‘I don’t know. I can’t tell you. I know it, that’s all. It was perhaps only nurse,’ he added with reluctance; ‘but she’s been to my place, and she knows all about it. You can ask her if you haven’t heard.’
‘So you have got a place besides being so rich?’ Beaufort said, in calm interrogation, without surprise.
Tom was very much embarrassed by this questioning. He stared at his stepfather more than ever. ‘Hasn’t mother told you? I thought she told you everything.’
‘So did I. But all this about your place I never heard. Let’s have the rest of it, Tom.’
‘Oh, I don’t know that there’s much more,’ said the boy. ‘It’s a great big place with a high tower, and a flag flying when I’m at home—like the Queen—and acres upon acres in the park. It was my father’s, don’t you know? and now it’s mine.’
‘How old are you, Master Tom?’
‘Eleven in April,’ said Tom, promptly.
‘Then it will be ten years before you have anything to say to your place, as you call it. I’ve seen your place, Tom. It is not so very much of a place; as for a flag, you know we might mount a flag at Easton if we liked and nobody would mind.’
Tom’s black brows had gathered, and his eyes looked with that fierceness mingled with fear which belongs to childhood, into his stepfather’s face. He was very wroth to have his pretensions thus made light of, but the habitual faith of his age alarmed him with a sense that it might be true.
‘We’ll mount one this afternoon,’ his tormentor said; ‘it will be fun for you and me taking it down when your mother goes out for her drive, and hoisting it again when she comes back. She deserves a flag better than you do, don’t you think? Almost as well as the Queen. The only danger is that the country people might take Easton for the Beaufort Arms, and want to come in and drink beer. What do you think?’