‘I say, Beau, are you in real earnest about a flag?’
‘To be sure. I don’t know what you have on yours at the Towers, but we have a famous blazon on the Beaufort side. We’ll get a square of silk from your mother, and paint it as soon as we go in. I forget what your arms are, Tom?’
‘I don’t know,’ said the boy, humbly. ‘I never heard anything about them. I didn’t know you had arms on a flag.’
‘Ah!’ said Beaufort, ‘you see there are a great many things you don’t know yet. And about matters that concern gentlemen, I wouldn’t advise you either to take nurse’s opinion or that of your young man whose father is in trade.’
Tom rode along by his stepfather’s side in silence for some time. He felt much taken down—crushed by a superiority which he could not resist, yet very unwilling to yield. There was always the uncomfortable conviction in his mind that what Beaufort said must be true, mingled with the uneasy feeling that Beau might be chaffing all the time, a combination confusing for every simple mind. Tom was not at all willing to give in. He felt instinctively that a flag at Easton would turn his own grandeur, which he believed in so devoutly, into ridicule: for Easton was not much more than a villa, in the suburbs of a little town. At the same time he could not but feel that to haul it up and down when his mother went out or came in would be fun; and the painting of the flag with a general muddle of paints and means of barbouillage in general still greater fun, and the most delightful way of spending the afternoon.
‘I say, Beau,’ he asked, after a long interval, ‘what’s in your arms, as you call them? I should like to know.’
Beaufort laughed. ‘You must not ask what’s in them, but what they are, Tom. A fellow of your pretensions ought to know. Fancy a chatelain in ignorance of such a matter!’
‘What’s a chatelain? You are only laughing at me,’ cried the boy, with lowering eyebrows. ‘It’s a thing mother wears at her side, all hanging with silver chains.’
‘It’s the master of a place—like what you suppose yours to be. My arms are rather too grand for a simple gentleman to bear. We quarter the shields of France and England,’ said Beaufort, gravely, forgetting who his companion was for the moment. Then he laughed again. ‘You see, Tom, though I have not a castle, I have a flag almost as grand as the Queen’s.’
All this was rather humbling to poor Tom’s pride, and confusing to his intellect, but he came home full of the plan of painting and putting up this wonderful flag. There was an old flagstaff somewhere, which had been used for the decorations of some school feast. Beaufort, much amused, instructed his small assistant to paint this in alternate strips of blue and white. ‘The colours of the bordure, you know, Tom.’ ‘Oh, are they?’ cried Tom, determined to pretend to understand. And Lady Car found him in the early afternoon, in a shed appropriated to carpentering behind the house, delightfully occupied about his task, and with patches of blue and white all over him from shoe to chin.