‘This is madness,’ she said, with a start, as if she would have sprung out of the carriage: then recovering herself. ‘Like every young and heated imagination you make mountains out of molehills,’ she said, in a very slow and measured voice. ‘A mere matter of family expediency, and you turn it into some dreadful secret. This shows how little you are to be treated with confidence. What a child you are still!’
He turned round upon her with all the fierceness of boyish wrath.
‘If it isn’t a dreadful secret, what is it? You’ve taken my father and my mother from me, both, both.’
She gave a little, quivering cry.
‘And what am I, then?’ she said.
The boy turned away with a sorrowful movement. They were drawing up at the little station, and there was time for no more.
CHAPTER XV.
A VISIT TO THE FOUNDRY.
John was not, perhaps, very much pleased with himself as he came home after seeing Emily away. As soon as he said that to her, his heart swung back like a pendulum, and he asked himself what if he were wrong after all, what if it were not so? He had believed her to be his mother all his life, and what if, after all, that idea, which up to a few days since there had been no doubt about, what if it proved the right one, and this new light which had burst upon him, wrong? He shivered when this thought came into his mind, but he would not entertain it. Yet instinctively, involuntarily, it would come back and back. In all that he could recollect of his childhood there was nothing which indicated to him a different kind of mother. He had little recollection of caresses or the softness of maternal tenderness. The bright spots in his childhood were those illegitimate moments which he knew enough to know must have been infringements of every rule, when he had been brought down in his night-gown in his father’s arms. In place of all the ordinary pleasures of childhood, he had the recollection of those moments and nothing more; but of a mother, such as his grandmother had been, nothing. All that he did remember chimed in well enough with the image of her whom he had called Emily, a recollection which began to burn and sting, but which yet he justified to himself, remembering all the years in which he had heard her spoken of by that name, and in which she had never come near him, never expressed any wish to see him, as most mothers would. He came home distracted by these thoughts, driving back solitary in the cab—though he had meant to walk; and found that his grandfather had gone to bed, and that all was silent and miserable in the house. There was the fire, and that was all, to give a little cheerfulness. John was not old enough to feel the companionship of a cheerful fire, making its little noises, its ashes falling, its flames breaking out, to cheer the solitary; but he liked the warmth in his nervous condition, and sat down by it and thought. If by chance it should have been to his mother that he dealt that cruel blow! but he would not think of a hazard so terrible. And then he put forward his hand and pulled out two old books from the shelf, where all his old classics stood untouched. These were classics too in a way, but it was not for their rank in literature that he prized them. One was the ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ which was so full of memories; the other, which was the one he chiefly sought, was Mrs. Trimmers’ ‘Robins.’ But it was not the story of Pecksy and Chicksy that moved him. It was the name in a large scrawl of childish text, Johnny May. He remembered it so distinctly now, the name that had come to him with such vague souvenirs, such a familiar but long-forgotten sound. He had never heard it since he came to Edgeley. And why did his grandfather give him no answer to his question when he asked what he had to do with that name? The wildest fancies went circling about his brain. Why was his name taken from him? Who was he? Had he indeed lost both father and mother in those old, long-forgotten days, or was she—the grave mother of old, the mother who never played with him or caressed him—was she—could she be after all—Emily? His heart grew sick at the thought—sick not so much with repugnance and opposition as with the recollection of how he must have wounded her, insulted her, if this was so.
He tried next day to get some satisfaction from his grandfather, but failed entirely. John began by telling the old man that, now he had found out his real name, he intended to be called no longer John Sandford, but John May—words which turned Mr. Sandford livid with horror, and for a moment dumb with passion.