“Mamma,” said Gussy, “there was no need for anything but to be frank and open. You have not been open—not to me, who was taken more or less into your confidence. I suppose you were compelled to tell me something, but not all, or nearly all. A child could see there is more in it than meets the eye. And now I presume you have taken Mr. Meredith into your confidence, but none of your children.”
“Why Mr. Meredith?” said he, with a smile, putting out his hand for hers.
Gussy made no reply. She gave him a look of indignant reproach. In point of fact, when he asked her thus, she could not have told why—after all. The truth began to steal into her mind, like the influence of a thaw, that after all he had done nothing. He had been curious to fathom the secret in the house. So would any one have been. And there was something about information that he had received—where or from whence could he have received information? But even that, she suddenly reflected, could not be his fault. If he had been told anything it would be difficult not to listen. Thus, though she gave him a look of reproach and drew away her hand, it suddenly occurred to Gussy that after all there was no particular reason why she should call him Mr. Meredith, or consider him as deeply to blame. The thaw had begun.
Dolff had kept behind backs all the evening. He took no seat, he attached himself to none of the party. For some time he had been seated in a large easy-chair which almost swallowed him up, in the other part of the room, reading, or pretending to read. Then when the conversation began he had risen from that place, and walked about in the half-light like an uneasy ghost. Now he came into the talk with a voice that sounded far off, partly because of the length of the room, and partly because of the boyish gruffness which, as a token of high contrariety and offence, he had brought into his voice.
“I don’t see,” he said, “what Lunacy commissioners have to do with it in comparison with the people in the house.”
Mrs. Harwood turned her chair round as much as she was capable of doing, and cast a look into the dim depths of the other room.
“It is a pity,” she said, “that the commissioners could not be of your opinion, Dolff; it would have saved me a great deal of trouble.”
“I can’t see,” he said, irritably, “why you should have taken such trouble upon you at all. What is the man to you? Who is he that you should have taken such trouble for him? You have no brother that I ever heard of. Mother,” said Dolff, coming forward out of the gloom, “I have cudgelled my brains to think who it could be. Is it possible that for a mere stranger—a man who is no relation to us—you should have risked all our comfort and separated us from you? I have heard of such things,” said the young man, working himself up, “but to find them out in one’s mother whom one has always respected——”
She gave a wondering look round upon them all and then burst into a strange confused laugh.
“In the name of wonder,” she cried, “can anybody tell me what the boy has got in his head? what does he mean?”