He made a hesitating answer and looked at her. Mrs. Meredith fell into the snare.
‘If he has misunderstood my sympathy for his troubles, if he has ventured to suppose——’
‘Cara has gone out with her aunt,’ said Edward, coming in hastily; ‘but there is surely something wrong in the house. Mr. Beresford called me into his room, looking very much distressed. He told me to tell you that he thought of leaving home directly; then changed his mind, and said I was not to tell you.’
‘Why do you tell me then?’ cried his mother, with impatience. ‘What is it to me where he is going? Am I always to be worried with other people’s troubles? I think I have plenty of my own without that.’
Edward looked at her with great surprise. Such outbreaks of impatience from his gentle mother were almost unknown to him. ‘He looks very ill,’ he said: ‘very much disturbed: something must have happened. Why should not I tell you? Are you not interested in our old friend? Then something very extraordinary has happened, I suppose?’
‘Oh, my boy,’ cried Mrs. Meredith, in her excitement, ‘that is what Mr. Sommerville has come about. He says poor James Beresford comes too often here. He says I am too kind to him, and that people will talk, and he himself thinks—— Ah!’ she cried suddenly, ‘what am I saying to the boy?’
Edward went up to her hurriedly and put his arm round her, and thus standing looked round defiant at the meddler. Oswald, too, entered the room at this moment. The hour for luncheon approached, and naturally called these young men, still in the first bloom of their fine natural appetites, from all corners of the house. ‘What’s the matter?’ he said. But he had another verse of his poem in his head which he was in great haste to write down, and he crossed over to the writing-table in the back drawing-room, and did not wait for any reply. Edward, on the contrary, put the white shield of his own youthfulness at once in front of his mother, and indignant met the foe.
‘People have talked a long time, I suppose,’ said Edward, ‘that there was nobody so kind as my mother; and I suppose because you have trained us, mamma, we don’t understand what it means to be too kind. You do, sir?’ cried the young man with generous impertinence; ‘you think it is possible to be too innocent—too good?’
‘Yes, you young idiot!’ cried the old man, jumping up in a momentary fury. Then he cooled down and reseated himself with a laugh. ‘There is the bell for lunch,’ he said; ‘and I don’t mean to be cheated out of the luncheon, which, of course, you will give me, by the freaks of these puppies of yours, madam. But Oswald is a philosopher; he takes it easy,’ he added, looking keenly at the placid indifference of the elder son.