“Not to-night,” she said, and kissed him. She lingered a moment, patting him on the shoulder with her hand. “I know it must seem strange to you, Fred—but not to-night, not to-night.”
As a matter of fact, the least imaginative of lookers-on will allow that the position of a middle-aged mother who has to tell her grown-up son that she is going to marry again must be an embarrassing one. Mrs. Dalyell was not like a girl expecting ecstatic happiness in the union with the man she loves. It was an arrangement which had come to seem natural, partly because she wanted someone to lean upon, and ill-natured gossips (as she heard) objected to that constant, easy, unembarrassing presence of the household friend, which she and her children had found so comfortable—without the existence of some closer bond. She would rather honestly have had Mr. Wedderburn on his old footing; but, if she could not have him on his old footing, it was better to marry him than to lose him. This had been the unimpassioned fashion of Mrs. Dalyell’s thoughts. And he wished it. A man, it appeared, even at fifty-seven, could not content himself with the friendship which was quite enough for a woman. Perhaps she was a little flattered to know that this was so, and that in her mature matronhood she still had charms. And she had thought, as he assured her, that it would draw the family bonds closer and make so little difference. The chief difference would be that he would come of right, instead of only for love, and that the interests of her family would be his own, not only much more than his own, as they were at present. It had seemed very plausible, as he set all the advantages forth, which indeed Pat Wedderburn had done, not only to calm her scruples, but also his own; for, had she but known it, he too was very well contented with the existing position of affairs. But if Mrs. Dalyell had known the trouble it would have given her—the wild vexation of the girls, and the horrible necessity of having to tell Fred! No, that last was what she could not do. She had intended to do it on his return, but her courage had failed her. Tell your grown-up son that you are going to marry! No, no, she could not do it. And when two years had not yet elapsed from his father’s death! “Oh,” she said to herself, “it was no wrong to Robert! Oh, no, no wrong to Robert! It was a different thing, not to be thought of in the same way.” But still, when it came to the point, she could not do it, it was beyond her power.
Fred could not tell what to think: he was angry and vexed and cast down by the strange reception he had received. The first night at home, which was always so pleasant, the girls hanging about him with a hundred things to ask and to tell, his mother beaming with affection and pleasure on her united family. And here he was left alone, the lamps burning with a sort of calm intelligence as if they knew all about it, the clock chuckling at him on the mantel-piece. Foggo came in with the tea-tray, and looked round in astonishment for the ladies, then shook his head solemnly and went away, leaving the little silver kettle boiling over its spirit-lamp. Foggo knew too. The very kettle puffed out its steam in Fred’s face like a mockery. Everybody knew—except the forlorn young master of the house, who knew nothing, and could not even form a guess what the mystery could be.
He was not however destined to spend that night in uncertainty. As he went upstairs, passing with a sense of injury the closed doors of his mother’s and his sisters’ rooms, Fred heard himself called in a whisper from the end of the corridor. Had he reflected for a moment he would have known who it must be. But with his mind full of his present trouble he did not reflect; he turned round quickly, hoping to see one of his sisters, and it was not till he found himself in the clutches of old Janet that he recognised the danger of her interference. “Has she told ye, Mr. Fred?” whispered the old woman, approaching her formidable head in the big mutch, and with its little palsied movement, to the young man’s face. “Told me what?” he cried with impatience. “Oh, my bonnie lad, dinna lose your temper—you’ll have need of all your patience. That she’s going to be married upon Pat Wedderburn!”
Fred gave a hoarse cry, which ran along the whole corridor into his mother’s closed room, who heard it and trembled—and to Susie’s, who sat half desperate over her fire longing for her brother. Not for a moment did Fred doubt the news: it explained everything; but he fled from the creature of ill-omen, the woman who gave it, with a sense of hatred and rage, for which indeed there was no warrant so far as she was concerned. “This is your doing!” he cried with fantastic bitterness. Why should he hate Janet, and how could it be her doing? he asked himself afterwards. But at the moment it seemed to the distracted young man as if this old retainer was one of the Fates, the enemy, not the friend of the house. He would not wait to hear another word, but rushed upstairs and shut himself in his room, as if some evil thing had been at his heels. Married!—his mother, his father’s wife, the first authority of his life—the woman without reproach—mamma! With that last baby-cry the cup was filled. The young man flung himself upon his face on his bed. And what an unhappy house it was which the darkness held that night concealed in its outer mantle of peace! Unhappy without any cause, for there was no evil going to be done—no harm: so far as any of these troubled people knew.
Mr. Wedderburn, who came “out” next day with an embarrassment not less than that of Mrs. Dalyell, was roused a little by the desperate self-repression with which Fred received the official announcement. “My boy,” he said, “it may vex you that there should be any change, but what we are doing is no wrong to you—nor to any man.”
“I have not said it was,” said Fred sullenly.
“No, you have not said it was—but you seem to think it’s an unpardonable step. It is nothing of the kind,” said Mr. Wedderburn, indignant. “The time will come when you will think fit to marry, and then your mother will be turned out of her house; and that will seem the most natural thing in the world. Why should she not have one by her side that will make her comfort his care? Your father would have wished it. She’s not a person to stand alone to fight with the world.”
“She has her children.”
“Her children! Susie, who will have a husband of her own as soon as the lad has enough to live on; and Alice, who will follow her sister’s example; and you—when are you here to keep your mother company? A month in the vacations when the house is full—and a marriage whenever it strikes your fancy, with her turned adrift. No, no, my young man! You may not like it, you may scorn both her and me for it. But that face!—as if you were wronged and shamed. Come, come, Fred, that’s not an air to put on with an old and faithful friend like me.”