Lady Eskside rose again in her restlessness and rang the bell. “Bring something for this gentleman to eat,” she said, when Harding appeared; “bring a tray to the dining-room; and get me the paper about the trains; and let none of the other fools of men come about me to stare and stare!” she cried, fretfully. “Serve us yourself. And bid your wife come here—I have something to say to her.”
“To the dining-room, my lady?”
“Didn’t I say here!” cried Lady Eskside. “You’re all alike, never understanding. Send Marg’ret here.”
Mrs Harding must have been very close behind, for she followed almost instantly. She gave a little cry at sight of Dick. I fear this was not so independent a judgment as Lady Eskside supposed, for of course her husband had suggested the resemblance she was called upon to remark; but, at the same time, she had no unbounded confidence in her husband’s judgment, and was upon the whole as likely as not to have declared against him. Lady Eskside turned sharply round upon her. “What are you crying out about, Marg’ret? I expected a woman like you to have more sense. What I wanted to tell you was, that I am going away for a day or two. Well; why are you staring at a stranger so?”
“Oh, my lady!” cried Mrs Harding, “it’s no possible but what you see——”
“Ay, ay—I see, I see,” cried Lady Eskside, moved to tears; “well I see! and if it please God,” she added, devoutly, “I almost think the long trouble’s over. Marg’ret, you’ll not say anything; but I have no doubt you know what it has been this many a year.”
“Oh, my lady! yes, my lady! How could I be in the house and no know?”
“It is just like you all!” cried Lady Eskside, with another sudden change of sentiment; “prying into other folk’s business, instead of being attentive to your own; just like you all! But keep your man quiet, Marg’ret Harding, and hold your tongue yourself. That’s what I think,” she went on, softly, “but nothing’s clear.”
Dick sat and listened to all this, wondering. He thought she was a very strange old lady to change her tone and manner so often; but there was enough of sympathetic feeling in him to show that, though he could not tell how she was moved, she was much moved and excited. He was sorry for her. She had so kind a look that it went to his heart. Was it all for Val’s sake? and what did she mean about his mother? Somehow he could not connect his own old suspicions as to who his father was with this altogether new acquaintance. He got confused, and felt all power to think abandoning him. In everything she said, it was his mother who seemed to have the first place; and Dick felt that he knew all about his mother, though his father was a mystery to him. Of what importance could she be—a tramp, a vagrant, a woman whom he himself had only been able to withdraw from the fields and roads with difficulty—what could she be to this stately old lady? Dick, for his part, was deeply confounded, and did not know what to think.
She came up to him with a tremulous smile when the housekeeper went away. “Richard,” she said, speaking to him as if (he thought) she had known him all his life—“if I am right in what I think, you and I will be great friends some day. Was it you that my boy wrote about, that he was so fond of when he was at Eton?—oh, how blind I have been!—that had a mother you were very good to? My man, was that you?”