"Thank you," he said, with a laugh. "I have always said for a mother-in-law you were the least difficult to get on with I ever saw. Do you remember giving me that money to make ducks and drakes of? It was awfully silly of you. You didn't deserve to be trusted with money to throw it away like that, but still I have not forgotten it. Well! I came to thank you for yesterday, Nell. And there are things, you know, that we must talk over. You never gave up your name. That was like your pluck. But you will have to change it now. It was indecent of me to have myself announced like that and poor old St. Serf not in his grave yet. But I daresay you didn't pay any attention. You are Lady St. Serf now, my dear. You don't mind, I know, but it's a change not without importance. Well, who is that fellow behind there, standing in the window? I think you ought to present him to me. Or I'll present him to you instead. I saw him in the theatre, by Jove! with that fellow Tatham, that cousin John of yours that I never could bear, smirking and smiling at him as if it were his son! but I saw the boy then for the first time. Nell, I tell you there are some things in which you have taken it well out of me——"
"Mr. Compton," she said, labouring to speak. "Lord St. Serf. Oh, Phil, Phil!—--"
"Ah," he said, with a start, "do you remember at last? the garden at that poky old cottage with all the flowers, and the days when you looked out for wild Phil Compton that all the world warned you against? And here I am an old fogey, without either wife or child, and Tatham taking my boy about and Nell never looking me in the face."
Philip, at the window looking out at nothing through the hideous-coloured glass, had heard every word, with wonder, with horror, with consternation, with dreadful disappointment and sinking of the heart. For indeed he had a high ideal of a father, the highest, such as fatherless boys form in their ignorance. And every word made it more sure that this was his father, this man who had so caught his eyes and filled him with such a fever of interest. But to hear Phil Compton talk had brought the boy's soaring imagination down, down to the dust. He had not been prepared for anything like this. Some tragic rending asunder he could have believed in, some wild and strange mystery. But this man of careless speech, of chaff and slang, so little noble, so little serious, so far from tragic! The disappointment had been too sudden and dreadful to leave him with any ears for those tones that went to his mother's heart. He had no pity or sense of the pathos that was in them. He stood in his young absolutism disgusted, miserable. This man his father!—this man! so talking, so thinking. Young Philip stood with his back to the group, more miserable than words could say. He heard some movement behind, but he was too sick of heart to think what it was, until suddenly he felt a hand on his shoulder, and most unwillingly suffered himself to be turned round to meet his father's eyes. He gave one glance up at the face, which he did not now feel was worn with study and care—which now that he saw it near was full of lines and wrinkles which meant something else, and which even the emotion in it, emotion of a kind which Pippo did not understand, hidden by a laugh, did not make more prepossessing—and then he stood with his eyes cast down, not caring to see it again.
The elder Philip Compton had, I think, though he was, as he said, an unlikely subject for that mood, tears in his eyes—and he had no inclination to see anything that was painful in the face of his son, whose look he had never read, whose voice he had never heard, till now. He held the boy with his hands on his shoulders, with a grasp more full perhaps of the tender strain of love (though he did not know him) than ever he had laid upon any human form before. The boy's looks were not only satisfactory to him, but filled his own heart with an unaccustomed spring of pride and delight—his stature, his complexion, his features, making up as it were the most wonderful compliment, the utmost sweetness of flattery that he had ever known. For the boy was himself over again, not like his mother, like the unworthy father whom he had never seen. It took him some time to master the sudden rush of this emotion which almost overwhelmed him: and then he drew the boy's arm through his own and led him back to where the two ladies sat, Elinor still too much agitated for speech. "I said I'd present my son to you, Nell—if you wouldn't present him to me," he said, with a break in his voice which sounded like a chuckle to that son's angry ears. "I don't know what you call the fellow—but he's big enough to have a name of his own, and he's Lomond from this day."
Pippo did not know what was meant by those words: but he drew his arm from his father's and went and stood behind Elinor's chair, forgetting in a moment all grievances against her, taking her side with an energy impossible to put into words, clinging to his mother as he had done when he was a little child.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
It was while this conversation was going on that John Tatham, anxious and troubled about many things, knocked at the door in Ebury Street. He was anxious to know how the explanations had got accomplished, how the boy took it, how Elinor had borne the strain upon her of such a revelation. Well as he knew Elinor, he still thought, as is generally thought in circumstances so painful, that a great crisis, a great mental effort, would make her ill. He wanted to know how she was, he wanted to know how Pippo had borne it, what the boy thought. It had glanced across him that young Philip might be excited by so wonderful a new thing, and form some false impression of his father (whom doubtless she would represent under the best light, taking blame upon herself, not to destroy the boy's ideal), and be eager to know him—which was a thing, John felt, which would be very difficult to bear.
The door was opened to him not by good Mrs. Jones, the kind landlady, but by the magnificent Jones himself, who rarely appeared. John said "Mrs. Compton?" as a matter of course, and was about to pass in, in his usual familiar way. But something in the man's air made him pause. He looked at Jones again, who was bursting with importance. "Perhaps she's engaged?" he said.