“You have said enough, sir,” said the boy. “Would to God you had left me where you found me![Endnote: 4] It was not my fault that you took me from the alms-house. But it will be my fault if I ever eat another bit of your bread, or stay under your roof an hour longer.”
He was moving towards the door, but little Elsie sprung upon him and caught him round the neck, although he repelled her with severe dignity; and Doctor Grimshawe, after a look at the group in which a bitter sort of mirth and mischief struggled with a better and kindlier sentiment, at last flung his pipe into the chimney, hastily quaffed the remnant of a tumbler, and shuffled after Ned, kicking off his old slippers in his hurry. He caught the boy just by the door.
“Ned, Ned, my boy, I’m sorry for what I said,” cried he. “I am a guzzling old blockhead, and don’t know how to treat a gentleman when he honors me with his company. It is not in my blood nor breeding to have such knowledge. Ned, you will make a man, and I lied if I said otherwise. Come, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
The boy was easily touched, at these years, as a boy ought to be; and though he had not yet forgiven the grim Doctor, the tears, to his especial shame, gushed out of his eyes in a torrent, and his whole frame shook with sobs. The Doctor caught him in his arms, and hugged him to his old tobacco-fragrant dressing-gown, hugged him like a bear, as he was; so that poor Ned hardly knew whether he was embracing him with his love, or squeezing him to death in his wrath.
“Ned,” said he, “I’m not going to live a great while longer; I seem an eternal nuisance to you, I know; but it’s not so, I’m mortal and I feel myself breaking up. Let us be friends while I live; for believe me, Ned, I’ve done as well by you as I knew, and care for nothing, love nothing, so much as you. Little Elsie here, yes. I love her too. But that’s different. You are a boy, and will be a man; and a man whom I destine to do for me what it has been the object of my life to achieve. Let us be friends. We will—we must be friends; and when old Doctor Grim, worthless wretch that he is, sleeps in his grave, you shall not have the pang of having parted from him in unkindness. Forgive me, Ned; and not only that, but love me better than ever; for though I am a hasty old wretch, I am not altogether evil as regards you.”
I know not whether the Doctor would have said all this, if the day had not been pretty well advanced, and if his potations had not been many; but, at any rate, he spoke no more than he felt, and his emotions thrilled through the sensitive system of the boy, and quite melted him down. He forgave Doctor Grim, and, as he asked, loved him better than ever; and so did Elsie. Then it was so sweet, so good, to have had this one outgush of affection,—he, poor child, who had no memory of mother’s kisses, or of being cared for out of tenderness, and whose heart had been hungry, all his life, for some such thing; and probably Doctor Grim, in his way, had the same kind of enjoyment of this passionate crisis; so that though, the next day, they all three looked at one another a little ashamed, yet it had some remote analogy to that delicious embarrassment of two lovers, at their first meeting after they know all.
CHAPTER X.
It is very remarkable that Ned had so much good in him as we find there; in the first place, born as he seemed to be of a wild, vagrant stock, a seedling sown by the breezes, and falling among the rocks and sands; the growing up without a mother to cultivate his tenderness with kisses and the inestimable, inevitable love of love breaking out on all little occasions, without reference to merit or demerit, unfailing whether or no; mother’s faith in excellences, the buds which were yet invisible to all other eyes, but to which her warm faith was the genial sunshine necessary to their growth; mother’s generous interpretation of all that was doubtful in him, and which might turn out good or bad, according as should be believed of it; mother’s pride in whatever the boy accomplished, and unfailing excuses, explanations, apologies, so satisfactory, for all his failures; mother’s deep intuitive insight, which should see the permanent good beneath all the appearance of temporary evil, being wiser through her love than the wisest sage could be,—the dullest, homeliest mother than the wisest sage. The Creator, apparently, has set a little of his own infinite wisdom and love (which are one) in a mother’s heart, so that no child, in the common course of things, should grow up without some heavenly instruction. Instead of all this, and the vast deal more that mothers do for children, there had been only the gruff, passionate Doctor, without sense of religion, with only a fitful tenderness, with years’ length between the fits, so fiercely critical, so wholly unradiant of hope, misanthropic, savagely morbid. Yes; there was little Elsie too; it must have been that she was the boy’s preserver, being childhood, sisterhood, womanhood, all that there had been for him of human life, and enough—he being naturally of such good stuff—to keep him good. He had lost much, but not all: he was not nearly what he might have been under better auspices; flaws and imperfections there were, in abundance, great uncultivated wastes and wildernesses in his moral nature, tangled wilds where there might have been stately, venerable religious groves; but there was no rank growth of evil. That unknown mother, that had no opportunity to nurse her boy, must have had gentle and noblest qualities to endow him with; a noble father, too, a long, unstained descent, one would have thought. Was this an almshouse child?