When I was about seven years of age my father died. I think the cause was aerated waters, although I remember that on being shown his body after death it looked so small that my mind hardly established any very definite relation between it and the weary, kindly little man with the abnormal waist whom I had known as my father.
My mother must, I am sure, have sorrowed greatly, but she spared my tender years any harrowing spectacle of grief and set herself courageously to the task of keeping our home together.
My father had been insured for some five hundred pounds, which brought my mother in a tiny income. The house fortunately was her own. She immediately dismissed her one servant and let the front rooms, so that we were not so badly off after all. My mother, who had hitherto superintended my education, was now no longer able to do so, as the house took up most of her time. Certainly, the school I was sent to was a very much better one than a boy circumstanced as I was could have expected to attend. It was patronised by a great many sons of the comparatively wealthy in the neighbourhood, and was by no means inexpensive. I went right through it from the lowest form to the highest.
My masters pronounced me quick, but not studious. Personally, I don’t think highly imaginative people are ever very studious in childhood or early youth. How is it possible? The imaginative temperament sets one dreaming of wonderful results achieved at a remarkably small outlay of effort. It is only the dull who receive any demonstration of the value of application.
My mother was careful that I should not be dressed so as to compare unfavourably in any way with my schoolfellows, and managed that I should always have a sufficiency of pocket-money, advantages which I hardly appreciated at the time. How she accomplished this I do not know, but I can honestly say that I never knew what want meant, and although my mother did all the work of the house herself, and cooked for the gentleman to whom our front rooms were let, we never lived in the kitchen or descended to a slovenly mode of life. We had our meals in quite a well-bred manner in the dining-room, which was also our living-room.
Our lodger was a mysterious creature who always brought me a handsome birthday and Christmas present and declined to be thanked. The first time he saw me he pronounced me to be too good-looking for a boy.
He was gruff and abrupt in manner, but the incarnation of deferential courtesy to my mother, whom I truly think he worshipped. I believe that his prolonged residence in our front rooms was not entirely due to their comfort or to my mother’s cooking.
I am sure he embarrassed her by his chronic efforts to spare her trouble. By degrees he took to dining out nearly every evening, although his arrival immediately after the dinner hour showed that he had no engagement anywhere else.
I have every reason to believe that he made her an offer of marriage, but if it were so he did not allow her refusal to drive him away. He remained, and continued to treat her with even greater deference than before.
Apart from the memory of my father, which she held sacred, her devotion as a mother would, I think, have kept her from the remotest contemplation of a second marriage. She lived entirely for me.