“I never dreamed of such a thing,” said Godfrey.
“All right. That’s settled. We come now to the main point. We’re father and son. What are we going to do about it?”
“It’s a peculiar situation, sir,” said Godfrey.
Baltazar, who in the impatient interval between Sheepshanks’s staggering news and the present interview, had pictured many a dénouement of the inevitable drama, had never pictured one so cold and unemotional as this. The Chinese filial ideal he knew to be non-existent in the West; but in his uncompromising way he had imagined extremes. Either scornful enmity and repudiation, or a gush of human sentiment. A scene in a silly old French melodrama, a memory of boyhood, had haunted him. “Mon fils!”—“Mon père!” And the twain had thrown themselves into each other’s arms. But neither of these dramatic situations had arisen. The situation, indeed, was characterized by the cool and thoughtful young man merely as “peculiar.” Well, it was an intelligent view. The boy had heard the arguments of the advocates of the devil and the advocates of the angels, and he had formed a sound and favourable judgment. On the angels’ advocacy he had never reckoned. So much was there to the good. He was not condemned. On the other hand, he saw no signs of filial emotion. He himself, with his expansive temperament, would have rejoiced at being able to cry “Mon fils!” and clasp to his breast this son of his loins, this splendid continuance of his blood and his brain. But in the calm, collected young soldier he could discover no germ of reciprocated sentiment. He felt disappointed, almost rebuffed. All the pent-up emotion of the lonely man was ready to burst the lock-gates; it had to surge back on itself.
After a long silence, he said: “Yes, you’re right. It is a peculiar situation. Perhaps circumstances make me take it more—what shall we say—more emotionally than you. After all, I’m a perfect stranger. I’ve never done a hand’s turn for you. I may be a complication in your life—to put it brutally—a damned nuisance. I don’t want to be one, I assure you.”
“Of course not,” Godfrey answered, with wrinkled forehead. “I quite understand. You must forgive me, sir, if I don’t say much; but you’ll agree that this revelation, or whatever we like to call it, is a bit sudden. If your mind, as you said just now, is in process of adjustment, what do you think mine must be?”
“All right,” said Baltazar. “Let us leave it at that for the present.”
He rose and marched to the door in search of Marcelle. But she had disappeared from the terrace and was nowhere visible to his eye scanning the garden. When he returned to the hall, Godfrey was standing.
“I suppose I must give the two of you time to recover from the shock of me. I can quite understand that bouncing in from the dead like this is disconcerting to one’s friends.” He looked at his watch. “I must be catching my train. I shall see you soon again, I hope.”
“I was wondering, sir, whether you would lunch with me in town to-morrow,” said Godfrey.