'What are you talking about, Warren? Look at that girl. What a striking face! The features of the Moor and the spirit of the Greek.... Did you see some one you know, dear boy?'
'Yes—the man reading; I was at school with him in my last year, but I can't think of his name.... Crevequer, that's it.... Now, that's funny, rather,' he mused.
'The young man reading, Warren?'
'That's the one. I knew him by his stutter, chiefly—and the blazer. He knew me, too, or half thought he did. Seems to be amusing himself pretty well. Do you remember, mother, you said something about my seeing after him, more or less, when he went to school? You'd met his father, or knew about him in some way. I suppose that was why I felt I had to lick him for his stutter; I don't remember that I ever had much other intercourse with him.'
'Crevequer?... Oh, Maddan Crevequer's boy, do you mean? Yes, I met Maddan Crevequer once or twice, and I used to hear a good deal about him. He was an eccentric—a genius, too, I think, only he didn't turn it in the right directions. Shut himself up in a little place in the North of Italy, and no one ever knew what he did there. Very striking. Then he came to England to send his boy to school, and it killed him. He required Italy for his existence, physically, intellectually, and spiritually. Quite a pagan, but his wife was a Roman Catholic, and I heard that the children were brought up to her faith, though she died quite young.... One feels always about his books that they should be intensely interesting, but it is an interest somehow run off the lines.... And so that is Maddan Crevequer's boy!'
The thought suddenly brought her up. The flare of a street lamp had shown Tommy Crevequer rather plainly—his bare head, his frayed blazer, his friends, girls and men, who laughed. It was, perhaps, his friends who chiefly put the ring of surprise into Mrs. Venables' tone. Interest followed close on its heels. The thing struck her.
'Curious. We must find him out, Warren; get to know him.'
'Must we, mother? Good copy, do you think? But one knows the sort'—he made a downward movement with his hand—'when it's sober it borrows, and that's such a bore. Besides, we shan't be able to find him—and he won't, probably, want to be found.'
'You might go back now....'
'Interrupt the reading? No, I think not. He mightn't be pleased.'