“What have you to do with your mother’s marriage?” she said, trembling a little. “Do you know what a very strange question you are asking? Who has told you anything about that? O me! you frighten me so, I don’t know what I am saying. Did Mary send you? Have you just come from your mother? If you want to know about her marriage, it is of her that you should ask information. Of course she can tell you all about it—she and your Aunt Agatha. What a very strange question to ask of me!”
Wilfrid looked steadily into Mrs. Kirkman’s agitated face, and saw it was all true he had heard. “If you do not know anything about it,” he said, with pitiless logic, “you would say so. Why should you look so put out if there was nothing to tell?”
“I am not put out,” said Mrs. Kirkman, still more disturbed. “Oh, Will, you are a dreadful boy. What is it you want to know? What is it for? Did you tell your mother you were coming here?”
“I don’t see what it matters whether I told my mother, or what it is for,” said Will. “I came to you because you were good, and would not tell a lie. I can depend on what you say to me. I have heard all about it already, but I am not so sure as I should be if I had it from you.”
This compliment touched the colonel’s wife on a susceptible point. She calmed a little out of her fright. A boy with so just an appreciation of other people’s virtues could not be meditating anything unkind or unnatural to his mother. Perhaps it would be better for Mary that he should know the rights of it; perhaps it was providential that he should have come to her, who could give him all the details.
“I don’t suppose you can mean any harm,” she said. “Oh, Will, our hearts are all desperately wicked. The best of us is little able to resist temptation. You are right in thinking I will tell you the truth if I tell you anything; but oh, my dear boy, if it should be to lead you to evil and not good——”
“Never mind about the evil and the good,” said Will impatiently. “What I want is to know what is false and what is true.”
Mrs. Kirkman hesitated still; but she began to persuade herself that he might have heard something worse than the truth. She was in a great perplexity; impelled to speak, and yet frightened to death at the consequences. It was a new situation for her altogether, and she did not know how to manage it. She clasped her hands helplessly together, and the very movement suggested an idea which she grasped at, partly because she was really a sincere, good woman who believed in the efficacy of prayer, and partly, poor soul, to gain a little time, for she was at her wits’ end.
“I will,” she said. “I will, my dear boy; I will tell you everything; but oh, let us kneel down and have a word of prayer first, that we may not make a bad use of—of what we hear.”
If she had ever been in earnest in her life it was at that moment; the tears were in her eyes, and all her little affectations of solemnity had disappeared. She could not have told anybody what it was she feared; and yet the more she looked at the boy beside her, the more she felt their positions change, and feared and stood in awe, feeling that she was for the moment his slave, and must do anything he might command.