“Mother; Mar is to sit up for supper. He couldn’t be sent upstairs at this hour, a day like this?”
“Papa says he may,” said Letty coming forward a step, dragging her father to the front with her arm through his arm.
“I don’t say anything, Letitia,” said John alarmed, “except with your approval. But I think you may relax your care a little for once, for Duke’s sake. I don’t think it will do the boy any harm.”
Letitia threw up her arms with a gesture of despair. “You must have it your own way of course,” she said. “I can’t oppose you; and if Mar is laid up to-morrow it will be his own fault, or it will be your fault, and much good that will do him. You can put him in the way of having a headache, but you can’t bear it for him; but I wash my hands of it,” Mrs. Parke said.
The supper was very gay. The few guests were all old friends. The youngest members of the family were all there, and the license of a family domestic festival prevailed. The one spectator who did not unbend was Agnes, whose heart was so full of anxieties that her countenance could not lose their trace. She sat by John’s side, however, which was the most favorable place, and listened to all the chatter of the children, who had perfect confidence in their father, and felt in spite of herself a confidence in the eventual fate of Mar which she had never felt before. John Parke was but a stupid man, and he had not been without a feeling that to sweep the little interloper out of his way, if it could be done, was desirable; but that had long died away, and John had come to regard Mar as one of his family, with a little special pity for the delicacy upon which his wife dwelt so much, acquiescing in all her measures of special care for the weakly boy with a more generous and kind motive than hers. John was heartily pleased that Mar had distinguished himself, that it was he almost more than Duke who was the hero of the day. He was pleased with his son’s generosity, and with his nephew’s affection, and with the clamor and pleasure of all the young ones ranged near him, leaving the strangers to be entertained by the mother. Tiny was at her father’s elbow, the youngest of all, the privileged member of the party, at whose sallies everybody laughed, though perhaps they were not very witty. By one of those curious confusions of nature which occur in families, Tiny, who was like her mother—not a Parke at all, as good-natured friends said—had also, in certain aspects of her lively little countenance, a resemblance to Mar, who was a Parke all over except in the point of height. And it had been very agreeable to Mar to find in the baby of his aunt’s nursery a something more feeble, more easily tired, less capable of fatigue than even he himself was considered to be; from which circumstance, and from the fact that the little one had become the playmate of the delicate boy when all the other boys had gone to school, there was a special tie between them. Mar himself was a totally different being here from the mild and sad boy whom Agnes had found alone in the schoolroom accepting his solitary fate with precocious philosophy. Very different dreams were now before his eyes. He had forgotten how likely it was that “something should happen.” The gravest impressions disappear like a passing breath from the consciousness of sixteen. Mar had made a great step in advance by his first appearance in public. He felt himself almost a man with fortune before him. He no longer looked on Reggie and Jack with the uneasy sense of superiority, yet inferiority, which is so bitter at all ages. The sense that he was more advanced than they, of a different kind of being in his boyish premature thoughtfulness, but oh so far behind the public school-boy in everything that is most prized at that age, passed from his mind in the happier consciousness of personal importance, of being in himself something that Reggie and Jack could never be. This made the boy happier with them all, with the two boys who were least his friends and did not conceal their contempt of him, as well as with the others who patronized and pitied Mar. Neither of these conditions, which were both humiliating, were visible this evening. Duke did not patronize nor Reggie contradict. They were all, to say the truth, a good deal startled, even those who had brought that happy accident about, by the unexpected response of Mar to the call of circumstances. There is no English boy or man who does not feel the advantage of being able to make a speech. And though Mar might be a milksop, unfit for football, and unable to be out in all weathers, yet it was a tremendous revolution to find that he could stand up before a crowd and not be afraid to speak. Even Duke had learned off by heart a speech which had been prepared for him beforehand, the boys knew. But Mar said it straight off out of his head.
All this change of feeling Agnes perceived with an absorbed attention which in no way changed the grimness of her aspect as she sat at table. She listened to all the young clamor about her with a yielding heart but an unyielding face. “You are not used to a noisy party, and I am afraid they worry you,” said John Parke, whose attention was suddenly called from his own placid enjoyment of his children’s gaiety which he pretended to hush by times with a raised finger and a “Don’t let your mother hear you making such a row”—to the aspect of the “old lady,” as he called her, though Agnes was younger than himself, by his side. “You see,” he added, “it makes a difference, I suppose, when they are one’s own—otherwise I object as much as you to the young ones taking the lead. It’s one of those American fashions we are all getting infested with.”
“It is an exceptional day,” said Agnes, stiffly, as if she disapproved. She was not able to change the fashion of her countenance, notwithstanding the sympathy of her heart.
“That’s it,” said John. “Your eldest boy can’t come of age but once in your life”—he laughed at this wise speech as he made it—“and then,” he added, caressing his big moustache, “the boys acquitted themselves so well. That’s what I look at. A boy mayn’t be strong, but as long as he knows how to take his part in life——”
“Papa,” said Tiny, “do you call a tenants’ dinner life?”
“It’s life in a kind of way,” said Duke, whose attention had been attracted from more mirthful matters by that sound which would catch the ear through a bombardment or a cyclone, the sound of praise.