The old lady gave a little whimpering cry.
‘Poor Robert! poor Robert! You may say what you like, but the boy is like him, not like any of us,’ she said.
‘Hold your tongue!’ said her husband, peremptorily. ‘Merry, yes, he was merry enough in his time; but it doesn’t make other folks merry that kind——’
And there was again a little pause. John’s curiosity was aroused, and his interest: but yet he was not greatly moved—for anything connected with his father was so vague for him and far away.
‘Well, grandfather? he said at last.
‘Well,’ said the old man, slowly, ‘there is not very much to say; the short and the long of it is that—hush, woman, I tell you! he is just—dead. That is all there is to say.’
‘Dead!’ John was startled. He repeated the word in an awestruck and troubled tone. He did not know what he had expected. And yet the moment he thought of it—and thought goes so quick!—he had gone through the whole in a moment like a flash of light, realising the long separation, the utter silence, through which there never came any news. Of course, that was the only thing that was possible. He said, after a time,
‘I ought to have known. It must have been that. Never to hear of him for so many years—’
‘Yes, to be sure,’ grandfather said. ‘He didn’t do well in his business, and he went abroad, and then he died——’