‘Tom! everything about you matters to me,’ said Janet, ‘and for one thing we couldn’t make up our game.’
‘Oh, that humbugging game. Do you think I’m a baby or a girl? I hate your tennis. It isn’t a game for a man.’
‘Quantities and quantities of gentlemen play. Beau plays. Why, the officers play,’ cried Janet, feeling that nothing more was to be said.
Tom could not refuse to acknowledge such authority. ‘Well, then, it isn’t a game for me, playing with girls and children. A gallop across country, that’s what I like, and to see all father’s old friends, and to hear what they thought of him. By Jove, Janet, father was a man! not one to lounge about in a drawing-room like old Beau;’ here the boy’s heart misgave him a little. ‘Beau’s kind enough,’ he said; ‘he doesn’t look at a fellow as if—as if you had murdered somebody. But if father had lived——’
‘I wonder——’ Janet said, but she did not go any further. Her light eyes, wondering under her black brows, were round with a question which something prevented her from putting. The possibility of her father having lived confused all her thoughts. She had an instinctive sense of the difficulties conveyed in that suggestion. She changed the subject by saying unadvisedly, ‘How bad you look, Tom! Were you ill last night?’
He pushed her away with a vigorous arm. ‘Shut up—you!’ he cried.
‘You are always telling me to shut up; but I know you were to have taken in Miss Ogilvie to dinner—that pretty Miss Ogilvie—and when you did not come, it put them all out. I heard Hampshire telling Nurse. He said something about “your boozing Mr. Tom,” and Nurse fired up. But afterwards she cried—and mother has been crying this morning; and then you look so bad. Do tell me if you were ill, Tom.’
He did not reply for some time, and then he burst out: ‘Mother’s such a bore with her crying! Does she think I’m to be a baby all my life?’
‘Do you know,’ said Janet, ‘you’re very much like that portrait of father in the hall—that great big one with the horse? Mother looks frightened when she passes it. He does look a little fierce, as if he would have scolded dreadfully,’ the girl added, with the air of making an admission.
‘I would rather have been scolded by him,’ cried the boy—‘No, he wouldn’t have scolded, he would have known better. A man like that understands fellows. Jan, we’re rather badly off, you and me, with only a woman to look after us, and that Beau.’