“But I want very much to talk to you, Gervase.”
Gervase looked at her with a smile of foolish complacency. “I dare say you think me silly,” he cried, “but here’s two of you after me. Get along, Meg; whatever I do I’m not going to take your way.”
“You must do as you please, then,” said Margaret in despair; “but remember, Gervase,” she said, turning back before she reached the door, “your father is old, and you might drive him into a fit if you go on as you did to-night—and where would you be then?” she added, with an appeal to the better feeling in which she still believed.
“Why, I’d be in his place, and she’d be my lady,” cried the young man, with a gleam of cruel cunning, “and nobody could stop me any more, whatever I liked to do.”
But next evening there seemed to be in his mind some lingering regard for what she had said. Gervase left his father alone, and devoted himself to his mother, who was more able to take care of herself. He offered to wind her silks, and entangled them hopelessly with delighted peals of laughter. He took her scissors to snip off the ends for her, and put the sharp points through the canvas, until Lady Piercey, in her exasperation, gave him a sudden cuff on his cheek.
“You great fool!” she cried—“you malicious wretch! Do you want to spoil my work as well as everything else? I wish you were little enough to be whipped, I do; and I wish I had whipped you when you were little, when it might have done you some good. Margaret, what do you mean sitting quiet there, enjoying yourself with a book and me driven out of my senses? That’s what he wants to do, I believe—to drive us mad and get his own way; to make us crazy, both his poor father and me.”
“No, I don’t,” cried Gervase, “and you oughtn’t to hit me—I’ll hit back again if you do it again. It hurts—you’ve got a fist like a butcher, though you’re such an old lady.” He rubbed his cheek for a moment dolefully, and then again burst out laughing. “You look like old Judy in the show, mamma, when she hits her baby: only you’re so fat you could never get into it, and your voice is gruff like the old showman’s—not squeaky, like Mrs. Punch. I’ve cut all the silks into nice lengths for you to work with—ain’t you obliged to me? Look here,” he said, holding out his work. Poor Lady Piercey clapped her fat hands together loudly in sheer incapacity of expression. It made a loud report like a gun fired off to relieve her feelings, and Sir Giles looked up from his quiet game with Dunning, not without a subdued amusement that she should now be getting her share.
“What’s the matter, what’s the matter, my lady? Is that cub of yours playing some of his pranks? It’s your turn to-night, it appears, and serves you right, for you always back him up.”
“Oh, you fool, you fool, you fool!” cried the old lady in her passion. And then she turned her fiery eyes on her husband with a look of contempt and fury too great for words. “Meg!” she cried, putting out her hand across the table and grasping Mrs. Osborne’s arm, “If you’re ever driven wild like me, never you look for sympathy to a man! when they see you nearly mad with trouble they give you a look, and chuckle! that’s what they always do. Put down the scissors, you, you, you——”
“Oh, and to think,” she cried wildly, “that that’s my only son! Oh, Giles, how can you play your silly games, and sit and see him—the only one we have between us, and he’s a born fool! And me, that was so thankful to see him stay at home, and give up going out to his low company! And now I can’t abide him. I can’t abide to see him here!”