"What! Uncle John?"
"Steady, boy. I was going to say Philip Compton's son; but Lord St. Serf is another man."
There was a long pause in the room where John Tatham's life was centred among his books. He had so much to do with all this business, and yet so little. It would pass away with all its tumults, and he after being absorbed by it for a moment would be left alone to his own thoughts and his own unbroken line of existence. So much the better! It is not good for any man to be swept up and put down again at the will of others in matters in which he has no share. As for Philip, he was silent chiefly to realise this great thing that had come upon him. He, Lord Lomond, a peer's son, who was only Pippo of Lakeside like any other lad in the parish, and not half so important at school as Musgrave, who did not get that scholarship. What the school would say! the tempest that would arise! They would ask a holiday, and the head master would grant it. Compton a lord! Philip could hear the roar and rustle among the boys, the scornful incredulity, the asseverations of those who knew it was true. And a flush that was pleasure had come over his musing face. It would have been strange if in the wonder of it there had not been some pleasure too.
He had begun to tolerate his father before many days were over, to cease to be indignant and angry that he was not the ideal father of his dreams. That was not Lord St. Serf's fault, who was not at all aware of his son's dreams, and had never had an ideal in his life. But John Tatham was right in saying that Lord St. Serf was another man. The shock of a new responsibility, of a position to occupy and duties to fulfil, were things that might not have much moved the dis-Honourable Phil two years before. But he was fifty, and beginning to feel himself an old fogey, as he confessed. And his son overawed Lord St. Serf. His son, who was so like him, yet had the mother's quick, impetuous eyes, so rapid to see through everything, so disdainful of folly, so keen in perception. He was afraid to bring upon himself one of those lightning flashes from the eyes of his boy, and doubly afraid to introduce his son anywhere, to show him anything that might bring upon him the reproach of doing harm to Pippo. His house, which had been very decent and orderly in the late Lord St. Serf's time, became almost prim in the terror Phil had lest they should say that it was bad for the boy.
As for Lady St. Serf, it was popularly reported that the reason why she almost invariably lived in the country was her health, which kept her out of society—a report, I need not say, absolutely rejected by society itself, which knew all the circumstances better than you or I do: but which sufficed for the outsiders who knew nothing. When Elinor did appear upon great occasions, which she consented to do, her matured beauty gave the fullest contradiction to the pretext on which she continued to live her own life. But old Lord St. Serf, who got old so long before he need to have done, with perhaps the same sort of constitutional weakness which had carried off all his brothers before their time, or perhaps because he had too much abused a constitution which was not weak—grew more and more fond in his latter days of the country too, and kept appearing at Lakeside so often that at last the ladies removed much nearer town, to the country-house of the St. Serfs, which had not been occupied for ages, where they presented at last the appearance of a united family; and where "Lomond" (who would have thought it very strange now to be addressed by any other name) brought his friends, and was not ill-pleased to hear his father discourse, in a way which sometimes still offended the home-bred Pippo, but which the other young men found very amusing. It was not in the way of morals, however, that Lord St. Serf ever offended. The fear of Elinor kept him as blameless as any good-natured preacher of the endless theme, that all is vanity, could do.
These family arrangements, however, and the modified happiness obtained by their means, were still all in the future, when John Tatham, a little afraid of the encounter, yet anxious to have it over, went to Ebury Street the day after these occurrences, to see Elinor for the first time under her new character as Lady St. Serf. He found her in a languor and exhaustion much unlike Elinor, doing nothing, not even a book near, lying back in her chair, fallen upon herself, as the French say. Some of those words that mean nothing passed between them, and then she said, "John, did Pippo tell you that he had been there?"
He nodded his head, finding nothing to say.
"Without any warning, to see his mother stand up before all the world to be tried—for her life."
"Elinor," said John, "you are as fantastic as the boy."
"I was—being tried for my life—before him as the judge. And he has acquitted me; but, oh, I wonder, I wonder if he would have done so had he known all that I know?"