‘You are very good to them, Edward—oh! very good. How can I ever thank you?’ said Lady Car, with tears in her eyes. Her nerves had been a little shaken by that shock, and by the vain perception that stole over her of two parties in the family, two that would become more distinctly two by the progress of years, unlike in nature and constitution, and even in name. It is not necessary to insist upon the family name of children travelling with their mother. No one had been much the wiser during these years of wandering. But Tom’s ‘Torrance!’ was a revelation, and opened before her possibilities unknown.
‘Good, am I? That’s all right, that’s something to the credit side, but I was not aware of it,’ said Beaufort, in his easy way; ‘all the same,’ he added, laughing, ‘Master Tom will want looking after if we are to make anything of him. He will want a tight hand, which, I fear, does not belong either to you or me.’
It cost Lady Car a pang to hear even this mild expression of opinion about her boy. A mother says many things, and feels many things, about her children which no one else may say before her. She looked at him wistfully, with a faint smile, which was full of pain. ‘He is only a child,’ she said, apologetically, ‘and then he will get that at school.’ She could not contradict him, and she could not argue with him. Poor little Tom! he was her own, though he might not be all she wished him to be—the plea rose to her lips unconsciously that he was fatherless, that he had drawbacks to contend against, poor child. What a plea to form even unconsciously in her mind! She looked at her husband with such a troubled and wistful appeal that his heart smote him. He laid his hand upon her head caressingly, and stooped to kiss her.
‘To be sure,’ he said; ‘the boy will be all right, Car. He has plenty of spirit, and that is the best thing, after all. Ready, Tom? Come along, then. I’m ready too.’
Lady Car followed him with her wistful eyes. They were not full of admiring delight, as when a mother watches her children going out with their father, proud of both him and them, and of their love for each other. What it must be to have a life without complications, full of unity, in which a woman can feel like that! Carry longed to whisper in her child’s ear, to bid him, oh! to be good, to mind what Beau said to him, to behave like a gentleman to one who was so kind—so kind! But she had to let him go without that warning, fearing that he would be disrespectful, and come back in disgrace, though Edward was so gentle with him, and never complained, except to say that he would want a tight hand. How well she knew that he wanted a tight hand! and how certain she was that it was not from her he would get that needful restraint! And from whom, then? At school, from some master who would know nothing about him, nor give him credit for the complications in his lot, his having no father. Perhaps, she said to herself in her troubled thoughts, it is better for a boy to have any kind of a father than no father at all. His father would have flogged him, had no mercy upon him, taught him to swear and swagger, and ride wild horses, and run wild about the country. Would that have been better? She stopped, with a shudder, unable to pursue the question. Better—oh heavens! But for her what would it have been? She turned to meet little Janet’s large eyes fixed upon her, and started with alarm and a kind of horror. It seemed to her that the child must have read her thoughts.
‘Are you cold, mozer?’ Janet said. Though she was eight, she had still difficulties with the ‘th,’ difficulties perhaps rather of a foreigner than a child.
‘No, dear,’ said Lady Car, again shuddering, but smiling upon the little girl. ‘It is not at all cold.’
‘Mozer, take me out with you, since Tom has gone with Beau. I don’t want to go out with nurse. I want to be wiz you.’
‘Dear,’ said Carry, wooing her little daughter for a favourable reply with soft caresses, ‘isn’t Beau kind to Tom? Don’t you love Beau?’
The child searched her face, as children do, in an unconscious but penetrating search for motives unknown. Janet saw that her mother was wistful and unassured, though she did not probably know how to name these motives. ‘I do well enough,’ she said. ‘I don’t think of him. Mozer, take me out with you.’