“I came to tell you about Mr Ross——”
“Boy,” said Lady Eskside, “don’t trifle with me. This was what drove my darling away. Is the woman living, and do you know where she is? Your face tells a great deal,” she went on, “but not all. Where is your mother? Did she send you? Is she near? Oh, for God’s sake, if you have any pity, tell me! What with one trouble and another, I am near at an end of my strength.”
“Mr Ross is ill, ma’am,” said Dick, much bewildered, but holding fast to his mother’s consigne, not to say anything about her. “He is lying ill at our—at my house.”
“What could he be but ill,” cried the old lady, drying her eyes, “after all that has come and gone? But don’t think that I’ll let you go now. Richard, perhaps you are ignorant, perhaps you don’t know how important it is—but oh, for God’s sake, tell me? Have you got her? have you got her safe this time? Come near to me; you have a kindly face,” my lady went on, looking closely at him with the tears in her eyes. “A face I knew as well as I know myself; but kind and young, like what he was before the world touched him. Sit down here; and oh, my bonnie man, have confidence in me!”
She laid her delicate old hand upon his arm; she bent towards him, her face all tremulous with emotion, tears in her eyes, her lips quivering, her voice pathetic and tender as the cooing of a dove. Dick looked at her in return with respectful sympathy, with natural kindness, but with a half smile of wonder. What was it she wanted of him? What could he respond to such an appeal?
“I don’t know, ma’am, what I can do for you, what I can tell you,” he said; “I’m but a working man, not educated to speak of. There is nothing particular about me that I should confide in any one; but if you’ll tell me what it is you want, I’ve nothing to conceal neither,” the young man said with a gentle pride, so innocent and honest that it made his smile all the brighter. “You are welcome, ma’am, if you care for it, to know everything about me.”
“I do care for it,” she said, keeping her hand upon his arm. She had made him sit beside her on the little sofa, and her eyes were so intent upon his face, that he scarcely knew how to sustain the gaze. He paused a little to think what he could say first.
“I don’t know what to tell you, ma’am,” he said, with a laugh; “it’s all in what I’ve said already. Except about Mr Ross—perhaps that is what you mean; I can’t say, and you can’t think what he’s done for me. My life is more a story about him than anything about me,” said Dick, with a generous glow coming over his face, “since the day I first met him on the river——”
“That was—how long ago?”
“He wasn’t in the boats till the year after,” said Dick, availing himself of the easiest mode of calculating. “It’s about seven years since—we were both boys, so to speak. He took to me somehow, ma’am—out of his own head—by chance—so some folks says——”