“I don’t understand you, any more than you understand me,” said Lord Eskside, “and I don’t wonder that you’re confounded; but, nevertheless, what I have told you is true. I am your grandfather, Dick. Ah, that takes you by surprise? Now, why, I would like to know? since you believe my son is your father, though ‘not in that way’——”
“My lord,” said Dick, “I beg your pardon; but there’s ways of being a man’s son without being anything to his relations, and that’s what I am thinking of. In my class we understand that such things are—though perhaps they oughtn’t to be.”
“But, you gomeral, you belong to my class, and not to your own!” said the old lord, feeling, with a mixture of pain and amusement and impatience, his own ignorance before the superior and melancholy knowledge of life possessed by this boy. “What must I say to convince you? You are Valentine’s twin brother; do you not see what that means? and can you suppose that anything in the world but a boy’s mother would nurse Val as that woman is doing?—besides, he’s her living picture,” said Lord Eskside, abruptly, and not without a grudge. He said it to convince this boy, who was a genuine Ross, without dispute or doubt; but even now it gave him a pang to acknowledge that his Val was like the tramp-mother, and not like the noble race of which his father came.
Dick stopped short, and put out his hand blindly as if to save himself from falling. This was a new view of the subject altogether. He could understand the relationship through the father; but—his mother! Valentine! What did it all mean? He caught his breath, and something like a sob came from his breast “I can’t understand it—I can’t understand it!” he cried, feeling choked as well as blinded; air failing him, sight failing him, and the whole steady earth turning round and round. When he recovered himself a little he turned to Lord Eskside, who was watching him closely from under his shaggy eyebrows. “Don’t say anything more, sir,” he cried with an effort which was almost piteous. “Let me try to make it out—I can’t all at once.”
“Go home, my lad,” said the old lord, kindly patting him on the shoulder, “and think it out at your leisure.”
“Thank you, sir—thank you,” cried Dick; and he turned back without another word, and hurried to his little bedroom, which was next door to the one in which Valentine lay. Ought he to have been overwhelmed with delight and joy? Instead of being a nobody, Dick Brown, Styles’s head-man, he was Richard Ross, Lord Eskside’s grandson, a person of importance, the son of a future baron; superior to all his old surroundings, even to most of his old patrons. But Dick was not glad at first, not even when he had fully realised this wonderful news, and allowed to himself that, Lord Eskside having told it, it must be true. He had found a family, a name, a position in the world; but he seemed to have lost himself. He sat down on his bed in the small room which he had himself furnished with a hundred little graces and conveniences, and of which a week ago he had been proud, and covered his face with his hands. But for his manhood, he could have sobbed over this extraordinary break and stop in his life; and at the first he was no more able to reconcile himself to being Dick Brown no longer, than Mr Richard Ross would have been able to reconcile himself to descending into the place of Styles’s head-man! The change was as great one way as another; indeed I think the higher might have been better able to come down than the lower, who did not understand how he was to mount up, and in whose modest, simple soul there rose on the moment impulses of pride he had never been conscious of possessing. Here, in his natural sphere, he was respected, thought well of, and everybody was aware how well he fulfilled his duties, bearing himself like a man, whatever he had to do. But this new world was all dark to him, a place in which he would have no guidance of experience, in which he would be judged according to another standard, and looked down upon. I do not mean to paint Dick as a perfect being, and this sense of natural pride, this personal humiliation in his social rise, gave him a pang which was at least as respectable as other pangs of pride. He did not know how long he sat there pondering blankly, forecasting with sombre thoughts an unknown future. He had lost himself, whom he knew, and he could not tell how the new self whom he did not know would be able to harmonise his life. He was still sitting there, with his hands over his eyes, when a faint sound in the room roused him, and, looking up, he saw his mother, who had entered softly, and now stood looking at him. He returned her look seriously for a moment before he spoke.
“Mother, is this true?”
“Yes,” she said, clasping her hands as if she would have wrung them. “Yes, boy, yes; it’s true. I gave up the one, because I thought he had a right to one; and I kept you, Dick. I was your mother that bore you, and sure I had a right to you.”
“Just a word more, mother,” said Dick, softly, “not to vex you: the little chap that died—was it him?—the one that you said died?”
“He died to me,” she cried—“to me and to you. I never, never thought to set eyes on him again. I gave him up, free. Dick, that night on the river, when you helped him with his boat——”