WHILE Roger Musgrave travelled full of hope and pleasant anticipation towards Milnehill, Roger’s mother had been mourning over her dead husband. And now, while that happy evening party gathered in Colonel Sutherland’s drawing-room, the widow and her little boy were spending the slow hours together in the warm parlour, where Edmund spent his invalid childhood. His father’s death had given a shock more than it could bear to the nervous and weakly frame of the ailing child; his father was dead, and he was the heir. An unnatural excitement stimulated the precocious little mind, and rose to fever in the throbbing pulse and little pinched cheeks, now flushed with a hectic brightness. The little fellow had visions too magnificent to be safe, and projects as wild and impossible, as they were childish and simple-hearted. After the first pangs of his childish grief were over, Edmund, who knew nothing about guardians nor minority, began to speculate splendidly what he should do with his new wealth. He poured into his mother’s ears a flood of intentions, vain, lavish, childish dreams of universal help. He was to send for Roger and give the greater half of all he had to his elder brother; he was to get everything she could desire for Mrs. Stenhouse; he was to send a present of the most beautiful horse in the world to Colonel Sutherland; and henceforward they were all to live together, and “my brother Roger” was to be supreme in the joint household. Mrs. Stenhouse, afraid to check him, and at the same time trembling for the effect of this excitement upon his weak frame, looked on with a troubled heart. She knew Edmund would not get his wild will now, as he supposed he should. She knew very well that nobody would permit him to do a tenth part of what he meant to do. But when he roused himself up out of his chair with that light of pleasure on his face, and that hectic flush which she persuaded herself into supposing “a healthy colour,” and amused the languor of his lonely days with these imperative fancies, what could the poor woman do who had been his bondwoman and servant so long? And then she was full of sorrowful thoughts about “his dear father,” as Mrs. Stenhouse now called the careless partner of her life, mourning him as many a man is mourned who does little to deserve that remorseful tribute of late affection. Now that he was gone, she thought it must have been her own fault that they did not get on better; and it grieved her to find how impossible it was to check Edmund into sadness, and to make him feel that the loss of his father was a matter far more important than his supposed mastery of his father’s wealth. Edmund had cried all his tears out the first day, and had no more lamentations to make.
“What do you cry for?” he exclaimed at last, impatiently; “aren’t you glad to send for Roger, and have him at home? I shouldn’t wonder if he’d join the Edgehill Cricket-club, and get to be captain of the eleven—wouldn’t it be famous. And I mean to get strong, I can tell you, mamma. I don’t mean to live in this stifle and coddle, now I’ve come into my fortune; for papa said it was all for me.”
“Oh, Edmund, dear child, your father was so fond of you!” cried the poor mother; “have you no thought to spare for him, now that he is gone? He loved you more than everything in the world. I wish—I wish you would think more of him than of what he leaves behind.”
Little Edmund looked up keenly at the weak, weeping, timid woman.
“Were you fond of him yourself?” said the child, half suspiciously; “now you love him and cry about him; but it is different with me. He was very good to me, was papa,” continued the little man, with a reluctant tear in the corner of his eye; “but all of you say he’s a deal better off now, and that we’ll see him again. If that’s true, why do you cry?—and besides, mamma, I used always to think that you liked Roger’s father best.”
Mrs. Stenhouse covered her face with her hands, and only cried the more; she was vexed, humiliated, and ashamed, as well as full of grief. It seemed somehow sacrilege to speak of Roger’s father to the son of her second husband; and Roger’s father was little to herself now but a bright, brief dream of her girlhood, too short, too happy to influence her life. Now the second, longer, harder, more serious portion of her existence had concluded also; but while she sat crying these tears of mortification and wounded feeling, some one beckoned her to the door of the room and gave her some letters. One of these was from Roger himself, announcing his arrival, and that he had gone to Milnehill; for Roger as yet did not know what had happened in his mother’s house. This surprising announcement raised her out of her distress in a moment and dried her tears. A thrill of new freedom ran warm through her heart, stirring the blood in her dull veins. Roger, her first-born, whom she had not seen since he was almost a baby—whom Mr. Stenhouse smilingly disliked, and would not permit to come there—Roger, her brave soldier, her handsome boy! Now she could have him under her own roof, without asking anybody’s permission; now she could enjoy her son’s society in fullest freedom. Poor soul! it gave her a compunction to feel how glad she was; but she could not deny even to herself how exquisite for the first moment was that unaccustomed delight.
“Oh, Edmund, darling, look here!” cried poor Mrs. Stenhouse, crying again, but this time with joy; “Roger has come home—your brother, my love;” and with an outcry of mingled terror, compunction, and delight, to feel herself daring enough in this house to pronounce these words aloud, Mrs. Stenhouse thrust the letter into Edmund’s hands, and relapsed once more into tears.
Her other letters had fallen on the floor at her feet. When Edmund had finished Roger’s, his inextinguishable childish curiosity discovered these. His mother was still crying, and he was her lord and master, the autocrat acknowledged and apparent of the house; he slid out of the easy chair as a cripple slides, and snatched up the nearest. Though it was addressed to Julius Stenhouse, Esq., the arrogant little imp did not hesitate to tear it open; but he did it with some haste, to make sure of the epistle before his mother uncovered her eyes. It was a communication somewhat puzzling to brains so young. Edmund, though his pride would not acknowledge it even to himself, did not understand half of Mr. Pouncet’s letter, but he gleaned enough out of it to know that something that concerned Roger had been a subject of importance likewise to his father and his father’s friend; and that the writer of the present epistle, which had, it appeared, been delayed in the transmission, was in a state of considerable alarm and trepidation about something. What it was that Mr. Pouncet feared Edmund could not make out, but he jumped at the conclusion that something was wrong as rapidly as Susan had done. Afraid!—why should a man be afraid?—Roger wasn’t. Roger was the epitome of Edmund’s faith. He had been badly educated, this poor child. He knew very little in heaven or earth save his prayers and Roger, and trusted in nothing as he did in that unknown, never-to-be-acknowledged, secret, invisible brother, whom his mother told him of in whispers, and whom he thought of by day and dreamt of by night. Now glorious times were coming. Papa and this other man, whose letter rather baffled Edmund, had doubtless entertained some project of keeping Roger down; but behold the tables were turned, the conspirators were cheated, and the details of the complot had fallen into the hands of Roger’s little knight and defender. True, he did not understand them very well, but still they were here.
“Roger shall come home directly,” said the little despot, waving aloft in his hand these two epistles. “I’ll give him half of all my money, mamma. He shan’t go for a soldier any more; and I’ll find out if anybody wants to do him any harm, and punish them, I will! Look here; it’s something about Roger, but I don’t quite know every word what it means. You can’t tell any more than me. I say, mamma, let’s have Scarsdale here, and ask him.”
“What is it, love?” asked Mrs. Scarsdale, wiping her eyes.
“I wish you’d mind what one says,” cried the impatient little invalid. “I told you I didn’t know quite all it means, neither could you if you was to try. Mamma, ring the bell and send for Scarsdale—he’s got no master now but you and me; send and tell him I want him, and he’s to come directly. Mamma, do you hear?”
And when Mrs. Stenhouse had glanced over the letter, which she did understand rather better than Edmund after all, she thought the boy’s suggestion wise. She had not the smallest gleam of discrimination in respect to character, and to be Colonel Sutherland’s nephew was enough to give her a blind confidence in Horace; and as to the possibility of acting for herself, that did not enter into the poor woman’s head. She sent for Scarsdale accordingly, not in little Edmund’s imperative mood, but with a pleading message that Mr. Scarsdale would be so very good as to come to her as soon as it was quite convenient for him, as she was so anxious to consult him about a letter she had received. Her heart beat higher in her breast that day with a deeper individual throb than it had known for many a previous year; a little flutter of tumultuous independence was in her mind; she would receive Roger into her own house unreproved; she seemed on the very eve of finding out something which might be of service to that cherished but unknown son; and her whole nature was stimulated by these unaccustomed hopes.