‘Ah, but then that wounds his own eye,’ said Mrs. Severn, half turning round; ‘just as a false note in music wounds my child, though it does not disturb me much. The dreadful thing is not to know when you’re out of drawing or out of tune. One feels something is wrong, but one is not clever enough to see what it is.’
‘I don’t think you are often out of tune, padrona nostra, or out of drawing either,’ said poor Laurie, with a sigh.
‘Dear, dear!’ said Mrs. Severn, ‘what does this mean I wonder—that our friend is out of tune himself?’
‘Dreadfully out of tune,’ said Laurie, ‘all ajar and not knowing what to do with myself, and come to you to set me right.’
Then there was a pause of a minute or two, and the painter turned from her easel and put down her palette with a sigh of relief. ‘That’s over for to-day at least,’ she said, and came and held out her hand to her visitor. ‘I saw it in the papers,’ she said, ‘but I would not say anything till I could give you my hand and look you in the face. Was it sudden? We have all to bear it one way or other; but it’s very hard all the same, and especially the first blow.’
It was the first time since the reading of the will that anybody had sympathised honestly with one of Mr. Renton’s sons for their father’s death; and, near as that event was, the voice of natural pity startled Laurie back to natural feeling. The twilight, too, which hid the tears that rushed to his eyes, and the soft, kind clasp of the hand which had come into his, and the voice full of all sympathies, united to move him. A sudden ache for his loss, for the father who had been so good to him, struck, with all its first freshness, into the mind where dwelt so many harder thoughts. When Mrs. Severn sat down, and bade him tell her about it, the young man went back to the sudden death-bed, and was softened, touched, and mollified in spite of himself; his voice trembled when he told her those wanderings of the dying man,—as everybody thought them,—and of his affectionate confidence that ‘Laurie would not mind.’
‘I see there is something more coming,’ said the padrona, with that insight in which he had trusted; ‘but whatever it is I am sure he was right, and Laurie will not be the one to mind.’
‘I don’t mind,’ said Laurie, with a sob that did no discredit to his manhood; and if there had been a shadow of resentment in his heart for the injury done him, in these words it passed away; and instead of asking the padrona’s advice as he had intended, as he had asked old Welby’s, he told her, on the contrary, about his father, and his anxieties touching Ben, and all the sinkings of heart, of which he did not himself seem to have been conscious till sympathy called them forth. I do not know whether the softness of the domestic quiet, and the padrona’s face shining upon him across the table, with all the light in the room concentrated in her hazel eyes, and the soft monosyllables of sympathy—the ‘poor Laurie’—that dropped from her lips now and then,—one cannot tell what effect these might have had in making the character of this interview so different from that he had held with Mr. Welby. Had it been her daughter to whom he was talking there could of course have been no doubt about it. But anyhow this was how it happened. Laurie made it apparent to her and to himself that it was the tender anguish of bereavement which had brought him here to be comforted, and was perfectly real and true in thus representing himself; and Mrs. Severn was very sorry for him, and thought more highly of him than ever. It had grown almost dark before she rose from her chair and brought the conversation to an end.
‘You are too young to dwell always on one subject,’ she said, ‘Come in now and have tea with the children. They are all very fond of you, and it will do you good. Of course you have not dined: you can go and dine later at eight or nine: it does not matter to you young men. And, if the talk is too much, Alice will play to you.’
‘The talk will not be too much,’ said Laurie; but as he followed the padrona out of the room he plucked the rose out of his button-hole and crushed it up in his hand and let it drop on the floor. A rose in a man’s coat is perhaps not quite consistent with the deepest phase of recent grief. But he was no deceiver in spite of this little bit of involuntary humbug. Other thoughts had driven his grief away, and diminished its force perhaps; but those were true and natural tears he had been shedding, and he felt ashamed of himself for having been able to think of the rose, and did not want the padrona’s quick eye to light upon that gentlest inconsistency; but on the whole it did not appear to him that he was unequal to their talk. So he went and played with the children while Mrs. Severn withdrew to change her dress for the evening, seating himself in the inner room where the lamp was burning and the table arrayed for tea, while Alice in the dim grey drawing-room, with the folding-doors open, played softest Lieder, such as her soul loved, in the dusk; and Miss Hadley sat and knitted, casting now and then a keen look from under her deep brows at Laurie in his mourning; and the urn bubbled and steamed, and little Edith climbed up into her high seat by the table, waiting till the padrona in her lace collar should come down to tea.