‘Well!’ he exclaimed at length, ‘this disposes of the whole bother. I can do what my mother wished without having to run away from you. Are you not glad?’
‘Yes, I am glad,’ she answered slowly; ‘but, do you know, I am almost afraid of your uncle.’
‘Nonsense. He is an odd fish, and dry as a roasted coffee-bean in his letters. But he must be the right sort at bottom, or she would never have cared so much for him, or have asked him to take an interest in me.’
Philip was thinking of his mother; Madge was thinking of hers; and she also came to the conclusion that Austin Shield must be a good man at heart, or he could not have won so much affection, and he would not have been so faithful to the pledge he had given his sister years ago. The vision of the hard unforgiving man vanished from her mind, but no new conception took its place. Some instinct impels us to create a mental portrait of any person about whom we hear much or with whom we correspond. As a rule, the portrait is entirely erroneous; and we are disappointed, agreeably or the reverse, as may be, when we meet the original in the flesh. Yet these portraits of the imagination often exercise a permanent influence on our conduct towards the unconscious sitters.
‘Have you ever formed any notion of what he can be like personally?’ she asked by-and-by.
‘Well, no.... I cannot say that I have—that is, any particular notion of him. There is no portrait of him anywhere about the house, and my father never spoke about him till that evening when he tried to persuade me not to go to him. I should say he is a big chap, with a thin face and a keen eye to business, but good-natured in the main. What is your idea?’
‘I cannot say now. I had my idea; but something has driven it quite out of my head within the last few minutes.’
‘Well, we shall soon see what he is like without cudgelling our brains about it. He will be here in a week or two, if he is as sharp about coming as he was about my going. Of course he will meet you, even if he persists in refusing to see anybody else; and I hope he won’t do that. Our plan must be to bring him to reason somehow; and I am ready to submit to a good deal in order to bring that about.... But I say, Madge, now that we have had just as much worry as if I had really gone away for ever so long, you are not going to stick to that stupid idea of putting off till next harvest?’
‘We are to wait till then—at least,’ she answered, shaking her head and laughing.
But Philip did not regard this decision as irrevocable.