But Jock’s answer was to get up, and put away his book.
“I am going,” he said.
It was the old lady who was afraid of him. She sat and watched him, and was glad when he was gone. Lucy was comprehensible and manageable, but the child dismayed and troubled her. Poor little forlorn boy! There was no home for him anywhere, no one to care for him but Lucy, who no doubt would form, as people say, “other ties.”
It was a bright morning in March, the skies full of the beauty of spring, the air fresh with showers, the sun shining; the buds were beginning to swell on the trees, and primroses coming out in the suburban gardens. Jock looked somewhat forlorn, all by himself, in the front seat of the carriage, buttoned closely into his great-coat, and looking smaller than ever as his delicate little face looked out from the thick collar; opposite to Lady Randolph’s portly person, in her great furred mantle, he looked like a little waxen image; and he sat very stiffly, trying to draw up his thin little legs beneath him, but now and then receiving a warning glance from Lucy, who was extremely nervous about his manners. They were both amused, however, by the long drive across London, and up the hill toward the northern suburbs. Lady Randolph did not know the way. She took almost as much interest as they did in the animated streets.
“Jock, little Jock, there is the heath. Do you see the big furze bushes?” she said. “How strange to see a place so wild, yet so near town!”
“It is not so good as our common,” Jock said. Yet school took a more smiling aspect after he had got a glimpse of the broken ground and wild vegetation.
They drew up at last after a troublesome search (for Lady Randolph’s coachman would not have betrayed any knowledge of that out-of-the-way locality for worlds, it was as much as his reputation was worth) before a little new house with a bay-window and a small square patch of green called a garden. Through the bay-window there was a dim appearance visible of some one seated at a table writing; but when the carriage stopped there was evidently a great commotion in the house, and the dim figure disappeared. Some one hastily opening an upper window, a sound of bells rung, and of noisy footsteps running up and down the stairs, were all audible to the little party seated in the carriage, who were amused by all this pantomime.
“She will have a headache,” Lady Randolph said, “as soon as she sees us.”
Lucy, for her part, felt that to sit at her ease, and witness the flutter in the house, of excitement and expectation, was scarcely generous. She was relieved when the door opened. It wounded her to see the disdain of the footman, the scorn with which he contemplated the house, and the maid who came to the door; all this penetrated her mind with a curious sense of familiarity. Mrs. Ford, too, would have been greatly excited had a pair of prancing horses drawn up before her door, and a great lady in furs and velvet been seen about to enter; and Lucy knew that she herself would have rushed out of the parlor, had she been sitting there, and would have been apt to fly to an upstairs window and peep out upon the unwonted visitor. She felt all this in the person of the others, to whom she was coming in the capacity of a great lady. She had never felt so humble or so insignificant as when she stepped out of the carriage, following Lady Randolph. Jock grasped at her hand as he jumped down. He clung to it with both his without saying a word. He did not feel at all sure that he was not now, this very moment, to be consigned to separation and banishment, and the new life of school for which he had offered himself as a victim. He contemplated that approaching fate with courage, with wide-open, unwinking eyes, but all the same at the descent of Avernus, at the mouth of the pit, so to speak, clung to his only protector, his sole comforter. She stooped down and kissed him hurriedly as they crossed the little green.
“You shan’t go if you do not like it, Jock.”