"Why don't you go to sleep, my dear?" she said, with a sweet tender smile, and sate down on the bed and took one of his hot hands.
Pen looked at her wildly for an instant—"I couldn't sleep," he said—"I—I was—I was writing."—And hereupon he flung his arms round her neck and said, "O mother! I love her, I love her!"—How could such a kind soul as that help soothing and pitying him? The gentle creature did her best: and thought with a strange wonderment and tenderness, that it was only yesterday that he was a child in that bed: and how she used to come and say her prayers over it before he woke upon holiday mornings.
They were very grand verses, no doubt, although Miss Fotheringay did not understand them; but old Cos, with a wink and a knowing finger on his nose, said, "Put them up with th' other letthers, Milly darling. Poldoody's pomes was nothing to this." So Milly locked up the manuscripts.
When, then, the major being dressed and presentable, presented himself to Mrs. Pendennis, he found in the course of ten minutes' colloquy that the poor widow was not merely distressed at the idea of the marriage contemplated by Pen, but actually more distressed at thinking that the boy himself was unhappy about it, and that his uncle and he should have any violent altercation on the subject. She besought Major Pendennis to be very gentle with Arthur: "He has a very high spirit, and will not brook unkind words," she hinted. "Dr. Portman spoke to him very roughly—and I must own unjustly, the other night—for my dearest boy's honor is as high as any mother can desire—but Pen's answer quite frightened me, it was so indignant. Recollect he is a man now; and be very—very cautious," said the widow, laying a fair long hand on the major's sleeve.
He took it up, kissed it gallantly, and looked in her alarmed face with wonder, and a scorn which he was too polite to show. "Bon dieu!" thought the old negotiator, "the boy has actually talked the woman round, and she'd get him a wife as she would a toy, if master cried for it. Why are there no such things as lettres-de-cachet—and a Bastile for young fellows of family?" The major lived in such good company that he might be excused for feeling like an earl.—He kissed the widow's timid hand, pressed it in both his, and laid it down on the table with one of his own over it, as he smiled and looked her in the face.
"Confess," said he, "now that you are thinking how you possibly can make it up to your conscience to let the boy have his own way."
She blushed, and was moved, in the usual manner of females. "I am thinking that he is very unhappy; and I am too—"
"To contradict him or to let him have his own wish?" asked the other; and added, with great comfort to his inward self, "I'm d—d if he shall."
"To think that he should have formed so foolish and cruel and fatal an attachment," the widow said, "which can but end in pain whatever be the issue."
"The issue shan't be marriage, my dear sister," the major said, resolutely. "We're not going to have a Pendennis, the head of the house, marry a strolling mountebank from a booth. No, no, we won't marry into Greenwich Fair, ma'am."