Mrs. Sandford said tchick, tchick as her husband did; half coughing, half crying.
‘How very silly I am. Of course, you can’t put all that in if you begin “dear mamma.” This is what you must say, John, just “My dear.” That is neither one thing nor another. Put all the rest that I have told you, and “My dear,” to begin with. “My dear,” will do for anybody. Tell her that I’ve been thinking of late of a great many things I should like to say to her: but that it tires me very much to write, and that the only way I can think is if she would come. Of course it will interfere with her time and she might not be able to get leave; but I hope she won’t grudge that once in a way to her mother: and tell her, John—it is just a little matter between us; it is nothing you will understand—tell her that the people here are very ignorant, good sort of souls that never know anything. They don’t even read the newspapers, and never have done so. She will know what I mean.’
John put down all this in the best way he could; but it seemed sadly out of character to him to write with his firm young handwriting, and with all the sense of incongruity that was in his mind, such sentences as these to his mother. He wrote to her very seldom; only on great occasions, at Christmas and other anniversaries, and very formally, as a boy writes when he is at school. He had done this for a long time, as a matter of course, and never thought any more of it. But now his eyes were opened to the strangeness of everything, to all that was out of nature in the constitution of his family, and it did not seem possible to him to continue any longer in that way which till now he had accepted without question. There was something even in the erasures with which this paper began—the ‘dear Emily’ which gave him a little shiver, the ‘dear mamma’ which was still more incongruous—which seemed to stir up all the smouldering questions which he was not aware were in his mind. He had not known anything about them, and yet, apparently, they were all there, waiting only this touch to bring them to light. Why was it she never came? Why was it she had abandoned him, her child, and then her parents? What was it in her life that kept her so far apart, so unknown, in a strange world, from which nobody ever came—nobody who could say ‘I have seen her’—to give them fuller satisfaction than letters could afford, letters which John was now aware told nothing but the merest surface of existence, that all was well, that he was getting on with his lessons, that the weather was very fine, or the season a cold one? What are such facts as these in comparison with the intercourse that ought to exist between people who were each other’s nearest relations? It gave him a great shock as he wrote that about ‘your dear father.’ Was grandpapa, indeed, her dear father? and did she think so little of him that she never came to see with her own eyes whether he was growing old or not? And what was he, John himself, her son? Oh, but other women were not so with their sons. All this must have been in his mind, though he had never thought of it before. He wrote down all that his grandmother had told him, and then he paused in his new development of feeling. It seemed to him that he would like to take this paper and tear it into a dozen pieces in the exasperation of his soul.
‘Grandmamma,’ he said, with a little quiver in his voice, ‘don’t you think it would be better for me to write from myself, and tell her this in my own way? I will say just what you want to have said, but it shall be from myself. It would be more natural. After all she is my—mother, I suppose.’
‘John!’ said the old lady. ‘You suppose! What should she be but your mother? Who should be your mother but she? Oh, my dear, I hope you will not take things into your head that are not true. We have enough of trouble, enough of trouble, in our family. Don’t you begin and imagine things that are not true.’
‘I don’t imagine anything,’ said the boy, ‘but if you will consider, grandmamma, this is my mother. And I know nothing about her. For a long time it seemed all simple. I never minded. But, now I’m getting older and see how other people are, it is all so strange. Let me have my own way this time—let me just write to her as it would be natural if I were really her son.’
‘Oh, my John, that you are, indeed, indeed; her son and nothing else. Whose son should you be but hers? Don’t take any wrong notions into your head. My poor Emily! Oh, if you knew how many things she has had to bear! And what would she do at the end of all if her own boy’s heart was cold to her? You are her son and no one’s else—hers, my dear, and hers alone.’
John looked with his clear young eyes, severe yet gentle, in her face.
‘Isn’t that too much to say, grandmamma? Am I not the son of my father, too?’
The old lady looked at him with a strange, low cry. She caught hold of both his hands for a moment, with a grasp in which there seemed something like terror. And then she dropped back upon her pillow and covered her face with her hands.