"Elinor," said John, "I have said nothing on the subject for many years, though I have thought much: and you must for once hear reason. The boy belongs—to his father as much as to you. I have said it! I cannot take it back. He belongs to the family of which he may one day be the head. You cannot throw away his birthright. And think, if you let him grow up like this, not knowing that he has a family or a—unaware whom he belongs to."
"Have you done, John?" asked Elinor, who had made two or three efforts to interrupt, and had been beating her foot impatiently upon the ground.
"If you ask me in that tone, I suppose I must say yes: though I have a great deal more that I should like to say."
"Then hear me speak," cried Elinor. "Of us three at least, I am the only one to whom he belongs. I only have power to decide for him. And I say, No, no: whatever argument there may be, whatever plea you may bring forward, No and no, and after that No! What! at fourteen, just the age when anything that was said to him would tell the most; when he would learn a lesson the quickest, learn what I would die to keep him from! When he would take everything for gospel that was said to him, when the very charm of—of that unknown name——"
She stopped for a moment to take breath, half choked by her own words.
"And you ought to remember no one has ever laid claim to him. Why should I tell him of one that never even inquired—— No, John, no, no, no! A baby he might have been told, and it would have done him no harm. Perhaps you were right, you and mother, and I was wrong. He might have known it from the first, and thought very little of it, and he may know when he is a man, and his character is formed and he knows what things mean—but a boy of fourteen! Imagine the glamour there would be about the very name; how he would feel we must all have been unjust and the—the other injured. You know from yourself, John, how he clings to you—you who are only a cousin; he knows that, yet he insists upon Uncle John, the one man who belongs to him, and looks up to you, and thinks nothing of any of us in comparison. I like it! I like it!" cried Elinor, dashing the tears from her eyes. "I am not jealous: but fancy what it would be with the—other, the real, the—— I cannot, cannot, say the word; yes, the father. If it is so with you, what would it be with him?"
John listened with his head bent down, leaning on his hand: every word went to his heart. Yes, he was nothing but a cousin, it was true. The boy did not belong to him, was nothing to him. If the father stepped in, the real father, the man of whom Philip had never heard, in all the glory of his natural rights and the novelty and wonder of his existence, how different would that be from any feeling that could be raised by a cousin, an uncle, with whom the boy had played all his life! No doubt it was true: and Phil Compton would probably charm the inexperienced boy with his handsome, disreputable grace, and the unknown ways of the man of the world. And yet, he thought to himself, there is a perspicacity about children which is not always present in a man. Philip had no precocious instincts to be tempted by his father's habits; he had the true sight of a boy trained amid everything that was noble and pure. Would it indeed be more dangerous now, when the boy was a boy, with all those safeguards of nature, than when he was a man? John kept his mind to this question with the firmness of a trained intelligence, not letting himself go off into other matters, or pausing to feel the sting that was in Elinor's words, the reminder that though he had been so much, he was still nothing to the family to whom he had consecrated so much of his life, so much now of his thoughts.
"I do not think I agree with you, Elinor," he said at last. "I think it would have been better had he always known that his father lived, and who he was, and what family he belonged to; that is not to say that you were to thrust him into his father's arms. And I think now that, though we cannot redeem the past, it should be done as soon as possible, and that he should know before he goes to school. I think the effect will be less now than if the discovery bursts upon him when he is a young man, when he finds, perhaps, as may well be, that his position and all his prospects are changed in a moment, when he may be called upon without any preparation to assume a name and a rank of which he knows nothing."
"Not a name. He has always borne his true name."
"His true name may be changed at any moment, Elinor. He may become Lord Lomond, and the heir——"