“You have,” his mother said; “you are judging me and finding me wanting whatever I do.”
“Why should you have this party?” cried the young man; “why fill the house with strangers when we are all so miserable?”
Dolff could have cried with trouble and discontent and a sense of wrong had not his manhood forbidden such an indulgence. He was all wrong, out of place, wherever he turned.
“I see no cause you have to be miserable. I am not miserable,” said Mrs. Harwood, “and I hope you will have the sense not to look so, making everybody talk.”
This effort, however, on the part of Dolff was impossible. He sat at the foot of the table like a ghost. He scarcely opened his mouth, either to the lady on his right hand or the lady on his left. He ate nothing, making it very evident that he had something on his mind; and it became quite clear to all the guests that Dolff was in great trouble. Rumors about him had flown through the neighborhood, as well as rumors on the other subject, perplexed stories of which it was difficult to make anything. But when his mother’s guests saw Dolff’s looks, they were instantly convinced that the true part of the story was that which concerned him.
“Didn’t you remark what a hang-dog look he had? Depend upon it, it is Dolff that is at the bottom of everything. The other thing is probably great nonsense, but Dolff is evidently in a bad way.”
This was the conclusion arrived at by Mrs. Harwood’s guests, which that inscrutable woman had foreseen, and for which, perhaps, she was scarcely sorry. It is so common for a young man to get into a scrape—and when the said young man is only two-and-twenty it is not so difficult to get him out of it. Even the hardest of judges are tolerant of misdemeanors—when they are not dishonorable—at that age. Therefore, perhaps, the mother calculated—being forced to very deep calculations at this trying period—that it would do no harm to the house to have the trouble in it saddled upon Dolff. “Is that all?” people would say. Whereas to have a family secret divulged—to have curious minds in St. John’s Wood inquiring what was the meaning of that story about a secret inmate in the Harwoods’ house, and who the Harwoods were before they came to that house, and what there was in the antecedents of the family to account for it—that would be a very different matter. When a sympathetic friend, anxious to find out what she could, condoled with her after dinner in the drawing-room about her son’s looks, Mrs. Harwood accepted the kind expressions gratefully.
“No,” she said, “I am afraid Dolff is not looking very well, poor boy; he has had a good deal to trouble him: but I hope everything is now in a right way, and he will have no more bother.”
“Was it some trouble with his college?” asked the sympathetic friend.
“Oh, no! nothing with the college,” said Mrs. Harwood. “He has stayed down for an extra week to look after some business, and he is going back to Oxford in a day or two—it is nothing of that kind.”