Gervase stood with his mouth open: he was confounded with these big names. The Queen and the Lord Chancellor and St. Paul’s! They mingled together in a something stupendous, an authority before which even Patty, with all her cleverness, must fail. He gazed at his mother with the stupid alarm which all his life her denunciations had inspired. St. Paul’s and the Queen! The one an awful shadow, coming down on the moors; the other at the head of her army, as in a fairy story. And the Lord Chancellor! something more alarming still, because Gervase could form no idea of him unless by the incarnation of the police, which even in Greyshott was a name of fear.
“Look here,” said Lady Piercey, “this is what it would mean; you wouldn’t have a penny; you’d have to draw the beer yourself to get your living; you’d be cut off from your father’s will like—like a turnip top. The Lord Chancellor would grant an injunction to change your name; for they won’t have good old names degraded, the great officers won’t. You might think yourself lucky if you kept the Gervase, for that’s your christened name; but it would be Gervase Brown, or Green, or something;—or they might let you for a favour take her name—the beerhouse woman’s; which would suit you very well, for you would be the beerhouse man.”
Gervase’s lip dropped more and more, his face grew paler and paler. Lady Piercey by long experience had grown versed in this kind of argument. She was aware that she could reduce him to absolute vacuity and silence every plea he might bring forth. He had no plea, poor fellow. He was so ignorant that, often as he had been thus threatened, he never had found out the absurdity of these threats. He fell upon himself like a ruined wall, as he stood before her limp and terrified. There was a grim sort of humour in the woman which enjoyed this too, as well as the sense of absolute power she had over him; and when she had dismissed him, which she did with the slight touch of a kiss upon his cheek, but again a grimace at the smell of beer, she burst into a wild but suppressed laugh. “Was there ever such a fool, to believe all I say?” she said to her niece who removed her dressing-gown, and helped her into bed; and then—for this fierce old lady was but an old woman after all—she fell a-whimpering and crying. “And that’s my son! oh Lord! my only child; all that I’ve got in the world.”
CHAPTER IV.
Margaret found Gervase waiting for her in the darkness of the corridor, when she left his mother. Lady Piercey was a righteous woman, who would not keep her maid out of bed after ten o’clock; but her niece was a different matter. He caught his cousin by the arm, almost bringing from her a cry of alarm. “Meg,” he said in her ear, “do you think it’s all true?”
“Oh, Gervase, you gave me such a fright!”
“Is it all true?”
“How can I tell you? I don’t know anything about the law,” she said, with a sense of disloyalty to the poor fellow who was so ignorant; but she could not contradict her aunt, and if that was supposed to be for his good——
“If it should be,” said Gervase, with a deep sigh: and then he added, “I couldn’t let her marry me if it wasn’t to be for her good.”
“Oh, Gervase, why can’t you show yourself like that to them?” his cousin said.