‘I should like that,’ cried the boy; ‘and I suppose you can fire a gun, Beau,’ he added, after a moment’s hesitation, scrutinising his stepfather closely, glad to have the chance of one insult, but something afraid of the response.
‘Tom!’ cried his mother, in a warning tone.
‘More or less,’ said Beaufort languidly; ‘enough to hit a Dutchman if there was one before me—you know they’re very broad. At Guildford people are buried on the top of a hill for the sake of the view. Yes, I think Surrey would do.’
‘Am I to go to Eton straight off, mother—is that in Surrey? I want to go a good long way off. I don’t want to be near home. You would be coming to see me, and Jan, and kiss me, and call me “Tom,” and make the other fellows laugh.’
‘What should you be called but Tom?’ said Lady Car, with a smile.
‘Torrance!’ cried the child with pride, as who should say Plantagenet. She had been looking at him, smiling, but at this utterance of the boy Lady Car started and turned burning red, then coldly pale. Why should she? Nothing could be more fantastic, more absurd, than the feeling. She had done no harm in making a second marriage, in which she had found happiness, after the first one, which had brought nothing but misery. She had offended against no law, written or unwritten. She had wiped out Torrance and his memory, and all belonging to him (except his money), for years. Why should the name which she had once borne, which was undeniably her son’s name, affect her so deeply now? The smile became fixed about the corner of her mouth, but the boy, of course, understood nothing of what was passing in his mother’s mind, though he stared at her a little as if he did, increasing her confusion. ‘The fellows never call a fellow by his christened name,’ said Tom, great in the superiority of what he had learned from various schoolboys on their travels. These were things, he was aware, which of course women didn’t know.
‘You’d better come and have a stroll with me, Master Tom,’ said Beaufort. ‘I’ll show you Piccadilly, which is always something; as for the park, you wouldn’t care for it: there are no riders in the Row now. You see, as I told you, there’s nobody in London. Come, get your hat, quickly.’
‘Me too,’ said little Janet, with a pout of her small mouth.
‘Not any ladies to-day, only two fellows, as Tom says, taking a stroll together.’
‘In a moment, Beau!’ cried Tom, delighted, rushing to get his hat. ‘I told you, Jan, old Beau’s a gentleman—sometimes,’ the boy added, as his sister ran after him to see what arrangements of her own she could make to the same end.