It was on that night, long after midnight, that wakeful Helen, passing stealthily by her son’s door, saw a light streaming through the chink of the door into the dark passage, and heard Pen tossing and tumbling, and mumbling verses in his bed. She waited outside for a while, anxiously listening to him. In infantile fevers and early boyish illnesses, many a night before, the kind soul had so kept watch. She turned the lock very softly now, and went in so gently, that Pen for a moment did not see her. His face was turned from her. His papers on his desk were scattered about, and more were lying on the bed round him. He was biting a pencil and thinking of rhymes and all sorts of follies and passions. He was Hamlet jumping into Ophelia’s grave: he was the Stranger taking Mrs. Haller to his arms, beautiful Mrs. Haller, with the raven ringlets falling over her shoulders. Despair and Byron, Thomas Moore and all the Loves of the Angels, Waller and Herrick, Beranger and all the love-songs he had ever read, were working and seething in this young gentleman’s mind, and he was at the very height and paroxysm of the imaginative frenzy when his mother found him.
“Arthur,” said the mother’s soft silver voice: and he started up and turned round. He clutched some of the papers and pushed them under the pillow.
“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 rather roughly—and I must own unjustly, the other night—for my dearest boy’s honour 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 Bastille 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.”