‘She would be one by this time, I dare say,’
said I.
We gazed in silence.
‘Yes!’ he sighed. ’She was
a charming actress, and one of the best of women.
A noble-minded young woman! A woman of cultivation
and genius! Do you see a broken heart in that
face? No? Very well. A walk will take
us to her grave. She died early.’
I was breathing ‘Who?’ when he said, ‘She
was my mother, my dear.’
It was piteous.
We walked to an old worn flat stone in a London street,
where under I had to imagine those features of beautiful
humanity lying shut from us.
She had suffered in life miserably.
I MEET THE PRINCESS
Hearing that I had not slept at the hotel, the Rev.
Ambrose rushed down to Riversley with melancholy ejaculations,
and was made to rebound by the squire’s contemptuous
recommendation to him to learn to know something of
the spirit of young bloods, seeing that he had the
nominal charge of one, and to preach his sermon in
secret, if he would be sermonizing out of church.
The good gentleman had not exactly understood his duties,
or how to conduct them. Far from objecting to
find me in company with my father, as he would otherwise
have done by transmitting information of that fact
to Riversley, he now congratulated himself on it, and
after the two had conversed apart, cordially agreed
to our scheme of travelling together. The squire
had sickened him. I believe that by comparison
he saw in my father a better friend of youth.
‘We shall not be the worse for a ghostly adviser
at hand,’ my father said to me with his quaintest
air of gravity and humour mixed, which was not insincerely
grave, for the humour was unconscious. ’An
accredited casuist may frequently be a treasure.
And I avow it, I like to travel with my private chaplain.’
Mr. Peterborough’s temporary absence had allowed
me time for getting ample funds placed at our disposal
through the agency of my father’s solicitors,
Messrs. Dettermain and Newson, whom I already knew
from certain transactions with them on his behalf.
They were profoundly courteous to me, and showed me
his box, and alluded to his Case—a long
one, and a lamentable, I was taught to apprehend, by
their lugubriously professional tone about it.
The question was naturally prompted in me, ‘Why
do you not go on with it?’
‘Want of funds.’
‘There’s no necessity to name that now,’
I insisted. But my father desired them to postpone
any further exposition of the case, saying, ’Pleasure
first, business by-and-by. That, I take it, is
in the order of our great mother Nature, gentlemen.
I will not have him help shoulder his father’s
pack until he has had his, fill of entertainment.’
