They both looked at her with an alarmed aspect, not knowing what would happen. Poor Carry was the gentlest of mothers. She never punished them, never scolded, but yet no one could tell why, they had always the air of being afraid of her. They looked at her now as children might have looked who were accustomed to be sent into solitary confinement, shut up in a dark closet, or some other torture. Tom’s voice fell in a moment, and Janet came out in defence like the little woman in a weatherhouse, when the little man skulks indoors disconcerted by the good weather. Janet came forward with a little hand raised. ‘Mozer, it was not naughtiness. It was because he has been out in the world and knows things different from me.’
‘Yes?’ said Lady Car, smiling upon them, ‘and what are the things this man of the world knows? To be sure, dear, he must be greatly in advance of you and me.’
The children were all the more abashed by this speech, though its tone was so gentle. They stared at her for a moment with their father’s face, dark and stolid, the likeness intensified in Tom by the sullen alarm of his look. She put out her hand to him, to draw him close to her. ‘What is it,’ she said, ‘my little boy?’ She was, to tell the truth, rather afraid of him too.
‘It’s nothing,’ Tom replied. ‘It’s something she’s said.’
‘Oh, Tom,’ cried Janet with a sense of injury. ‘Mozer, he says, they have such nice teas at school—strawberries, and sometimes cold partridge, and whopping hampers.’
‘My dear!’
‘That’s how the fellows talk,’ said Tom. ‘That’s not the right thing for a girl.’
‘Was the cold partridge in the whopping hamper?’ said a voice behind. ‘Carry, I don’t wonder the boy’s indignant. You have sent him no hampers. A first half at school and not so much as a big cake. I feel for Tom. Never mind, old fellow; you see she never was at school.’
They had both turned round their anxious faces to him as he came in. They were instinctively jealous of him. Yet both turned with a certain relief, or at least Tom did so, who was aware that Beau was one of his own faction, a man, against the sway of the everlasting feminine. Janet took the hand which the mother had stretched out towards her boy and clung to it, drawing herself close into Lady Car’s skirts. Beau was not of her faction in any sense of the word. The little girl pulled her mother’s face towards her, and whispered her tale into Carry’s ear.
‘To have your tea upstairs! Why, doesn’t he want to be with us, dear, after being away so long? You shall have what you like best, my dear children. If you really prefer the nursery to the drawing-room, and my company.’