“But you will be very kind to him now; and he will be such a comfort to you, now he is come back again, and going away no more.”
“I declare you make me shake, John. You do talk such nonsense. One would think you knew all about him,—more than his own father does. What have I done, to be kept like this in the dark, all in the dark? And you seem to think that I was hard to him.”
“Cradock, all you have to do is just to say the word; just to say that you wish to see him, and your son will come and talk to you.”
“Talk to me! Oh yes, I should like to talk to him—very much—I mean, of course, if he is at leisure.”
He leaned on his stick, and tried to think, while John Rosedew hurried off; and of all his thoughts the foremost were, “What will Cradock my boy be like; and what shall I give him for dinner?”
Cradock came up shyly, gently, looking at his father first, then waiting to be looked at. The old man fixed his eyes upon him, at first with some astonishment—for his taste in dress was somewhat outraged by the Broadway style—then, in spite of all the change, remembrance of his son returned, and love, and sense of ownership. Last of all, auctorial pride in the young manʼs width of shoulder, blended with soft recollections of the time he dandled him.
“Why, Cradock! It is my poor son Cradock! What a size you are grown, my boy, my boy!”
“Oh, father, I am sure you want me. Only try me once again. I am not at all a radical.”
“Crad, you never could be. I knew you must come round at last to my way of thinking. When you had seen the world, Crad; when you had seen the world a bit, as your father did before you.”
And so they made the matter up, in politics, and dress, and little touches of religion, and in the depth of kindred love which underlies the latter; and never after was there word, except of migrant petulance, between the crotchety old man, and the son who held his heartʼs key.