There was none of the art of the orator in these words, or in the exquisitely tender flexions of the voice. But the heart of the man was in the tones of his voice for his mother.
She looked at him in the dim light and saw his disordered collar and tie, but put that down to excitement caused by his rehearsal.
He led her gently to a chair and took one in front of her by the side of the dining-table. He took her thin, white hand in both his own and looked into her calm, beautiful face, radiant with that tranquil light of maternal love justified and fulfilled.
"You have something to tell me, mother? Something pleasant, I hope, about yourself." He had never spoken in a voice of such unreckoning love to Dora in all their meetings and partings. It was the broad, rich, even sound of a river that is always flowing in one direction and always full, not the tinkle of a capricious fountain or the tempestuous rush of a torrent at the mercy of exhaustion or drought.
"I have, my son. It does not concern me, or if it does, but indirectly. Indeed, I do not know. It has to do with you, dear." They, like sweethearts, called one another "dear," because they were inexpressibly dear to one another.
"With me, mother? And how?" John Hanbury was not a handsome man, but when he smiled at his slender, grey-haired mother, and patted her delicate white thin hands with his own large and brown, there was more than physical beauty in his looks, there was a subjugating, an intoxicating radiance, and all-completed prostration of his soul before the mother he worshipped.
"I do not know exactly, John. Your father gave me in trust for you, as you know, a paper, which I was not to give to you except at some great crisis of your life. If no harm of any particular moment threatened you until you were thirty, you were never to see this paper."
"I know," he said. "I was only seventeen then--not launched in the world--and he thought I might, when I came of age, and got my two thousand a-year, plunge into dissipation, and take to racing or backing horses, or cards, or something of that kind. Well, mother, I hope you are not uneasy about me on those scores? This paper is no doubt one of extremely good advice from an excellent father to a young son. I am sure I will read the paper with all the respect I owe to any words he may have left for my guidance. You do not think, mother, I am now likely to give way to any of those temptations?"
She shook her small head gravely.
"I do not fear you will give way to the ordinary temptations of youth, John. I know you too well to dread anything of the kind. I don't think the paper your father left me for you refers to the ordinary danger in a young man's path."