“It’s very strange,” said Dick, troubled; “and somehow I feel for him as I never felt for anybody else. You knew his—father——?”
“I won’t have any questions from you, Dick,” she cried passionately, rising from her chair. “I told you I knew his—people. Some time or other I’ll tell you how I knew them; but not now.”
“I wonder does he know anything about it,” said Dick, speaking more to himself than her. “It’s very strange; he said he thought you were a lady, mother; and that he had seen you before——”
“Did he? God bless him!” cried the woman, surprised by sudden tears. “But I ain’t a lady—I ain’t a lady,” she added, under her breath; “he was wrong there.”
“You have some lady ways, mother, now and again,” said Dick, pondering. “It is strange. If you knew his people, as you say, does he know?”
“Not a word, Dick, and he mustn’t know. Remember, if it was my last word—he mustn’t know! Promise me you’ll not speak. If he knew and they knew—they’d—I don’t know what they mightn’t do. Dick, you will never betray your mother?—you will never—never——”
“Hush, mother dear; you are worrying yourself for nothing,” said her gentle boy. “If there’s nothing wrong, what could they or anybody do? Of course, I won’t say a word. All the safer,” he added, with a laugh, “because I don’t know what words to say. When you keep me dark, mother, I can’t give out any light to other people, can I? It’s the surest way.”
She took no notice of this implied reproof, the most severe that had ever come from Dick’s gentle lips. She was another creature altogether from the languid woman whom he had found sitting there in the midst of the untidy room. A new light had come into her eyes—all her stupor and weariness were over. Dick was startled, and he was a trifle hurt at the same time, which was natural enough. If there had been any material for jealousy in him, I think it must have developed at that moment—for all his love had not called forth from his mother one tittle of the feeling which to all appearance an utter stranger awoke. Dick sighed, but his nature was not in the smallest degree self-contemplative; and he shook the momentary feeling away ere it had time to take form. “If I can get leave, I’ll go up to Oxford and see about it to-morrow,” he said. When he had come to this conclusion, he went towards the door to return to his work, leaving her active and revived, both in mind and body. But he stopped before he reached it, and turned back. “Mother,” he said, with a little solemnity, “Mr Ross will be only about two years at Oxford. What shall we do when he goes away? We cannot follow him about wherever he goes.”
“God knows,” she said, stopping short in her sweeping. “Perhaps the world may end before then; perhaps——. We can’t tell,” she added solemnly, bowing her head as if to supreme destiny, “what may happen any day or any year. It’s all in God’s hand.”
Dick went away without another word. He arranged to go to Oxford, and did so, and found Val, and finally made an agreement to take the situation offered him; but this little prick to his pride and affection rankled in his mind. Why should Mr Ross be so much more to her than himself, her son, who had never left her side? “It is strange,” he said, with a sense of injury, which grew fainter every moment, yet still lingered. He looked at Val with more interest than ever, and a curious feeling of somehow belonging to him. What could the link be? Dick knew very little about his own history; he did not know whose son he was, nor what his mother had been. The idea, indeed, gleamed across his mind that Val’s father might have been his own father, and this thought gave him no such thrill of pain and shame as it would naturally have brought to a young man brought up in a different class. Dick, with the terrible practical knowledge of human nature which belongs to the lower levels of society, knew that such things happened often enough; and if he felt a little movement in his mind of unpleasant feeling, he was neither horrified by the suggestion of such a possibility, nor felt his mother lowered in his eyes. Whatever the facts were, they were beyond his ken; and it was not for him to judge them. Pondering it over, however, he came to feel with a little relief that this could not be the solution. He knew what the manners of his class were, and he knew that his mother had always been surrounded by that strange abstract atmosphere of reserve and modesty which no one else of her degree resembled her in. No, that could not be the explanation. Perhaps she had recognised in Val the son of some love of her youth whom she had kept in her thoughts throughout all her rougher life. This was a strangely visionary hypothesis, and Dick felt how unreal it was; but what other explanation could he make?