“Well, my child! You will like to come out with papa, and Betsy can dress you.” He flings off his own paint-stained shooting-jacket as he talks, takes a frock-coat out of a carved wardrobe, and a hat from a helmet on the shelf. He is no longer the handsome splendid boy of old times. Can that be Clive, with that haggard face and slouched handkerchief? “I am not the dandy I was, Pen,” he says bitterly.
A little voice is heard crying overhead—and giving a kind of gasp the wretched father stops in some indifferent speech he was trying to make. “I can’t help myself,” he groans out; “my wife is so ill, she can’t attend to the child. Mrs. Mackenzie manages the house for me—and—here! Tommy, Tommy! papa is coming!” Tommy has been crying again; and flinging open the studio door, Clive calls out, and dashes upstairs.
I hear scuffling, stamping, loud voices, poor Tommy’s scared little pipe—Clive’s fierce objurgations, and the Campaigner’s voice barking out—“Do, sir, do! with my child suffering in the next room. Behave like a brute to me, do. He shall not go! He shall not have the hat”—“He shall”—“Ah—ah!” A scream is heard. It is Clive tearing a child’s hat out of the Campaigner’s hands, with which, and a flushed face, he presently rushes downstairs, bearing little Tommy on his shoulder.
“You see what I am come to, Pen,” he says with a heartbroken voice, trying, with hands all of a tremble, to tie the hat on the boy’s head. He laughs bitterly at the ill success of his endeavours. “Oh, you silly papa!” laughs Tommy, too.
The door is flung open, and the red-faced Campaigner appears. Her face is mottled with wrath, her bandeaux of hair are disarranged upon her forehead, the ornaments of her cap, cheap, and dirty, and numerous, only give her a wilder appearance. She is in a large and dingy wrapper, very different from the lady who had presented herself a few months back to my wife—how different from the smiling Mrs. Mackenzie of old days!
“He shall not go out of a winter day, sir,” she breaks out. “I have his mother’s orders, whom you are killing. Mr. Pendennis!” She starts, perceiving me for the first time, and her breast heaves, and she prepares for combat, and looks at me over her shoulder.
“You and his father are the best judges upon this point, ma’am,” said Mr. Pendennis, with a bow.
“The child is delicate, sir,” cries Mrs. Mackenzie; “and this winter——”
“Enough of this,” says Clive with a stamp, and passes through her guard with Tommy, and we descend the stairs, and at length are in the free street. Was it not best not to describe at full length this portion of poor Clive’s history?