Of course, my conscience-keeper at Rosebury was anxious to know about the school-dinner, and all the speeches made, and the guests assembled there; but she soon ceased to inquire about these when I came to give her the news of the discovery of our dear old friend in the habit of a Poor Brother of Grey Friars. She was very glad to hear that Clive and his little son had been reunited to the Colonel; and appeared to imagine at first, that there was some wonderful merit upon my part in bringing the three together.
“Well—no great merit, Pen, as you will put it,” says the Confessor; “but it was kindly thought, sir—and I like my husband when he is kind best; and don’t wonder at your having made a stupid speech at the dinner, as you say you did, when you had this other subject to think of. That is a beautiful psalm, Pen, and those verses which you were reading when you saw him, especially beautiful.”
“But in the presence of eighty old gentlemen, who have all come to decay, and have all had to beg their bread in a manner, don’t you think the clergyman might choose some other psalm?” asks Mr. Pendennis.
“They were not forsaken utterly, Arthur,” says Mrs. Laura, gravely: but rather declines to argue the point raised by me; namely, that the selection of that especial thirty-seventh psalm was not complimentary to those decayed old gentlemen.
“All the psalms are good, sir,” she says, “and this one, of course, is included,” and thus the discussion closed.
I then fell to a description of Howland Street, and poor Clive, whom I had found there over his work. A dubious maid scanned my appearance rather eagerly when I asked to see him. I found a picture-dealer chaffering with him over a bundle of sketches, and his little boy, already pencil in hand, lying in one corner of the room, the sun playing about his yellow hair. The child looked languid and pale, the father worn and ill. When the dealer at length took his bargains away, I gradually broke my errand to Clive, and told him from whence I had just come.
He had thought his father in Scotland with Lord H.: and was immensely moved with the news which I brought.
“I haven’t written to him for a month. It’s not pleasant the letters I have to write, Pen, and I can’t make them pleasant. Up, Tommykin, and put on your cap.” Tommykin jumps up. “Put on your cap, and tell them to take off your pinafore, tell grandmamma——”
At that name Tommykin begins to cry.
“Look at that!” says Clive, commencing to speak in the French language, which the child interrupts by calling out in that tongue. “I speak also French, papa.”