After a while she spoke again, with a softened voice.
‘I recognise,’ she said, ‘all the difference: poor boy!—it is natural you should feel it. I am a stranger—so to speak—though I—gave you birth, which is something, perhaps. But it is not your fault. Tell me—you think that all my father had to leave is yours, and that you might continue to live here, just as before—is that what you expect?’
He made a little movement with one hand, still leaning his head on the other. It was a movement that looked like assent. And yet this was not what he had expected; for he had expected nothing, nor had he any thought what he was to do.
‘To do nothing?’ she continued, ‘or to do—what? To live all alone at your age—to carry on the sort of life my father led? That was suitable enough at his time of life, but not at all for you. To keep the maid Sarah and the gardener, and doze in your chair of an afternoon? This could not be seriously what you thought.’
He started a little and cast a look at her, half indignant, half piteous, but did not reply.
‘I am not laughing at you,’ she said, quite gently; ‘you will yourself see when I put it to you that this would be quite impossible. Now I must tell you how things really are. All that my father had is divided between you and me: but you are too young to enter into possession of your share. It will accumulate for you till you are twenty-one, and in the meantime the charge of you naturally lies with me. Whatever has to be determined is between us two. This is what I told you when we came in; you have nobody but me.’
To describe what John’s feelings were while she spoke would be impossible; everything seemed to swim and dissolve around him. It was true that he had formed no definite idea to himself of what was to come; and yet there had never seemed any question about this—that he was his grandfather’s heir—his natural and lawful heir. Nothing else had occurred to him. There had been nothing said about it; but it was this arrangement which seemed inevitable to the boy. He did not think even that any will was wanted. He, John Sandford, and no one else, could succeed John Sandford. This was what he had believed; and in this inheritance a certain sense of liberty was involved. He had thought of various things he would do. That about keeping up the house for one thing, and putting in the old gardener to take care of it; and then of the measures he would take in his own person to learn his profession, and prepare himself for a larger life. But in all of these thoughts emancipation was the first article. He did not suppose that he could have much to do with Emily. He had shivered a little when he so named her in his own mind, feeling a chill shadow of doubt as to who she was. But he had never remembered that he was only seventeen, much under age, and that he might have to yield to some other will instead of doing his own. He looked at her with a sort of helpless alarm in his eyes, feeling that everything was going to pieces round him, and as if he were feeling for something to clutch at in the general whirl.
‘You are surprised,’ she said, ‘and yet it is quite true. You have been put, perhaps, in a false position, John. It is not your fault, nor anyone’s; but I cannot let it go on. You are only seventeen. Who at seventeen is fit to be his own master? The position would be absurd, if it were not worse. It is sad for us both that you have not been brought up to care for me. I never realised how it might be when I left you in my father’s and mother’s hands. I was willing that they should have you, but not that they should turn the heart of my child away from me.’
John’s voice broke forth hoarse, not as it had sounded in his own ears before, ‘It was not their fault.’
‘I do not ask whose fault it was. Mine, perhaps, for giving you up; but that is past and need not to be taken into account. The thing we have to do is to get right now.’