‘Why now? What has happened to make you dissatisfied? What does it all mean?’
‘Since my—since your—since—Emily was here.’
‘How dare you call her Emily, sir? What do you mean by it? Do you intend to drive me distracted in my lonely state? Am I to be brought to the grave with your questions and your doubts? Ah, you never would have taken that upon you,’ said the old man, ‘while she was here. You think you have got me at your mercy. You think you can take every advantage of me now that I am alone.’
‘No,’ said John. ‘Grandfather, it is you who are hard upon me. She was going to tell me. She would have told me if she had lived. The last thing she said was, “Emily, tell the boy.”’
Old Mr. Sandford relapsed into his broken sobbing. It was quite genuine, and yet both now and on other occasions it had served his purpose.
‘What is between two women,’ he said, ‘nobody can know, nobody but their Maker. And neither you nor me can tell what that was. But she never told you, bless her soul, that you were to insult your mother: oh no! nor me that have always been your support and provided for you all your life. You think perhaps you would have got on just as well without me, by yourself, left upon the world?’
And then he fell into such agitation that John was full of regret and self-reproach. He tried the best he could to make his grandfather forget all that had been said, and to forget it himself, and to return to their old life. But it was very hard to do. Indeed, this period in John’s life was altogether very hard; his lessons were given over and he had nothing to do: and after all the troubles and emotions of the past month or two he had not strength of mind to begin some study by himself, as Mr. Cattley advised and Elly urged him to do.
‘You should carry on your mathematics. Mathematics are always good for an engineer: or even draw,’ said Elly, as if that branch of industry was very frivolous in comparison, ‘that’s good for an engineer too. I am sure Mr. Cattley would help you if you were to ask him. But, for goodness sake, Jack, do something; don’t fall into the same ways as all the other boys, wandering about with your hands in your pockets. It is better to do anything,’ said Elly, ‘than to do nothing at all.’
John assented dutifully, but he neither resumed his drawing nor his mathematics. He began even to avoid Elly, lest she should scold him; and did wander about disconsolate with his hands in his pockets, with no heart to do anything. This pause in his life was very hard upon him. It had been settled that his mother, or Emily, whichever she was, should arrange matters her own way at some engineer’s office in London, where she had hopes of getting him taken in; but in the meantime she made no sign, and it did not seem possible to do anything without her. Mr. Sandford himself would take no trouble; sometimes he would lament querulously that the boy whom he had brought up wanted to leave him and had no feeling for him: sometimes he would say that his mother must settle all that, that Emily was the proper person to arrange for her son. But in any case nothing was done, and John relapsed into idleness and wretchedness, and did nothing, devouring his own heart.
Whether this was a calculation of a cold-blooded kind on the part of the woman who now seemed to have the lives of these two, the old man and the boy, in her hands, as to what would happen—or whether it was the mere course of events unquickened by any mortal calculation—it proved at all events that Emily’s prognostics were right. Mr. Sandford never recovered the death of his lifelong companion. He went out a little fitfully as the spring came on, and took little walks chiefly ending in a visit to her grave to see, after the snowdrops were over, if the primroses and then if the violets were coming out there. He had covered the little mound at first with all those spring flowers which she had loved, perhaps with a dim prevision that the sod would be displaced before the time for the later blossoms came. And all the long evenings he would sit with a book laid out open upon her little table, but not reading, gazing in the fire and twirling his thumbs. John sat at the table in his old place near the lamps with his books, and sometimes tried to talk. But his grandfather was not disposed to talk, and the hours would thus pass by on leaden wings, so slow, so endless, so silent, not a sound in the little parlour but the falling of the ashes from the fire, and the ticking of the clock, and the rustle now and then of a page turned. But John had no new books to tempt him, and at this turn of his life was but a languid reader, and yielded in spite of himself to the fascination of the strange dreary silence, and the contemplation of the old man twirling his thumbs by the fire.